Nancy Davis was twenty-eight years old and under contract at MGM when she found her name on a list of suspected communist sympathizers. It was a clerical problem with a career-ending shape. There was another working actress named Nancy Davis, and the other Nancy Davis was the one they meant.

In 1949 there was no appeal process for that. There was no office to call and no form to file. What there was, was the Screen Actors Guild, and the Guild had a president who had a habit of taking those meetings himself.

She asked the director Mervyn LeRoy to set it up. Reagan agreed to dinner. Both of them, separately and in advance, told the other they had an early call the next morning and could not stay long. Neither one of them had an early call. They had each quietly built a door out of the evening in case the evening turned out to be nothing.

Neither one used the door. They closed the restaurant and then went on to a club and stayed through two shows.

He got her name off the list. That part took him almost no effort at all, which is its own quiet comment on how the list worked.

They were married on March 4, 1952, at a small church in the San Fernando Valley. The wedding had two guests: the actor William Holden and his wife, Ardis, who stood up as best man and matron of honor. There was no press. There was no photographer on the guest list.

They had fifty-two years. He wrote her letters the entire time — from location shoots, from Sacramento, from the White House, from upstairs in the residence on an anniversary when she was somewhere downstairs in the same building. She kept all of them.

The whole family at Rancho del Cielo, their ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains. National Archives file, stamped August 17, 1985 — forty-one years ago today, which we did not plan and only noticed after we had picked it.

What the two of them did after Hollywood is the reason this is three pages instead of one. He ended up on an operating table with a bullet an inch from his heart, and in front of a wall in Berlin, and across a table from Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. She outlasted all of it, and then spent the last twelve years of her life on the losing side of a fight with her own political party, on purpose, because of what happened to him.

Marine One on the South Lawn. He is in the bomber jacket, she has his arm, and there is a Marine in dress blues holding the salute below them. Whatever else the job was, for eight years it was also the two of them getting on and off a helicopter together.

Those are the other two pages. This one is only about the dinner that neither of them left.

Ronald Reagan has his own page. So does Nancy Reagan.