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Unlike most members of the class of '43, Nancy Davis did not plunge from college straight into marriage. Indeed, she was out in the world from 1943 to 1952, first as a Marshall Field's shopgirl in Chicago, then as a bit-part Broadway actress, then as a successful Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player. Still, even as she pursued a Hollywood career, she wanted everyone to understand that her hopes and dreams were safely conventional. Her "childhood ambition," she wrote on her MGM biographical questionnaire at 27, was "to be an actress." But her "greatest ambition" was "to have a successful, happy marriage." She listed some of her phobias: "superficiality, vulgarity especially in women, untidiness of mind and person, and cigars." Before she married Ronald Reagan in 1952, she made eight movies, one of the best of them Night into Morning, starring Ray Milland. Says Milland of his co-star: "She was a damned good workman."
As soon as she became a wife, she says in her autobiography, she would have been happy to give up her career. In fact, she continued to act. Married in March of 1952, a mother that October, she was back on a Hollywood sound stage filming Donovan's Brain before little Patti was two. She made four movies as a married woman, including Hellcats of the Navy, in which she co-starred with her husband. When Ron, the second child, was born in 1958, she was almost 37 and no longer acting in feature films. But two years later the Reagans performed together again in a very curious TV production called A Turkey for the President: they played the poultry-farming Caldwells, an American Indian couple in Southern California whose son is chosen to send his pet bird to the White House for Thanksgiving dinner.
As she edged away from show business, she joined the Colleagues, a group of several dozen socially active Los Angeles women who lunched together and put on charity fund raisers. She forged important friendships with Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jergensen and Mary Jane Wick, who are among Nancy's best friends today. A few years later, at 45, she went to Sacramento as the Governor's wife.
Nancy Reagan, decorous and high-strung, fought the same battles with her two children that every parent was apt to fight during the late 1960s and 1970s. Patti, now 32, and Ron, now 26, grew up in California. Both flirted with counterculturalism, she carrying on with a member of the Eagles rock group, he growing his hair long and dropping out of Yale to dance professionally. Nancy Reagan was thrown for a loop by it all, but she made peace. Her relationships with her husband's two children from his earlier marriage to Actress Jane Wyman have seemed more fundamentally troubled. The crosscurrents can be fierce. "Yeah," says young Ron, "our family is somewhat unusual. We are people with very different personalities. I imagine that is why sometimes there is some friction."