Hollywood, World Mourn Reagan

Retracing the path of his life, Ronald Reagan's final campaign takes him from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., and back again.

A week of ceremony not seen in the United States for more than 30 years began Monday with the movie star turned President's flag-draped casket transported, under careful watch of military guard, to his library in Simi Valley, California.

Reagan, the nation's 40th President, died Saturday of pneumonia following a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 93.

Reagan's body is set to lie in repose in the main lobby of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library through late Tuesday. Thousands of visitors are expected to file past to pay their respects.

Even more thousands are expected to do the same when Reagan is transported to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where the Reagan casket will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda through Thursday.

A national funeral service at Washington National Cathedral, to be attended by President Bush and other dignitaries, is scheduled for Friday morning. Reagan will be the first former president to be sent off with such pomp since funeral services were held for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973.

Late Friday, Reagan's body returns to California by plane for burial in a crypt beneath his presidential library.

A small contingent of Reagan family and friends, including TV impresario Merv Griffin, said their goodbyes to the late leader on Monday morning at the library in a private ceremony captured in every detail--right down to a ringing cell phone--for live TV.

Earlier, his widow Nancy Reagan, a B-movie starlet turned world figure herself, issued a statement of gratitude for "everyone's prayers over the years."

Since his 1994 announcement that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Reagan's retreat from public life was steady and, eventually, complete.

In an article published in the new Time magazine, but written before her husband's death, Nancy Reagan eulogized her husband of 52 years as a man possessing no ego, a man supremely comfortable in his own skin.

"I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie," Nancy Reagan wrote.

In Newsweek, daughter Patti Davis, who carried on the family's working acting tradition before settling into a writing career, talked about coming to terms with her famous father--and his fans.

"[Growing up] I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him. America was the important child in the family, the one who got the most attention," wrote Davis, who patched up a fractious relationship with her parents about a decade ago. "It's strange, but now I find comfort in sharing him with an entire nation."

In a statement, son Michael Reagan, a talk-radio host, called himself the "luckiest man in the world."

"To think I was not born into this family, but that I was chosen to be part of this family by Ronald Reagan!" said the younger Reagan, adopted in 1945 by Ronald Reagan and first-wife Jane Wyman.

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who knows of recasting oneself as a statesman, called Reagan a personal hero.

"Ronald Reagan always inspired me to be a leader, to do what I can do to help make our country stronger," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

In Hollywood, the keepers of the Walk of Fame placed a wreath at Reagan's Hollywood Boulevard star (awarded to him for his TV work) on Saturday. The site has since become a makeshift memorial, a place for admirers to leave candles and flowers.

Screen Actors Guild President Melissa Gilbert, meanwhile, tactfully acknowledged the chasm between Reagan's Republican ideology and Hollywood's largely liberal point of view.

"While President Reagan's politics grew conservative over the years and, at times, at odds with the nation's labor movement, there can be no question that he devoted years of his life to advancing the wages, benefits and working conditions of his fellow actors," Gilbert said in a statement.

Reagan, who appeared in more than 50 films before mounting his first run for the California governorship in 1966, was elected President of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, in one of his first forays into public service. He served until 1952, and then again led the union from 1959 to 1960.

To Hollywood's man in Washington, Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti, Reagan's acting career was, as he wrote in USA Today, "merely a prefatory interlude to his true vocation: the voice of a country."

Added Valenti: "As they say in the movie industry, 'He hit his mark and said his lines.' "