begin quote from:
| New York Times | - |
Nancy
Reagan, the influential and stylish wife of the 40th president of the
United States who unabashedly put Ronald Reagan at the center of her
life but who became a political figure in her own right, died on Sunday
at her home in Los Angeles.
Nancy Reagan, an Influential and Stylish First Lady, Dies at 94
Nancy Reagan Dies at 94
CreditTeresa Zabala/The New York Times
Nancy
Reagan, the influential and stylish wife of the 40th president of the
United States who unabashedly put Ronald Reagan at the center of her
life but who became a political figure in her own right, died on Sunday
at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.
The cause was congestive heart failure, according to a statement from Joanne Drake, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Reagan.
Mrs.
Reagan was a fierce guardian of her husband’s image, sometimes at the
expense of her own, and during Mr. Reagan’s improbable climb from a
Hollywood acting career to the governorship of California and ultimately
the White House, she was a trusted adviser.
“Without
Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan,”
said Michael K. Deaver, the longtime aide and close friend of the
Reagans who died in 2007.
Mrs.
Reagan — who in her later years became an outspoken advocate for
people, like her husband, with Alzheimer’s disease — helped hire and
fire the political consultants who ran Mr. Reagan’s near-miss campaign
for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 and his successful
campaign for the presidency in 1980.
She
also played a seminal role in the 1987 ouster of the White House chief
of staff, Donald T. Regan, whom Mrs. Reagan blamed for ineptness after
it was disclosed that Mr. Reagan had secretly approved arms sales to
Iran.
Behind
the scenes, Mrs. Reagan was the prime mover in Mr. Reagan’s efforts to
recover from the scandal, which was known as Iran-contra because some of
the proceeds from the sale had been diverted to the contras opposing
the leftist government of Nicaragua. While trying to persuade her
stubborn husband to apologize for the arms deal, Mrs. Reagan brought
political figures into the White House, among them the Democratic power
broker Robert S. Strauss, to argue her case to the president.
Mr.
Reagan eventually conceded that she was right. On March 4, 1987, the
president made a distanced apology for the arms sale in a nationally
televised address that dramatically improved his slumping public
approval ratings.
His
wife, typically, neither sought nor received credit for the turnaround.
Mrs. Reagan did not wish to detract from her husband’s luster by
appearing to be a power behind the presidential throne.
In
public, she gazed at him adoringly and portrayed herself as a contented
wife who had willingly given up a Hollywood acting career of her own to
devote herself to her husband’s career. “He was all I had ever wanted
in a man, and more,” she wrote in “My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy
Reagan,” published in 1989.
He
reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from
out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing
wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight,
I’m a worrier about her.”
In
truth, she was the worrier. Mrs. Reagan wrote in her memoirs that she
sometimes became angry with her husband because of his relentless
optimism. He didn’t worry at all, she wrote, “and I seem to do the
worrying for both of us.”
It
was this conviction that led Mrs. Reagan to take a leading role in the
Regan ouster and in other personnel matters in the White House. “It’s
hard to envision Ronnie as being a bad guy,” she said in a 1989
interview. “And he’s not. But there are times when somebody has to step
in and say something. And I’ve had to do that sometimes — often.”
She
did not always get her way. Mr. Reagan ignored her criticism of several
cabinet appointees, including Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.
In 2001, seven years after her husband announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease, Mrs. Reagan broke with President George W. Bush and endorsed embryonic stem cell
research. She stepped up her advocacy after her husband’s death on June
5, 2004. “She feels the greatest legacy her family could ever have is
to spare other families from going through what they have,” a family
friend, Doug Wick, quoted Mrs. Reagan as saying.
Years on Camera
Born
Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, in New York City, Nancy Davis was
the daughter of Edith Luckett, an actress, and Kenneth Robbins, a car
dealer who abandoned the family soon after her birth. Ms. Luckett
resumed her stage career when her daughter was 2 and sent the child to
live with relatives in Bethesda, Md. In 1929, Ms. Luckett married a
Chicago neurosurgeon, Loyal Davis, who adopted Nancy and gave her the
family name.
Almost
overnight, Nancy Davis’s difficult childhood became stable and
privileged. Throughout the rest of her life, she described Mr. Davis as
her real father.
Nancy Davis graduated from the elite Girls’ Latin School in Chicago and then from Smith College
in 1943. Slender, with photogenic beauty and large, luminous eyes, she
considered an acting career. After doing summer stock in New England,
she landed a part in the Broadway musical “Lute Song,” with Mary Martin
and Yul Brynner. With the help of a friend, the actor Spencer Tracy, her
mother then arranged a screen test given by the director George Cukor,
of MGM.
Cukor,
according to his biographer, told the studio that Miss Davis lacked
talent. Nonetheless, she was given a part in the film she had tested
for, “East Side, West Side,” which was released in 1949 starring Barbara
Stanwyck, James Mason and Ava Gardner. Cast as the socialite wife of a
New York press baron, Miss Davis appeared in only two scenes, but they
were with Miss Stanwyck, the film’s top star.
After
her husband went into politics, Mrs. Reagan encouraged the notion that
her acting interest had been secondary, a view underscored by the
biographical information she supplied to MGM in 1949, in which she said
her “greatest ambition” was to have a “successful, happy marriage.”
But
this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have
careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At
Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just
been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the
steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own
with accomplished actors.
The
producer Dore Schary cast Miss Davis in her first lead role, in “The
Next Voice You Hear” (1950), playing a pregnant mother opposite James
Whitmore. She received good reviews for her work in “Night Into Morning”
(1951), with Ray Milland, in which she played a war widow who talked
Milland’s character out of committing suicide. Mrs. Reagan thought this
was her best film.
Mr.
Wills wrote that she was underrated as an actress because she had
become most widely associated with her “worst” and, as it happened, last
film, “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957), in which Ronald Reagan had the
leading role.
How They Met
As she so often did in life, Nancy Davis took the initiative in meeting the man who would become her husband.
In
the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by
government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in
the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a
Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging
the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who
had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing
to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Such
newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis
sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East
Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity:
another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He
offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to
make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis
insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.
The
meeting took place over dinner at LaRue’s, a fashionable Hollywood
restaurant on Sunset Strip. Mr. Reagan, recovering from multiple leg
fractures suffered in a charity baseball game, was on crutches. Miss
Davis was immediately smitten.
Mr.
Reagan, though, was more cautious. According to Bob Colacello, who has
written extensively about the Reagans, Mr. Reagan still hoped for a
reconciliation with his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman, who had
divorced him in 1948.
After
dating several times in the fall of 1949, Mr. Reagan and Miss Davis
drifted apart and dated others. But they began seeing each other again
in 1950. Miss Davis had been accepted on the board of the Screen Actors
Guild, and she and Mr. Reagan began having dinner every Monday night
after the meetings, often with the actor William Holden, the guild vice
president, according to Mr. Colacello.
Mr.
Reagan and Nancy Davis were married on March 4, 1952, at a private
ceremony at The Little Brown Church in the Valley, in Studio City. Mr.
Holden and his wife, Ardis, were the only witnesses.
After
their marriage, the Reagans bought a house in the Pacific Palisades
area of Los Angeles, where their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born — “a
bit precipitously,” Mrs. Reagan wrote in her memoirs — on Oct. 21, 1952.
She is known as Patti Davis professionally. The Reagans also had a son,
Ronald Prescott, on May 28, 1958.
Besides
her son and daughter, survivors include Mrs. Reagan’s stepson, Michael
Reagan, and her brother, Dr. Richard Davis. A stepdaughter, Maureen
Reagan, died in 2001.
At
the time of their marriage, Mr. Reagan’s film career was, as his new
wife put it, at a “standstill.” Although Nancy Reagan had vowed not to
be a working wife, she made a low-budget science-fiction movie,
“Donovan’s Brain” (1953), with Lew Ayres. Her working was “a blow to
Ronnie,” Mrs. Reagan observed in her memoirs, “but quite simply, we
needed the money.”
The
money worries ended early in 1954, when Music Corporation of America,
the entertainment conglomerate, offered Mr. Reagan a television contract
for $125,000 a year to be the host of “General Electric Theater.” It
had a long run, broadcast on Sunday nights until 1962, and Mrs. Reagan
herself acted in a few of its episodes.
Indeed,
when her film career was over, she continued to work sporadically in
television, in episodes of “Zane Grey Theater,” “The Dick Powell Show”
and, as late as 1962, “Wagon Train.”
A Loyal Supporter
By
then, Mr. Reagan had changed his partisan affiliation from Democratic
to Republican and was giving political speeches. In Hollywood, Mr.
Reagan’s shift toward the right was often attributed to Mrs. Reagan and
her father, Loyal Davis, a staunch conservative. Both the Reagans denied
this; she was barely interested in politics at the time, they said.
Ironically, when President Reagan began to negotiate with Soviet
leaders, conservatives accused Mrs. Reagan of pushing him in a liberal
direction. Evidence is lacking to support either suspicion. As Mrs.
Reagan put it: “If Ronnie hadn’t wanted to do it, he wouldn’t have done
it.”
Though
Mrs. Reagan was not at first keen on her husband’s entry into politics,
she loyally supported him. His career took off when he made a rousing
nationally televised speech for the Republican presidential candidate
Barry Goldwater on Oct. 27, 1964. The following year a group of wealthy
people from Southern California approached Mr. Reagan about running for
governor of California. He was interested.
From
the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a
team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan
campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer
found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was
peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.
Mr.
Reagan won a contested Republican primary and then a landslide victory
in November against the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Edmund G. Brown. For
the Reagans, that meant a 350-mile move to the state capital,
Sacramento.
Mrs.
Reagan was not happy there. She missed friends and the brisker social
pace and milder climate of Southern California. And she hated the
governor’s mansion, a dilapidated Victorian house on a busy one-way
street. So she persuaded her husband to lease, at their own expense, a
12-room Tudor house in a fashionable section of eastern Sacramento. Mr.
Reagan’s wealthy Southern California supporters later bought the house
and leased it back to the Reagans.
The
mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern
California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn
disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to
socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband.
She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan
Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering
article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The
article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen
insecurity.
Mrs.
Reagan, who thought she had made a good impression on Ms. Didion, was
crushed by the article. Katharine Graham, the longtime publisher of The
Washington Post and later a friend of Mrs. Reagan’s, said the article
set the tone for other unfavorable ones.
But
not all the press coverage was unflattering. A few months later, The
Los Angeles Times published an article whose tone was telegraphed by its
headline: “Nancy Reagan: A Model First Lady.” She also received
positive publicity for welcoming home former prisoners of war from
Vietnam and taking an active role in a Foster Grandparents Program for
mentally disabled children.
Governor
Reagan left office in 1975. With President Richard M. Nixon enmeshed in
the Watergate scandal, the Reagans had already begun planning their
next political move. In May 1974, they met with supporters at their home
in Pacific Palisades. Among them was John P. Sears, a Washington lawyer
who had worked for Mr. Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1960. Mr.
Sears, alone of those who attended the meeting, predicted the Nixon
resignation. That made an impression on Mrs. Reagan.
After
Nixon resigned and was succeeded by Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Reagan began
planning to challenge Mr. Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential
nomination. Mrs. Reagan recommended hiring Mr. Sears to direct the
effort, which Mr. Reagan narrowly lost. (Mr. Ford was then defeated by Jimmy Carter.)
Four
years later, as Mr. Reagan again sought the nomination, Mrs. Reagan
played a leading role in the firing of Mr. Sears. The campaign had just
won the New Hampshire primary, but Mrs. Reagan nevertheless came to
believe that Mr. Sears was a disruptive influence. She also had a hand
in the hiring of his replacement as campaign manager, William J. Casey,
whom Mr. Reagan later named director of central intelligence.
But
after Mr. Reagan won the nomination and got off to a flustered start in
his campaign against President Carter, Mrs. Reagan became critical of
Mr. Casey and urged her husband to bring in Stuart Spencer, who had run
Mr. Reagan’s first campaign for governor. Mr. Spencer was persona non
grata in the Reagan camp because he had managed Mr. Ford’s campaign in
1976. But Mr. Reagan followed his wife’s advice. Mr. Spencer joined the
campaign and ran it smoothly.
Not
all of her advice was equally good. For instance, she opposed Mr.
Spencer’s proposal that her husband debate President Carter. Mr. Reagan
decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and
won convincingly a week later.
A Sophisticated Turn
As
first lady, Mrs. Reagan was glamorous and controversial. The White
House started serving liquor again after the abstemious Carter years.
Mrs. Reagan reached out to Washington society. More sophisticated than
she had been in Sacramento, Mrs. Reagan also reached out to politicians,
Democrats as well as Republicans. She became friends with Millie
O’Neal, wife of the House speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill, who was a
political foe of President Reagan by day and a friend after hours.
During one period in 1981, when Mrs. Reagan was getting “bad press,” as
she recalled, Mr. O’Neill leaned across at a luncheon and said, “Don’t
let it get you down.”
Mrs.
Reagan’s critics said she had brought the bad press on herself. After
one look at the White House living quarters, Mrs. Reagan decided to redo
them. She then raised $822,000 from private contributors to accomplish
this. Another contributor put up more than $200,000 to buy a set of
presidential china, enough for 220 place settings; it was the first new
set in the White House since the Johnson administration.
With
a slim figure maintained by daily exercise, Mrs. Reagan looked younger
than her years and wore expensively simple gowns provided by Galanos,
Adolfo and other designers. One best-selling Washington postcard
featured Mrs. Reagan in an ermine cape and jeweled crown with the label
“Queen Nancy.” It touched a nerve with Mrs. Reagan, who had been
surprised at the press criticism of the china purchase and the White
House redecoration. But the rest of the country was kinder. In 1981, a
Gallup poll put Mrs. Reagan first on the list of “most admired women” in
the nation. She was in the top 10 on the list throughout the Reagan
presidency.
White
House image-makers, aware that President Reagan was generally well
liked for his self-deprecating humor, urged Mrs. Reagan to use humor as a
weapon against her critics. She did so spectacularly on March 29, 1982,
at the Gridiron Dinner, an annual roast by journalists, where, to
standing ovations, she made sport of her stylish if icy image in a
surprise on-stage appearance as “Second Hand Rose,” wearing feathered
hat, pantaloons and yellow boots and singing a parody of “Second Hand
Clothes.”
Mrs.
Reagan’s darkest memory was of March 30, 1981, when she received word
that her husband had been shot by a would-be assassin outside the
Washington Hilton Hotel. She rushed to the hospital, where her husband,
although fighting for his life, was still wisecracking. “Honey, I forgot
to duck,” he said to her, borrowing a line that the fighter Jack
Dempsey supposedly said to his wife after losing the heavyweight
championship to Gene Tunney in 1926. But Mrs. Reagan found nothing to
laugh about. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary
that night. “My life would be over.”
After
the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San
Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would
be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley
“began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to
alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs.
Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the
information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr.
Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief
of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.
Mr.
Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For
The Record:From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley
information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs.
Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the
astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.
But
the disclosure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and
many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had
played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs.
Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly
that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.” In fact, however,
Mr. Regan’s resignation had also been demanded by powerful Republican
figures, and the president had agreed to it. When Mr. Regan saw a report
of this on CNN, he quit and walked out of the White House.
Within
the White House, Mrs. Reagan was known as a meticulous taskmaster. Some
staff members feared incurring her disfavor. The speechwriter Peggy
Noonan was wearing walking clothes in the White House the first time she
passed by Mrs. Reagan, who looked at her with disdain. “The next time I
saw her I hid behind a pillar,” Ms. Noonan wrote in the book “What I
saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.”
Other
staff members found Mrs. Reagan more approachable than her husband. One
of these was the speechwriter Landon Parvin, who worked with Mrs.
Reagan when she was engineering her husband’s recovery from the
Iran-contra scandal and drafted the apology in the president’s televised
speech.
Her Own Causes
As
first lady, Mrs. Reagan traveled throughout the United States and
abroad to speak out against drug and alcohol abuse by young Americans
and coined the phrase “Just Say No,” which was used in advertising
campaigns during the 1980s.
In
speeches about drug abuse, Mrs. Reagan often used a line from the
William Inge play “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” in which a mother
says of her children, “I always thought I could give them life like a
present, all wrapped in white with every promise of success.” Mr.
Parvin, in an interview, said she had become emotional when she read
this line, “as if it had a power that went back to her own childhood.”
On
Oct. 17, 1987, a few days after cancer was detected in a mammogram,
Mrs. Reagan underwent a mastectomy of her left breast. Afterward, she
discussed the operation openly to encourage women to have mammograms
every year.
After
the presidency, the Reagans returned to Los Angeles and settled in a
ranch house in exclusive Bel Air. In 1994, Mr. Reagan learned he had
Alzheimer’s disease and announced the diagnosis to the American people
in a poignant letter, which Mrs. Reagan had helped him write.
For
the next decade, Mrs. Reagan conducted what she called a “long
goodbye,” described in Newsweek as “10 years of exacting caregiving,
hurried lunches with friends” and “hours spent with old love letters and
powerful advocacy for new research into cures for the disease that was
taking Ronnie from her.”
At
Mr. Reagan’s funeral, at the National Cathedral in Washington, she
remained in tight control of her emotions. Then she flew west with the
coffin for a burial service at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in
Simi Valley, Calif., where Mrs. Reagan will also be buried. At the
conclusion of the ceremony, at sunset, soldiers and sailors handed Mrs.
Reagan a folded American flag. She held it close to her heart, put it
down on the coffin, and at last began to cry.
No comments:
Post a Comment