It keeps humming so that he can keep running
When Ronald Reagan arrived in Hollywood in 1937, he had only a few dollars in his pocket and a $200-a-week contract with Warner Bros. In the course of making more than 50 films, Reagan earned and spent a lot of money, but ended up with relatively little saved. Yet today the presumptive G.O.P. presidential nominee is a millionaire, with a net worth of at least $2 million and possibly as much as $4 million.
The figure is imprecise because Reagan has shrouded his personal finances in considerable secrecy. Attempts to force him to disclose the details of his holdings have encountered such tough resistance that he has been sued by the Federal Election Commission and a similar California agency. Reagan is by no means unique in his desire to keep his personal finances confidential, and it may simply reflect his strong feelings about privacy. More important, there has been no hint of any dishonesty or illegality in his financial dealings. But his adamant refusal to disclose his finances has inevitably bred curiosity about how rich he really is and how he got that way.
Reagan has fairly simple tastes, but his affluence provides handsome rewards for his wife Nancy. She wears $5,000 designer dresses, collects fine jewelry, paintings and antiques and keeps her hairdresser and an interior decorator on call. Reagan, by contrast, has to be prodded into buying a new suit, prefers outdoor barbecues to haute cuisine and drives a worn 1969 red Ford station wagon, a 1976 Monarch sedan and a decade-old Jeep. He carries little cash, usually only a few bills carefully folded into a money clip in his pocket. In fact, he once flew to Paris with only $5 and was annoyed when he had to use that to tip someone.
Reagan's residences, while very comfortable, are not lavish by Southern California standards. He and Nancy live in a spacious nine-room house in Pacific Palisades, an exclusive Los Angeles enclave. For weekends they have Rancho del Cielo, their 667-acre spread near Santa Barbara, complete with four horses and 50 grazing cattle.
Reagan enjoyed no such amenities in his early days in Hollywood. He appeared in about 20 minor movies before he won his big break in 1940 as the Notre Dame football hero George Gipp in the hit Knute Rockne—All American. That brought Reagan stardom, and the following year, when he played in King's Row, Warner's tripled his salary to $600 a week, a substantial sum in those Depression-ridden days. He celebrated by moving into a large apartment and buying a Cadillac convertible. He also fell behind in paying his income taxes. Pearl Harbor cut off Reagan's fat paychecks. As an Army Air Corps officer, he remained in Hollywood narrating training films for the Air Corps, earning only $2,400 a year as a first lieutenant and then $2,760 as a captain. When the war ended, the IRS began dunning him for his unpaid taxes. Reagan maintains, however, that he thought these taxes would be forgiven for soldiers as they had been in World War I.