CELEBRITY HOMES: Remembering Reagan’s Homes and Life in the Riviera

Pacific Palisades holds the first home that Ronald and Nancy Reagan ever owned as a couple. After their March 1952 wedding, they had a mere months-long pit stop at Nancy’s Brentwood apartment before calling 1258 Amalfi Drive in the Riviera their home that same year. The couple paid $42,000 for the Cape Cod-style house. “I loved that home,” Nancy once recalled.

The two-story house had seven rooms and four bedrooms, but was ultimately unassuming, and that may have been what the honeymooning Reagans were after. Built in the same year the Reagans moved in, the house featured a couple of prominent bay windows facing the well-groomed lawn that greeted passersby on busy Amalfi.

Its decent-sized backyard would allow for plenty of playing room for their soon-to-be born daughter, Patti and Reagan’s visiting kids Michael and Maureen from his previous marriage to actress Jane Wyman.

On Amalfi Drive, Reagan displayed soft and romantic touches toward Nancy over the four-plus years they enjoyed there.

When Patti came along in October of 1952, Nancy and the newborn were greeted by a welcome-back home gift Ronald had planted for the new mother – an olive tree. Often, when he would have to leave for out-of-state work trips, he would write letters to Nancy reminding her how he missed and loved her.

The Reagans were among the handful of stars that were making post-WW II Pacific Palisades a haven for Hollywood. Around the time of his marriage to Nancy, according to his own admission, Hollywood was offering Reagan less attractive movie roles to play. This was a time when he had starred in such films as The Winning Team and the B-movie Hong Kong, both coming out in 1952.

In 1954, with his film career in a decline and his finances tightening, Reagan made a move that would set him on the path to financial security. The gig was not a big-screen acting part, rather the job of hosting a weekly television series.

Reagan hosted the “General Electric Theater,” a move that would eventually figure into the building of his next home on a couple of fronts. Or, as Reagan put it, “My income from General Electric had enabled us to build a dream home overlooking the Pacific Ocean that GE stuffed with every imaginable electric gadget.” The house, he said, would have “everything electric except a chair.”

Indeed, when this new house, located at 1669 San Onofre in the Riviera, was being built, GE was supplying futuristic electrical equipment that had yet to be offered to consumers such as an ultra-modern dishwasher.

Nancy would later say, “They even put in a garbage disposal, which was unique for the time.” The four-bedroom house boasted a film projector that was hidden behind a painting that would slide aside when the Reagans viewed films at home.

Walking through the home, a visitor would be treated to several slices of glass walls. Stone added another interior aesthetic. The home the Reagans occupied in early 1957 was a then modern-day wonder, which was situated on a slope of a hill.

Like the Amalfi house, the ranch-style house on San Onofre would be the first home for a Reagan newborn. Ronald (Ron) Reagan was brought home in the Spring of 1958.

Ron would later recall growing up as a kid at the home when the surrounding area “really wasn’t developed.” Today, multi-million dollar homes cover the nearby hills.

Life on San Onofre was about a string of good money-making years, family experiences, a happy marriage, and, of course, the start of a political career. It was on Jan. 4, 1966, when Ronald Reagan gathered the press at the home and announced his candidacy for California governor. He would go on to win the governorship in that year and again in 1970.

As governor, Reagan would escape the state’s capital of Sacramento most weekends, returning to his beloved Pacific Palisades home.

Fast forward to the night of the presidential election of Nov. 4, 1980, and we have a scene inside the San Onofre home that only a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up. Ronald and Nancy jumped out of the shower and bath respectively after she had heard newsman John Chancellor announce that Reagan had won the presidency. They were watching the television reports wearing only bath towels.

A congratulatory call from President Jimmy Carter, conceding the election, soon followed.

Ronald Reagan’s election win that night in 1980 would become the catalyst for the Reagans to sell their Pacific Palisades house in 1981.

Michael Oldham, co-author of Movie Star Homes: The Famous to the Forgotten and author of the novel The Valentino Formula, can be reached at HollywoodLandings@sbcglobal.net.