Ronnie and Nancy
Page 1
RONNIE
& NANCY
OTHER BOOKS BY BOB COLACELLO
Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up
Studios by the Sea: Artists of Long Island’s East End (with Jonathan Becker)
RONNIE
& NANCY
THEIR PATH TO THE WHITE HOUSE
1 9 1 1 TO 1 9 8 0
BOB COLACELLO
Copyright © 2004 by Bob Colacello
All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is expressed to quote from the following: A Surgeon’s Odyssey by Loyal Davis, copyright © 1973 by Loyal Davis, used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Behind the Scenes by Michael K. Deaver, copyright © 1988 by Michael K. Deaver, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc., William Morrow. Dutch: A Memoir by Edmund Morris, copyright © 1999 by Edmund Morris, used by permission of Random House, Inc. Early Reagan by Anne Edwards, copyright © 1987 by Anne Edwards, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc., William Morrow. First Father, First Daughter by Maureen Reagan, copyright © 1989 by MER, Inc., by permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc. Governor Reagan by Lou Cannon, copyright © 2003 by Lou Cannon, reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, a member of Perseus books, L.L.C. Jane Wyman: The Actress and the Woman, copyright © 1986 by Lawrence J. Quirk, reprinted by permission of the author. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, copyright
© 1991 by Kitty Kelley, reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Nofziger by Lyn Nofziger, copyright © 1992, published by Regnery Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved; reprinted by special permission of Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C. Where’s the Rest of Me? and An American Life by Ronald Reagan, copyright © 1965 and copyright © 1990 by Ronald Reagan; with permission of Nancy Reagan. Nancy, My Turn, and I Love You, Ronnie by Nancy Reagan, copyright © 1980, copyright © 1989, and copyright
© 2000 by Nancy Reagan; with permission of Nancy Reagan. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Oral History Program, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA: Oral histories of Neil Reagan and Stanley Plog. Courtesy of Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton: Henry Salvatori, OH 1674, Holmes Tuttle, OH 1675, Justin Dart, OH 1676, Ed Mills, OH 1677.
Warner Books
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.
First eBook Edition: October 2004
ISBN: 0-7595-1268-X
To my father, John, who passed away
five days before Ronald Reagan;
and my mother, Libby,
his beloved wife of nearly fifty-eight years.
And to the late Jerry Zipkin,
who opened so many doors for me.
Contents
PROLOGUE
Le Cirque: 1981
1
ONE
Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
15
TWO
Early Nancy: 1921–1932
33
THREE
Iowa: 1933–1937
58
FOUR
East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
72
FIVE
Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
93
SIX
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
121
SEVEN
Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
149
EIGHT
Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
180
NINE
Divorce: 1947–1948
195
TEN
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
225
ELEVEN
Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
260
TWELVE
The Group: 1958–1962
285
THIRTEEN
The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
313
FOURTEEN
Sacramento: 1967–1968
351
FIFTEEN
Sacramento II: 1969–1974
391
SIXTEEN
Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
429
SEVENTEEN
Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
461
Acknowledgments
507
Notes
511
Bibliography
571
Index
581
v i i
RONNIE
& NANCY
P RO L O G U E
LE CIRQUE
1981
You say there can be no argument about matters of taste?
All life is an argument about matters of taste.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial— out of profundity.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Nietzsche Contra Wagner
ON SATURDAY NIGHT, MARCH 14, 1981, PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, who had been inaugurated less than two months earlier, and his wife, Nancy, went to dinner at Le Cirque, then New York’s most fashionable restaurant. The new President and First Lady had been to see a Broadway show— Sugar Babies, starring those Hollywood old-timers Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney—so it was about 10:30 when their motorcade turned into East 65th Street, where a small crowd cheered as they stepped out of their limousine. Caught up in the excitement, those of us in the restaurant spontaneously stood and applauded when the Reagans walked through the door, accompanied by their very close friends from California, Alfred Bloomingdale, the department store heir, and his fashion-plate wife, Betsy.
Both women were wearing fur coats. Mrs. Reagan’s was mink, Mrs. Bloomingdale’s sable.
They were followed by the retired media tycoon Gardner Cowles and his wife, Jan, pillars of the Republican establishment, who had homes in 1
2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House New York, Southampton, and Miami and had been friends with the Reagans since the 1950s. Then came Jerry Zipkin, the acid-tongued Park Avenue bachelor who was Nancy Reagan’s best friend in New York— Women’s Wear Daily, which for years had dismissed him as “the Social Moth,” now called him “the First Walker,” walker being its term for a single man who escorts society ladies to parties when their husbands are unavailable. On one arm Zipkin had Claudette Colbert, the ageless movie star, who knew the Reagans from their Hollywood days. On the other he had Etti Plesch, an Austrian-born dowager from Monte Carlo known for her prize-winning racehorses and her six rich husbands.
All eyes were on the presidential party as Le Cirque’s owner, Sirio Mac-cioni, showed them to the best table in the house—the corner banquette just to the right of the entrance, which Jerry Zipkin and his nemesis, WWD publisher John Fairchild, always fought over. Betsy Bloomingdale, who was giving the dinner, directed the seating, putting the President between her and Claudette Colbert, and the First Lady between Zipkin and Alfred Bloomingdale. One couldn’t help but marvel at how young—fit, tan, handsome—the President looked for a man who had just turned seventy. He beamed when the model Janice Dickinson, sitting a table away with Peppo Vanini, the owner of Xenon, a midtown disco that rivaled Studio 54 in exclusivity and decadence, raised her champagne glass and, in a voice loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, announced how proud she was to be an American now that Ronald Reagan was in the White House. The entire room erupted into applause again.
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Sirio had obviously packed the place with friendly faces, having consulted the day before with Zipkin about who should, or should not, get reservations. Among those at tables near the President’s were the octogenarian New York Post fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard and her regular walker, Earl Blackwell, the octogenarian publisher of Celebrity Service; Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, of Salzburg and Paris, and the billionaire Spanish banker Alfonso Fierro, whose wife was an old friend of Zipkin’s.
I had been invited to Le Cirque that night by one of Zipkin’s favorite couples, Carolina Herrera, the Venezuelan socialite who was just beginning to establish herself as a New York fashion designer, and her aristocratic husband, Reinaldo, whose family had lived in the same house in Caracas since the sixteenth century. The Herreras’ other guests were Bianca Jagger, who had almost turned down their invitation, she told me that afternoon, because of Reagan’s campaign attacks on her native Nicaragua’s leftist San-Le Cirque: 1981
3
dinista government; the Italian movie producers Franco Rossellini and Countess Marina Cicogna, the latter with her longtime companion, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan; and Andy Warhol, who published Interview magazine, of which I was the editor. “Gee, Bob, this is so glamorous. Oh, it’s just so glamorous,” he said, with his flair for repetition. He had voted for Jimmy Carter.
I had voted for the winner. Like the majority of voters in forty-four states, I was fed up with the anemic wishy-washiness of the Carter administration, particularly in foreign policy, and turned on by Ronald Reagan’s full-blooded, unabashed patriotism, his clear delineation of right and wrong, his sense of certainty. Also, like William Safire, I was—and still am—“a libertarian conservative Republican contrarian iconoclast.”
I was brought up in an Italian-American family where becoming a Republican was equated with becoming an American, and where any mention of Eleanor Roosevelt was invariably followed by the comment “she should mind her own business,” usually uttered by one or the other of my grandmothers. Bess Truman, they never tired of saying, wore her corsage upside-down at the 1949 inauguration. My father, a World War II veteran who had fought in Europe and the Pacific and was one of the first Italian-Americans to hold an executive position in the Wall Street coffee trade, never got over Thomas Dewey’s loss or Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, my father’s hero. My mother was a Republican com-mitteewoman in Plainview, the middle-class Long Island suburb where we lived from 1955 to 1968; in 1956 she had my sisters and me walk up and down the street waving signs saying, “I Like Ike,” “I Like Dick,” and
“Vote Row A All the Way.” Jackie Kennedy, my fashion-conscious mother and grandmothers used to say, dressed beautifully, but why shouldn’t she, they would add, repeating a popular Republican rumor, she’d been given a million dollars by her father-in-law to stay married to his son. For some reason they didn’t mind Lady Bird Johnson, but LBJ had to go—before I got drafted. By then I was at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a raging radical—I’d even joined Students for a Democratic Society, although I never told my parents that.
And then, in 1970, I went to work at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where in reaction to the lockstep liberalism of the New York art world, I found myself returning to my Republican roots. I voted for Ronald Reagan for the first time in the 1976 Republican primary, when he unsuccessfully challenged President Gerald Ford. It seemed to me that the Reagans were being 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House unfairly portrayed by a largely Democratic press, which cast him as a B actor bozo invented and controlled as a politician by a sinister claque of ultraconservative Southern California tycoons, and her as the driven daughter of a John Bircher Chicago neurosurgeon who had played a major role in turning his dim-bulb son-in-law into a fanatical anti-Communist.
Somehow this didn’t square in my mind with a couple whose best friends were the fun-loving Bloomingdales and Jerry Zipkin, one of the most sophisticated men I had ever met. Zipkin had been friends with Warhol since the 1950s, and had taken me under his wing not long after I became editor of Interview; he was constantly calling with story ideas and sending gift subscriptions to his grand friends around the world.
And now here, at Le Cirque, was Nancy Reagan, the supposedly square and uptight First Lady, taking her social cues from Zipkin, who in his not too distant past had been known to give two cocktail parties on the same night—“Why waste the flowers?” he would explain—the first from five to seven for his international society friends, the second from seven to nine for “gents only.” And here was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge—one of his first acts was to have a portrait of
“Silent Cal” hung in the Oval Office—seeming perfectly comfortable, sitting in a peach-and-gray room lined with murals of cavorting monkeys in eighteenth-century court dress, surrounded by assorted European titles and jet-setters, exotic mystery women from Central Europe and Central America, and male and female homosexuals of varying degrees of closet-edness. Then again, he was also the first divorced president and the first movie star president. This president had dated Rhonda Fleming and Piper Laurie. In retrospect, the scene that evening—a circus crossed with a court—was a fairly accurate metaphor for the decade to come.
When we got up to leave, the Reagans and their friends were still dining.
I headed straight for the coat-check room, trying hard not to stare at their table. Andy, who pretended he never knew what to do, followed me.
Everyone else with us filed past the President’s table, where they were introduced to the Reagans. As we stood waiting for our coats, I heard Alfred Bloomingdale’s booming voice: “Where the hell is Bob Colacello? He’s the only Republican in this group.” “I think they want you at that table,”
Andy said. Coat in hand, I approached the table, with Andy still following. “Mr. President,” Bloomingdale said, “I’d like you to meet the great American artist Andy Warhol, and Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview Le Cirque: 1981
5
magazine. He’s a real Republican.” We shook hands. Then Alfred introduced first Andy, then me, to Mrs. Reagan. Taking my hand in hers, she looked me right in the eyes and said, “I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you from Ron and Doria.” She was referring to their son Ron and his wife, Doria, who had recently started working as my secretary. “I’ve heard so much about you from Ron and Doria” was all I could think to say, but it made her laugh—a big coquettish laugh, sparkling, knowing, and warm, that was unexpected from someone who looked so proper. The moment we were on the street, Andy moaned, “She held your hand for so long. I think she really loves you.”
Jerry Zipkin called early the next morning. “You played it just right,”
he pronounced, “not rushing over to the table with all the Italians and Brazilians and God-knows-whats. She said to me, ‘Bob Colacello is so not pushy.’ ”
That evening I saw President and Mrs. Reagan again, from afar, at the Metropolitan Opera House, where Ron Reagan was making his debut with the Joffrey II Ballet Company. Zipkin had a few friends up to his apartment on Park Avenue at 93rd Street—“I live on the hem of Harlem,”
he liked to say—for chicken salad and champagne before the ballet. The friends included Jan Cowles, modern art collector Lily Auchincloss, society columnist Aileen Mehle (who wrote under the name Suzy), Andy, and me. We had orchestra seats at the Met, and rose to our feet with the rest of the audience when the Reagans entered the center box with Doria and the Bloomingdales. As young Ron leapt and spun through an abstract piece called Unfolding, we all agreed that he was pretty good for someone who had started dancing only four years before, at age eighteen. The second half of the program was a concert by Diana Ross. As she sang “Reach out and touch somebody else and make the world a better place to live,” the President took his wife’s hand, and she took Doria’s. “That’s your secretary up there, Bob,” said Andy.
&
nbsp; The next day every paper in New York ran a photograph of Ron, in full makeup and a terry cloth robe, being embraced backstage by his mother, in an off-the-shoulder Galanos evening gown, while his father, in a tuxedo, stood beside them smiling proudly. It wasn’t exactly Camelot, but it was a long way from home on the right-wing range.
Two weeks later a madman named John Hinckley shot and almost killed Ronald Reagan in a misguided attempt to impress the movie star Jodie 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Foster. For the next seven and half years, there would be no more presidential dinners at Le Cirque, and Nancy Reagan would be obsessed with her husband’s security (to the point of secretly consulting with a San Francisco astrologer about his schedule and travels). Within months Alfred Bloomingdale would be stricken with cancer and then engulfed in a tabloid scandal when his long-secret mistress, a Hollywood playgirl named Vicki Morgan, sued him for palimony as he lay on his deathbed. Betsy Bloomingdale went to Mass every morning, gathered her children and grandchil-dren close to her, and held her head high. “Nancy called every single day when Alfred was ill,” she later told me. “She knows what a friend is.” On the night Alfred Bloomingdale died, Betsy, who had visited him in the hospital earlier that day, was giving a dinner party at an obscure German restaurant in Santa Monica for friends from Europe and New York, including Jerry Zipkin, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, and me.
In the meantime, Nancy Reagan had started calling me at the office, causing no end of envy in Andy. She always had an ostensible excuse, such as asking what I thought Ron or Doria might like for their birthday, but invariably she would end up urging me to persuade her son and daughter-in-law not to give up their Secret Service protection. Both the Libyans and the Puerto Rican Liberation Front were threatening to kidnap Ron, she said.
Then I got the idea of putting her on the cover of Interview. I called Zipkin, who called Michael Deaver, the White House aide closest to Mrs. Reagan, who liked the idea because he thought associating her with Andy Warhol would help lighten her imperious image. Unfortunately, Andy and Nancy did not hit it off when we went to the White House to interview her. “The funny thing about movie people,” he told her, “is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.” Looking at him as if he were unbalanced, she replied, “I am a movie person, Andy.” Doria later told me that her mother-in-law had said she didn’t understand how I could work for Andy. Whenever the interview got on track, she said, he seemed to undermine me. When the December 1981 issue hit the stands, the entire New York art world seemed to rise up in horror and outrage. How could I put that googoo-eyed harridan, that overdressed housewife, on the cover of Andy Warhol’s magazine? The Village Voice even ran a parody by Alexander Cockburn in which Andy and I went to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and asked him the same softball questions we had asked the First Lady.