Ronnie and Nancy (79 page)

Ronald Reagan campaigning for president in 1980, flanked by former president Ford and Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush.

(A.P. Wide World Photos)

Nancy and Ronnie at Rancho del Cielo in the canoe he gave her as an anniversary gift, 1976.

(A.P. Wide World Photos)

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

REAGAN VS. FORD

1975–1976

Once upon a time [Reagan] said [something] to me on an airplane about the future and about the presidency, and about any possibilities in ’76. He was telling me that I was perhaps overly concerned; that I should not be concerned so much about the future, about the planning, and about making sure you meet all the right people or enough of them, and that sort of thing. He said, “Bob, if the Lord wants me to be president of the United States, I’ll
be
president of the United States, and you don’t need to worry.”

Bob Walker, political aide to Governor Reagan1

Of Ronnie’s five campaigns for public office, the one I remember most vividly is the only one he lost. That was in 1976, when he challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. That campaign was so exciting, so dramatic, and so
emotional
—especially at the convention—that in my mind it almost overshadows Ronnie’s four victories.

Nancy Reagan,
My Turn
2

ONE RESULT OF NIXON’S DOWNFALL WAS THAT THE ANNENBERGS CAME

home from London and made their presence felt much more in the Reagan Group. On December 31, 1974, they had the first of their New Year’s Eve parties at Sunnylands, and it would become Reagan court ritual. “Lee called and said, ‘Could I take over your whole New Year’s Eve party?’ ” recalled Betsy Bloomingdale. “They wanted to have the Governor and Mrs.

Reagan, you see. She said she would have everyone we had, but she didn’t have Connie Wald, which kind of put me in the thickety-wicket with Connie, whom I adore. She did have Jules and Doris Stein. I remember Doris changing into her long dress in the car on the way out, because she didn’t want to spend the night in Palm Springs.”3

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House This passing of the torch did not go smoothly; in fact, it created something of a power struggle between Betsy Bloomingdale and Lee Annenberg, with Nancy caught in the middle, juggling her steel-beneath-the-bubbles best friend and the titanium-tough wife of the man who could be most useful to Ronnie’s political future. “I told Lee, ‘I always spend New Year’s with my children,’” Betsy Bloomingdale went on, “and she said, ‘That’s okay, I’m inviting them.’ She invited the children the first year, but for
after
dinner.

The second year she didn’t invite them. And the third year she didn’t invite Alfred and me. Alfred said, ‘I don’t care about going all the way out to Palm Springs anyway. We’re not going to beg for an invitation.’ Apparently it was all because that summer, when Walter and Lee came out here, as they did every year in August, and stayed in the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I didn’t entertain them. I don’t know why I didn’t. I must have been busy with other things. But I didn’t have a lunch or dinner for them, and all the others would line up to give dinners for the Annenbergs every single night.

So Lee got miffed, and Nancy and I understood: one must pay attention.”4

Stirring the pot was Jerry Zipkin, who also spent Augusts at the Beverly Hills Hotel and had not made Lee’s New Year’s Eve list.

Nancy and Ronnie went to the Annenbergs’ again in 1975, the year that Lee codified the houseguest roster. From then on, the same five couples—the Reagans, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, the French Smiths, and the Deutsches—would stay in the same five guest suites, each done up by Billy Haines in a single cheery California color, with everything matching from the curtains to the wastebaskets. In 1976, however, Nancy favored Betsy, and they went there on New Year’s Eve. The matter was finally resolved the following year. “Ardie Deutsch made it up,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “He said, ‘This is ridiculous, that we’re all there and Alfred and Betsy aren’t.’”5

President Ford called Governor Reagan over the 1974 holidays and, already nervous, tried to tempt him with a choice of jobs: he could go to Washington as secretary of transportation or take the post Walter Annenberg had just left at the Court of St. James’s. Reagan declined, saying, “Hell, I can’t afford to be an ambassador.”6 He agreed, however, to serve on a commission to investigate alleged CIA abuses connected to Watergate; the eight-man panel was chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and included former secretary of the treasury C. Douglas Dillon, former NATO supreme
Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

4 3 1

commander General Lyman Lemnitzer, and Lane Kirkland, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.7

The sixty-four-year-old Reagan was leaving office on a wave of high approval ratings and flattering editorials and about to embark on a lucrative career as a private citizen. By January 6, 1975, he was on his way back to Pacific Palisades, after seeing his successor, Edmund “Jerry” Brown Jr., the son of his predecessor, sworn in. The thirty-six-year-old, unmarried Jerry had already annoyed Nancy by announcing that he would not live in the new Governor’s Mansion upon its completion, referring to it as “a Taj Mahal” and suggesting that it be used as “a halfway house for lobbyists.”8

Both Ronnie and Nancy were relieved to be leaving the drab state capital and eager to get on with the next stage of their life. As Lyn Nofziger, who had reconciled with the Reagans when he ran Nixon’s 1972 campaign in California, later wrote, “I think he was tired of the job, tired of dealing with the petty personalities in the legislature, tired of commuting to Los Angeles on most weekends so his wife could socialize with their rich friends, tired of the small-town atmosphere of Sacramento.”9

Three months earlier, Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford, a public relations specialist who joined the Governor’s staff in his last year, had presented Reagan with a “comprehensive plan” for his immediate future, including a syndicated newspaper column, a daily radio program, and frequent speaking engagements. Both aides relocated to Los Angeles, where they opened Deaver & Hannaford, in a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, fifteen minutes from San Onofre Drive. The corner office was reserved for Reagan and decorated by Nancy with mostly the same furniture and in the same warm reds as his office in the state capitol. The jellybean jar was on his desk, Helene von Damm was office manager, and Nancy Reynolds was in charge of advance work.10 Only Ed Meese, who took a job as vice president and general counsel of the Rohr Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer based in San Diego, was missing, but he was in constant touch.11 Although Ronald Reagan was the raison d’être of Deaver

& Hannaford, the PR firm would pick up a few other clients, including the Dart Corporation, the government of Taiwan, and Rockwell International, one of the major Southern California defense firms.12

Reagan’s income reportedly jumped to more than $800,000 that year.13

His five-minute radio program, titled
Viewpoint,
was aired every weekday on nearly three hundred stations, his column ran in more than two hundred 4 3 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House newspapers, and he commanded up to $10,000 for each of the eight to ten speeches he gave every month.14 In all three formats his message was basically the same as it had been since the 1950s: only conservatism could save America from economic disaster and the world from Communist domination. As always, he wrote the bulk of his own material, scratching out his radio addresses on yellow pads as he flew around the country on his speaking tours. It was a clever way to keep Reagan in the public eye—

by his own calculation he was reaching 20 million Americans each week15—and a fairly exhausting routine even for someone half his age.

But Nancy made sure his itineraries allowed for an afternoon nap, and Ronnie kept up his exercise regime on the road. He was constantly telling Deaver and Hannaford, “Remember to build some ranch time into that schedule.”16

“From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell over us,” Reagan would write of his fourth and last ranch. “No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does.”17 The Reagans had closed on their 688-acre hideaway in the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara just a few weeks before the end of the governorship. It had been found for them by Bill Wilson, whose avocado ranch was a few miles away.

Nancy was nervous at first about the torturously twisting seven-mile-long road that led to the remote property, but as Wilson recalled, “Ronnie fell in love with the place immediately—before we got anywhere near the house.

As we got closer to it, he said, ‘It’s absolutely gorgeous here. I love it.’”18

Nancy, too, was swept away by the sheer beauty of the place, with its old oaks and madrones, riding trails crisscrossing the chaparral, and views of the Pacific in one direction and the horse farms and vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley in the other.

A tiny—“and I mean tiny,” as Nancy put it—adobe house built in 1871

by the property’s first owner, José Jesús Pico, a homesteader from Mexico, sat in the middle of a rolling pasture, and cattle grazed under a smog-free blue sky. A subsequent proprietor had named the place Tip Top Ranch, and while the Reagans changed the name, they maintained it as a working livestock operation, with twenty-two head of cattle and four horses, to take advantage of California tax breaks for agricultural preserves.
The New York
Times
estimated that the $900 in property tax they paid in 1979 would otherwise have been closer to $42,000.19

Over the next two years, Ronnie spent most of his free time fixing up
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4 3 3

his “Ranch in the Sky,” usually making the two-hour drive from Pacific Palisades with Barney Barnett, the retired California highway patrolman who had been his driver in Sacramento, and Dennis LeBlanc, the young former state trooper who had been his security man and now traveled with him on his speaking trips. “Sometimes the three of us would go up and back every day for three days in a row,” LeBlanc recalled. “Anne, the Reagans’ housekeeper, would pack a lunch for us or we’d stop at a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the way up.” They completely gutted the house, converting its screened-in wrap-around porch into an L-shaped living room and dining area, replaced the asbestos roof with Spanish-style tiles, repaired old fences and built new ones. Nancy helped Ronnie paint the house and lay a new floor in the kitchen. They also dug a pond behind the house and named it Lake Lucky.20

The end result was an exceedingly modest, 1,500-square-foot cottage heated only by two fireplaces. There were two bedrooms, one off the kitchen for Anne Allman. The master bedroom had sunny yellow walls and a matching chenille bedspread. The living room sofas were covered in brown cotton, the armchairs in the den were done in orange plaid, and paintings of horses, cowboys, and Western landscapes hung in every room. As I toured the place in 1999, I kept thinking, Nancy Reagan stayed
here
? It was a far cry from Sunnylands, or even her parents’ villa in manicured Biltmore Estates. But it had a simplicity and coziness that said a lot about the couple that spent so much time there together.

On a rise just above the house were a tack barn and a spruced-up trailer, where the kids stayed. “There was always a project at the ranch, and if you went up there to stay, you helped,” said the Wicks’ son C.Z., who had become close to young Ron. “On one of the first weekends I went there, they were building a patio in front of the house. Ron and I quarried the rocks for that—putting them in the back of their ancient Ford station wagon and bringing them down to the house.”

C. Z. Wick explained that when guests arrived at the turnoff from Pacific Coast Highway, “you’d call from the gas station down at the bottom of Refugio Road and say you were coming up. The Governor would always be waiting to unlock the gate for you. Inevitably, something would catch his interest while he was waiting. I remember once he’d been creosoting those telephone poles that he used to make the fences around the house—you know, this greasy stuff that would make them waterproof and keep the termites away. And he had found some berries that when you 4 3 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House rubbed them together acted like soap. I walked up, and there he was rubbing these things between his hands, cleaning the creosote off.”21

“Since the day we bought the ranch,” Ronnie said, “if Nancy or I wanted to think something out, there’s been no better place to do it than Rancho del Cielo. . . . During those first months after we left Sacramento, I spent a lot of time . . . riding around the ranch thinking about the future.”22

On Halloween 1975, Ronnie and Nancy called a family meeting at San Onofre Drive to tell the children that he had decided to run for president.

Maureen, the self-described “political junkie” of the family, arrived first.23

She had campaigned hard for Nixon in 1972—George Shultz, then secretary of the treasury, even wrote Reagan a note calling her “terrific.” But, at thirty-four, Maureen was not having much success in launching an acting career, and had taken up with a fifty-five-year-old song-and-dance man named Gene Nelson. Her new beau had actually acted with her father in one of his last films for Warner Bros., but that did not endear him to Ronnie or Nancy.

Then came Michael with his fiancée Colleen Sterns. After a brief first marriage—to an eighteen-year-old belle from Mobile, Alabama—that produced a son in 1973, Michael had finally found a source of stability in Colleen, “a girl who was equal in strength to Mom or Nancy.”24 He had a good job selling boats in Costa Mesa, and with Colleen’s help he was working off his considerable debts, while trying to follow the advice his father had given him about marriage: “You’ll never get in trouble if you say

‘I love you’ at least once a day.”25

Patti was not at the meeting. Her parents claimed she didn’t want to come; she said she hadn’t been asked.26 A year earlier, while working as a singing hostess at the Great American Food and Beverage Company in Santa Monica, she had met Bernie Leadon, the pot-smoking steel guitarist for the Eagles, one of the most popular rock bands of the early 1970s.