Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  In January 1982, Mrs. Reagan invited me to attend the State of the Union speech with Ron and Doria. In June she came up to New York to Le Cirque: 1981

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  attend the premiere of the movie Annie, which had been produced by Ray Stark, an old and close friend of the Reagans’. I remember her calling me over to her table at the party afterward and introducing me to her dinner partners, Cary Grant and John Huston, who had directed the film—and whose father, the great actor Walter Huston, she told me, had played on Broadway with her mother back in the 1920s. Jerry Zipkin was also at her table, along with retired CBS chairman Bill Paley; Elizinha Moreira-Salles, the ex-wife of the richest man in Brazil; Greek shipping tycoon George Li-vanos and his wife, Lita; and Rosemarie Marcie-Rivière, an aging Swiss socialite who had been married almost as many times as Etti Plesch. It was the same kind of mix—Old Hollywood’s A-list and charter members of the jet set—that one would find at the small private dinners Mrs. Reagan liked to give upstairs at the White House.

  I remember her having me tracked down at a friend’s house in Southampton one weekend that summer and keeping me on the phone for nearly two hours, asking again and again, “Why does the press hate me so much?” She had been under constant attack since the day her husband was elected, it seemed—for trying to get the Carters to leave the White House early, for borrowing designer clothes and jewelry, for ordering up expensive White House china, for attending the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer with an elaborate security entourage. But nothing raised the ire of the East Wing press corps—mostly younger feminists—

  more than the way she gazed at her husband with rapt adoration during his speeches. By the end of their first year in the White House she had the highest disapproval rating of any first lady in modern times. No wonder she sounded so hurt and bewildered. I agreed that the press had been unduly hard on her. Yet it crossed my mind that Nancy Reagan, like my grandmothers and mother, seemed to have a talent for playing the martyr.

  In September, I was invited to a state dinner for President and Mrs.

  Marcos of the Philippines. Much to Andy’s dismay, he wasn’t. So I called Zipkin, who called Muffie Brandon, the White House social secretary, who prevailed upon the First Lady to have him. A month later Mrs. Reagan was in New York for a party at the Lincoln Center library to promote her book about the Foster Grandparents Program, To Love a Child. I had just returned from Thailand and brought her some souvenir seashells from Phuket Island. She hugged and kissed me as if I had given her pearls, and everyone on the receiving line wondered what I had done to deserve such a display of affection. But I was beginning to realize that 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House once Nancy Reagan liked you she really liked you. (Just as once she didn’t, she really didn’t.)

  When I quit Interview the following February, a rumor arose that I was under consideration for a job in Nancy Reagan’s office. That was followed by a second rumor: a photograph of me dancing with Truman Capote at Studio 54 had come to the FBI’s attention, ruling me out. The truth was that I soon signed a contract with Vanity Fair and didn’t have as much contact with Mrs. Reagan, partially because Tina Brown, the editor, preferred to deal with the White House herself, partially because Doria Reagan no longer worked for me. She and Ron moved to Los Angeles with the Joffrey Ballet not long after I left Interview.

  But I remained close to Jerry Zipkin, and when he died of lung cancer in 1995, I was assigned to write his obituary by Graydon Carter, Tina Brown’s successor at Vanity Fair. I called Mrs. Reagan at her house in Bel Air. She and her husband had been out of the White House for six years by then; he had announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease in a letter to the nation the year before. Our conversation took off as if we had spoken days, instead of years, before, and as usual with her, it was a long conversation. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” she said several times. “I feel as if I’ve lost the two most important men in my life now.

  Well, Ronnie’s still here, but . . .” She told me she had visited Zipkin at his apartment just before he died, and had sat at his bedside for two hours. “I feel very strongly that he stayed alive until he saw her,” their mutual good friend the designer Bill Blass told me. “It was all very planned, his departure.”

  In 1997, Graydon Carter called me into his office and said that he thought it was time to take a look back at the Reagan years, and that he wanted me to write the article. “I know you like them, which is why their friends will talk to you,” he said. “But you will have to become neutral when you sit down at the typewriter.” There is no such thing as true neutrality in journalism, and access is a two-edged sword, but I believe I was fair and balanced in the two-part article that was published in July and August 1998. In any case, I like telling stories more than making judg-ments, especially when writing relatively soon after the fact. I also like writing about the social side of life, not only because it is amusing but also because I have learned from experience that what seems silly often has serious repercussions, and that what seems superficial often reveals deeper Le Cirque: 1981

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  truths. And if any subject was about the confluence of the serious and the frivolous, the social and the political, it was the Reagans and the era they came to represent.

  I spent a large part of the next four years in California, researching first that article and then this book, and in the process growing much closer to Nancy Reagan than I ever would have thought possible that night at Le Cirque. We had many long lunches at the Hotel Bel-Air, which she liked because it was five minutes from home and her ailing husband. We spent many afternoons meticulously going through her White House scrapbooks at the former president’s office high above Avenue of the Stars in Century City. She invited me to numerous events at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, including lunches for George W. Bush and John McCain during the 2000 primary campaign. But although she had me to their house on St. Cloud Road, she never let me see Ronald Reagan. She may have mellowed in other ways, but Nancy Reagan was not about to stop protecting her husband’s image when it needed protecting most. This was an exceptionally shrewd and determined woman, I came to realize, who did not give up, who never let go.

  I have also been fortunate in having access to the Reagan Group, as Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s oldest and closest friends in Los Angeles are called, and to what’s left of its political subset, the Kitchen Cabinet, the wealthy businessmen who came together to elect Ronald Reagan governor in 1966, and who continued to support him through his bids for the presidency in 1968, 1976, and 1980, when he was finally triumphant. Most of these friends met the Reagans during the early years of their marriage.

  Some had known them separately before they married. Almost none of them had ever talked about the Reagans to a journalist or biographer (and they almost invariably checked with Nancy Reagan before talking to me).

  In the case of those who had died, I was usually able to interview their children, several of whom worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns and, in two cases, in his White House.

  Mostly in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, the surviving members of the Reagan Group were proud of their long association with Ronnie and Nancy, as they always called the Reagans, and were still jealous of one another’s closeness to them. They actually referred to themselves as the Group. “She wasn’t in the Group as early as some of us were,” said Betty Adams, who took credit for introducing Nancy Reagan to many of the women in the Group in 1958, referring to Erlenne Sprague, who said she 1 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had sponsored Nancy’s membership in the Colleagues, the exclusive Los Angeles charity, in 1962. “There were a lot of Johnny-come-latelys,” Jean French Smith, the widow of the Kitchen Cabinet lawyer who became attorney general in the first Reagan administration, told me, “who say they were in the Kitchen Cabinet from the beginning but weren’t. If you turn off your tape recorder, I’ll tell you which ones.”


  The Kitchen Cabinet—the term goes back to the gang of cronies who unofficially advised President Andrew Jackson—was led by three self-made multimillionaires, auto dealer Holmes Tuttle, oilman Henry Salvatori, and drugstore tycoon Justin Dart, all long gone. Alfred Bloomingdale, steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, and oil equipment manufacturer William Wilson, the husbands of Nancy Reagan’s three best friends, Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, and Betty Wilson, were also in the inner circle. Somewhat removed but extremely influential were the Group’s only billionaire, Walter Annenberg, the owner of TV Guide and President Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, and his wife, Lee, who were based in Philadelphia but who spent several months each year in California.

  Over the years, the Reagans and their friends came to resemble a court, and their social life, with its fixed calendar and closed guest list, took on the aura of ritual. Every Fourth of July these same couples trekked to the Santa Inez Mountains for Nancy Reagan’s birthday picnic at the Reagans’ Rancho del Cielo. Every New Year’s Eve they celebrated at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ palatial Palm Springs estate. Every New Year’s Day they went to Holmes and Virginia Tuttle’s bungalow on the grounds of the Eldorado Country Club. Every election night they watched the returns at the Jorgensens’ house in Bel Air. When President Reagan turned seventy in 1981

  and seventy-five in 1986, his black-tie birthday parties at the White House were paid for by the Annenbergs, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, and the Armand Deutsches, who were also longtime members of the Group. “We all stood up when Ronnie cut the cake,” recalled Harriet Deutsch, sitting in the screening room of their Beverly Hills house, surrounded by dozens of framed photographs of the Reagans and their friends. “Oh, he was so darling. The most loving, sweet man. I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body. And Nancy is a darling friend. When she is your friend.”

  One of the advantages of taking a social approach in writing about the Reagans is that it highlights Nancy Reagan’s role—the importance of which cannot be overemphasized—in Ronald Reagan’s political career. As the pun-Le Cirque: 1981

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  dit George Will once said, “Ronald Reagan has one best friend, and he married her.” I would go further: one cannot figure out Ronald Reagan without figuring out Nancy Reagan, too.

  Taking this angle has led me to three conclusions. First, the marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan is undoubtedly one of the great love stories of our time, with few rivals in fidelity, intensity, and longevity. Second, the social life that grew out of their marriage made Ronald Reagan’s political career possible, mainly because, more than those of any other presidential couple, the Reagans’ social and political lives were completely intertwined.

  Third, Nancy Reagan was one of the most powerful first ladies in history—although she was largely successful in her efforts to cover her tracks during the White House years and remained reluctant to reveal the extent of her influence for fear of appearing to be the power behind the throne and thereby diminishing her husband’s legacy. Like Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, she shielded an aging and sometimes ill husband, though as president Ronald Reagan was never as incapacitated as Woodrow Wilson.

  Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she lobbied her husband on appointments and policy, though always privately, never publicly. Like Hillary Clinton, she stood by her man, particularly in times of crisis, though Reagan’s crises were never as sordid as Clinton’s. And like Jacqueline Kennedy, she understood the connection between style and substance, though she never quite matched Mrs. Kennedy in elegance and cultivation.

  Ronald Reagan’s five-day state funeral, at once grand and intimate, historic and moving, was his wife’s finest moment. His death came on June 5, 2004, the day before the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, which it eclipsed on the world’s television screens. Nancy Reagan had begun planning the obsequies a decade earlier, concerning herself with every detail, determined to make this her final contribution to her husband’s legend. From the first moment we saw her, standing outside the funeral home in Santa Monica, leaning on the arm of a brigadier general as she watched her husband’s casket being lifted into a hearse, this frail eighty-two-year-old woman in a perfect black suit and pearls was a picture of dignity and grace.

  More than 110,000 people filed past the casket at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, and nearly as many paid homage in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, where Reagan’s body lay in state for thirty-six hours. The funeral service in Washington National Cathedral brought together four former United States presidents, and eulogies 1 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House were delivered by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, and President George W. Bush. Among the four thousand mourners were Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan’s partner in ending the Cold War, and Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader who led the struggle to overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe; the current leaders of Germany, Great Britain, and South Africa; and an array of Reagan friends from the East Coast ranging from David Rockefeller to Joan Rivers.

  Prince Charles accompanied the Reagan family on Air Force One back to California for the sunset burial service that same day. Awaiting the party at the burial site on a hilltop behind the Reagan Library were the surviving members of the Group, including Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, William Wilson, Erlenne Sprague, and Betty Adams. Eulogies there were given by the three surviving Reagan children, Michael, Patti, and Ron, and at the end of the service Nancy Reagan broke down for the first time. According to her old friend Merv Griffin, an honorary pall-bearer, she was astounded and touched by the outpouring of sympathy across the land. “I thought people had forgotten Ronnie,” she said. “They hadn’t seen him for almost ten years.”

  This work is not a full-scale biography of either Reagan, but rather an attempt to paint a portrait of a marriage that changed the course of history. I have sought to expand and correct the rather limited existing record of Nancy Reagan’s life before she became First Lady, which is riddled with errors and distortions, partly because her most extensive biography to date was written by the sensationalistic Kitty Kelley, a dogged digger for documents but a relentlessly negative judge of character. Nancy Reagan herself contributed to the confusion by redacting and deleting, whitewashing and sugarcoating the more unpleasant and complicated facts of her life. Ronald Reagan was also prone, like most politicians, to sentimentalizing and mythologizing his past, but his many biographers, including Lou Cannon, Garry Wills, Stephen Vaughn, and the self-destructive Edmund Morris (who for some inexplicable reason virtually ignored Nancy Reagan), have done an admirable job of setting the record of his life straight. I have mostly summarized and interpreted that record in order to give the reader a clearer picture of the man with whom Nancy Reagan fell in love. This volume, the first of two, follows the couple up to 1980 and the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

  “He never would have made it without her,” I was told again and again Le Cirque: 1981

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  in the course of interviewing nearly two hundred Reagan relatives, friends, colleagues, campaign aides, administration officials, and observers. “He never would have been elected Governor without her.” “He never would have become President without her.” They talked about her devotion, her protectiveness, her “antennae” for sussing out people who put their agendas ahead of her husband’s. This was not to discredit Ronald Reagan’s intelligence, talents, or achievements, they insisted. He was the simple man with the simple plan, the visionary, the dreamer, the great communicator, who had the big ideas he believed could change the country and the world for the better. She was the complicated woman of parts, the strategist, the fighter, the “personnel director of the Reagan operation,” who created the atmosphere and forged the relationships that made it possible for him to carry out what both of them saw as his destiny.

  One of the most telling convers
ations I ever had with Nancy Reagan was after I had appeared on the Today show to talk about my Vanity Fair story and had stressed the point that the Reagans were a great political team. “How was I?” I asked when she called that same day.

  “You were good,” she said, with a certain hesitation in her voice. “But you left out the most important word.”

  What was that? I asked.

  “Love,” she said. “Please don’t make me sound like some kind of master backstage manipulator. Everything I did, I did for Ronnie.”

  C H A P T E R O N E

  EARLY RONNIE

  1911–1932

  We were poor and I suppose at the bottom edge of the town, but we thought of ourselves as typically middle-class Americans. . . . My father told Neil, two years older, and me, that he would try to help us get to college, but that we would have to do most toward it ourselves.

  Ronald Reagan, in a Saturday Evening Post interview, April 1974

  I was the one who . . . would go down to the one pool hall in town that was downstairs under a store, where your folks couldn’t see you if they happened to walk by on the walk. [Dutch] would never do anything like that. He would rather be up there, just gazing at his birds’ eggs.