Quigley’s Reign as Queen of Charts : Books: The Reagans’ astrologer claims she was the Great Prognosticator to the Great Communicator.

SAN FRANCISCO —  Joan Quigley cuts a handsome figure as she nibbles on fruit salad in a restaurant at the stately Fairmont Hotel, but if anyone else recognizes her as the person who claims to have put the Teflon in the “Teflon Presidency,” they are keeping it to themselves.

The other diners are unaware of the celebrity in their midst, the woman who says she made the Great Communicator great and single-handedly made a lovable First Lady out of a Dragon Lady.

Perhaps they have forgotten her. Since she entered the limelight in 1988, when former White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan broke the news that Nancy Reagan employed an astrologer, Quigley herself has had little to say.

But now, after all those tasteful, loyal years of silence, Quigley has dashed off a book in which she details her job as court astrologer in the Reagan White House--an unusual form of civil service that Quigley says made her as important to Ronald Reagan as his wife Nancy when it came to making the 40th President a diplomatic dynamo.

“In a different way,” she explains modestly. “Each person did their own job and own function. Nancy knew what she had in me. I don’t think she ever wanted to admit it. I think she would have preferred for me never to be heard from again.”

Just out from Birch Lane Press, “What Does Joan Say?” in its title refers to the plea Quigley says the President put to his wife during the depths of the Iran-Contra affair--a nasty scandal, by the way, that Quigley asserts she foresaw, but could not forestall.

Quigley wrote the book in six weeks, two weeks in a suite at the Fairmont, which is less than a block from the Nob Hill apartment she shares with her sister, and four more weeks in the home of an unnamed friend.

“I was not angry,” she says. “I just wanted to give my version of what happened and explain what astrology really was. It was really very hurtful when I realized (after Regan’s revelations ignited such an uproar) in 1988--maybe I was living in an ivory tower--that it was perceived as being on the edge of the lunatic fringe.”

In her book, the matronly San Francisco astrologer writes that in the Reagan White House, she decided when it was time to talk to the public, when to talk to the press and when not to talk at all.

According to Quigley, she told the President through his wife when to take off in Air Force One and when to land; when to name a Supreme Court justice and when to lobby Congress; when to campaign and when to debate.

She writes that she said when the President should undergo surgery and when the First Lady should go in for a checkup; when superpower summits took place and even what issues they should cover.

She said the time was ripe for world peace.

And that is just the first chapter.

Contemporary news accounts do not always match her versions of events.

Ronald Reagan has flatly said that astrology played no role in negotiating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force Treaty, as Quigley claims, and he has said that “no changes were ever made” in his schedule because of astrology.

Nancy Reagan, in her book “My Turn,” dismissed speculation about the political role that may have been played by her personal astrologer. “Joan’s recommendations had nothing to do with policy or politics--ever,” she wrote, italicizing the passage for emphasis.

Even Regan, after he first revealed the presence of a presidential astrologer in his book “For the Record,” said that the stargazer’s role was limited to scheduling some events to ease Nancy’s fear of a second assassination attempt against her husband.

“I’m simply telling what happened from my point of view,” Quigley responds in a matter-of-fact tone. “I have told the truth. I can’t be tripped up (with the contrary recollections of others) because I told the truth.”

Quigley asserts that she began casting and interpreting astrological charts for both Reagans in 1973. Nancy Reagan, in her memoirs, said only that “Merv (Griffin) had apparently introduced us (sometime after Quigley began appearing on his show), although I don’t remember meeting her.”

Quigley also writes that she worked on Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 effort to win the Republican presidential nomination, although she concedes over lunch that, “I can’t remember quite what I did.”

She does recall returning as a volunteer astrologer for Reagan’s triumphant 1980 campaign.

Nancy Reagan began to pay Quigley for her services in 1981, after President Reagan was shot. In a phone conversation with Griffin, Nancy Reagan was told that Quigley had predicted such a calamity. Mrs. Reagan then renewed her relationship with the astrologer, asking her to predict the safety of future presidential excursions.

At first, Quigley profferred advice only on the safest time to schedule a presidential trip. Quickly, however, Quigley claims, her cosmic counsel was solicited for an astounding number of subjects, from the First Lady’s public image (Quigley says she made it better) to Walter Mondale’s election hopes (Quigley says she made them worse).

Quigley says that she remade Nancy Reagan’s public image during the Reagans’ early years in the White House, that she defused the controversy when the Reagans toured a German cemetery with Nazi SS graves, that she paved the way for political reform in Eastern Europe by getting “Ronnie,” as she calls the President, to ease up on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (whose charts she also cast).

Quigley adds--contrary to Nancy Reagan’s book and news reports at the time--that she persuaded the Reagans to delay the President’s 1985 cancer surgery because the stars were not right.

“I would participate (in the Reagan Administration) in a more intimate way than the publicly recognized insiders of greatest importance,” Quigley writes, adding in another chapter that “I was the Teflon in what came to be known for the better part of six years as the ‘Teflon Presidency.’ ”

According to her book, Quigley never “suggested,” “recommended” or even “advised” the timing of presidential appointments. No, the book tells us, she “allowed” the President and First Lady to go places, see people or say things.

Nancy Reagan made the relationship sound significantly less vital. “While astrology was a factor in determining Ronnie’s schedule,” she wrote in her book, “it was never the only one, and no political decision was ever based on it.”

It was Nancy Reagan’s book, apparently not giving Quigley the credit she thought she deserved, that prompted her to write her own version of events and also to defend astrology. Quigley says she refused pleas to do so after Regan’s book came out in May, 1988. “I did not want to damage a sitting President or the next Republican to run for office,” she explains. “I’m only doing it now because I feel it’s appropriate.”

And, she adds, because Nancy’s book “reads like fiction.”

Nancy Reagan declines to comment on Quigley’s book. Everything she has to say about Joan Quigley is in her own book, Reagan spokesman Mark Weinberg said.

In “My Turn,” Nancy Reagan described Quigley in various passages as warm, sympathetic and compassionate. Quigley does not return the warmth.

“Once I had succeeded in reforming her image, she basked in the glow for a time,” Quigley writes of Nancy Reagan. “Then further ambition took over. She realized that she was a power in her own right. She devoted herself tirelessly to promoting her own interests. . . . Gradually, her desire to back Ronnie from behind the scenes diminished. She wished to be a political power openly.”

Not surprisingly, Quigley says that she and Nancy haven’t swapped pleasantries or predictions for more than a year and a half. Their last conversation was in June, 1988, shortly after Quigley’s chart casting made news.

Does it bother her that she and Nancy are no longer close?

“I think she has lost out, because when I was controlling her image it was a great deal better,” Quigley says without hesitation. “I really frankly feel it has deteriorated terribly in the last couple of years.”

Quigley’s book never spells out her relationship to the President. How much of her advice was actually passed on to him by his wife? How much, if any, did he listen to? Perhaps she does not know herself. She has met him only once, briefly, in the receiving line at a state dinner.

She writes throughout the book of Reagan’s “tremendous vitality and almost superhuman strength,” of his “perfect integrity” and “utmost will power,” of his “almost magical inner will,” of how he is “fearless” and of how his horoscope “makes a person feel his sexual powers . . . come from God.”

Reagan’s horoscope, she writes, preordained him as a leader and peacemaker, just as the stars made a legend of another notable Aquarian, Abraham Lincoln.

Now that he is out of office, will President Reagan acknowledge a belief in astrology in his memoirs?

“I think he probably won’t because he’s denied it,” Quigley says. “I can see why he would want to deny it when they were in office because of the public perception of astrology being so negative. Although I must say that if I had been handling it for the Reagans, people would have been coming out saying, ‘If the President doesn’t have an astrologer, why doesn’t he?’ Really, I would have handled it differently from the way they handled it. I feel they handled it very badly, and they still are.”

HERE’S WHAT JOAN QUIGLEY SAYS

On becoming the first White House astrologer: “I knew that if I decided to take the Reagans on, I would be giving up my time and effort like all those who take part in any administration, sacrificing the rewards they command in the private sector in order to serve their country.”

On working with Nancy: “She trusted me completely and followed my advice absolutely. Yet, as we worked, she combined her areas of knowledge and her usually excellent political judgment with my astrological expertise. The combination was for a time unbeatable.”

On presidential travel: “My control over the departure times of Air Force One was absolute.”

On presidential surgery: “It is because of me that the operation was successful and that there was no recurrence of cancer between July, 1985, and President Reagan’s departure from office.”

On the President’s staff: “In the beginning, Nancy would relay the information I gave her to Mike Deaver, who was very good about seeing to it that what I wanted was done. Later, she relayed my instructions concerning the President’s schedule to Donald Regan, who, while he cooperated, resented what Mike Deaver had always expedited routinely without question. Howard Baker had no problem with astrology, and I was never told that he objected to anything Nancy and I had planned.”

On Gorbachev: “What I saw in his chart turned out to be glasnost and perestroika. “

On the Geneva Summit: “I briefed the President through Nancy for every meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva. I also tried to brief her for her teas alone with Raisa which I knew in advance would not be harmonious.”

On the Rekjavik Summit: “The President had asked Nancy to ask me about going to Rekjavik; he and (Secretary of State George) Schultz followed my advice to negotiate there as long and hard as possible, and, following my advice, they stayed longer than planned.”

On presidential oratory: “Everyone, even the smoothest, silver-tongued orator has off-moments. . . . Until I took over the task of guarding President Reagan’s tongue by astrology, he had a tendency to come out not unfrequently with real bloopers and other remarks better left unsaid.”

On Nancy’s image: “I recreated Nancy’s image. . . . I was amused to learn when I was watching the 1988 Republican Convention on television that someone had been putting about the rumor that Michael Deaver had been the architect of Nancy’s image. That her image had had to have an architect was, of course, obvious to everyone.”

On Congress: “If a member of Congress occupied a pivotal position and could swing a vote or add his vote or persuade others to pass a bill the President wanted, I was called upon.”

On visiting Nazi graves: “I planned that the visit to the Bitburg cemetery would be as inconspicuous as possible. . . . The only difficulty was that someone had planned for the Reagans to have an hourlong picnic with the villagers at Bitburg, which I said was absolutely out of the question as it made Bitburg far too important and called attention to something I thought should be glossed over rapidly.”

On presidential knowledge: “There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the President was fully aware of the contribution I made, the scheduling, my ideas, the problems I solved and the advice I gave.”

The last advice I ever gave Nancy: “Go to Moscow if you will . . . but for God’s sake don’t sign anything of importance at 2 p.m. on June 1 in Moscow. I’m warning you, signing anything of importance at that time is ‘Roosevelt at Yalta’ stuff.”

Source: “What Does Joan Say?,” Birch Lane Press.