Stink-eye
A Joke That Wiped the Smile Off Ronald Reagan’s Face
After a hard-fought campaign and a landslide victory, President-elect Ronald Reagan was unwinding at Rancho del Cielo, his retreat nestled close to the sky in the Santa Ynez Mountains, north of Santa Barbara. My friend Mike Evans, who had covered both of Reagan’s presidential campaigns for Time, was unwinding, too, as my houseguest in L.A. before returning home to New York. It was early December 1980.
The telephone rang ; you know, one of those colorful plastic push-button jobs with a handset on a curly cord. John Loengard was on the line, Life magazine’s director of photography. He had tracked Mike down at my house and told him to head back up the coast for a cover shoot with the Great Communicator.
I carried a Secret Service press pass, so Mike asked if I wanted to tag along. His invitation may also have had something to do with the fact that he didn’t have a car and needed a ride. But mine was in the shop. There wasn’t enough time to rent one, so I called Marty LeAnce—my trusty business manager—and implored him to show up lickety-split, prepared to go for a long drive.
“Don’t ask,” I said. “Drop whatever you’re doing; I promise you’re going to like this.”
Twenty minutes later, Marty pulled up in his pink 1977 Cadillac Eldorado, ragtop down. Flinging itself from the street onto my driveway like an enormous salmon, it stopped with a mechanical clatter, shuddered, and went quiet. Marty was committed to his car’s identity. Vanity license plate: T H E L O X. He also called it a “schnook salmon.”
Within seconds of revealing our destination to Marty, the three of us piled in and sped away, top down, swimming upstream through Beverly Glen Canyon, then slewing through traffic on the Ventura Freeway, hell-bent for the Pacific Coast Highway.
Ninety minutes later, our rosé leviathan came to another quavering halt at Gaviota State Beach, the Secret Service checkpoint. The agents were already laughing when they saw us coming. They knew Mike as a carefully combed, buttoned-down shirt, steel-rimmed glasses kind of guy, and here he was with two windblown, shaggy dudes in a Pepto Bismol-colored land yacht sporting goofball Jewish-deli license plates. The G-men knew the big Caddy would get beat to hell on the last leg of our drive to the Reagans’ ranch house: back across PCH from the beach parking lot and up Refugio Road, which cut a narrow dirt swath—as bumpy as a washboard—through a quarter-mile gantlet of abrasive brush. Marty was a good sport.
The quiet crunch of gravel under our tires underscored an eerie stillness as we pulled up to a modest adobe bungalow adjacent to a horse barn and tack room. A rough-hewn wooden fence enclosed a paddock next to a large pond. This small cluster of buildings was surrounded by hundreds of acres of grassland studded with ancient oaks, rising to an ocean view.
Marty’s pink piscine machine gave a final shudder as he killed the ignition. Then there was birdsong. I was surprised by how alone we seemed to be. Surely, there were agents lurking in the bushes. But we saw no one except Mrs. Reagan, the Governor (as the former California chief executive was still called), and a retired California Highway Patrolman who had served as one of Reagan’s gubernatorial bodyguards and remained a close friend of the Reagans. The three of them had come outside to greet Mike, Marty, and me.
Mrs. Reagan invited us inside to sign her guestbook. It’s nice to know, in retrospect, that my signature appears among those of Mikhail Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth … and Marty, who bent over to add his autograph when—rrrrrip!—he split his pants. I’m sure that Marty, until his dying day, kept the pair of “Ronnie’s” blue jeans Mrs. Reagan gave him to wear.
Marty took on the task—perhaps to redeem his dignity—of being Mike’s photo assistant, carrying cameras and aiming big silver reflectors at the president-elect. Mike was kind enough to make a nice picture of me with the Reagans.
This was Mike’s gig, so I hung back and enjoyed the scenery. But I made one picture that day with a pocket-size “emergency” camera, the only one I’d brought along.
Mike was preoccupied elsewhere when I caught the Reagans sharing an unguarded giggle while they were relaxing in a hammock. (Maybe they were thinking about Marty’s pants.) In deference to Mike, I kept that picture under wraps, unpublished during his lifetime.
Mike worked with Reagan for well over an hour. When he was satisfied with his take for the Life cover, we packed up his gear and got ready to say goodbye. At this point, you might think the President-elect of the United States—who surely had more important things to do—would have been glad to see the last of three schmoes who had barged onto his private property road-warrior style, one of whom had mooned Mrs. Reagan. The Marx Brothers would have envied our performance. But no! Enthusing about how the imminent sunset was bound to be a stunner and how “Nancy” could shake up some tasty margaritas, Reagan asked, “Would you boys like to stay for a cocktail?”
“Uh …”
Of course, the Reagans considered Mike their friend; he’d covered them at public events and in private moments for nearly five years for Time. Mike and I, however, had very different opinions about Ronald Reagan. Mike was a fan; I thought Reagan’s political dogma was barking up the wrong tree. His warmth, though, was genuine and appealing. He was the kindest bigot I’ve ever met.
I found myself sitting next to Reagan on his patio, sipping a margarita. The mood was casual enough that I asked where he got his cowboy boots—plum-colored ostrich, much admired by yours truly. Tony Lama in Texas, he said. (I bought an identical pair and still wear them, resoled over the decades.)
I was also thinking that now was as good a time as any to pass along a communiqué from the leader of another sovereign country, as I had improbably been asked to do, to the man who was about to become President of the United States. Presumptuous? You bet it was. But General Omar Torrijos, the military ruler of Panama, had made me promise three years earlier to deliver a personal message—a reprimand, no less—to Reagan. The general’s demand, and my acquiescence, were offered as a joke. But who knew I’d ever get the chance, or that when I did, Reagan would just have been elected president?
