LOS ANGELES – Ronald Reagan’s fierce protector was there to the end.
Nancy Reagan was at the her husband’s side for a half-century in his journey from motion pictures and head of the Screen Actors Guild to California governor and president of the United States. He called her Mommy. She called him Ronnie.
She was also there as caregiver when Alzheimer’s disease sapped his memory in the sunset of his life at the couple’s Bel-Air home. The nation’s 40th chief executive knew it would be tough on the light of his life.
“I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience,” Reagan wrote in his poignant November 1994 letter to the American people disclosing he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
When asked about the president during those declining years, Nancy Reagan seemed to force a smile before saying simply, “He’s OK.” There were no details, no elaboration.
Reagan’s protector was always on the job. When he fell and broke his hip in January 2001, she was with him at the hospital night and day.
“I think the only time that they were able to get me out was they wouldn’t let me in the operating room. But otherwise, I was there,” she said.
Throughout their years together, Nancy Reagan was her husband’s champion, helpmate and closest adviser. Admirers and detractors alike insisted she was the real power in the White House.
She laughed it off.
“This morning I had planned to clear up the U.S.-Soviet differences on intermediate-range missiles, but then I decided to clear out Ronnie’s sock drawer instead,” she once joked with an audience.
Her husband was always paramount.
“I make no apologies for telling him what I thought,” the former first lady wrote in her 1989 book, “My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan.”
“For eight years, I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn’t give you special access, I don’t know what does. So yes, I gave Ronnie my best advice whenever he asked for it, and sometimes when he didn’t.”
While working as an actress at MGM, she met Reagan in 1950 through an old family friend, director Mervyn LeRoy. She had gone to him with a problem – her name had been placed in an advertisement in a list of people she considered left wing. LeRoy called Reagan, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, who discovered Nancy’s name had been put in the ad by mistake.
They discussed it over dinner and were married two years later, on March 4, 1952. It was her first marriage, his second. Patti was born in October and Ron six years later. Reagan had two children from his previous marriage to actress Jane Wyman, Maureen and Mike.
She and Reagan made one movie together, a 1957 World War II story called “Hellcats of the Navy.”
During Reagan’s final years, Nancy Reagan and a nurse cared for him with a contingent of Secret Service agents nearby. First quietly, later publicly, she lobbied for funding for stem cell research, which could some day help fight Alzheimer’s, even though many abortion opponents are against it.
She ventured frequently to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, some 60 miles away, to autograph copies of her book or attend speeches and seminars.
She was glamorous and gracious on those occasions. And she always forced that smile when asked about her husband.
Once, pausing at a gallery of photos in a Century Plaza Hotel suite dedicated to Reagan, she smiled widely when she spotted a picture of them floating in their canoe Tru Luv in the pond the president built at their mountaintop ranch north of Santa Barbara.
“I’m old-fashioned, I know, but I thought it would be so romantic if he was playing a ukulele,” Nancy Reagan said, recalling the photo taken on their 25th wedding anniversary.
“I don’t have a ukulele,” Reagan told her that day.
“I said, ‘That’s OK, you can hum.’ “
“We’ve had an extraordinary life … but the other side of the coin is that it makes it harder,” she wrote in “I Love You, Ronnie.” “There are so many memories that I can no longer share, which makes it very difficult. When it comes right down to it, you’re in it alone. Each day is different, and you get up, put one foot in front of the other, and go – and love; just love.”
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