Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Only the postmortems remained:

  “I wrote in a column from Miami that Reagan’s candidacy was almost certainly something that he undertook to do something nice for his friends.

  It was so obvious he was not going to win,” said Bill Buckley. “Reagan called to tell me that was exactly correct—it was only because he felt an obligation to them.”152

  “I think Cliff [White] gave us a little bad advice,” said Holmes Tuttle.

  “He felt we couldn’t convince some of these people unless he was a definite candidate, you understand, instead of just being a ‘favorite son.’ I think we were just overoptimistic. . . . Well, we were a little premature, I’ll put it that way. . . . But it was a good start.”153

  “What I remember most,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, “was there were so many Secret Service we could hardly move. And the night Ronnie didn’t make it, we came back to the hotel, and there was not a soul around.”154

  Ronnie and Nancy stayed in Florida for the weekend, cruising through the Keys on Alfred Bloomingdale’s yacht. “Only the two of us and the crew,”

  Reagan wrote. “That first night, we slept fourteen hours, and we felt the greatest sense of relief either of us had ever known.”155

  “Reagan limped back to Sacramento, more than a little embarrassed, 3 9 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to lick his political wounds,” Mike Deaver recalled. “For Nancy, the convention fiasco served as confirmation of her own political antennae. After Miami, she would never again hold back her opinion on major political decisions, whatever the Gipper might be thinking; but it was always about protecting her husband, not about driving him on.”156

  “He told me afterward,” Lyn Nofziger confided, “and I know he told other people, too, that he was not disappointed. He did not feel that he was really ready for the presidency.”157

  C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

  SACRAMENTO II

  1969–1974

  It was in the California period that I began to understand that there was a Reagan mystique, that it carried a force of its own, and that no matter how you tried you couldn’t pin it down. I saw Reagan run for reelection as governor by running against the government. He campaigned as if he had not been part of it for four years. I can’t explain it either. I only know it worked.

  Michael Deaver, Behind the Scenes 1

  Reagan is a closet moderate and regularly practiced compromise with other consenting adult politicians in Sacramento.

  Richard Whalen, The New York Times, February 22, 1976

  Princess Salima, English-born wife of Aga Khan IV, was named the best-dressed woman in the world yesterday, nosing out the leading American entry, Mrs. Ronald Reagan.

  Frederick Winship, UPI, January 7, 1972

  RONALD REAGAN HAD GOOD REASON TO BE PLEASED WITH HIMSELF ON

  December 5, 1968, as he headed to Palm Springs to host the Republican Governors’ Conference. The state budget was now running a surplus, and Reagan had been able to announce the first of four rebates he would give to taxpayers during his governorship. In November the Republicans had won control of the state legislature, and Nixon had beat Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, by a hair in the popular vote but decisively in the Electoral College. No governor had campaigned harder for Nixon than Reagan, who traveled to twenty-two states in the ten weeks between the convention and the election and was credited with helping Nixon keep most of the South out of George Wallace’s hands.2

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy was in a cheerful mood, too, since the Reagans would be staying at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ sumptuous estate in Rancho Mirage, along with the President-elect and his daughter Tricia. The 32,000-square-foot neo-Mayan palace had been completed two years earlier at a cost of $5 million. Set on a square mile of erstwhile desert and enclosed by pink stucco walls, with a gatehouse at the corner of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope Drives, the house had been designed by Quincy Jones, the dean of USC’s architecture school, and decorated by Billy Haines and Ted Graber in vibrant corals, yellows, and greens. Its 6,400-square-foot living room was shaped like a tent, with walls of volcanic rock and enormous picture windows looking out onto Walter’s private nine-hole golf course. There was a meditation garden for Lee, still a devoted Christian Scientist, as well as a cactus garden and two hothouses, one just for orchids. The house contained a good part of the Annenbergs’ art collection, including masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse.3 The first time the Reagans had visited Sunnylands in 1967, Nancy wrote in the guest book,

  “Sheer heaven! How can you ever bear to tear yourself away?”4

  “The Eisenhowers came to us for lunch while Nancy and Ronnie were our guests,” Lee Annenberg said of that visit. After leaving the White House in 1961, Ike and Mamie spent their winters in a bungalow on the eleventh fairway of the Eldorado Country Club, the most exclusive of the private gated communities around Palm Springs, and the Annenbergs became their friends. “You know, when you played golf with General Eisenhower, no one ever spoke,” she continued. “There was this silence. He was very serious about his golf. And he always wanted to be called ‘General.’

  He was a chef. He loved to cook steaks, and he would put on an apron and a high, tall chef hat and do delicious barbecued steaks. They had their friends at the club—the Darts and the Gosdens and the Tuttles. The Firestones were at Thunderbird. It was like a big, happy group. They had us over from time to time, and they came here from time to time. He came here for golfing and fishing. We had the lake stocked with fish, and as he got older and it was harder for him to play golf, he would come over here and fish.”5

  The three-day Republican Governors’ Conference was “quite a production,” according to Helene von Damm, who was there as Bill Clark’s secretary. “The Walt Disney studio masterminded the weekend. They issued each Governor a car with a personalized license plate. The entertainment, including a manufactured ‘afternoon on the range’ complete with cowboy Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  hats and chaps for the men and bonnets and umbrellas for the women, and a western barbecue made getting any work done pretty challenging.”6

  Most of the governors were staying at the Riviera Hotel, but the real action was at Sunnylands. On Saturday, Walter invited Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford, then the GOP minority leader in the House, to join him, Nixon, and Reagan in a round of golf. (Eisenhower had been hospitalized earlier that year and could not attend the conference.) Pointedly excluded was Maryland governor and vice president–elect Spiro Agnew, who Walter thought was “the bottom of the barrel” and who had embarrassed himself at the opening ceremony the night before by saying how pleased he was to be in “Palm Beach.”7

  “That weekend was when Nixon asked Walter to be his ambassador to Great Britain, right then and there on the spot,” Lee Annenberg told me.

  “Walter said, ‘Leave my paper? Well, maybe for two years.’ Nixon said,

  ‘Oh, you’ll love it. I know you’ll stay longer.’”8 According to other accounts, a stunned Annenberg—fearful that the confirmation process would dredge up his father’s imprisonment and overturn everything he had done to restore the family name—gave Nixon a flat no at first. But Reagan, Rockefeller, and Ford all urged him to accept, and by the end of the day he had. As Nancy put it, “It was such a great opportunity for Walter, and for Lee, too.”9 The Annenbergs would be in London for almost six years, from 1969 to late 1974, and become bosom friends of the royal family.

  On December 13, 1968, the Los Angeles Times named Nancy “Woman of the Year,” an honor accompanied by an article titled “A Model First Lady.”

  “Nancy Reagan treaded the intricate paths of politics, state and national, with never a misstep,” the paper declared, and went on to commend her for doing “a job few women would envy for long if they understood the day in, day out grind that ceremonial dutie
s can become. She was poised, friendly, informed, interested and beautifully turned out day after day, not just when she felt like it.” There were laudatory quotes from her mother, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and the recently widowed Anita May, who said, “Nancy has never changed. She has always been a wonderful wife and mother with time for her family, time for her friends, time for everybody.

  When my husband was ill she never came to town without coming up to see him.”10

  The kudo was but a temporary truce in the ongoing battle between the Reagans and the paper’s publisher, Otis Chandler. The liberal Otis had 3 9 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House succeeded his father as publisher in 1960 at age thirty, though the conservative Norman remained chairman of the Times Mirror Company. Under Norman the paper had turned big profits; under Otis it started winning Pulitzers. The younger Chandler’s elevation had been pushed by his mother, the formidable “Buff ” Chandler, over the objections of the rest of the family, who favored Norman’s younger brother, Philip, a patron of the John Birch Society. The Times had endorsed Reagan for governor, but as David Halberstam has written in The Powers That Be, both Otis and Buff disapproved of him and his policies.11 Unfortunately, Buff also found Nancy insufferable, and Buff was the power behind her son’s throne.

  According to Marion Jorgensen, “Otis never really took over. He was the most useless human being I ever saw in my life. It was Buff. It was all Buff. The paper gave a hard time to the Reagans. She was very snobbish about it. She had no reason not to like them. But the Chandlers were used to having their hand in, and she didn’t pick Ronnie.”12

  Dorothy Buffum, as she was christened in 1901, was the daughter of the owner of Buffum’s department stores in déclassé Long Beach, and she was always looked down on by her right-wing Pasadena in-laws, which may explain why she constantly nudged her husband toward the center. When Norman refused to switch his support from Taft to Eisenhower in 1952, she told him, “No Ike, no sex,” or words to that effect, and it worked.13 The paper had been in the Chandler family—and the Republican Party’s vest pocket—since 1882, when it was bought by Norman’s maternal grandfather, Colonel Harrison Grey Otis. Norman took over in 1944, upon the death of his father, Harry, who was said to be the richest man in Los Angeles. Shortly after that, Buff went to work as her husband’s “administrative assistant.” She helped him start the afternoon Los Angeles Mirror in 1947, launched the Times Woman of the Year award in 1950, and won it herself the following year, for heading the Save the Hollywood Bowl Committee.

  Her most important accomplishment was the building of the $30 million Los Angeles County Music Center. When the downtown elite didn’t come up with enough money, she turned to the Westside and ended up naming two of the center’s three buildings, the Mark Taper Forum and the Ah-manson Theater, after rival Jewish savings-and-loan tycoons.14 The third, and largest, was named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

  “She was tough, old Buff,” said producer Jim Wharton. “She had a list of what she thought everybody should give, and you were on that list for $25,000, $50,000, $1 million, or whatever. And, boy, if you didn’t come Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  through.”15 Betsy Bloomingdale concurred: “I was terrified of her. I remember she came to dinner one night and I had on these new earrings from Harry Winston that Alfred had given me. They had these marvelous pear-shaped diamonds, and she said to Alfred, ‘Just one of those little diamonds, if you gave it to the Music Center . . .’ Alfred did give money, and our name is on the wall.”16 Among the Reagan Group, it was gospel that Grace Salvatori had been the real rainmaker of the ten-year building drive.

  “Gracie Salvatori raised more money right out of her telephone than Buff Chandler ever thought of raising,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “We were with the Salvatoris the night the Music Center opened, in 1964. Buff Chandler got up and made a speech, talked about Welton Beckett, the architect, and never ever said one word about Gracie Salvatori. It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. The cruelest worst.”17

  When the Mark Taper Forum opened in April 1967, Governor and Mrs. Reagan were photographed with Buff Chandler; Nancy was wearing her white Galanos gown from the inaugural ball. Buff Chandler liked clothes, too, and she had her dresses made by Balenciaga in Paris and Norman Norell in New York. She was also a devotee of Carroll Righter’s, so much so that she once threatened to fire an editor who wanted to drop his astrology column.18 In the picture, the two women seem worlds apart.

  Only a week before, Reagan’s then chief aide Philip Battaglia had gone public about the Governor’s unhappiness with his press coverage.

  Battaglia complained that it was considered perfectly proper for Mrs.

  Chandler to raise money from the private sector for her Music Center,

  “yet when a bipartisan group of private donors started a fund drive for a new Governor’s residence, a seemingly parallel situation, it’s tagged editorially as illegal. It makes you wonder.”19 Mrs. Chandler was not amused.

  The Reagans and the Bloomingdales slipped out during intermission because, it was said, they disapproved of the opening night play, John Whiting’s The Devils, about a libertine priest and a wanton nun, which had been condemned by the archdiocese of Los Angeles and the County Board of Supervisors.20

  In 1968, when Buff Chandler launched the Blue Ribbon 400—a women’s group that would provide continuing funds for the center by requiring each of its four hundred members to donate $1,000 a year—the Governor’s wife was conspicuous in her lack of support. The first meeting was held at Doris Stein’s Misty Mountain, with Grace Salvatori and Anne Douglas as co-chairs, and everyone from Anita May to Virginia 3 9 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Tuttle as founding members. “Nancy loathed Buff Chandler,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “She didn’t want us to join the Blue Ribbon 400.

  Punky Dart and I were the last holdouts, as I recall. Marion, Betty Wilson, Erlenne, Harriet—they all joined. I never joined. I didn’t really need to be involved in that, and Nancy didn’t want us to be.”21

  “The paper was terrible to Ronnie all during the governor’s years,”

  Nancy Reagan recalled wearily. “And Buff was a very strong woman. But at least we knew where we stood with her. Her son was trickier. I remember the son asked us to dinner and afterward we had to go into his trophy room. It was filled with all these animal heads and guns. And he told us about shooting each one. It was as if he was trying to prove his masculinity.”22

  The fact that Betsy was almost alone in taking Nancy’s side against the fear-some matriarch of the Los Angeles Times was an indication that by the second year of the governorship she had become first among equals at the budding Reagan court. Her husband’s behind-the-scenes role had also grown during that time; it was said that Nancy called Alfred frequently to ask for his advice on anything from staff problems to how to help Ronnie deal with recalcitrant legislators. On December 31, 1968, Ronnie and Nancy were at the Bloomingdales’ New Year’s Eve party for the fourth year running, along with Patti and Ron and the three Bloomingdale children.

  That year’s guest list included Cecil Beaton, Jules and Doris Stein, Freddie and Janet de Cordova, Ray and Mal Milland, Bill Frye and Jim Wharton, and Father Bill Kenney, the Paulist priest who had brought Alfred into the church. Also partaking of the champagne, caviar, and chili was the gadabout New York real estate heir who was fast becoming Nancy Reagan’s best male friend: Jerry Zipkin.

  Neither Nancy nor Betsy could ever remember when they met “the divine Jerome,” as Pat Buckley called him, but from the late 1960s until his death in 1995 the three seemed inseparable. Betsy Bloomingdale told me that the commonly held assumption that he and Alfred had grown up together in Manhattan was not true, though they probably crossed paths at Elberon, a New Jersey shore resort frequented by well-to-do Jewish families in the 1920s. “Alfred and Jerry used to call it Albumen-by-the-Sea,”

  she said, and
her party books show that the first time Zipkin went to dinner on Delfern Drive was in 1960. Nancy Reagan told me she thought she Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  met Zipkin at one of Anita May’s parties in the 1950s. “But I’m really not sure,” she said. “It just seems like he was always part of my life.”23

  In later years, Zipkin sometimes claimed that he had introduced Nancy and Betsy to each other. “All of a sudden, he was there,” said a friend of both women, who remembered meeting him at a dinner at the Jorgensens’ around the time Reagan became Governor. “Justin Dart took an instant dislike to him at that dinner. A lot of us wondered what Nancy and Betsy saw in Zipkin—all that spewing venom.”

  “I’ll never forget, one day there was a lunch at Betsy and Alfred’s,” said Marion Jorgensen. “It was right after Ronnie was elected, and I don’t think he was there. Jerry was walking beside me as we were leaving the dining room, and Nancy was just ahead of us with Alfred. And Jerry said, ‘Look at her. She looks awful. Everything is wrong—the hair, the dress, the shoes.’ And she heard him and turned around. He said, ‘I said you look awful.’ She gave him a look. But a few minutes later I see them in a corner talking. And that’s when it began—their great friendship—I think.”24

  For Nancy, their bond was based on much more than clothes: “Jerry had an eye,” she said in a long, wistful conversation we had a few days after he died, in 1995. “And whenever Jerry said something, he was right.

  He was very instinctive about people. He was a great teacher. You could learn a lot from Jerry—about art, about books, about history—if you left yourself open to it. He enjoyed teaching you. Friendship was the basis of it all. Ronnie was very fond of Jerry, too. Jerry was a big defender. God help anybody who said anything against Ronnie to Jerry. And he never forgot. I’d forget, but he wouldn’t.”25