From left: Ronald Reagan with daughter Patti, son Ron and wife Nancy Reagan in 1963.Photo: Snap/Shutterstock
The love story ofNancyandRonald Reaganis sweeping, swooning and familiar to many, having been documented in letters from the former president and quotes from some of their most famous friends.
Their dysfunctional family life, Tumulty writes, “was the collateral heartbreak that accompanied the Reagans' epic love.”
There, the young Nancy Davis (who took her adopted father’s name after her mom’s marriage) worked to follow in her mom’s footsteps, attending college at Smith to study theater and moving to New York to pursue her dream.
In early 1949, her agent called with the news that someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wanted to fly her to California for a screen test.
From left: Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan in 1988.Bettmann/Getty
The two hit it off but didn’t date exclusively immediately, instead playing the field before finally settling down with one another. But once they were committed, they were all in — getting married in 1952 and eventually uprooting from Hollywood for the world of politics (and from sunny Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.)
The Reagans had two kids: daughter Patti, born 1952, and youngest son Ron, born 1958, along with his three children from a previous marriage to the actress Jane Wyman: Maureen, Christine and Michael.
While family life was of integral importance, the Reagan’s allegiances to one another as a couple — and to his legacy as a politician — often overshadowed their responsibilities to their kids, according to Tumulty.
“When she was displeased about something, they all knew it, and those who were not in her good graces tended not to last for long,” Tumulty writes.
Tumulty quotes Stu Spencer, President Reagan’s chief political strategist from early on in his political career, describing the couple as “an inseparable team politically and personally. He would never have been governor without her. He would never have been president without her.”
From left: Ronald Reagan with daughter Patti and wife Nancy Reagan.Bettmann/Getty
Theirs was a relationship true to its showbusiness roots.
“As the conductor shouted, ‘All aboard!’ Ronnie and Nancy fell into each other’s arms and started making out for what seemed like an interminable amount of time,” Tumulty writes. “Spencer grew deeply embarrassed. ‘Jesus, this is like a scene out of a damn movie,’ he thought to himself. ‘What the hell is going on?’ "
Recounting how the couple would ride horses together at Rancho del Cielo before he would gather her in his arms as he helped her dismount, John Hutton — who served as White House physician during President Reagan’s second term — told Tumulty: “Good Christopher Columbus, how does anybody keep a romance going for this many years with that intensity?”
That love was so strong, however — and burned so bright — that the relationship with their own children often fell into its shadow.
In the letter, dated May 24, 1963, he discusses an issue the couple’s been having with two of the children: Michael, his adopted son from his first marriage, and Patti, his daughter with Mrs. Reagan
“Whether Mike helps buy his first car or spends the money on sports coats isn’t really important. We both want for him to get started on a road that will lead to his being able to provide or himself … (Patti is another kind of problem, and we’ll do all we can to make that one right, too),” Reagan wrote. “But what is really important is that having fulfilled our responsibilities to our offspring we haven’t been careless with the measure that is ours—namely what we are to each other.”
The tenuous relationship between the Reagans and both Michael and Patti would only worsen in the decades after that letter.
Patti, who declined to be interviewed for Tumulty’s book, has since claimed her mother beat her and abused prescription drugs — claims her brother Ron told the author were “hyperbole.”
Still, he agreed that his mom wasn’t the most easygoing person and not always a nurturing presence.
“She was an anxious personality, and her anxieties, particularly when my father was away, were visited upon her children,” Ron tells Tumulty in the book. “You didn’t know quite who you’re going to be dealing with today, so you had to be wary of her.”
Patti has been more forgiving of her mom in recent years, but she has still spoken openly about the fraught relationship. She once told NBC News' Maria Shriver of her parents: “Their lives wouldn’t be destroyed if we weren’t there. They were complete unto each other. And that can be a complicated thing for children.”
With Michael, tensions came to a head a few years before his father died of Alzheimer’s in 2004.
Ron, Michael’s half-brother, confirmed this story, telling Tumulty: “The Secret Service were concerned enough about Mike that after an incident where he sort of loomed over my mother, who was frail at the time, and screamed at her that we’d all be better off if she just died, or was dead — something to that effect — the Secret Service would no longer leave him alone in the house wither her. They would always put somebody outside the door on the rare occasions when he visited.”
A message sent to the Reagan Legacy Foundation, of which Michael is president, was not immediately returned to PEOPLE.
From left: Ron Reagan with parents Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a swimming pool at home on their California ranch.Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
The Reagans' decades-long marriage, while strong, wasn’t without its own challenges as well.
Tumulty writes that, after the president suffered a nearly fatal gunshot wound during an assassination attempt in March 1981, the first lady became obsessed with taking precautions to ensure her husband’s safety.
That meant forcing him to wear the bulletproof vest he hated, advising his aides that he would not be holding outdoor events and turning to an astrologer to advise her on the most and least dangerous times for him to travel.
The shooting took its toll on Mrs. Reagan, whom Tumulty writes “cried constantly when Ronnie wasn’t around” in the months after the incident.
“Sometimes she cried when he was, though she tried to do it in the bedroom or the bathroom, so he wouldn’t see,” Tumulty writes.
From left: Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan.Ronald Reagan Presidental Library/Getty Images
While visiting the two, Hutton said, Mrs. Reagan turned on the song “Unforgettable” and held up her hands, beckoning her husband to dance.
“It was a scene that Hutton had witnessed many times in the past,” Tumulty writes. “In the old days, the Reagans would fall together and cling to each other as they moved as one to the music. But this time, Ronnie brushed her away.”
His June 2004 death was agonizing for Nancy, who lived until March 2016. Still, he was never far from his widow, who kept a photo of the two on her bedside table.
That photo, Tumulty writes in her new book, depicts President Reagan “taken in profile, when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s. He was lying down … she was hovering above him, their two faces nose to nose. The intimacy was still there, even through the fog of his illness.”
The former first lady, ever proud of her relationship with her husband, had picked up the photo during a meeting with Stuart Kenworthy, an Episcopal priest approached about delivering her eventual eulogy.
After he asked Mrs. Reagan to describe the photo, Tumulty writes, she looked at Kenworthy after a few moments to say, simply: “This one is my favorite.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reaganis available now.
source: people.com
