Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004

Author and journalist Bob Colacello has written the definitive book on the love affair that changed America.

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  It took more than six years for him to write the first volume of his widely acclaimed book "Ronnie & Nancy: Their Path to Power - 1911 1980."

This first volume reveals the personal histories of Ronald and Nancy, their marriage and their rise on the national political scene up to his inauguration.

Colacello is eagerly planning to tackle the volume two, and detail how this unique relationship affected the White House and world history.

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Colacello, most famous as a contributor to Vanity Fair, talked about the things he discovered while researching and writing this extraordinary book.

NewsMax: Your book, nearly 600 pages, is awe inspiring.

Colacello: It took six years, seven if you count the time it took for the story I did for an assignment from Vanity Fair to take a look at the Reagans. I spent nine months writing the two-part Vanity Fair article which came out in ’98 and led to interests from publishers about doing a book.

NewsMax: In the early chapters, you delve in Ron and Nancy's family histories. Why is this important?

Colacello: Well, because Mrs. Reagan cooperated, and her stepbrother, Dr. Richard Davis, talked for the first time. He was a great resource. He is a bit younger than her and has a very good memory.

Unlike Nancy Reagan, who does like to sugarcoat things or to forget the unpleasant parts of her life, he was very frank and direct. He really helped me a lot. He led me to people who they grew up with. I was able to interview a lot of people that were never interviewed before.

And she herself rather late in the game found a scrapbook of her mother’s from the 1920s when her mother was still acting. That filled in a lot of stuff for me. I learned that instead of hopping around a lot, she was actually a featured player in regional theater companies in Atlanta, Dallas and then in New Jersey. I got a much better sense of what her mother was like in those days too because there were a lot of interviews she gave.

I also had a few letters from Loyal Davis, Nancy’s stepfather, to young Nancy and one letter to him from Nancy.

NewsMax: I was amazed at the parallel between her mother’s moves to advance her husband’s career and her own. She obviously learned from her mother.

Colacello: Her mother was definitely her model in two regards. One in learning how to use social life to advance your husband’s career. And two, learning how to make and keep friends with people who were more famous and more powerful and richer than themselves.

Her mother seems never to have passed up somebody who was famous and powerful who she didn’t turn into a real friend, starting with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Lillian Gish, Colleen Moore – all of those Hollywood people who were much bigger stars than she ever was, of course, but who really became her close friends. They stayed at the Davises’ apartment when they passed through Chicago, had the Davises stay with them when they were in California. All of them were there for Nancy when she wanted to go to Broadway and were there for her again when she wanted to try Hollywood.

Loyal Davis was a very good neurosurgeon in the days when operating on the brain and the spine were new areas, but I don’t think he would have become chairman of the American College of Surgeons, the highest position you can hold in American medicine, if he hadn’t had a wife like Edith who got him involved in all these organizations, went to all the conventions with him, constantly gave dinner parties where the important doctors met important people like Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston and Mayor Kelly. She really ran a little salon there on East Lake Shore Drive where they lived. And I think Nancy saw how that was all done.

NewsMax: Then it wasn’t just a matter of using people to advance their husbands’ careers, but these were genuine friendships?

Colacello: I think Edith loved people and adored people, and they in turn liked her. And while Nancy lacks her mother’s bawdy sense of humor and all of that, she can be very charming with her friends, and her friends are very loyal to her.

That whole group she put together in California all adored Nancy and Ronnie. They just found them to be the best company. They wanted them around, even before he became governor. They found his politics not only interesting, but the men agreed with his political ideas, being most self-made men who believed in rugged individualism, in entrepreneurial capitalism, lower taxes and saw Russia as the big threat.

The women found her to be absolutely charming … she was good, and still is, at turning political opposite into good friends.

NewsMax: She wasn’t as politically conservative as her husband, was she?

Colacello: She was bought up in a more worldly way. Her mother taught her to be friendly with whomever was in power. I don’t think she was perhaps as ideological as Ronnie, but on the other hand, once they were married and he moved to the right, she moved to the right with him. She was very gung-ho for Barry Goldwater.

I think she was as right wing as Ronnie was in the California days, but when they got to Washington she started moving to the center because she saw that was useful.

She’s very Republican, and even though she disagreed with President Bush on stem cell research she endorsed him, and she had the Bushes to her house and endorsed him because she didn’t want anybody to get the wrong impression from what young Ron was doing.

NewsMax: Ronald Reagan was a very private man, and she sought to protect his privacy. Can you ever plumb the depths of the problems she had with her children as a result of that?

Colacello: Ronnie was a very private man, even remote on a one-on-one basis. He liked everyone, and everyone liked him, but even his big buddies like Bill Wilson and Bill Clark told me that there was always a part of him that you could not get to.

I think his children felt the same thing. He also was not a disciplinarian – he wanted everyone to like him, he wanted to get along with people, so Nancy had to be the bad cop, even with the children She was the disciplinarian. She was the one who spanked them. She was the one who told them "No." I think they came to resent her in that role.

NewsMax: Didn’t she keep them away from their father as part of this protective role?

Colacello: Maybe he wanted it that way. American men in the 1940s and 50s and 60s went to work, and they came home, and the children had had their dinner and were off to bed. It was really the women who raised the children. American men were not encouraged to show their feelings, or to have big emotional conversations with anybody, let alone their children.

I think growing up in Hollywood and then having their father become governor and then president put a lot of pressure on the children and put a lot of pressure on the whole parent-child relationship.

The press writes about every little rebellion. That doesn’t happen in most families.

One of the things that really struck me was how many children of close friends of the Reagans had either overdosed on drugs or committed suicide. Gregory Peck’s son, Art Linkletter’s daughter, Ray Stark’s son. Robert Taylor, one of their best friends, had a son died from an overdose.

NewsMax: Maureen and Michael Reagan, the children of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, turned out to be more like their dad than Nancy’s children, Patti and Ron Jr.

Colacello: It’s interesting that both Michael and Maureen have such a passion for politics when their mother, Jane Wyman, hated the whole subject. They were very much like their father in that respect. Maureen especially from a very early age was interested in politics, and both were very conservative, unlike Patti and Ron, who are liberals.

I don’t think Michael and Maureen had it easy growing up given the number of times their mother moved. The number of schools they went to – Michael was sent to boarding school when he was 5 years old – that’s hard.

NewsMax: You took a unique approach when you say that Ronald Reagan couldn’t have gotten where he did without Nancy.

Colacello: I took that approach because that’s what I was told again and again by their close friends and by people who worked on his campaigns and when he was governor.

Nobody believed that he wasn’t his own man in terms of having a vision of what he wanted to do and having very strong policy ideas and being totally on top of what the issues were all about. They felt what he needed from her was on the personnel side of things. She was the one who had a lot to say who was around him and on his staff.

I think that Ronald Reagan was very dependent on his mother psychologically because he couldn’t count on his father. They went everywhere and did everything together, and he got his sense of optimism from her. I think that’s what he was looking for in a wife, that some kind of total moral uplift.

Nancy was there every night, telling him you can do it, we can do it together. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this or that problem – I’ll handle the children. She made his life very simple for him so he could focus on writing his speeches, on formulating his policies.

They were a great team, and I don’t think that she could have gone as far in life either without him. They were joined at the hip, a case of one plus one equaling 22.

Neither one was all that extraordinary. When they met they were doing OK in Hollywood, but by the time they married they were both out of work, and yet 14 years later they’re in the Governor’s Mansion, and 14 years after that they’re in the White House.

NewsMax: We’re hearing all about George Bush and his religious beliefs. He’s being portrayed as some kind of religious fanatic, but you mentioned a point where Reagan was having difficulties getting ahead, and something broke for him, and a friend went looking for him and found him on his knees praying.

Colacello: He was very religious. He probably didn’t show it as much as George Bush. His mother’s whole life was the church, and he was very close to his mother. He was definitely very religious.

We know that he had a strong belief, and one of his criticisms of communism all the way through was that it was an atheistic system, that it had to fail because it didn’t take God into account, it didn’t take into account what be believed was the natural order of things.

I think it would have really pained him to hear Ron Jr. announcing that he is an atheist. Remember when he was nearly assassinated he told Cardinal Cooke that he felt he owed the rest of his life to God?

Click here to order Bob Colacello’s “Ronnie & Nancy: Their Path to the White House — 1911 to 1980.”

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