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Reagan's wife Nancy is a gracious and attractive woman of 56. They will celebrate their 28th anniversary this week. She travels with "Ronnie" (a nickname that only she and a few of his closest friends use) as adoring fan and adviser in small things. "Smile, honey, smile!" she will whisper to the candidate as he gets ready to tape a TV interview. A onetime movie actress who appeared in such films as East Side, West Side (1949) and Shadow on the Wall (1950), she gave up her career to marry Reagan. The candidate seems quite accurate when he says, "Any interest that she has in politics, she got from me." She does play a significant part, however, in Reagan's decisions about his staff.
Nancy makes occasional separate appearances, but limits them to innocuous Q.-and-A. sessions. Says she: "Making a speech would scare me to death." When Reagan is speaking, she sits near by watching him with rapt attention, laughing at the little jokes she has heard scores of times. Why? "There is always something different in the audience or the setting, and I do enjoy hearing Ronnie talk."
Reagan copes good-humoredly with a subterranean but important issue: his age. He jokes about it at senior citizens' meetings, and once amiably let a TV reporter run her fingers through his gray-streaked brown hair to see if it was dyed; she could not find any signs that it was. Other evidence is equally inconclusive. In TV closeups, Reagan sometimes looks wrinkled and wattled. He seems to walk a bit stiffly and sometimes has difficulty hearing questions from an audience.
His afflictions are minor and might not even be noticed if Reagan were not under the most intense scrutiny. He plows through grueling campaign days with apparently undiminisned vigor, though he does try to get eight hours of sleep a night; and until late in the New Hampshire campaign he insisted on flying back to California every weekend to relax at his ranch, a $1.5 million enclave near Santa Barbara that few reporters or even campaign aides are ever permitted to visit. His doctors insist that he is in "remarkably good" health, and he maintains a hard campaign schedule without feeling any need to exercise or watch his diet. Quite the contrary: he is one of the few politicians who regularly eat the food at banquets, and he complains mildly that he is often called on to speak before he can start on the dessert.