July 6 marks the centenary of Nancy Reagan’s birth and were the former first lady in a position to comment, she would be up in arms about a new biography by Karen Tumulty. When Nancy died in 2016, obituaries praised her wifely devotion to ‘Ronnie’, her fierce stewardship of him after he got Alzheimer’s and her principled stands on family values and drugs.
But in The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, which is by no means a hatchet job, we hear about her more controlling and neurotic side, particularly during the Reagans’ eight-year stint at the White House. The couple were undeniably close, but at times in an almost co-dependent way: she called him ‘Ronnie’, he called her ‘Mommie’, which seems vaguely creepy, and woe betide anyone who got in her husband’s way.
Observers noted Nancy’s fierce and unyielding gaze on Ronnie whenever he spoke in public, as though she were exercising some sort of telepathic control. Perhaps she was just worrying, and John Hinckley Jr’s assassination attempt on her husband in 1981 had a deep and lasting impact on her. After that incident, she hung about him like a bird of prey, and White House staffers lived in fear of ‘Mommie calls’ in the dead of night. Nancy took a hand in removing advisers inimical to her husband’s image and famously consulted a San Francisco astrologer before planning Ronnie’s public itinerary.
Nancy with Ronald in hospital after the assassination attempt in 1981. Photo: Reuters
Multiple face-lifts are not against the law and nor is hypocrisy: Nancy fronted the Reagans’ war on drugs, which largely targeted African-Americans, yet the first lady depended on uppers and downers to soothe anxiety and help with sleep. She preached conservative family values, but was pregnant when she married Ronald and later lied to their daughter about it.
But her devotion to Ronald was undeniable. When he started getting visibly confused in public, she would hiss panicked prompts in his ear. They were quite the double act, and both started out as actors in Hollywood.
Ronald got there first. Born in Tampico, Illinois, in 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan had it tough growing up. Though his mother Nelle was a great support, Ronald’s first generation Irish father John ‘Jack’ was an alcoholic and the family moved many times as he searched for work.
Ronald grew up handsome and driven, and the ‘aw shucks’ manner that would later charm a nation landed him a job in sports broadcasting. He was in Hollywood to report on a baseball game when he took his first screen test at Warner Brothers in 1937. Jack Warner liked what he saw and gave the 26-year-old a contract.
His charisma soon made him a favourite of Warner’s and, almost as importantly, of the career-smashing gossip columnist Louella Parsons. But even his most ardent admirers quickly realised he was no John Barrymore. Tall and blandly handsome, Ronald radiated an apple-pie wholesomeness that made him a natural sidekick. As Warner pithily put it, “he was no Errol Flynn — but as Flynn’s non-threatening pal, he was perfect”. It was in those innocuous ‘buddy’ roles that he was typecast.
Too bland
In all, Ronald Reagan made 54 features in a film career that spanned almost 30 years, but most were B-movies. His acting limitations aside, Ronald’s unshakeable Midwestern wholesomeness ruled out playing bad guys, the character actor’s traditional route to stardom.
He was simply too bland to be cast as the lead in a major studio film. Instead he played a series of Johnnys and Jimmys and Petes and Gils, earnest and loyal friends of the hero who sometimes died tragically for the overall good.
There were, however, a few highlights. In Knute Rockne, All American (1940), he co-starred with fellow Irish-American Pat O’Brien in the story of a legendary Notre Dame football coach. Ronald played college football star George ‘the Gipper’ Gipp, who became the emotional focal point of the film after dying of a mysterious infection, inspiring the rallying cry, “Let’s win one for the Gipper.” That slogan would be used again to great effect in successive presidential campaigns.
In a string of westerns, most notably The Last Outpost, he looked a natural on a horse, a skill he would later use to mould his political image. But perhaps his most underrated film was King’s Row (1942), a turn-of-the-century family saga that featured Reagan’s most celebrated screen moment as his character Drake McHugh wakes after an accident which necessitated the amputation of his legs and wonders: “Where’s the rest o’ me?”
Such highlights, though, proved not to be the beginning of A-list glory, and by the late 1940s, the Reagan name was hardly considered the mark of quality. When Shirley Temple was cast alongside Ronald in That Hagen Girl in 1947, her mother took it as a sure sign that her daughter’s film career was nearing its end.
Enter Nancy, née Robbins, later Davis, an equally dull young actor whose lack of star quality had bedevilled a misfiring Hollywood career. Though she liked to paint a rosier version of her childhood, Nancy Robbins was born in New York in 1921, disowned by her biological father and abandoned by her actress mother, spending six years in Maryland in the care of an aunt.
When her mother married a wealthy Chicago neurosurgeon, Nancy went to finishing school and got notions. Nancy’s mother was well-connected and friends including Spencer Tracy managed to land her a screen test.
Distant manner
In 1949, she moved to California after signing a seven-year contract with MGM. Almost immediately, it became apparent that her huge staring eyes and somewhat distant manner were going to make her hard to cast, and she would mainly be consigned to play loyal wives, good mothers, ‘steady’ women — the female equivalent of Ronald’s stand-up guys.
She was by no means a terrible actress, though and, despite an inherent stiffness, had a handful of fine on-screen moments. She was praised for her portrayal of a child psychologist in the 1950 thriller Shadow on the Wall, and also for her work in The Next Voice You Hear… (also 1950), playing a housewife who hears the voice of God on the radio. Her own favourite role was opposite Ray Milland in Night and Morning (1951), a rather sombre melodrama built around the theme of grief.
Ronald and Nancy at the première of Moby Dick in 1956
She and Ronnie appeared in just one film together, the 1957 wartime drama Hellcats of the Navy, in which Reagan played a US submarine commander, and Nancy a nurse on whom he is keen. In it, one critic said, she seemed like “a housewife who came along for the ride”. It is remembered with little affection.
When critics used adjectives like “satisfactory” and “reliable” to describe her performances, Nancy must have known she was not the next Garbo. She does not appear to have nursed high hopes as an actor, but was wildly ambitious in other regards.
She first encountered Ronald in November of 1949: the meeting was not auspicious. By that stage, he was president of the Screen Actors’ Guild and active in the fight against America’s scourge — communism. Nancy had been horrified when her name popped up on the Hollywood blacklist, which Ronald reassured her was all a misunderstanding — she had been confused with an allegedly Marx-loving actress of the same name.
Having bonded over their suspicion of all things un-American, the pair began dating: one delighted gossip columnist dubbed them “the couple who have no vices”.
But Ronald was still something of a ladies’ man and not keen on remarrying after his travails with first wife Jane Wyman. Nature settled the matter and after Nancy got pregnant, the couple married on March 4, 1952.
Ronald became a highly paid television presenter and product endorser, who would shortly turn his attention to politics. After switching his allegiance from Democrat to Republican, he began quietly and efficiently networking and, in 1964, made a highly regarded speech in support of right-wing presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
Ronald’s political philosophy — small government, low taxes, free markets and anti-communism — was solidifying, and in 1967, to the amusement of many, he was elected governor of California.
Afterwards, his former studio boss Jack Warner commented on whether Reagan looked the part. “Governor, no. Bad casting — the friend of the governor.” Even Ronald himself made jokes. When asked how he thought he would cope in his new job, he said: “I don’t know — I’ve never played a governor.”
He played one pretty convincingly from 1967 to 1975, balancing the then-almost bankrupt state’s budget and pursuing a nakedly right-wing, anti-welfare, pro-death penalty agenda that may have horrified showbiz liberals, but impressed many in the Republican Party.
Ronald and Nancy as president and first lady in 1988. Photo: Getty Images
Pundits were surprised when he decided not to pursue a third term as governor in 1975, but he had bigger things in mind.
As for Nancy, she was delighted to become ‘the first lady of California’, which might not have been a thing up to then, but definitely would be now. And in 1980, she would finally find a role worthy of her unique and particular talents — first lady to the nation.
