The Faith of Ronald Reagan by Mary Beth Brown

Author:Mary Beth Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc.
Published: 2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

I can sum up our marriage in a line I spoke when I played the great pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, a line spoken by him in life to his wife, Aimee: “God must think a lot of me to have given me you.” I thank Him every day for giving me Nancy.

—RONALD REAGAN, 1990

CHAPTER 8

NANCY GETS HER MAN

But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

GENESIS 2: 20–22

The 1940s was a time of tremendous change for Ronald Reagan. He had started the decade on top of the world: a great family, a successful career, enormous wealth. He ended the decade quite differently— in despair and loneliness. This was the lowest point of his life. His family was torn apart by his divorce from Jane Wyman, and his acting career was beginning a downward spiral. He was not his usual optimistic self. Following his divorce from Jane, he began to re-examine his beliefs and life, and his political beliefs were morphing into something entirely different from his New Deal liberalism.

Early in his acting career, Reagan had been surprised by his own success and assumed his marriage would be just as successful. Now he was a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor, living alone in an apartment, unsure how to get his life back together. A close friend of his once described Reagan as someone who needed to be married. Being single was unnatural for him. In an interview after his divorce, he said, “I was footloose and fancy free, and I guess down underneath, miserable.”

Feeling forlorn and lost without his family, Reagan spent most of his time working on films or fulfilling his duties at the Screen Actors Guild. Every morning he would stop by to have breakfast with his mother Nelle. On weekends, he would take Maureen and Michael out to his new ranch. After the divorce, Reagan sold his eight-acre ranch and purchased a larger ranch in Malibu Canyon, further away from the growing city of Los Angeles. Maureen called it “the ranch of my growing-up years.”

Maureen fondly remembers the trips to the ranch in her dad’s convertible. “Whenever I think back to the period just after the divorce, I picture Michael and me in the backseat of dad’s turquoise convertible, happily engaged in some game or story cooked up by our clever dad. Most little kids just hate being on a long car ride, but for us the time would just fly. . . . Dad also mixed in a little history and geography along the way. He’d teach us tidbits of information on the way out to the ranch, and then on the way back he’d quiz us to see what we remembered.”

“There were also impromptu lessons in ethics,” Maureen reflects about those special times.

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