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

Three days later, there was a lavish celebration. Airlines had to add flights from Los Angeles to Sacramento to accommodate the seven thousand people who came for it. At the inaugural ball, two orchestras played for revelers on a half dozen raised dance floors. Nancy wore a showstopping, one-shouldered gown of white wool and silk, studded with sparkling daisies. It was designed for her by couturier Jimmy Galanos, who said it was “a little grander and has a little more glitter than she usually allows.” The San Francisco Examiner noted approvingly that the new first lady was “an extremely pretty woman who knows how to wear clothes. Her clothes are not the drab costumes politicians’ wives in the past have worn in order not to call attention to themselves.” The Oakland Tribune declared: “The eyes of the fashion world, long focused on Jackie Kennedy as a pacesetter, are already finding pleasure in watching Mrs. Reagan.”

This was a time for Nancy to bask in her husband’s triumph. But her brother, Dick, who had not seen her much since Ronnie had decided to enter politics, sensed a change in her; a shadow over the gay girl he remembered growing up in Chicago. “She was very tight and not her old open self,” he told me.

As Nancy was starting to understand, first lady is a title that comes without a job description. Always wary about moving into new situations, she understood she had a lot to learn. But one thing—the most important thing—remained constant. Ronnie was as devoted to her as ever. Two months after his inauguration, Nancy woke up to a note from the governor:

My Darling First Lady

I’m looking at you as you lie here beside me on this fifteenth anniversary and wondering why everyone has only just discovered you are the First Lady. You’ve been the First—in fact the only—to me for fifteen years.

That sounds so strange—“fifteen years.” It still seems like minutes, they’ve gone by so swiftly. If I have any regret it is for the days we’ve been apart and I’ve had to awaken without watching you. Some day, you’ll have to explain how you can be five years old when you sleep and for fifteen years yet. But then maybe it has something to do with my only being fifteen—because I wasn’t living before I began watching you.

Nancy, not as good at putting her emotions on paper, was left at a loss for words. Along with the love in her response was an undercurrent of anxiety and protectiveness. She wrote him:

My darling husband,

You beat me to it this morning ’cause I was going to write you—

I can never say what I really feel in my heart to you ’cause I get puddled up—and you always say everything so much better. But I too can’t believe it’s been fifteen (16!) years. In another way tho’ it seems like forever—I really can’t even remember a life before you now. Everything began with you. My whole life—so you’d better be careful and take care of yourself because there’d be nothing and I’d be no one without you.

I love you so much—I never thought I could love you more than the day we were married but I do—and I’m so proud of you—every day—I could pop—It just keeps getting bigger and bigger—those poor other mommies—they don’t have a you—but I do—and I hope you’ll always have a me.

Sacramento, where Ronnie served two terms as governor, was different from anything they had ever known. It was a fog-prone, medium-sized city in an agricultural valley, a plane trip from the glamour of Los Angeles and a long drive from the sophistication of San Francisco. Living on the governor’s $44,000-a-year salary meant Ronnie had to sell his Yearling Row ranch, and with it, his beloved horses. But there was some consolation—and perhaps something ethically questionable—in the fact that the newly elected governor reaped a handy profit when Twentieth Century-Fox bought the property for an eyebrow-raising $2 million. That was nearly double what the tax assessor set as the ranch’s value, and twenty-three times what Ronnie had paid for it in 1951. Democrats suggested the inflated price, negotiated by some of his wealthy friends, was a sweetheart deal meant to buy the governor’s favor on a tax bill that gave a big break to the movie industry.

The Reagans stood apart from and above the scene in Sacramento. Legislators noticed that the governor never joined them for nights of carousing at their regular haunts, such as Frank Fat’s, a Chinese restaurant and watering hole a block from the capitol that was considered the “third house” of the legislature. Bills were said to have been written on Frank Fat’s napkins. “Reagan was convivial, but he had neither a genuine interest in socializing with other politicians nor a need to demonstrate he was one of the boys,” wrote journalist Lou Cannon, who covered the statehouse for the San Jose Mercury News in those days. “Some legislators thought their celebrity governor looked down on them; the prosaic truth was that Reagan was tired at the end of the day and preferred to spend evenings at home.”

Occasionally, lawmakers were invited over to the Reagans’ house—though it generally took a bit of prodding from Ronnie’s legislative secretary, George Steffes. However reluctant she may have been, Nancy brought an entertaining flair of the kind Sacramento had not seen before. Famous acts such as Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Red Skelton performed at the annual parties they held for the legislators in their backyard, where Nancy had a temporary stage built over the swimming pool. When she spotted the neighborhood kids hanging on to the fence to watch, Nancy invited them to join as well. But the California first lady was not subtle in letting everyone know when it was time to leave so that Ronnie could get to bed.

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