Co-Starring At the White House

It was nearly noon, and Nancy Reagan stood in the Red Room with a butler, waiting. Over in the Oval Office, her husband had just finished the most consequential diplomatic meeting of his first term, last fall’s tete-a-tete with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Now, for a few minutes, she was to do her duty as First Lady, to greet and charm the visitor from Moscow.

Something to drink? Gromyko took a glass of fruit juice, Nancy one of Perrier; the chitchat was of liters and pints, metrics vs. the old American way. But then Gromyko abruptly turned the small talk big. “Does your husband believe in peace or war?” he asked.

“Peace,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Yes, she said, she was sure, and the conversation floated back to more effervescent subjects. When it came time for the two men to go in to lunch, however, Gromyko returned to the central issue. “Well, then,” he instructed the President’s wife, “you whisper peace in his ear every night.”

“I will,” she replied. “I’ll also whisper it in your ear.”

Three months later, Nancy Reagan describes the heady encounter with precision and some satisfaction. She is pleased not so much that she got the last word with Gromyko but that the exchange took place at all. If Gromyko had come in 1981 instead of 1984, she says, “he probably wouldn’t have broached it.” Why? “Because I was different then.”

Gromyko may or may not know it, but Nancy Reagan has changed. She still sometimes wears extraordinarily expensive Galanos dresses (size 4 or 6) and $950 beaded silk evening pajamas by Adolfo, and she still conveys a certain brittle, recherche haughtiness that drives feminists crazy. But she is no longer the liability for the President that she sometimes was during his first two years in office. In fact, in the past two years she has probably become an outright political plus, winning friends and influencing people. She remains tightly wound, by her own description “a born worrier,” but now she has a public and private sure-footedness that she once seemed unable to manage. “I have more self-confidence,” she says. A longtime presidential aide agrees. “She has become more of a person in her own right,” says the aide, “and no longer just Ronald Reagan’s wife.” The First Lady delivers speeches more often and more effectively, and recently engaged an outside writer to provide her with new, improved material. She has plunged into unfamiliar territory, sitting on Mr. T’s lap at a White House Christmas celebration, opening her arms to a young addict at a California drug rehabilitation clinic and, in Peking last spring, responding gracefully when Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping suggested to her that “next time” she “come alone.” A few weeks ago she agreed to spend time with drug-addicted inmates at a jail in the heartland. But the new gusto goes beyond pageantry and photo opportunities. For Nancy Reagan has become a forceful figure within the Administration, and in recent months her White House clout has become strikingly apparent.

Of course, wives have pull with husbands. In the Reagans’ case, her impact & may be greater because the bond is stronger. After 33 years together, they are, by all accounts, rapturously fond of each other. “She has always had more influence than people generally realize,” says Michael Deaver, the departing White House deputy chief of staff and long her principal ally in the Administration. Even when she does not make her position known on an issue, Administration officials have learned to anticipate her potential support or opposition and proceed accordingly. “The threat of her influence,” says one White House aide, “is as important as her real influence.”

Just what is a First Lady supposed to do? In the late 20th century the very phrase has an anachronistic scent, musty and perfumed like Great Grandmother’s sachet. Yet Presidents’ wives still face criticism for fiddling with the affairs of state, for doing anything much more than looking well groomed and making bland statements on behalf of unexceptionable philanthropies. The day- to-day duties of the job are no snap. Nancy Reagan plans and presides over some 20 big White House dinners each year, and makes an official appearance just about every day of the week.

The other requirements of the role are trickier, more fluid, shifting with the times. The First Lady has no constitutional or statutory duties at all, but she is almost constantly on display, and held to the ephemeral ideals of the moment. Since Eleanor Roosevelt, Presidents’ wives have been expected to show some interest in good works, and recent First Ladies have taken that to mean an active concern for the sick or the helpless. Nancy Reagan has devoted her energies to the Foster Grandparents Program, a volunteer child-care organization, and, even more emphatically, to a crusade against drug abuse among the young.

Her work on behalf of these causes helped salvage her public image after an awful stretch at the start of Reagan’s presidency. “The first year was a terrible year,” she says. “That year is almost wiped out for me. There were all of those personal things that happened.” First and foremost was the attempt to kill the President. “The little episode that happened to me on March 30th,” says Reagan, “she didn’t get over it as quickly as I did.” Then, in 1982, her beloved stepfather died, devastating her. That winter she had a cancer removed from her lip.

Unlike her husband, who received awestruck coverage of his run of early legislative successes, the First Lady was granted no press honeymoon. “From . the beginning,” she says now, “I was certainly aware that everybody was not just cuckoo about me.” She was caricatured as the high-handed queen of a new Gilded Age, making a fuss over fops and froufrous just as a painful national recession was setting in. Muffie Brandon, her social secretary, was joking when she spoke of a “tablecloth crisis” at the White House, but the new concern for elegance was real. The First Lady had some of the Reagans’ rich friends, among others, pony up $800,000 to redecorate the private rooms at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then got $209,000 worth of china donated, and let opulent Architectural Digest have exclusive photo rights to the spruced-up interiors. She maintained arrangements with her favorite couturiers to give her gowns to wear, which were then given to two Manhattan fashion-design schools. She had–and still has–three hairdressers buzzing in and out. (Nancy Reagan is a “warm honey-blond with highlights,” says Monsieur Marc, her New York stylist, who provides some of the highlights.) In all, Washington was overtaken by an extravagant new Tory chic.

“She has innate taste, no question about that,” says a former aide. “She has great instincts–and great blind spots. Sometimes she gets glamour, class and notoriety all mixed up.” Frank Sinatra, whom she calls “Francis Albert,” became an almost monthly White House visitor. When her aides suggested she invite Opera Star Frederica von Stade to perform at a state dinner in 1982, the unsure First Lady ordered them first to “check it out with Frank.” Nancy also saw quite a lot of her rich bachelor friend Jerry Zipkin, a full-time Manhattan partygoer whom she has called “a modern-day Oscar Wilde.” Says one of her former aides: “There is a little element here of Louis XIV’s French court and les precieuses –the affected ladies. She had a certain liking for witty, amusing, well-dressed men who were willing to walk three paces behind and carry the purse.”

Women’s Wear Daily and gossip columnists were thrilled by the self- consciously lavish example she set. Democratic Socialite Oatsie Charles, an arbiter of Washington taste, was pleased too. “The White House sets the tone for everything that goes on here,” says Charles. “It was nice to know that she cared.” But many newspaper editorialists and a large portion of the citizenry thought the extravagance unseemly. “She was one of the best single targets for the opposition’s attacks about ‘fairness’ and special interests,” says a White House strategist. Thin-skinned Nancy Reagan was wounded by the criticism, especially since the White House really was badly in need of repairs. “That absolutely uncalled-for attack by some in the media with regard to the refurbishing and painting a few walls in the White House,” says the President, “that was very upsetting to her.” The First Lady was hurt when she had feelers sent out about getting an honorary degree from her alma mater, Smith College, and Smith refused. As a reaction to the general antipathy in 1981 and 1982, she says now, “I tended to retreat and hold back.” She went from a petite 114 lbs. to a rather gaunt 104.

She has not gained back the weight, but more than a year ago she snapped out of her malaise. Perhaps she realized that the whole country had never been against her; even in 1982, after all, a poll of Good Housekeeping readers found that Nancy Reagan was the second most admired woman. Even more important to the return of her equanimity, the high-pitched criticism quieted: the recession was ending and her posh style no longer seemed so callous. But the First Lady also changed tack, remodeling her public persona. The Reagans still see Sinatra and invite the likes of Dynasty Star Joan Collins to state dinners, but Zipkin and his dandyish ilk have been much less in evidence. The President’s wife has devoted more time and effort to earnest, conventionally First Lady-like endeavors.

Nancy Reagan has quite deliberately altered the way she looks at Ronald Reagan in public. Her worshipful staring during his speeches had for years been regarded as prima-facie evidence of a Goody Two-Shoes phoniness. She claims that it was not a theatrical device, just her natural way of watching anyone speak. But the gaze is gone. “I am trying not to do it as much as I have done it in the past,” she explains, “only because there was so much talk about it and it was kind of ridiculed.” Campaigning last year seemed to convince her that she can venture out alone without making costly faux pas. She has learned to resist her tendency to hunker down and hide. These days, she says jauntily, “Ronnie always complains that when I go places and come back I never tell him anything–that he has to hear it from other people.”

Rawhide and Rainbow, as the Secret Service code book calls them, are unapologetic lovers, affectionate in the extreme, at times almost treacly. They call each other by diminutives: he’s “Ronnie” and often she’s “Mommy.” At their California ranch, they paddle together in a canoe named TruLuv that was a 25th-anniversary present from “Ronnie.” Every July on Nancy’s birthday, Reagan calls David Jones’ Hollywood flower shop and has a bouquet sent to Edith Davis, his mother-in-law. Says the florist: “He thanks her for giving him Nancy.” Last Election Day, when the First Lady was still wobbly from a bad bump on the head received two days earlier, the President fretted so much that he ignored early exit-poll results and wanted to cancel three important press interviews he had scheduled. At Camp David, the two former movie stars cozy up on a sofa in the dark, holding hands and sharing a bowl of popcorn as they watch good, wholesome films–lately, Local Hero and Phar Lap. Says one aide who has attended the Camp David cinema: “It’s like looking at a pair of high school kids.”

Reagan’s boyish enthusiasm is part of his public appeal, and that gee-whiz attitude begins at home. As the President told TIME in an interview, “When something unusual happens, or something important in my life, or something that I hear about, the first thing in my mind is, ‘Wait till I tell Nancy!’ It’s that way between us.” Even political decisions are cast in romantic terms. Of the period a year ago, when Reagan wanted her to go along with his desire to seek re-election, she says, “I guess he was wooing me.”

Even before she decided that she could handle four more years, the First Lady had been exercising her formidable influence in the White House. Her clout is only rarely applied to substance or ideology in a direct way. Rather, her agenda is highly personalized. Nancy Reagan is single-minded in her intention “to protect Ronnie,” and to that end she is a hard-eyed judge of the officials serving him. “Her first concern is the people around the President,” says one of those people, Reagan Strategist Stuart Spencer, “because she knows that they are the ones who will make things happen.” Again and again, she has used her leverage to effect important personnel changes right up to the Cabinet level. There is now a rather effective upstairs-downstairs alliance between her and the leading West Wing moderates, Deaver and Chief of Staff James Baker. “I’ve always been comfortable talking with Mike (Deaver),” she explains. “He’s my oldest friend, and I’m sure that he knows that whatever I say, I say it with all good intentions, trying to be helpful. So there’s not really a conspiracy on their part, plus me, to get messages to Ronnie.”

Suggestions that Nancy is grabbing for power, determining policy like a modern-day Edith Wilson, make the President peevish. Says he: “A part of the false image-making has been to suggest that she is some dominant force behind the scenes.” She is uncomfortable discussing the nature and extent of her influence. “I read that I make decisions and I’m the power behind the throne, and that I get people fired,” she says. “I don’t get people fired.”

Not singlehanded, perhaps. But she has had a role in most of the Administration’s important shake-ups. Back in early 1980, she was deeply involved in the departure of Campaign Manager John Sears and two of his assistants; she first tried to mediate the potentially embarrassing dispute between Reagan and the men, then made sure the aides’ dismissal did not come before the crucial New Hampshire primary. Later that year, when it was time to choose the White House chief of staff, she, Deaver and Spencer successfully backed James Baker, then a newcomer to the Reagan ranks, over Edwin Meese, a Reaganite of 13 years’ standing. After National Security Adviser Richard Allen became embroiled in a controversy involving $1,000 that a Japanese magazine had intended to give the First Lady in exchange for an interview, she joined the Deaver-led effort to purge him from the Administration. Alexander Haig believes that his ouster from Foggy Bottom came in large measure because Baker and Deaver persuaded her he should be replaced as Secretary of State and she in turn persuaded the President. In 1982, after William Clark had taken over for Allen, Clark got on her bad side. She favored his transfer from the White House to the Interior Department–a push that proved unnecessary, as it happened, when Clark volunteered to go. One disgruntled former Administration official called the trio of Nancy Reagan, Deaver and Baker “Mama and the Gold Dust Twins.” But the First Lady does not always get her way. When Clark became Interior Secretary, she wanted Baker to replace Clark as National Security Adviser, with Deaver becoming White House chief of staff. The plan foundered, however, when it was opposed by Administration conservatives, particularly Meese and CIA Director William Casey, who mistrust the highly flexible pragmatism of Baker and Deaver.

Around the time of the 1982 congressional elections, Nancy told the President he needed to clear away the deadwood in his Administration, but he . disagreed. Last fall she once again recommended a purge. “After this election,” she admits, “I said the same thing–it was the obvious time to make changes. I was talking generally, not just the White House staff.” Her hypothetical list might have included Casey, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan and Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, but Reagan, as in 1982, declined to go along. “You know him,” his wife says. “It’s very difficult for him to do such a thing.” She calls the President “a soft touch,” and believes he is excessively indulgent concerning personnel problems. Said she in 1982: “I think it’s the eternal optimist in him, his attitude that if you let something go, it will eventually work itself out. Well, that isn’t always so.” Her son and favored child confirms that she is a natural, unsentimental manager. Her political instincts, says young Ron Reagan, “are better than my father’s in a narrow sense. He has great instincts on a whole-country kind of level, the big picture. She’s got great instincts when it comes to individuals and small groups. That’s why she’s involved in the inner workings of the staff at the White House.”

The First Lady’s interventions are not limited to the President’s Cabinet and staff. She has had White House schedulers cut back on her husband’s travel. Last summer, when campaign officials were sounding overconfident of winning the election, she made her displeasure clear to Baker, who in turn warned the premature celebrators, “This is causing me serious problems in the East Wing.” During the fall campaign she decided that the White House speechwriters were cranking out too many different versions, and that Reagan was being overtaxed and confused as a result. She told Deaver that the President should resume his practice of delivering variations on a single speech. “Ronnie was complaining about all these speeches that were coming up. I said to Mike, ‘Why don’t we go back to what he did before? What was wrong with that?’ ” When Reagan badly muffed his first debate with Walter Mondale, the First Lady blamed his White House handlers for cramming him with too many facts. She raised hell. “I thought they went about it all wrong,” she says now. “All I knew was what I was hearing from Ronnie when he came home after the sessions. And the way he was studying and the papers that would come up –my Lord! That was not the way to do it.”

She has, in some instances, involved herself in the substance of national policy. Clark’s allegiance to Pentagon hard-liners, for example, contributed to his fall from her favor, since she has been especially sensitive to suggestions that the President is a saber-rattling militarist. Before Reagan moderated his anti-Soviet rhetoric last year, she encouraged him to show his peaceful intentions. “I would say, you know, ‘This is unfair. It’s not right. You are not trigger-happy.’ “

Seldom is her collaboration as bald-faced as it was at an impromptu press conference last August in California: when the President hesitated after a question about arms control, she whispered an all-purpose answer (“We’re doing everything we can”) within earshot of reporters, which the President then repeated as his own. (Both Reagans claim that she was just talking to herself, not intending to cue him at all.) In her serious intramural forays at the White House, she is fairly subtle, talking up ideas from Baker and Deaver to her husband, as well as transmitting intelligence about the President back to the West Wing. For example, she explains, “I pick up on something that he’s unhappy with . . . He may make some comments that I think would be helpful for Mike (Deaver) to know, and might facilitate a situation, and I might call Mike and tell him.” She calls Baker less often. Spencer, who comes to Washington regularly, is her third confidant; a week before Christmas they had a serious luncheon talk.

Nancy Reagan’s nudges have, if anything, served to move the President from the far right toward the political center. Within the Administration, she has consistently allied herself with the moderates against the conservative ideologues. It is not that she is a crypto-liberal. Rather, like Deaver and Baker, she has instincts attuned more to public relations than to undiluted principle. More than anything else, she wants the public to continue adoring her husband. Maintaining consensus has inevitably meant a tempering of the original Reaganite agenda: the New Right’s fractious social issues have been down-played at the White House, and nuclear-arms control is, belatedly, being pursued. “She’s as good an instinctive politician as her husband,” says Spencer, who has known them both since 1965. “She’s more tactical, he’s more strategic.”

In private she may be astute Nancy Reagan, refining tactics and wheedling the President’s men, but outside she is obliged always to play the First Lady, a serene and smiling public presence. The role may be a grand one, but it can get to be a grind. “Well, it is a job,” she says, “which I didn’t realize.”

She has two dozen phone conversations a day, usually at least one each with Deaver and Press Secretary Sheila Tate. She must oversee White House Chef Henry Haller and his helpers, as well as her personal staff of 24. Among those two dozen are six top aides, who generally meet with her every week as a group: Chief of Staff James Rosebush, Tate, Social Secretary Gahl Hodges, Personal Assistant Elaine Crispen, Projects Director Ann Wrobleski and Marty Coyne, director of her advance team.

The spangly, fairy-tale part of the First Lady’s role may reach its apotheosis in the State Dining Room. Yet even state dinners are, to Nancy Reagan, an agglomeration of hundreds of prosaic checklist items. She approves and tastes beforehand virtually every item on every menu. During the first term, she spent roughly 450 hours planning 30-odd state dinners. She presided at nearly as many other official dinners, as well as an additional 250 official White House functions, the picture-perfect but surely enervating flurry of luncheons, teas, receptions. Such occasions require a deep well of small talk and unwavering poise. Last month, at a dinner in honor of Venezuelan President Jaime Lusinchi (chicken breast Sandeman, poached salmon, radicchio salad and glazed pear), Nancy Reagan sat dutifully on the visitor’s left–and when Lusinchi’s bow tie slid askew, she smiled, reached over, and refastened the clip-on without skipping a beat.

The First Lady and her p.r.-conscious operatives have tried to down-play galas in favor of uplifting public forays. Lately the coverage has tilted more toward the latter. Last Christmastime, the President’s wife spent three hours at Washington’s Children’s Hospital doling out toys. The visit provided a particularly emblematic First Lady image: Nancy Reagan in her red-and-black pumps, black knit Adolfo jacket and plaid Adolfo skirt, kneeling on a linoleum ward floor to coddle an infant. Impeccably turned out, uncomplainingly doing her social duty.

As the Governor’s wife more than a decade ago in California, she began promoting the Foster Grandparents Program, in which older volunteers befriend orphaned or handicapped children. She has continued some work on behalf of the organization as First Lady. Yet for the past two years, that cause has been eclipsed by a more aggressive, hard-edged campaign intended to discourage drug use among young people. Her advisers encouraged the shift in emphasis: speaking out against marijuana and narcotics use in the schools, they felt, would have greater urgency and political appeal. The serious-minded displays of the First Lady’s social consciousness have been shaped mainly by Rosebush and Wrobleski as part of an overall effort to make her appear more caring, less frivolous. The timing and destinations of her antidrug excursions last year were coordinated with Reagan-Bush campaign officials to satisfy their particular political needs. But the image molders learned they were dealing with a social problem that actually mattered to Nancy Reagan.

The First Lady has taken to the antidrug campaign with energy and evident feeling. The crusade made serious demands on her time last year: 110 appearances. “The kids relate to me and I to them,” she says. One measure of her burgeoning self-confidence was a new willingness to deliver public addresses; last year she gave 14 antidrug speeches, double the number of the year before. The First Lady played herself on an episode of the situation comedy Diff’rent Strokes, was co-host of the two-hour talk show Good Morning America and narrated an antidrug documentary for PBS, The Chemical People. She is about to announce an unusual high-profile variation on the theme, inviting the spouses of two dozen heads of state to the U.S. for a three-day antidrug forum in Washington and Atlanta.

As a boss, the First Lady is a stern taskmaster. Behind her back, some underlings mockingly call her Nana. When traveling, she has members of the entourage paged at restaurants to ask trivial questions, and phones them at home with petty requests. Even Deaver is cowed by the First Lady: last year, having incompletely quit smoking, he felt obliged to hide his cigarettes from her. A West Wing official who gets along well with her admits that she is sometimes charmless with her subordinates. “She is a demanding person in that she knows what she wants, she wants the best and she wants it right now,” says the presidential aide. “If there’s a fault in there, it’s that she doesn’t take the time to coax things out of people. She demands.” “She does get obsessive about detail,” says Son Ron. “That is part of her personality. It’s like her worrying.” Naturally, she is most obsessive and fretful about the President. “She is fiercely loyal to my father,” says their son. “I think it has a lot to do with the fact that she comes from a somewhat broken home.”

The home was broken, not just somewhat. Anne Frances Robbins, soon nicknamed Nancy, was born in 1921 in Manhattan. Her parents, Car Salesman Kenneth Robbins and Actress Edith (“Lucky”) Luckett, split up the same year. Edith felt she had to go on the road to earn a living, so the toddler was deposited just outside Washington, in Bethesda, Md., to live with her Aunt Virginia’s family. In 1929, Edith was married for the second time, to a Chicagoan named Loyal Davis, and reclaimed her seven-year-old child.

For Nancy Davis, suddenly the stepdaughter of a socially esteemed Lake Shore Drive surgeon, the Depression was a happy time of summer camp and nice clothes. She played field hockey and went on vacations with doting family friends; Actor Walter Huston was the most memorable. Nancy loved Davis, and wanted to be adopted legally. In the mid-1930s, during a family trip to New York, the teen-age Nancy tracked down Kenneth Robbins and had him sign away his parental rights. “He was my father, but I somehow never could think of him that way,” she wrote in Nancy, her 1980 autobiography. Says President Reagan: “She is very protective, with an intense family loyalty that grew out of her own rearing in the doctor’s family.”

The 17-year-old Nancy Davis sounds quite like the 63-year-old Nancy Reagan. In her debutante year, according to the high school yearbook, “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed.” At Smith she majored in drama and dated a lot. Her best beau, a Princeton boy, was struck and killed by a New York-bound train a week after the U.S. entered World War II.

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.”

Ill will between Nancy Reagan and Stepdaughter Maureen extended well into the first term. In 1981, when Maureen announced her candidacy for the G.O.P. Senate nomination in California, her stepmother and father offered no help. (Maureen finished fifth in the primary with 5% of the vote.) Since then, animus between the two women has subsided. Maureen, 44, now calls Nancy Reagan Mom or Mama. The First Lady recently gave her a small doll dressed as a cheerleader, to thank her for her work on the Reagan campaign last fall.

Michael Reagan, 39, the President’s adopted son from his first marriage, has had recent and serious problems with his father and stepmother. He complained that Reagan had never seen Michael’s daughter Ashley, who is almost two. Then, just before Thanksgiving, the First Lady told a reporter that the President and Michael did not get along. “There is an estrangement and has been for three years,” she told the interviewer. Michael counterpunched in the press on Thanksgiving Day. Said he defensively: “I think it’s not an estrangement as much as a jealousy Nancy might have toward me and my family –you know, being the son of another marriage.” One of the President’s advisers thinks the brouhaha has singularly troubled his boss. “For the first time,” says the aide, “Ronald Reagan is really finding out what’s on the heart and mind of one of his kids.” Finally, ten days ago, a holiday truce was called. Michael Reagan, his wife and two children spent three hours visiting his father and stepmother at their Los Angeles hotel suite. “All is resolved,” the First Lady declared in a communique. “Everybody loves each other.”

While women can identify with Nancy Reagan’s problems as a mother, they do not necessarily see eye to eye with her as a woman. The disapproval is almost ironic. The country expects its First Lady to represent some approximate ideal of American womanhood, and that perfectly modern superwoman is, in the 1980s, powerful but feminine, romantically alive and socially engaged. So what’s wrong with Nancy Reagan? Her ancien regime air and the covert style of her power rile the critics. “She has not advanced the cause of women at all,” complains Feminist Author Betty Friedan, who was one year ahead of Nancy Davis at Smith. “She is like Madame Chiang Kai-shek, doing it the old way, through the man.” The detractors would be no happier if she sat quietly and played cards like Mamie Eisenhower–or even if by some magic she were President. The distaste for her is deeper, more visceral: she seems to epitomize the very model of womanhood–dressed to the nines, well-behaved, wifely–that feminists have specifically rejected for themselves. “Her personality and values don’t necessarily fit in with what a lot of people consider to be those of the contemporary woman,” says young Ron. “When she first got to Washington, people did not like the idea of a woman who said, ‘My life began with Ronnie.’ That’s not a real popular notion these days, but she feels it. This is a woman who was born in 1921.”

Moreover, Nancy Reagan, like many ambitious women caught between feminine upbringing and the feminist times, seems ambivalent about her role. “I’m not really given to sitting down and analyzing myself,” she says. Yet for nine years in the 1940s and 1950s, she was an unmarried woman, pursuing a career at a time when other young women of her class became housewives, no questions asked. Today she seems almost embarrassed by that flagrant independence. As First Lady, she resists any suggestions that her job is that of an executive. She will grudgingly admit that she is a hard-charging boss, but her preferred adjective is strong, not tough.

Being First Lady has not exactly raised her consciousness. Yet she says she feels more like her own person, not a presidential appurtenance, when she travels abroad with Reagan. And Nancy Reagan is clearly more assertive in 1985 than she was in 1981. Recently she has even disagreed with her husband, albeit marginally, on a matter of policy: the President is opposed to abortion except when the mother’s life is threatened, but the First Lady has said that she has an open mind about abortion in cases of pregnancy caused by rape. Lately she has begun to discuss her role in White House policymaking more openly. Before William Clark announced last week that he was leaving the Government, she told her West Wing confederates that she did not want him to return to the White House.

Of greater concern is the departure of Deaver, who wanted to go back to public relations work a year ago but stayed on at the First Lady’s behest. “I’m sad to see him go because we’re close, old, dear friends,” she said Friday. “I’ll miss him but at least I think he’ll be near by.” Deaver will probably take a job in Washington. He will be out of the White House by spring, though, and unavailable for daily discussions of the First Lady’s suggestions and worries. How will she cope with a Deaverless second term? “I’ll think about that tomorrow,” she says, quoting Scarlett O’Hara.

Nancy Reagan might begin to repair that gap in her West Wing influence by moving closer to the other pragmatists. She and Baker are like-minded, if not yet especially friendly. On the other hand, Nancy Reagan has probably become confident and practiced enough in the ways of Administration powerbrokering to go it on her own. With Deaver and Reagan’s old pal Meese both gone, she will become the only true intimate of the President in the White House. The First Lady’s word should carry all the more weight.

Nancy Reagan is as determined as ever to protect Ronnie, whatever that takes. These days, on balance, she seems to be protecting him more and complicating his political life less. She may not be introspective, but she has figured out what kind of First Lady she wants to be. She is no longer so likely to flaunt the perquisites of wealth and power. Her politicking has lost its uncomfortable edge. She seems readier to concede that, yes, she is a strong- willed adviser as well as a fashionable First Lady. “If you are here and you don’t grow and don’t learn, you are pretty dumb,” says Nancy Reagan. “I don’t think I’m dumb.”