Stuart K. Spencer, who as one of the nation’s first political consultants for hire took a so-called B-list actor named Ronald Reagan and helped him become governor of California and later president of the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 97.
His wife, Barbara Spencer, confirmed his death. “He was vibrant up to the last six months of his life or less, and then time caught him,” she said.
Mr. Spencer worked for many of the leading Republicans of his time, including President Gerald R. Ford and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, but he was most remembered as one of the prime architects of Mr. Reagan’s unlikely rise from Hollywood to the White House.
A gruff, profane chain-smoker who once used an expletive in the Oval Office to tell President Ford that he was a poor campaigner, Mr. Spencer personified a rough-and-tumble era of politics before the advent of cable television and social media. Politics was a serious business, he believed, but it could also be rollicking fun, and he relished telling war stories.
In the memoir, “Behind the Podium: My Fifty Years in Politics,” he described once encountering Elizabeth Taylor at a political gathering (“she was completely hammered”); another time, an angry campaign aide pulled a .45-caliber pistol on him (“he was talking crazy, waving the gun around”). He related stories about Frank Sinatra and Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine, and ruefully recalled turning down campaign money from a brothel owner in Louisiana.
But Mr. Spencer respected his opponents, a trait that is increasingly vanishing in modern politics. In his later years, he lamented the rise of President Donald J. Trump and what he called the disappearance of the Republican Party that he had spent his life building.