The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

got from his Kitchen Cabinet, the group of wealthy backers who recognized the potential in a former movie actor. Most of them self-made millionaires who had picked up an interest in politics on the way to earning their fortunes, they financed his first campaigns and oversaw the selection of his advisers. At the core of this small group were auto dealer Holmes Tuttle and Italian-born geophysicist Henry Salvatori, who was among the pioneers of petroleum exploration. After the 1964 election debacle, they turned to Ronnie as their best hope of rebuilding the Republican Party in California and beyond. He was the man, they were convinced, whose eloquence and common touch would make their conservative principles appeal to working-class and suburban Democrats.

As the Kitchen Cabinet built the scaffolding for Ronnie’s rise, Nancy became a frequent intermediary. “Reagan seldom sought their collective advice,” recalled Thomas C. Reed, a top operative in Ronnie’s first gubernatorial campaign, but “their grievances, if untended, would surely percolate into his quiet space via Nancy.” She was constantly on the phone with Ronnie’s rich benefactors, stroking their egos and soliciting their opinions, gathering up whatever scraps of gossip they might have heard. “She cultivated them and maintained them in a way that my father just wouldn’t have; wouldn’t have occurred to him, really,” Ron said.

While Ronnie was moving more deeply into political activism in the early 1960s, he got to know some of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement. Chief among those relationships was the friendship the Reagans developed with National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and his wife, Patricia, a legendary hostess and socialite. “Probably the best instructor he had in the process was Bill Buckley. He really respected Bill Buckley, a thoughtful guy who had a point of view that he found interesting,” Ronnie’s first campaign manager, Stu Spencer, recalled. Nancy was the caretaker of the more personal side of that relationship. For decades, she and Buckley sent flirtatious letters back and forth. In one, dated January 4, 1965, she teased the erudite Buckley about his famously expansive vocabulary: “I’m still waiting for just the right moment to drop Zeitgeist (sp?) into the conversation and amaze all my friends—but so far it hasn’t come—it’s terribly frustrating.” Ten days later, Nancy’s tone was more serious as she confided to Buckley that she was deeply ambivalent about the path on which her husband was about to take them: “I alternately feel terribly brave about the whole thing and then as if I’d like to crawl into a cave where no one could find me. I know if Ronnie does decide to go into politics all the way, I’d better get over that.”

Though her ambition burned as brightly as Ronnie’s, Nancy was keenly aware of how much they were putting at risk, how much they would be leaving behind. The Reagans finally had achieved financial security and were traveling—thanks largely to her—in an elite social circle. During the lean, early years of their marriage, they kept company mostly with a tight group of friends from their movie days. They still saw Bill and Ardis Holden, of course. “Our idea of a big evening was to watch a picture on television with the Holdens, or go out to the movies,” Nancy said. Ronnie and Nancy also were close with onetime matinee idol Robert Taylor and his stunning wife, Ursula, who lived across the street in Pacific Palisades. Bob Taylor and Ronnie had a lot in common, including an introverted nature and a shared love of retreating to their ranches at every opportunity. Get-togethers with the Taylors were low-key and casual. Ronnie liked it that everyone felt comfortable wearing jeans at dinner.

But as Ronnie’s fortunes improved, so did Nancy’s opportunity to meet and ingratiate the Reagans into a more gilt-edged—and beneficial—set of friends. During their father’s years on television, Patti and Ron went to Bel Air’s exclusive John Thomas Dye School, as did the children of many famous Hollywood people. Nancy threw herself into volunteer work there. She met Mary Jane Wick at a 1959 school fair where the two of them ran the hot dog booth. The families started a ritual of spending Christmases together and continued to do so right through the Reagans’ years in the White House. Mary Jane’s husband, Charles Z. Wick, an entertainment lawyer who made a fortune in investments and nursing homes, would later raise $15 million for Ronnie’s 1980 presidential campaign and be rewarded with a post as head of the United States Information Agency, which was set up during the Cold War to spread this country’s vision across the world via platforms such as Voice of America. Their son Doug Wick, who became a producer of major films, including the 2000 epic Gladiator, described Nancy as “the queen bee. She was glamorous and fun and smart. At my parents’ parties, my dad would play the piano, and she would sing. She had a beautiful voice.” But Nancy was also “very strategic” in her relationships, Wick said: “She had a very good X-ray vision for who was full of shit and who was a person of substance.”

A sprawling city with no definable center, Los Angeles ran on imagination, opportunity, and reinvention. There existed an older social order, bunkered in the mansions of San Marino and Hancock Park. But power and prestige were the by-products of ambition in Southern California, growing as fortunes were made in oil, real estate, banking, and water. In just a generation or two, a family could go from being hungry speculators to stodgy capitalists welcomed into the downtown sanctums of the Jonathan Club or the California Club.

As Edie once had, Nancy found a foothold among the select by doing charity work. She was accepted for membership into the Colleagues, an elite organization of fifty socialites who raised money for women and children’s causes and who got together each month for gossip-fueled luncheons. The Colleagues were perfectly coiffed clotheshorses. Their big annual fund-raiser was a sale of slightly