I Love You, Ronnie Read online

  Mike, who had come to live with us in 1959, when he was fourteen, was making some steps toward independence. Ronnie wanted to support and guide him but also felt that he, like all our children, needed the space to sometimes make his own mistakes. He was away so much that disciplining the children usually fell to me—as it often does to women whose husbands travel a lot. But the children always knew that he was there for them, and he always made his principles and beliefs very clear. In fact, years later, when Patti went to college at Northwestern and wanted to live in a coed dorm, it was Ronnie who surprised her by saying no. “I never expected to hear that from you,” she said. “From Mom maybe, but not from you.”

  The Skipper was what we called Ron. He was such an easygoing child that we also called him Happy Jack.

  RONALD REAGAN

  PACIFIC PALISADES

  Thurs. [May 24, 1963]

  My Darling

  Last night we had our double telephone call and all day (I didn’t work) I’ve been re-writing the story of my life as done by Richard Hubler. Tomorrow I’ll do my last day of location and then I’ll call you and I’ll tell you I love you and I’ll mean it but somehow because of the inhibitions we all have I won’t feel that I’ve expressed all that you really mean to me.

  Whether Mike helps buy his first car or spends the money on sports coats isn’t really important. We both want to get him started on a road that will lead to his being able to provide for himself. In x number of years we’ll face the same problem with The Skipper and somehow we’ll probably find right answers. (Patti is another kind of problem and we’ll do all we can to make that one right, too.) But what is really important is that having fulfilled our responsibilities to our offspring we haven’t been careless with the treasure that is ours—namely what we are to each other.

  Do you know that when you sleep you curl your fists up under your chin and many mornings when it is barely dawn I lie facing you and looking at you until finally I have to touch you ever so lightly so you won’t wake up—but touch you I must or I’ll burst?

  Just think: I’ve discovered I can be fond of Ann Blyth because she and her Dr. seem to have something of what we have. Of course it can’t really be as wonderful for them because she isn’t you but still it helps to know there are others who might just possibly know a little about what it’s like to love someone so much that it seems as if I have my hand stretched clear across the mountains and desert until it’s holding your hand there in our room in front of the fireplace.

  Ronnie reading to the children, at the San Onofre house, at Christmas.

  Probably this letter will reach you only a few hours before I arrive myself, but not really because right now as I try to say what is in my heart I think my thoughts must be reaching you without waiting for paper and ink and stamps and such. If I ache, it’s because we are apart and yet that can’t be because you are inside and a part of me, so we aren’t really apart at all. Yet I ache but wouldn’t be without the ache, because that would mean being without you and that I can’t be because I love you.

  Your Husband

  Ronnie wasn’t, of course, going to stay a private citizen for long. He had joined the Republican party in 1962. By the mid-1960s, he was an influential party voice, repeatedly asked by local leaders to campaign for their candidates.

  In 1964, he was asked by Holmes Tuttle, a successful Ford dealer in Los Angeles, to make a fund-raising speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater at the Ambassador Hotel. That speech, which Ronnie wrote himself, went over so well that afterward, Holmes raised the money to have it televised and Ronnie’s words attracted national attention. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he said. “We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least we can let our children, and our children’s children, say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.” The televised speech brought in $8 million—more than had ever been raised for a candidate before.

  Ronnie’s running for office himself was the next logical step—or so some people thought. Holmes Tuttle put together a committee to support Ronnie for governor of California. At first, Ronnie said no. As in the past, when both Democrats and Republicans had asked him to run for office, he said he was a concerned citizen, not a politician. He was very happy with what he was doing. He’d just get into his own car and drive to wherever they wanted him to speak. He wanted to campaign for others, not promote himself.

  Ronnie making a speech,with Barry Goldwater in the background.

  But his supporters kept after him. Finally, Ronnie began to consider more seriously running for office, and we talked about it all the time. Ronnie agreed to run on one condition: that he could first go out and see if the people of California wanted him as their governor.

  The response came very quickly. In San Francisco, the first city we visited to test the waters, people were lined up around the block to meet Ronnie. We stood shaking hands for about four hours. The next morning when I woke up, I couldn’t move my neck—shaking hands for so long had sent me into a spasm—and a woman had to come and wrap me in hot packs. But it didn’t matter. We’d found the answer to our question, and now Ronnie’s mind was pretty well made up.And of course, for me, whatever he wanted to do was fine.

  An anniversary letter.

  Years later, people would sometimes say I pushed Ronnie into a career in politics. Nothing could be further from the truth, and saying that shows a real misunderstanding of Ronnie. For the fact is—and this is something that nobody, oddly enough, has ever picked up on—Ronnie has always been a very competitive person. He has never needed to be “pushed.”

  If you look back at his life, he very well could have stayed in Dixon, Illinois, but he didn’t. He wanted to get out and become a sports announcer, which took some doing. Then, once he got out of Dixon, he kept on pushing. He got his position with WHO Radio in Des Moines in the middle of the Great Depression, and he was a very successful sports announcer. Later, when he was signed by Warner Bros. in Hollywood, he fought for the roles he wanted, and he fought hard for the parts that the studio didn’t want to give him.

  When the studio first turned him down for his dream role, playing George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American (they said he didn’t look enough like a football player), Ronnie drove home, dug out a few old pictures of himself in his college football uniform, and drove back to the producer’s office. He won him over with the hard evidence.

  He knew how to hold his own. When Errol Flynn, who was famous for stealing scenes, tried to push Ronnie out of a scene during the filming of Santa Fe Trail by having him placed behind a row of taller actors, Ronnie bided his time. Then, as the rehearsal progressed, he quietly scraped together a pile of loose earth with his feet, to create a little hill. When the cameras rolled, he stepped on top of that pile—and when it came time for him to deliver his line, there he was, clear as day, towering over the crowd, the tallest man in the scene.

  Ronnie liked a challenge, and he wouldn’t give up a good fight easily. It was never an ego trip. It was just a question of playing to win.

  I supported Ronnie’s decision to run for governor in 1966—not too much of a surprise. I always supported him in whatever he wanted to do. But as the campaign began, I felt a little uncertain about my own life in the political arena. It was a new and unfamiliar world for me. Early on, I warned the campaign people: “You know, I don’t give speeches.”

  And they said, “You can take a bow, can’t you?”

  And I said yes, I thought I could manage that. Just that.

  Ronnie’s advisers knew what my soft spot was, though. Soon they came to me and said, “Your husband can’t possibly get to all the small towns. It’s too much for him; couldn’t you help him out?” So I said yes, of course I’d like to help him out—I’d go to the small towns. But once I started, I was swept up in the whole experience. I found that I liked meeting the peo
ple, and it was exciting hearing what people said to me, seeing the character and friendliness in their faces, seeing all the new places. One place we went, I remember, was so small that there were no lights on the airfield. Trucks came out from the town and shined their lights on the runway. That shook me up a little. In My Turn, I mixed up the dates and said this happened during the 1976 presidential campaign, so I’m correcting it and a few other things in this book.

  Ronnie had sworn off airplanes in the early years of our marriage, after two very frightening experiences. But once he decided to run for governor, he had to fly almost constantly for campaign appearances, and I worried about it all the time. Ronnie knew that I was worried, and it bothered him. He knew me so well—he understood that if anything had happened to him on a plane, I would have blamed myself for having gone along with the idea of his running for governor in the first place.

  Ronnie wrote me the following letter in 1966. He felt he had to go out of his way to set my mind at ease about his having to fly, about the fact that his earthbound “groundhog days” (as he put it) of trekking by train and car were coming to an end. This thoughtfulness and sensitivity to me were typical of him, and of the way we were with each other. Also typical of Ronnie was the deep faith he expresses in this letter.

  Ronnie has always been a very religious man. He was inspired in that by his mother. He has always believed, and has often said, that God has a plan for each of us and that while we might not understand His plan now, eventually we will. He often wrote to me of what was most important to him in spiritual terms, and I admired his faith, although I did not share the firmness of his convictions. I did, however, draw strength from his faith over the years.

  PLANKINTON HOUSE

  MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

  Tues. Night

  Dear Little Mommie

  Knowing you (in addition to loving you) I think it’s time to put something on the record. I’ve always known that someday my ground hog days would end, and now these political shenanigans have made “someday” come around. No one talked me into this so no one should have any feeling of responsibility.

  I have to write this because of all our talks about flying and because you’d try to take the blame personally if ever something did happen. That would be wrong. God has a plan and it isn’t for us to understand, only to know that He has his reasons and because He is all merciful and all loving we can depend on it that there is purpose in whatever He does and it is for our own good. What you must understand without any question or doubt is that I believe this and trust him and you must, too.

  What you must also believe is that I love you more and more each day and it grows more bright and shining all the time.

  Good night, middlesize muffin, who is all the rest of me I need—

  I love you

  Poppa

  GUESS WHAT NO PRIVATE DINING ROOM. THE VIEW WILL BE BETTER WHEN I FACE THE OTHER WAY. I MISS YOU & LOVE YOU—POPPA

  ON WAY ONE MUCH IN LOVE HOT DOG SALESMAN DUE TO ARRIVE SUNDAY MORNING. LOVE POPPA

  FINALLY SOLVED ARGUMENT OVER BEST WAY TO TRAVEL. DON’T. NO WAY TO AVOID MISSING YOU. I LOVE YOU

  Ronnie being sworn in as governor, January 1, 1967. Something was forgotten in the formal ceremony, so they had to repeat part of it. Maureen and I are talking in the background, and Ron is leaning on the desk, watching.

  In November 1966, Ronnie was elected governor of California by a margin of nearly a million votes. We’d been out to dinner with friends on election night, and heard the results on a car radio on the way out to Ronnie’s campaign headquarters. After all the anticipation and the hard work of campaigning, I felt a bit deflated for a moment. It sounds a little silly now, but I’d envisioned staying up all night listening to the returns and had been looking forward to it! But almost immediately afterward, I felt great joy at Ronnie’s victory.

  However, visiting our new “home” put a damper on my enthusiasm. The so-called mansion was located on a busy commercial street, right at a stoplight. Trucks would stop and shift gears and you’d hear their air brakes resonate throughout the house. The chandeliers would rock! There were times when you’d have to stop talking, because you couldn’t hear over the noise. When my predecessor, Governor Pat Brown’s wife, Berenice, took me on a tour of the house, she showed me a room in the back where she said she would go when the noise got so bad that she couldn’t sleep. There was no place outside for eight-year-old Ron to play, and no way he or any of us could have fought our way out in case of a fire—all the windows were painted shut. The house had, in fact, been declared a fire hazard years earlier. And a hazard it was—full of dry rot, so that if a fire had ever started, it would just have taken off.

  One Friday afternoon when Ron was home from school, the fire alarm went off. I grabbed his hand and we ran down the stairs and went outside. I said to the fire chief, “What happens if there’s really a fire? How does my son get out of his room?”

  And he said, “Oh well, Mrs. Reagan, it’s very simple. He just goes over and takes a drawer from his chest of drawers and then runs over to the window and uses the drawer to push the window out.” That did it!

  That night, when Ronnie came home, I said, “We’ve got to move. I can’t do my job as the governor’s wife and fulfill my responsibilities to our children in this house.”

  So we moved. Sacramento didn’t have many houses equipped to handle what’s expected of a governor and his wife, but we did manage to find one, on Forty-fifth Street, that did just fine. The house itself wasn’t big enough for any entertaining, but it had a wonderful backyard, with beautiful camellias and a pool, so we would wait until late spring or early summer and then we’d have our parties. We’d put a floor over the pool and have an orchestra and other entertainment, or in the hot weather we’d just have swim parties. People like Jack Benny and Red Skelton would come and perform, and I’d send notes around to all the neighbors, warning them about the noise and saying I hoped not to disturb them. Soon enough, the neighbors’ kids would be crowding around, hanging over the fence to watch the entertainment. I’d invite them in, and they’d sit on the grass and listen with everyone else.

  Ronnie, with instincts left over from his lifeguard days, was always aware of who was in the pool and what was going on. At one swim party, I recall, we were standing at one end of the pool when all of a sudden, without a word to anybody, he took off, dove in with his clothes and watch on, and pulled out a little girl. He stood in the water afterward, in his golf shirt and khakis, as she caught her breath by the side of the pool. Until that moment, no one else had even noticed she was in trouble.

  I really loved that house. We paid rent for it—which we wouldn’t have, of course, if we’d stayed in the governor’s mansion—but it was well worth it. Unlike the mansion, the house on Forty-fifth Street was the kind of place where we could have a real family life. Ron built a tree house in the backyard and had friends over all the time. Often, they’d play football, and when Ronnie came home from work, he’d change his clothes and play with them. He told me, not long after we moved into the house, that the first time he came home and saw all the bicycles lined up out front, he knew that we’d made the right decision.And that, of course, made me very happy, because I felt I’d gone out on a limb in insisting we move out of the mansion.

  Ronnie jumped into the pool in Sacramento with all his clothes on when he saw that a little girl was having trouble.

  We didn’t have the ranch anymore—we’d had to sell it when we moved to Sacramento, because the taxes on it were more than Ronnie was going to earn as governor of California. But we did keep our house in Pacific Palisades. So, on the weekends and for holidays, we’d pack up Ron and our two dogs, Muffin and Lady, and go home. Patti was in boarding school and came home for holidays, too; and Mike and Maureen were grown up and living on their own. In the summers, we’d rent a beach house at Trancas, just north of Malibu, and they’d all join us there as often as they could. Having the whole family together made Ronnie very
happy. I have lovely memories of those times.

  Life was changing; each day was new. I found I really liked the job of being first lady of California. Ronnie and I gave dinners for returning Vietnam War prisoners, and I often visited wounded Vietnam veterans in local hospitals. I’d always end my visits by asking the men if they wanted me to call their mothers or wives. They usually said yes, and I’d go home with a list and start making calls, and the conversations would almost always be the same.

  I’d say, “Hello, this is Nancy Reagan.”

  With Patti and Ron on the beach at Trancas.

  “Oh, come on now,” the woman would say.

  “Yes, it really is Nancy Reagan,” I would say, and then I’d tell her that I had seen her husband or son in the hospital and that he sent his love. Then the woman would start to cry, and then I’d start to cry, and that’s how we’d finish our conversation—in tears.

  I also worked with the Foster Grandparents, a program I discovered at Pacific State Hospital, which I thought was wonderful. I still think it’s one of the best programs I’ve ever seen, because it benefits both sides: children, who need love, and grandparents, elderly people, who need to feel wanted. They were matched up, and spent time together. I also wrote a Q & A column for a Sacramento newspaper, answering the questions that people wrote to me as first lady of California.

  During this period—the sixties—I became more and more concerned about the problem of young people and drugs. I hadn’t known anything about the growing drug problem in America until I started reading about it in the papers and began getting calls from friends. Some of their children had gotten involved with drugs, and some—like Art Linkletter’s daughter and Charles Boyer’s son—had died of drug overdoses. I felt it was a terrible tragedy for families and that it was growing in America. What kind of response would help? There was still such a stigma attached to speaking out about drugs at that time; people were embarrassed to admit that they or their families might have a drug problem. I wanted to see if there was something I could do about it as first lady of California. I thought perhaps I could use my position to break through the silence.