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

Their attachment to each other had grown deeper as their circumstances became shakier and their future more uncertain. After Patti was born, Ronnie—who had been instructed by his own mother to address her by her first name—began to call his wife “Mommie.” To Nancy, he was “Daddy.” Those nicknames would later make Ronnie’s political advisers roll their eyes and snicker behind his back. But it was probably no coincidence that this was also around the time Nelle began showing signs of what was then called senility, leaving Nancy to be Ronnie’s sole source of comfort and security. Nelle moved into a nursing facility in 1958 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962 at the age of seventy-nine. More than three decades later, both of her sons would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When aides cleaned out Ronnie’s office desk in Los Angeles for the last time, they found five or six of the poems Nelle had written tucked inside.

For the rest of Ronnie’s life, Nancy “filled the role that his own mother had filled in his childhood and youth. She provided him with a safe space for his solitude,” their son, Ron, said. “He needed a safe place to come home to, to be by himself, to recharge where nobody’s at him. She would provide him that. She’d be the gatekeeper. She’d keep people away when he needed to be alone. And, of course, served the social purpose of getting him out when he needed to get out, too. He was probably less enamored of that than the other.”

Ronnie himself put it this way: “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold? Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

The truest, rawest record of this emotional attachment are his passionate letters to her. He wrote her scores of them over the decades. Nancy saved every one in a shopping bag in her closet. She also kept telegrams, sentimental and funny greeting cards, and the notes that came with the flowers he sent her. A particular favorite was a missive he wrote on July 15, 1953, from New York on stationery printed with the name of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Nancy would reread it many times over the decades to come, always getting tears in her eyes. In the letter, Ronnie addressed her by another favorite nickname—“Nancy Poo Pants”—and wrote of his loneliness for her. Then he fantasized about what it would have been like if, instead of dining at the 21 Club alone, he had been there with her:

We walked back in the twilight and I guess I hadn’t ought to put us on paper from there on. Let’s just say I didn’t know my lines this morning.

Tonight I think we’ll eat here at the hotel, and you’ve got to promise to let me study—at least for a little while.

I suppose some people would find it unusual that you and I can so easily span three thousand miles but in truth it comes very naturally. Man can’t live without a heart, and you are my heart, by far the nicest thing about me and so very necessary. There would be no life without you nor would I want any.

I Love You

“The Eastern Half of Us.”

The Las Vegas act, which showcased Ronnie’s talents as an emcee, indirectly opened a new opportunity: a television series. He no longer considered such a thing out of the question, and his agent Taft Schreiber, a top MCA executive, had an idea that seemed particularly well suited to a movie star in eclipse. General Electric was looking to sponsor a new show, a weekly dramatic production with a rotating cast of guest performers. Ronnie could host it and star in a half dozen or so episodes a year.

So was born General Electric Theater, a half-hour program that aired Sunday evenings at nine o’clock on CBS for eight years. It featured such high-wattage guest stars as James Dean, Jimmy Stewart, and Fred Astaire in adaptations of novels, short fiction, plays, and films. GE Theater debuted on September 26, 1954, and was broadcast from both New York and Hollywood. Initially the series alternated between filmed productions and live ones, the latter being a difficult challenge to pull off on television. Nancy performed in one of the early live shows and had to wear two dresses for the first ten minutes, ripping off the outer one between shots.

Ronnie’s association with General Electric would also lay the seeds of his political career. The “real extra” of the deal, in his view, was its promotional side. He would travel the country and visit GE plants, where he would meet workers and could give speeches on whatever he liked. The only proviso was that he promote the virtues of free enterprise and electricity. GE figured Ronnie would be a natural. As he put it: “I had been tagged because of my experience in the Guild and the speaking I’d done in the industry’s behalf along the ‘mashed potato’ circuit.”

Television, a medium he would later employ more skillfully than any politician before him, made Ronnie a bigger household name than he had ever been as a film star. GE Theater was an instant hit and, by 1956, was the third most popular television series in the country, reaching more than twenty-five million viewers a week. Critics loved it too, praising the show’s quality, creativity, and intelligence. In one memorable episode, Jimmy Stewart did Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a Western. Ronnie’s five-year contract, which started at $125,000 a year, quickly rose to $150,000 and solved the Reagans’ money worries. Later he would become part owner of the show, making them even wealthier.

GE’s slogan in those postwar-boom days was “Progress is our most important product.” The company built the Reagans an all-electric dream home that