A History of Conventions: 1980
With the primary season winding down, and the candidates and their parties beginning to think about their conventions at the end of the summer, I thought I too would begin to think about conventions. Here in this space today, and throughout the summer, I’m going to take a look at some of the more contentious, and entertaining, conventions of the latter half of the 20th century, including (but not limited to) the Hubert Humphrey convention of 1968, the George McGovern convention four years later, the Ford/Reagan convention of 1976, and my personal favorite, the Carter/Kennedy convention of 1980.
But before delving into the contentious, I thought I would start with a far different vibe. Love. The year was 1980. The scene was Detroit’s Plaza Hotel, high noon on a Monday, hours before the start of the Republican convention.
Mike Curb, then the lieutenant governor of California and the program chairman for the Republican convention, stepped to the microphone. He instantly felt the reverb. “There was this feeling,” Curb wrote in his memoirs Curbside: One Man’s Journey from Songwriter to NASCAR to Politician and Back Again. “It was like the Indy 500. During introductions the cars are announced and the fans go crazy and it’s crowded and hot and quite a bit frenzied. That was the feel as I grabbed the microphone.”
“Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy are on their way,” Mike Curb announced to the crowd, an estimated fifteen hundred Republicans packed in sardine tight on the Plaza’s main concourse. “But while we wait, we are very fortunate to have America’s favorite female vocalist sing her smash hit. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Debbie Boone paying a tribute to Ronald Reagan and singing ‘You Light Up My Life.’”
The fifteen hundred Republicans greeted Curb’s word with excited applause. Unfortunately for the excited Republicans, Debbie Boone had just given birth and was not able to attend. To take her place, she’d asked her father, Pat Boone. She hadn’t mentioned this replacement to the organizers of the Republican convention. For instance, Mike Curb knew nothing of the Boone substitution.
Mike Curb greeted the approaching Pat Boone with a big smile. “Did I say Debbie?” he asked the crowd. “I meant Pat.”
The excited applause for Debbie grew even louder. Pat Boone, after all, was a devoted and vocal Republican. Pat Boone took the microphone. “I want to dedicate this song to my daughter Debbie, my new granddaughter Nancy, named after the next first lady, and to the next president of these United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan.” The crowd roared with delight while, at that very moment, the woman who would become the next first lady, Nancy Reagan, arrived with her husband.
To the observer, whether fervent Democrat or loyal Republican or staunch Independent, the Reagans formed a most fascinating picture. Ronald Reagan, in his Pierre Cardin ensemble with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, looked genuinely pleased. He conveyed that emotion like no presidential candidate, prior or subsequent. Nancy Reagan, in her beige Adolfo suit, looked genuinely conspiratorial. She too conveyed that emotion.
“Ronald and Nancy Reagan,” Pat Boone continued, “you light up my life.” And then, at five minutes after noon, Pat Boone strummed his guitar and broke into song: “‘So many nights I sit by my window. Waiting for someone to sing me his song. So many dreams I kept deep inside me. Alone in the dark but now you’ve come along...’”
A biographer of Ronald Reagan, the sympathetic Edmund Morris, happened to be at the Detroit Plaza Hotel on Monday at a little after noon. He said of the moment, “Reagan had this look of delight written all over his face. His smile was as wide and as contagious as could be. He could wear that smile all day and into the night and it never so much as ruffled.”
A hostile biographer of Reagan’s, Robert Dallek, didn’t quite see it that way. While Pat Boone sang, Reagan’s smile “became just a little frayed around the edges,” Dallek wrote in Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism. “Clearly, Reagan would have preferred Debbie Boone’s rendition.”
Robert Dallek, it should be noted, was not among the crowd of Republicans that day.
Pat Boone continued to strum his guitar and sing. At this point in the song he hit the chorus: “‘You light up my life. You give me hope to carry on. You light up my days and fill my nights with song.’”
Another historian offered her view of the moment. According to Nancy Reagan’s unauthorized biographer, Kitty Kelley, Nancy felt “awkward. There was a strange psychosexual dynamic going on. Pat Boone, who was as archconservative and anti-gay as they come, appeared gay. He just emanated that homosexual boytoy thing. Nancy, I believe, thought that Pat was hitting on her husband.”
According to Kelley, Nancy Reagan wanted to stop the singing. “She looked at the microphone,” Kelley told me. “She followed the electrical chord to the wall. She inched her way over. Her husband, inconspicuously, pulled her back.”
Kitty Kelley, it should be noted, was not among the crowd of Republicans that day.
However, if Kitty Kelley’s version of events and emotions was accurate, a corollary question must be asked. Was Ronald Reagan feeling the same psychosexual dynamic? His sympathetic and overtly masculine biographer Edmund Morris wouldn’t hear of it. “What are you creating?” he asked me. “A fantasy?” (Speaking of fantasy, the same might be said of Edmund Morris’s biography on Reagan. In researching his book Morris was granted all-access status to his subject. Like most of his predecessors and successors with all-access status, Morris fell in love with his subject. There’s a general rule. Historians granted all-access tend to write biographies that read like Harlequin romances. There’s lusty hero worship and latent sexuality involved. Edmund Morris’s Dutch certainly fits that mold.)
Reagan’s hostile biographer Robert Dallek considered the possibility. “Reagan, as we all know, was very good friends with Rock Hudson and Rock Hudson had come out to Reagan,” Dallek reflected. “Rumor has it that Hudson actually propositioned Reagan and Reagan was cool about the whole thing. Not interested, but cool. So maybe there’s some truth to this.”
Pat Boone continued to strum his guitar and sing: “‘Rolling at sea, adrift on the water. Could it be finally I’m turning for home? Finally a chance to say hey, I love you. Never again to be all alone…’”
Nancy Reagan looked at Pat Boone. According to Kitty Kelley, she saw “love in his eyes, and devotion.” She felt “strenuously irritated.”
According to Kelley, Nancy Reagan then saw Pat Boone perform a rather strange act. Boone was dressed in a typical button-down oxford. He did not wear a tie. His shirt was buttoned to just below the neck, with only the very top button undone. At that moment, according to Kitty Kelley, Boone unbuttoned the button just below the neck, exposing a bit of chest.
According to Dr. Ferguson Fricke, the distinguished rock and roll musicologist, “This was just what showmen did. They exposed themselves. This was Boone’s equivalent to Mick Jagger’s devil walk.”
According to Kitty Kelley, there was “a psychosexual causality. Pat Boone was turned on by Ronald Reagan.”
“And you’re sure Boone’s affection was for Ronald Reagan?” I responded to Kitty Kelley. “You’re sure it wasn’t for Nancy Reagan?”
“Well, one cannot be one hundred percent certain in these matters,” Kitty Kelley replied. “After all, I wasn’t there. I didn’t witness the event. However, I can tell you that Nancy Reagan was horrified by Boone’s unbuttoning.”
According to Kelley, Nancy Reagan displayed all the traits of “total shock.” Her eyes enlarged to the size of “apples.” In surprise, her mouth “formed the letter O.” Even her beige Adolfo suit radiated a sense of “indignation.”
“Nancy could do designer wear anywhere,” Kelley said. “At a baseball game, at a picnic, at the opera, just getting out of bed. But there, during the Boone song, she looked uncomfortable to the point of scandal.”
For her part, Nancy Reagan has never spoken publicly about Pat Boone’s rendition of “You Light Up My Life” at the Republican convention. As for Kitty Kelley’s description, Nancy Reagan, according to her spokeswoman Joanna Drake, offered a “no comment.”
As for Pat Boone, he continued to strum his guitar and sing: “‘You light up my life. You give me hope to carry on. You light up my days and fill my nights with song.”
Unlike the Reagans, Kitty Kelley reported, the crowd “was loving it. I talked to many eyewitnesses. I specifically remember one man’s reaction. ‘This is better than Marilyn serenading JFK,’ he said. I think that basically represents the overall feeling of the moment.”
“‘It can’t be wrong,’” Pat Boone sung, “‘when it feels so right. ‘Cause you. You light up my life.’”
According to musicologist Ferguson Fricke, Pat Boone “glowed with sweat and happiness and wonder.” He looked at Ronald and Nancy Reagan; he looked back at the crowd. “Sing it with me one time,” he said to the crowd. And then he, along with thousands of Republicans, sang, “‘It can’t be wrong when it feels so right. ‘Cause you…’” Pause, both from Boone and the crowd. “‘You… light… up… my-y-y-y… life.’”
And the crowd exploded. There was a noise factor threatening to blow off the roof of the Plaza Hotel. There were people hugging each other. There were high fives. There was alcohol spilled in exuberance. And there was Pat Boone glowing in joy and marvel. “The absolute high point of his career,” according to Ferguson Fricke.
In great fanfare Pat Boone handed the microphone to Ronald Reagan. For his part, Reagan nodded a thank you to Pat Boone. He did not, it should be noted, pat him on the shoulder or offer a hug.
Ronald Reagan broke into his oversized cowboy smile. “Nancy and I were just flying by and we thought we’d drop in and see what’s going on,” he told the packed, attentive audience. “I had a dream the other night…”
Other than Reagan’s voice, there wasn’t a sound to be heard. This was the Ronald Reagan effect. He could instantly quiet thousands of celebrating Republicans. “I dreamed that Jimmy Carter came to me and asked why I wanted his job,” Reagan continued. “I told him I didn’t want his job.” Reagan paused. He moved the microphone just slightly, so nothing blocked his oversized cowboy smile. “I want to be president,” he said.
A moment or two of uncertainty followed. Reagan then laughed and the crowd responded by mimicking their actor. “It was typical Ronald Reagan,” Edmund Morris wrote of this moment in Dutch. “The content didn’t matter; the delivery was the thing. And America, quite suddenly, was in love with Dutch. This was the man who was going to lead the American renaissance.”
The next four days, otherwise known as the Republican convention of 1980, was a coronation of Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Bibliography
WORKS CITED:
Curb, Mike. Curbside: One Man’s Journey from Songwriter to NASCAR to Politician
and Back Again. New York: Miramax Books, 1998.
Dallek, Robert. Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Kelley, Kitty. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1991.
Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House,
1999.
INTERVIEWS:
Edmund Morris in his “country home” in Kent, Connecticut.
Ferguson Fricke Oral History, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, Ohio.
http://www.rockhall.com/archive/ffricke/.
Joanna Drake in e-mail correspondence.
Kitty Kelley in interview and e-mail correspondence. Interviews at her home in
Washington, D.C.
Robert Dallek in interviews and e-mail correspondence. Interviews in Washington, D.C.
(Disclaimer: This is a faux history, a fiction based on fact. What's fact and what's fiction? I'll leave that up to your imagination.) |
