Pics: US presidency's greatest love affair

Published Mar 7, 2016

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London - Traditionally, whether she is running worthy social issue campaigns, competing in cookie-baking contests or just gazing adoringly at her husband for the cameras, America’s First Lady has always provided the softer side of any US presidency.

But the formidable Nancy Reagan broke the mould - a woman who is said to have run the White House with a “Gucci-clad fist”. Indeed, she managed - despite the political and economic revolution he ushered in - to become just as divisive a figure as her husband, Ronnie.

Most Americans will prefer to remember her later years, as the doting wife whose nursing of an ailing, Alzheimer’s stricken Ronald Reagan - “Ronnie’s long goodbye”, as she called it - inspired a nation. Not for nothing did the leader of the free world refer to his wife of 52 years as “Mommy”.

As she stood close by him through his rise to power and remained there during his slow decline, what actor Charlton Heston called the “greatest love affair in the history of the American presidency” touched even Mr Reagan’s political foes.

“My life didn’t really begin until I met Ronnie,” she liked to say - and it seemed she really meant it.

Her old friend, the late Michael Deaver, once said: “Without Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan.”

And on Sunday night President Barack Obama said she “had redefined the role” of First Lady, adding: “Later, in her long goodbye with President Reagan, she became a voice on behalf of millions of families going through the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s, and took on a new role, as advocate, on behalf of treatments that hold the potential and the promise to improve and save lives.”

But America wasn’t always in love with Nancy Reagan, who died on Sunday aged 94 of congestive heart failure at her Los Angeles home.

She had been in failing health in recent years, falling and cracking three ribs in 2012, four years after breaking her pelvis. She had previously battled with breast cancer - not to mention the death of her beloved Ronnie in 2004.

While she may have had a reputation for ‘The Gaze’ - that attentive, starstruck look she fastened on her husband when they appeared in public together - White House staff warned against mistaking it for subservience.

During the Reagan presidency from 1981 to 1989, she drew ridicule as she was portrayed as a meddling power behind the throne with a say in everything from the hiring and firing of her husband’s political staff to his handling of relations with the Soviet Union.

Depicted as being half-Lady Macbeth, half-Doris Stokes (the psychic medium), she had the last word on appointments and - most bizarrely - got her husband’s administration to take key policy decisions based on astrology readings.

We may never know the truth of the most scandalous accusations against her, in particular muck- raking biographer Kitty Kelley’s claim that she had a long affair with Frank Sinatra.

We do know the rumours are contradicted by many of those close to the couple. According to them, Reagan was as deeply devoted to Nancy as she was to him.

“Nancy loved Ronald Reagan with a consuming passion. He was her one and only reason for existence,” says Ronald Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris.

On Sunday night, Mrs Reagan’s adopted stepson, Michael, led tributes, saying: “She is once again with the man she loved. God Bless.”

The only US President to have been divorced, Reagan had emerged from an unhappy nine-year marriage to his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, when he met Nancy.

Their union had been permanently scarred by the death of their daughter shortly after birth. Wyman later claimed their break-up was due to their differing politics - ironically, he had been a Democrat at the time, while she was a Republican.

He met his future second wife - then using the name Nancy Davis - in 1949, the same year his divorce was finalised. The young starlet had found herself blacklisted as a communist after being mistaken for another actress of the same name.

She appealed to Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, for help. They met in a Hollywood restaurant and, despite Reagan being on crutches after breaking his leg in a charity baseball game, she was smitten. “I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it was pretty close,” she said later.

They married in 1952 and were famous for their public displays of affection - prompting a newspaper to dub it ‘the romance of a couple who have no vices’.

Their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born seven months after they wed - as Mrs Reagan put it, “a bit precipitously”. They had a son, Ronald, in 1958.

Initially opposed to her husband entering politics, she threw herself behind him when he ran for governor of California in 1966. From the first, she played a key role in planning his campaigns, with one chief adviser describing them as “a team”.

And they remained one. Friends or enemies marvelled at the closeness of their relationship.

Nancy said they never stopped being in love, even after his death. A former press secretary said: “They never took each other for granted. They never stopped courting.”

Mrs Reagan remained her husband’s self-proclaimed “protector”, never apologetic about dabbling in political affairs - even if it led to the media dubbing her the “dragon lady” of the White House.

Some never took the Reagans’ eternal love affair at face value. Kitty Kelley claimed Mrs Reagan’s relationship with Sinatra began after he appeared at a Reagan campaign function in Sacramento, the Reagans’ base while Ronnie was governor of California.

After they moved to the White House, said Kelley, Mrs Reagan would invite the singer to three or four-hour-long “private lunches” in their family quarters, with Sinatra sneaking in through a back door.

“When the First Lady was with Frank Sinatra, she was not to be disturbed. For anything. And that included a call from the President himself,” Kelley wrote.

Former staff conceded the pair enjoyed the occasional lunch together, but insisted that - with the Secret Service outside every door - anything more intimate than a private conversation would have been impossible.

Mrs Reagan never commented on Kelley’s 1991 book - Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography - which portrayed her as greedy, petty, compassionless and besotted with Hollywood glitz.

While political supporters dismissed such outrageous, unsourced stories, some suggested that Kelley had the core of her story correct.

As Newsweek put it: “Even her staunchest defenders concede that Nancy Reagan is more Marie Antoinette than Mother Teresa.”

Kelley had claimed that when President Reagan was given his agenda for his first Geneva summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 - a defining moment of his Presidency - he asked his aides: “Have you shown this to Nancy?”

When the answer came back “no”, the President is said to have replied: “Well, get back to me after she’s passed it.”

But her critics ignored the fact that Mrs Reagan was highly intelligent. “Reagan recognised a good mind when he encountered one, and he consulted her constantly on just about everything,” says ex-White House adviser Martin Anderson.

“On the other hand, he would never hesitate to overrule her counsel, although he seldom did so because she was usually right.”

Kelley certainly wasn’t the first to claim that Mrs Reagan was pulling her husband’s political strings.

Former White House chief of staff Donald Regan, whose sacking was supposedly engineered by Mrs Reagan after he objected to her interference, said she would consult astrologers before setting up the President’s public schedule.

Nancy admitted it was true in her own 1989 memoirs, My Turn, in which she said she had consulted Joan Quigley, an astrologer she had first met on a Seventies TV show.

Quigley would tell Nancy which days were “good”, “neutral” or to be avoided. Days were colour-coded in the diary according to their likelihood of his safety and success.

According to Quigley, the presidential plane, Air Force One, would not be allowed to take off without her say-so. She also suggested the timing of summit meetings with Gorbachev, and dates for presidential visits abroad.

She even claimed credit for Mr Reagan’s successful 1985 cancer treatment, saying the surgeon might not have cut out the malignancy properly if she hadn’t got the scheduling of the operation right.

Whether she had foreseen the end of the Cold War - perhaps Ronald Reagan’s greatest legacy - in the stars or not, Mrs Reagan freely admitted her astrologer encouraged her husband to get close to Mr Gorbachev.

Sadly, the same could not be said of Mrs Reagan’s relationship with Mr Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, an academic, which was as frosty as a Moscow winter.

When, during her visit to the US in 1987, Mrs Gorbachev had just left the room after having lectured her host and hostess on the finer points of socialism, a furious First Lady reportedly asked: “Who does that dame think she is?”

The Reagans had inherited the White House in the middle of a deep recession and it didn’t help that they wanted to spend a large amount of money giving the Washington DC address a facelift after years of neglect under the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford terms.

At a time when many Americans faced intense hardship, Mrs Reagan was accused of extravagance for spending $209 000 on replacing the White House china (even though it was paid for by tax-deductible private donations).

She was also criticised for her taste in expensive clothes. She wore a $10 000 gown to her husband’s inaugural ball and was dressed in a three-piece peach silk crepe suit for the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana.

But, worse, it emerged the following year she had accepted thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing and jewellery from top designers, breaching government rules.

Despite claiming they would either be returned or donated to museums, she hung on to some items for years, failing to reveal them in financial disclosure forms.

Meanwhile, she earned a reputation for stinginess, recycling gifts that had been sent to the couple and ignoring hairdressers’ bills.

For all her forbidding reputation, Nancy’s regime had its lighter moments. She recounted an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction at a meeting in which she was trying to persuade a female philanthropist to support the White House.

“I had on a blouse and a wraparound skirt. And she got up to leave, and I got up to shake hands with her... The skirt is down at my ankles and I’m standing there in my pantyhose and my blouse,” she recalled, laughing.

“I don’t know whether we ever got the money from the lady, but I said to her: ‘I’m sure this is a meeting you’re never going to forget.’”

Her life did not end, as she had fearfully confided to her diary, after ‘Ronnie’ died in June 2004 - a decade after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Her final years gave her time to reconnect with their children, whose liberal views, as well as daughter Patti’s decision to pose for Playboy, had led to family rifts.

Her fixation with the supernatural continued after her husband’s death. Four years ago, after Barack Obama made a quip about her performing seances, she revealed she was still in touch with her beloved Ronnie.

“It sounds strange but... I see Ronnie,” she told a magazine. “At night, if I wake up, I think Ronnie’s there and I start to talk to him.”

 

Tom Leonard, Daily Mail

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