Another Life (76 page)

Dick was jubilant at this coup, which was to be kept secret until the president had left the White House, lest he be accused of making a record-breaking book deal while still in office. The president had been affable, charming, totally forthcoming, everything he was reputed to be, Dick said, and confided one thing more: He had promised Reagan that I would be his editor. The president and Mrs. Reagan had been delighted to hear that, and looked forward to meeting me.

There was, however, one small fly in the ointment. I brought up the fact that I was already Kitty Kelley’s editor (I had published her biography of Elizabeth Taylor), who was then working on what was supposed to be a sensational, unauthorized kiss-and-tell biography of Nancy Reagan. Mrs. Reagan was known to be furiously apprehensive about the book. “I hope she gets hit by a truck,” Mrs. Reagan was reported to have said about Kelley. How would the Reagans feel when they found out that I was Kelley’s editor? I asked. And how would
she
feel when she learned that her editor was working with the Reagans?

All I had to do was to handle things firmly and everything would be fine, Dick replied. If necessary he would step in personally and help. Since I was only too aware of the fact that things had
not
been fine between S&S and the Collins sisters, I wasn’t optimistic that they would be any better between S&S, the Reagans, and Kitty Kelley.

As it turned out, the person who objected most strongly to this arrangement was Kelley, not the Reagans, who took the whole thing in stride once it hit the papers. I could have understood the Reagans’ objection to being published by the same house or having the same editor as Kelley; it was harder to understand why Kelley was so upset. Much to my dismay, she was moved to Alice Mayhew to solve the problem. I entered on the job of being Reagan’s editor, therefore, in a glum and slightly resentful frame of mind, since it had cost me a major author and, for a time, a good friend. Such regrets as I had, however, were soon assuaged by Reagan himself, who was charm personified.

In the meantime, we moved forward to select a writer to work with the president and eventually settled on Robert Lindsey, one of Alice Mayhew’s authors, a former journalist of some distinction, and the author of
The Falcon and the Snowman
. Lindsey was a Californian, which made it easier for him to spend time with Reagan, and, like everyone
else, he succumbed quickly to the president’s charm, although he noted with some concern that “Reagan is not a very introspective man and thus not easy to interview.” (This turned out to be an understatement.) Alice Mayhew and I drafted a proposed outline of the book, in which we recommended, rather hopefully, that it should begin with a memorable opening line, like Nixon’s (“I was born in a house my father built.”), stress his humble origins, and achieve so far as possible the simplicity and dignity of Grant’s prose.

The publication of the president’s collected speeches took place rather quickly and caused a small tremor of alarm. Beautifully packaged, they failed to sell, despite a lavish marketing campaign that involved Charlton Heston as the spokesman. Of course it is a well-known fact that nobody wants to read speeches—I had only to recall Jimmy Carter’s to remind me of that—but Reagan’s popularity was so great that we assumed
his
speeches would be an exception to the rule, that his supporters would
have
to buy them, out of sheer loyalty. When they did not, a certain panic set in regarding the memoirs.

It had been supposed that since he was the most loved and admired president since FDR, his memoirs would sell like hotcakes, whatever was in them. They might not be
read
by large numbers of people, but they would be bought in vast quantities. Now that this could no longer be depended upon, the quality of the memoirs became an urgent concern, so my associate editor, Chuck Adams, and I went to California in haste to review the text and—frankly—urge the president to greater candor.

T
HUS
, C
HUCK
and I found ourselves early one afternoon in 1990 in Beverly Hills, paying a visit to the president in his office in Century City, the vast, monumental neo-Egyptian real-estate development whose owner, Marvin Davis, has his office in the same building. I had visited Davis’s office once, to have coffee with him—Irving Lazar had been trying to sell me his book, but it turned out, as was so often the case, that poor Davis had no intention of writing one and didn’t have the slightest idea of who I was or why I had come to see him. Davis’s office was in keeping with his size—he is a man of enormous height and girth.

Reagan’s surroundings, by contrast, were restrained and modest, designed in the Williamsburg colonial style and staffed by clean-limbed, smiling young women and good-looking young men in suits. Both genders presented a perfect picture of wholesomeness. They all had perfect teeth. Many of the men wore red-white-and-blue patterned ties, while most of the women wore red-white-and-blue scarves. It wasn’t exactly a uniform, but almost.

The waiting room contained a long, glassed-in cabinet, built against one wall, containing all the saddles with which Reagan had been presented during the years of his presidency, many of the Western ones gleaming with silver. (Interestingly enough, when actually on a horse, the president seemed to favor English saddles, field boots, and old-fashioned flared whipcord riding breeches.) After a short wait, I was taken into a small, handsome room, lined with bookshelves and carpeted in blue, where, from behind a large and perfectly clear desk, devoid of any sign of work, Reagan rose to greet me, his brow furrowed as if he had been deep in thought. He was dressed in a tan summer suit, and once he had me in view, he smiled as naturally as if we had been friends for life. He had the kind of suntan and presence that only movie stars possess, a bigger-than-life quality that is purely physical and that makes it hard to take your eyes off them even when they’re not doing anything. His head was big, majestic, deeply seamed, his hands big, gnarled, sinewy, well cared for, but still a workingman’s hands, the only part of him that seemed genuinely Lincolnesque.

Reagan walked to the middle of the room, grabbed my hand, shook it heartily, then pulled me carefully into the position he wanted. “Smile!” he said, and an electronic flash went off. One of the pretty girls with the Betsy Ross scarves was taking our picture with a Polaroid. I looked down at the carpet and saw that there was a small, neat little cross on it, presumably duct tape. It was the president’s “mark,” the place every movie actor has to reach exactly in order to be in focus for a scene. The president had hit his mark like the pro that he was, then placed me at just the right angle for a handshake photo. At the end of our talk I was presented with the photo, in a special frame, and Reagan signed it for me.

This, I realized, was not only routine for visitors; it was, in many cases, the only reason for the visit. People seemed to come to have their pictures taken with Reagan the way they might with Old Faithful or
Mickey Mouse, as if he were a kind of tourist attraction. He didn’t seem to mind—on the contrary, he did it with genuine good nature.

Once we sat down, the president seemed to lose interest in the proceedings. He had done his part; now, it was time for me to do my part, which was to say thank you and go. Since I had substantive questions to ask him, however, I stayed, rather to his surprise, and we chatted briefly, as a kind of warm-up to the big meeting tomorrow, when we would all get together, the president, me, Chuck, Bob Lindsey, and the president’s staff, to discuss the manuscript.

I apologized for all the press about the Reagans and Kitty Kelley, and particularly for an ill-advised interview with me in the
Los Angeles Times
, in which I had been quoted as saying, “Let’s face it, Kitty Kelley’s book is not likely to be too flattering, if the past is any guide.” This comment had caused Mrs. Reagan great pain, and been reprinted all over the world, to the discomfort of Dick Snyder and Mort Janklow, the Reagans’ agent—so much so that I had promised not to give any more interviews, despite the fact that I was on tour for my new novel
The Fortune
, a copy of which I presented to Reagan.

“Well,” Reagan said pleasantly, his big, rough-hewn hands on my book, “it worried Nancy more than it worried me.” These things happened, he said. He had worked for the big studios. You had commitments, and you had to fulfill them. You couldn’t just renege on them. He understood that.

I told him that I had agreed to let Kitty Kelley go to another editor, so there would be no conflict of interest in having the same editor for both her book and his. He nodded, and thanked me. He would tell Nancy, and he was sure that it would please her. It would be a load off her mind. For himself, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. It would be hard to imagine a gentler, nicer, more natural, or more sincere person, now that he was no longer just a voice on the telephone—relaxed, easygoing, unhurried, although perhaps a shade
remote
, I thought, as if none of this really affected him at all. Lindsey’s warning about his coauthor’s lack of introspection had proven only too true. The president was genial, lavish with the anecdotes that were his familiar repertoire, and appeared never to have met a person he didn’t like.

At one point, we had mapped out a beginning in which the president would relate his thoughts on leaving office, “perhaps what goes through his mind as he flies back across the country in Air Force One, after the inaugural of his successor, passing over this vast country, thinking
about where he has come from, his roots, what he has achieved in these past eight years, what is ahead for those who lie sleeping or working below … as the president of the United States returns to California a simple citizen again.” But no amount of prodding could get the president to reveal what his thoughts, if any, had been on that historic occasion or any other. Given that reticence, Lindsey had done a remarkable job, but there were areas where more was required, symbolized by the fact that Reagan had absolutely refused to even
mention
his first wife, Jane Wyman, in the book—an omission that I feared might make the reviewers question his willingness to face facts.

Encouraged, I took up the question of Jane Wyman, and while Reagan’s benign expression didn’t change, his eyes looked a little frosty. Bob Lindsey had already brought that subject up, he said, and he’d thought it was settled. There was no point in going into all that stuff at this late stage. Why, he himself hardly remembered a thing about his marriage to Jane. It was all water under the bridge.

But it
wasn’t
quite all water under the bridge, I thought—he had a daughter from that marriage, after all, so he could hardly have forgotten it completely. I pointed out that reviewers were likely to pick up on this, and use it as a stick with which to beat him over the head. If he left out of his book something as simple and well-known as his first marriage—didn’t even
mention
it!—they would conclude that he was leaving out even more important things.

“I never pay much attention to critics,” Reagan said placidly. “Never have.” The world was divided between two kinds of people, he said: those who
can
and those who
criticize
. The president looked pleased with himself, as if he had just thought this up.

Ignoring the critics was a sensible attitude, I agreed. I tried to pay no attention to them either, in my own small way. The problem was that what we had here was a big edifice, the integrity of which could be destroyed by concentrating on a single brick. Give the reviewers an excuse to dismiss the book, and they would. Why risk it? I wasn’t looking for a whole chapter about Jane Wyman, after all. A couple of lines would do.

The president looked gloomy. Even the thought of a couple of lines about Jane Wyman made him uncomfortable. Long or short, it wasn’t something he wanted to do. It occurred to me that it might not be Reagan himself who was being stubborn about this point but Mrs. Reagan. I made a mental note to ask Janklow to call her, who liked and trusted him, and see if he could persuade her.

With that, Reagan concluded business by standing up and taking me on a tour of his quarters to see all the photographs of his horses over the years. His affability returned as he described each one in detail. I had heard people criticizing his memory, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with it at all. He could even remember the names of Margaret’s horses. It was, I decided, merely a question of whether he was interested in a subject or not. If he was, I was soon to discover, his memory was razor sharp; if he wasn’t, he couldn’t remember a thing.

I walked back to the hotel, and called Janklow, who promised to call Mrs. Reagan, and went off to dinner with Lindsey and Chuck Adams to prepare for the morning.

In the morning we met—Fred Ryan, the president’s genial chief of staff, Bob Lindsey, myself, Chuck Adams, and a couple of staffers—in a large room, around a big coffee table. Promptly on time, Reagan arrived, carrying a brown paper bag and dressed this time in a golf jacket, casual pants, and cowboy boots—an outfit in which he looked ten years younger and even more the movie star—and announced that he had a golf date at noon. This came as something of a surprise for us, since we had been anticipating an all-day session. Lindsey looked particularly shocked, since he wanted to go through the whole manuscript, line by line. Reagan, however, was at his placid best. He would deal with the big problems, then go and play golf. We could settle the rest. He had thought things over during the night, he told us, and come to the conclusion that it would be all right to mention his marriage to Jane Wyman. We quickly inserted four lines in the manuscript, and that was that. I guessed that Janklow had succeeded in persuading Mrs. Reagan to drop her objection to the mention of her predecessor.

The idea of starting the book with the president’s return home had seemed to him too negative. He had a different beginning in mind and sketched it for us from his big, reclining chair. Why not begin with the most important moment of his presidency? He had no doubt what it was. It was on November 19, 1985, during his first meeting with Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev, near Geneva. Reagan had realized, he told us, that the summit meeting was going nowhere. The two leaders were surrounded by advisers and specialists as they discussed disarmament and were unable to make any human contact, so Reagan had tapped Gorbachev on the shoulder and invited him to go outside for a walk. The two went outside, and Reagan took Gorbachev down toward the shore of Lake Geneva. “You and I,” he told Gorbachev, “are old men—grandfathers.”
The peace of the world was on their shoulders. Why could they not simply sit down and talk things out, man to man, without advisers and “experts”? So they went into the boathouse, overlooking the lake, just the two of them alone, lit a fire, and at the end of a long, heartfelt discussion, Gorbachev agreed to take major steps toward nuclear disarmament and to come to two more summit meetings as well, one in the United States, one in the Soviet Union. It just went to show, the president said, his eyes moist, how important a person-to-person approach was.