The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

he and Edie quickly discovered they had the same sense of humor, which included an affinity for dirty jokes. Once, years later, Ronnie was telling Edie a particularly filthy one over the phone, and there was silence on the other end. He was afraid that, this time, he had gone too far. What had actually happened was that the line had gone dead—something the long-distance operator did not tell him until she got to hear the punch line. “I soon had the feeling that if anything went wrong with Ronnie and me, he and Mother would be perfectly happy together,” Nancy recalled. On Nancy’s birthdays, Ronnie would send Edie flowers.

When Nancy and Ronnie got back from their honeymoon, they kept their two apartments for a few months—there was no room for his clothes in her tiny one. But by July, they had built a modest ranch-style house at 1258 Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a not-yet-fashionable area near the ocean. They paid $42,000 for it.

How to handle Nancy’s increasingly apparent pregnancy was a delicate issue. This being the early 1950s, the answer was to lie and assume the Hollywood press would go along. Twelve weeks after they were married, columnist Hedda Hopper broke the news to her readers that Nancy was expecting. “How did you find out it was due early in December?” Nancy asked. “We were keeping it a secret because I knew I would be in for lots of kidding.” Patricia Ann Reagan arrived about six weeks before her purported due date, and though she weighed a healthy seven pounds, the papers dutifully reported that she had been born prematurely. The story had it that the Reagans were at a horse show when Nancy’s labor pains began, but that she did not recognize what they were, because the baby was not expected to arrive for more than a month. The Reagans kept up the fiction even at home. As a child, Patti was told an absurd story that she had spent the first two months of her life in an incubator.

Nancy fibbed about all of this in a 1980 memoir, saying she got pregnant “early in our marriage,” because she was “close to 30 years old and didn’t want to wait.” (Make that two fibs: She was already thirty when she married.) In Nancy’s 1989 book, however, she owned up to all of it, though with a touch of coy defiance. Patti, she wrote, “was born—go ahead and count—a bit precipitously, but very joyfully, on October 22, 1952.” Ronnie planted an olive tree in their yard to commemorate their daughter’s arrival, and for many years after, Nancy would drive past the house to see how big it had grown.

Parenthood was not the only big adjustment the Reagans had to make in those early months of their marriage. Ronnie stepped down as president of SAG after having led the union for five turbulent years in which there had been violent strikes in the industry, Communist blacklisting, the enforcement of antiunion laws, and the decline of film production in the face of new competition from television. (He and Nancy remained on the board, and he would return to the presidency for a year in 1959.) His decision to give up leading the union was a relief to Nancy. “There’s no question in my mind that Ronnie’s political involvements had begun to hurt his prospects for work. By the time I came along, he had become so identified with the Screen Actors Guild that the studio heads had begun to think of him less as an actor than an adversary,” she reasoned.

On his way out, Ronnie did his agent Lew Wasserman a favor of the highest order. The six-member SAG board, which also included Nancy, quietly voted to give Wasserman’s MCA agency a waiver that would allow him to both represent talent and to produce television programs. It was a blatant conflict of interest because it put MCA in a position of being both labor and management in negotiations over issues such as stars’ salaries. Even more significantly for the industry, the new arrangement gave Wasserman a beachhead in television. It propelled him into becoming one of the biggest powers in the entertainment industry and the last of the true Hollywood moguls. His rise helped demolish the studio system for good.

Wasserman and television would a few years later become the Reagans’ financial salvation, though there is no indication they could have imagined it then. What the newlyweds could see were trouble signs building. Movie roles were drying up for both of them, as the collapsing industry was dumping supposed stars who couldn’t pull in enough ticket buyers to justify their salaries. Almost concurrently with its announcement of Ronnie and Nancy’s engagement, MGM put out another one saying that she had asked to be let out of her contract. Nancy was going to get the axe anyway after having done eight not particularly noteworthy pictures for the studio. But the fiction that leaving was her own choice allowed her to exit “with more dignity than I had managed under like circumstances,” noted Ronnie, who was losing deals he had with Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures at just about the same time.

Nancy accepted that she was nearing the end of the road for an acting career that had never really taken her very far. Turning her energies to building a marriage echoed the pragmatic choice that her mother had made a generation before, when Edie realized that her own professional options as an actress were running out. Nancy had found a steadfast man to love and belong to. But it was far from certain, at least in the beginning, that this union would bring the security and success that Edie and Loyal’s match had. Money became tight, and the newlyweds were piling up debt. Between the ranch and the house, they had two first mortgages and a second one. Ronnie had run up $10,000 in medical bills when he broke his leg. He