It is fair to say that without his wife’s strength and loyalty Ronald Reagan would probably never have made the transformation from Hollywood actor to President of the United States. Behind the successful man was a determined, ambitious and intelligent woman who wielded formidable political power in her own right. Her strength of character cost her popularity: because Ronald Reagan was, to the general public, one of the best-liked presidents the Americans ever elected, the media were prone to attack the first lady.
A handsome woman with large, luminous eyes, she said that entering the White House as first lady in January 1981 was like a fairytale. It soon turned into a nightmare. On March 30, Reagan was shot and seriously wounded by John Hinckley Jr. He later told friends that his wife never got over the shock. While he was in hospital recovering from a punctured lung caused by the gunshot wound, Nancy Reagan slept with one of his shirts to be comforted by his scent. Thereafter, she was described as a “lioness” in her determination to protect the president. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary that night. “My life would be over.” Most controversially, this included controlling her husband’s diary, because she “felt panicky every time he left the White House”.
She famously consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley — who had predicted that March 30 would be a bad day for the president — on which days were “good” “neutral” or to be “avoided”. Reagan’s diary was colour coded accordingly. She later admitted that Quigley was “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie. Astrology was simply one of the ways I coped with the fear I felt after my husband almost died.”
She was accused of forcing the resignation of Donald Regan, the White House Chief of Staff in 1987 and having influence on her husband’s political decision making. She was said to have pushed for America’s rapprochement with Russia, though her personal relations with Raisa Gorbachev opened up a new cold war. Of her unpopularity during her husband’s years in the White House from 1981 to 1989 she said: “So much has been made of my influence. You can’t be married for 28 years without having some influence over each other. I’m a woman who loves her husband and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare.”
Under the glossy veneer of this former actress there was a sensitive and often anxious human being, who would be privately devastated by criticism of her in the press. It was only slowly that she won public acceptance or received any credit for her achievements on her own account as first lady, for instance her considerable role in the drive to combat drug-taking. Most memorably of all, whenever Reagan made a speech, his wife would be at his side, fixing him with an adoring look that came to be known by media commentators as “the gaze”.
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She was born Anne Frances Robbins in 1921. Her mother called her Nancy from the start. Her classmates nicknamed her, ironically, La Belle. Taking her stepfather’s surname, she was known in Hollywood as Nancy Davis. When she became First Lady, White House staffers called her “Mrs President.” Ronald Reagan called her “Mommie”.
Nancy Reagan, as she came to be known around the world when her husband was elected president in 1980, was a carefully concocted construction. In 1929 her father Kenneth Seymour, a car salesman, left her mother, Edith Luckett. However, from the moment her mother remarried to Loyal Davis, a neurosurgeon, and moved the family to Chicago, young Nancy portrayed herself as a young debutante heading for the top.
During her ten years at Girls Latin private school in Chicago she worked to improve her manners and her deportment and slim down her figure. Although her school friends considered her unsophisticated and “a little prim”, after playing the lead role in the school play, ominously called First Lady, by George S Kaufman and Katharine Dayton, she set her sights on a career in acting.
Her strict, deeply conservative stepfather had a number of Hollywood friends, including Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston, who would stop off and stay with the Davises when travelling between the coasts by train. The young Nancy was in awe of these eminent screen idols and the notion of working in Hollywood entered her brain.
Yet when picking a university, Dr Davis urged Nancy to attend Smith, which had no drama department but would provide her with the right New England social contacts to marry well. He gave her an allowance of £1,200 a month, in today’s money, and when she returned from her first year away weighing 10st 10lbs — she was only 5ft 4ins tall — he put her on a strict diet. He also paid for her prominent nose to be surgically sculpted.
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In 1939 she was formally introduced to Chicago society at the Casino Club debutantes ball. While her contemporaries were getting into uniform after America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941, she was taking prominent singing roles on the Smith stage in such carefree shows as Ladies on the Loose and The Factory Follies.
On graduation, with acting now her firm ambition, Nancy Davis went to Detroit, where she joined a show, Ramshackle Inn, heading for Broadway. She only had three lines of dialogue, but it was a start. After a number of similar small parts she met Benjamin Thau, head of casting at MGM. Armed with a letter of commendation from Tracy, she travelled to Hollywood for a screen test and was before long employed by the studio for £2,100 a week, in 2016 money.
The reinvention of Anne Frances Robbins continued. On her contract, she lost a couple of years from her age, saying she was 26 rather than 28. Her first acting credit was for a small part in The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse.
After dates with actors, including Robert Taylor, Clark Gable and Peter Lawford, she set her eyes on Ronald Reagan, aged 38, the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). He was struggling to maintain his “A-list” actor status to a jaded postwar audience that was fast cooling on his screen persona as a gee-shucks, ever-smiling sidekick. He had just divorced the actress Jane Wyman and was enjoying the sexual freedom of his newfound bachelorhood.
Nancy Davis’s need to make contact with Reagan was not merely amorous. She discovered to her alarm that her name appeared on a blacklist of communist sympathisers that studios would not employ. On further inquiry, she discovered that there was another Nancy Davis, who did indeed have communist views. The only person who could sort out the double trouble was Reagan, an ardent anti-communist.
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When they met for supper to discuss Nancy’s dilemma, she fell in love. Reagan had put off other dates with his tendency to sermonise. Davis lapped it up. “I knew that being his wife was the role I wanted most,” she recalled. She started attending the weekly SAG meetings and found herself a regular sole woman weekend guest at Reagan’s ranch in Malibu. He was surprised when she told him she was pregnant by him.
They married in the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley on March 4, 1952, with the actor William Holden the best man. The day before, MGM unilaterally terminated her contract.
Life for the newly married Reagans was complicated. Reagan owed a fortune in unpaid income taxes. He already had three children with Wyman: Maureen, Christine and an adopted son, Michael. In 1952 Nancy gave birth to Patricia Ann Reagan, and in 1958 to Ronald Prescott Reagan.
Relations with both her biological children would later be strained. Patti became an actress and wrote a novel in which the character’s mother was a distant figure more concerned with clothes. Her son, Ron, left Yale to become a ballet dancer and later became a liberal television pundit. Her stepdaughter Maureen stood as a Republican for the Mississippi governorship. Her stepson Michael was a conservative radio talk-show host. They all survive her.
With both Nancy and Ronnie struggling to find work, salvation came in 1954 in the shape of General Electric, which chose the Reagans to be their all-American family in a series of sponsored television shows.
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A lifelong Democrat, in 1962 Reagan switched to the Republicans. Two years later he gave a brilliant televised speech, “A Time for Choosing,” in support of Barry Goldwater, the profound conservative Republican presidential candidate. Although Goldwater lost the 1964 election in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, the Reagan speech made him Goldwater’s obvious successor.
In 1966, Reagan declared his candidacy for the California governorship and the following year Nancy prepared for the campaign by having her eyes lifted by cosmetic surgery.
After two terms, Reagan was encouraged by rich conservative donors to challenge President Gerald Ford, the accidental president who had succeeded Richard Nixon on his resignation, for the Republican nomination in 1976. Nancy reluctantly agreed, though she became highly protective of his image and was hurt when Ford’s camp suggested that he was as dangerous as Goldwater and could edge America into another war. At the convention in Kansas City, Reagan lost to Ford by just 117 delegates.
The 1976 election turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the 1980 presidential race, where Nancy took a close interest in the campaign staff and ensured that the old Nixon operative was removed in favour of the more malleable adviser William Casey. It was the start of a pattern of not interfering in policy directly but of intervening when staff appeared not to have his best interest at heart.
Nancy Reagan became first lady in January 1981, wearing a flaming red hat and outfit for the Washington inaugural parade. Her first ambition was to attempt to restore the style along the lines of Jacqueline Kennedy, redecorating and renovating the White House, which had fallen into disrepair.
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She matched her interior design with expensive haute couture for herself by designers such as Oscar de la Renta, James Galanos and Bill Blass, and jewellery lent to her by Harry Winston. Who exactly paid for the outfits — some were borrowed, some bought on loans which were not expected to be paid — became Nancy’s first White House scandal.
Entertainment was lavish and those who did not measure up to her exacting standards were soon dispensed with. Her propensity to fire White House staff earned her the nickname “Little Gun” among the employees. When the Prince and Princess of Wales were guests at the White House, the chef was made to prepare their evening meal five times until the brown sugar feathers on the ice cream looked just like the real thing.
Food was served in new china service for state banquets whose cost, about £425,000 in today’s money was considered insensitively extravagant when the economy was in the depths of a recession. She responded that improvements were funded by private donations, adding: “This house belongs to all America. It should be the prettiest house in America.”
Nancy privately defined her own role as protecting Reagan from the stresses of the job. She ensured that they both took time out each afternoon to watch an old Hollywood movie in the White House screening room. Their relationship remained sentimental. On one birthday Reagan bought her a 15ft canoe called Trulove, rowed her into the middle of a lake, and serenaded her. She upset feminists in the way she spoke of her love for him. “My life didn’t really begin until I met Ronnie. What I wanted most in all the world was to be a good wife and mother. I make no apology for the way I feel about the position my husband holds in my life. Yes, he is at the centre of it.
“I’m pretty old fashioned about things like the woman’s place in the in marriage and home and motherhood and all those things. . . I don’t believe in women’s liberation as you can see.”
But she also kept tabs on what Reagan’s speeches said, demanding late drafts and amending them to avoid him appearing too right wing or too influenced by particular members of staff or Republican politicians. When he was swept up in the Iran-Contra arms for hostages scandal, she co-ordinated his efforts to deny the charges against him.
Nancy became obsessed with Reagan’s health. When, in 1987, he needed prostate surgery, she insisted on using seven surgeons, all friends of her father, perform the operation.
After the attempt on Reagan’s life on in 1981, she raced to the George Washington University Hospital to be by his side. He greeted her, as so often, with a line borrowed from an old movie: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” The incident led to one of the couple’s most intractable differences of opinion, with Nancy insisting that the assassination attempt suggested that he should not run for a second term and he insisting on carrying on for another four years.
Margaret Thatcher, whose political marriage to Reagan made her one of his most influential advisers, particularly on foreign policy, was careful to tiptoe around Nancy Reagan and appease her whenever necessary. She showered her with glamorous invitations. Although Reagan himself was unable to attend, the First Lady attended the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. The Reagans were invited to Windsor Castle, too, and, on his retirement, the Queen visited the Reagans on their ranch in Santa Barbara.
On Reagan’s death, on June 5 2004, Nancy Reagan repaid Thatcher by inviting her not only to the president’s Washington funeral, but the private funeral in California where the three most important women in his life mourned him: Wyman, Thatcher and his widow.
Reagan was aware how much he relied upon his wife’s good sense to keep him out of trouble. His diary entry for the day he was shot reads: “I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there. Of all the ways God has blessed me, giving her to me is the greatest.”
Nancy Reagan, US first lady, was born on July 6, 1921. She died on March 6, 2016, aged 94