Ronnie and Nancy (53 page)

Nancy was greatly impressed by the Annenbergs, especially Walter.

“Walter was the kind of man that Nancy liked,” said Leonora Hornblow.

“He was rich, he was powerful, he was very nice. And she liked rich, powerful, and nice. I’m not saying this against her. I agreed with her.”16 Her feelings toward Lee were more complicated. The two women had much in common—both were shipped off to relatives as children, grew up tantaliz-ingly close to fame and power, went to fancy private schools and elite colleges, and married men in their forties who were coming out of failed marriages. But Lee already inhabited a social universe that for Nancy was still a long way off. They understood each other, however, and enjoyed each other’s company. Like Nancy, Lee didn’t smoke or drink, and she was finely attuned to her husband’s moods and needs. “I’m a pleaser,” she once said.

“And my first goal was to please Walter.”17

Like Ronnie, Walter was a loner at heart. Both men were fanatically neat, a sign of needing to control the world around them, and capable of spending long stretches of time alone, lost in their own plans and visions.

And for both, their wives were everything: lovers, confidantes, and protectors. Walter called
his
wife Mother.

Every August, Lee and Walter Annenberg took a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Socially speaking, August was to Los Angeles what October was to New York or June to London—a time for parties and more parties, many of them for visiting New Yorkers and Europeans. The Deutsches,
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the Starks, and Jules and Doris Stein all lined up to give dinners in honor of the Annenbergs. So did Anita May, the grande dame of the Beverly Hills social set and another of Nancy Reagan’s fashionable new friends.

Anita May and her husband, Tom, the chairman of May Company Department Stores, have generally been overlooked by Reagan chroniclers, perhaps because both were dead by the time the Reagans reached the White House. But in the late 1950s and 1960s they were at the very center of what became the Reagan Group, and Anita especially played a significant role in promoting Ronnie politically and Nancy socially. As Richard Gully attested, “Anita May was a great power. And she helped Nancy Reagan a lot.”18

“My ex-mother-in-law was very close to Nancy. Nancy virtually sat on her knee,” said Ann Rutherford, who was married to the Mays’ son, David, in the 1950s.19 “Anita was a wonderful woman. Generous, kind, giving,”

Nancy Reagan told me. “And if she liked you, she wanted all the people she liked to like you, too.”20 “If she didn’t like you, watch out,” said Dr. Herbert Roedling, who was married to another one of David May’s ex-wives. “She had teeth. Tom was the opposite—he liked everybody.”21

Anita Keiler May, a bourbon heiress from Kentucky, had come to Los Angeles in 1922, after marrying Tom May and persuading his father to open the first California branch of the family’s St. Louis–based department store chain. Tom and Anita built a ballroom they called the Casino on a lot next to their white-pillared mansion on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills, and gave elaborate parties there even during the war years. In the late 1940s they sold the house, tore down the Casino, and had the architect Sam Marx put up an ultramodern ranch in its place. When the Beverly Hilton opened in 1955, the Mays moved into the penthouse, where Anita entertained on a grand scale. They also had a weekend place in Palm Springs. All of the May residences were done by Billy Haines, the openly gay silent screen star who had reinvented himself as Hollywood’s foremost interior decorator, and who, along with his lifelong companion, Jimmie Shields, was a regular on the social scene.

“Anita was the style queen out here,” said society florist David Jones, who started doing the flowers for her dinners at the Hilton. “Everything had to be just perfect. She had a daytime chauffeur and an evening chauffeur.

She had a daytime maid and an evening one. She had a series of cooks—the same cook didn’t do every meal. But most important was how pretty the table was.”22

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Ann Rutherford said that Anita would spend a month in New York in the spring and another in the fall, staying at the Hampshire House on Central Park South and being fitted for her clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue.

The store’s couture salon was run by Anita’s best friend, Sophie Gimbel, its resident designer and the wife of the owner of Saks and Gimbels.

Anita’s shoes and handbags were also custom-made in New York. In Los Angeles, she shopped at Amelia Gray’s for “Palm Springs things,” as Rutherford put it, but after Gimbel retired, Galanos became her preferred couturier. And she made a fetish of her makeup brands. “One time I was going off to Tahiti,” David Jones recalled. “And Anita said, ‘Isn’t that a French colony?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ She said, ‘Here’s $5,000. I want my mas-cara. It’s a French product, and I can’t buy it anymore in this country.

Bring me back as much as you can. And keep the change.’ ”23

May was already in her sixties when she discovered Nancy. “She kind of adopted four gals,” explained Harriet Deutsch. “Anne Douglas, Edie Wasserman, Nancy Reagan, and me. We were her special girls.” May loved giving her protégées advice on everything from clothes to china to how to handle their husbands’ idiosyncrasies. She was also known to shower her favorites with gifts. According to Leonora Hornblow, if Nancy thought a dress was too expensive, “Anita would buy it. And if you were at Anita’s house, you had to be careful. She was like the Spanish. You couldn’t say,

‘Oh, isn’t that pretty.’ It would be bundled up at once and in your car.”24

“Anita did things with such class,” said Anne Douglas, who had landed in Beverly Hills from her native Paris after marrying Kirk in 1954. “And with such taste. She never overdressed. She had the best jewelry—one of the most superb blue-white diamonds in the 20-carat range, that Tom gave her. Tom was a lovely man, and he adored his wife. He knew that everything she did was perfect, and she did everything that he admired. She really put her personal taste and her personal feelings into a party. Nobody was badly seated. Nobody had a bad time. And the caviar was flowing.”25

The Reagans were invited regularly to the Mays’ parties at the Hilton, where the guest list—“a mix of Hollywood and the Hillcrest Country Club,” as Ann Rutherford put it26—often included Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Frances and Edgar Bergen, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Dinah Shore, and the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Anita, an ardent Republican who liked talking politics, grew very fond of Ronnie and predicted great things for him. “She was the first one to tell me, ‘Ronnie is going to be governor,’ ” remembered Denise Hale, who became another of Anita’s
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girls after she married director Vincente Minnelli in 1960. “And when Anita May said something was going to happen, it usually came true.”27

As Ann Rutherford pointed out, Anita respected Nancy’s total belief in her husband. “Nancy simply idolized him. There was no competition. I think she saw in him what Anita saw in him. I’m sure Nancy had no idea whether he was going to go far in the theatrical business or what. But she knew that wherever Ronnie sat was the head of the table.”28

As the Reagans moved up on the Beverly Hills A-list, Nancy was seeking out another group that had little to do with the entertainment industry and was more connected to the Republican Party and the downtown Los Angeles business establishment. To be sure, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, and the Bloomingdales had Hollywood friends and lived on the Westside, not in old-money Hancock Park or ultraconservative Pasadena. But they were considered “society” as opposed to “Hollywood,” and in Los Angeles in the 1950s there was a strong distinction. As Dore Schary’s daughter, Jill Robinson, writes: “All the society-oriented people in Los Angeles made a point of excluding show business people from their ranks. Show business people, like gypsies, were usually excluded from schools . . . from country clubs, and even from the society pages of the
Los Angeles Times
(except for Jimmy Stewart, who made it after he became an Air Force General, and Irene Dunne, who was such an active and charming Republican that the publishers couldn’t resist her).”29

The whole notion of society in a city as new and spread out as Los Angeles was seen as something of a joke by East Coast experts and snobs in general—“Los Angeles Society,” Ethel Barrymore once said, “is anybody who went to high school.” Cleveland Amory, the ultimate arbiter of society in America, called the city a “social melee.”30 A 1957
New York Times
article on California society noted that San Francisco had its own edition of the Social Register, but Los Angeles did not.31 All of which may be why some of the local grandees took so much comfort in looking down their noses at Hollywood, and others felt the need to import New York socialites and titled Europeans to validate their place in the great scheme of things.

“I was Nancy’s first California friend outside pictures,” Betty Adams told me. “Before Betsy, before Marion, before Betty Wilson. I met Nancy at Amelia Gray’s shop in Beverly Hills. She had told Amelia, ‘I’d like to meet some girls out of the picture industry.’ Just because she wanted to broaden 2 9 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House her base and get into a little different group. Amelia said, ‘I have the perfect person for you.’ So we all had a sandwich at Amelia’s office. We just had the best time, laughing and enjoying it. Nancy said that she belonged to the Junior League, but none of her Hollywood friends did, and she didn’t want to go alone. She said, ‘Would you go with me?’ I said, ‘I haven’t been in years, but we should go.’ So we went and sat through the whole boring meeting, and decided we didn’t have to go anymore.”

Adams was reminiscing over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air in 1999. A tall, slim woman then nearing eighty, she was still attractive and still very much a part of the Group. A widow, she had been married three times, and all three of her husbands were from prominent Los Angeles families.

The first, Alphonzo Bell Jr., was the son of the developer of Bel Air—

“This hotel used to be my father-in-law’s office,” Adams pointed out.

From 1956 to 1959 the younger Bell was chairman of the California Republican Party, and two years after they divorced, in 1958, he won a seat in Congress, which he held until 1977. Her second husband, Harry See, was an heir to the See’s Candies family, which had shops all over the state.

Her third and longest marriage was to Robert Adams, whose family had been established in Los Angeles since the 1890s, when they developed the city’s first exclusive residential enclave, West Adams, near downtown.

Betty Adams’s father, Paul Helms, was the multimillionaire owner of Helms Bakery, which sold its goods in neighborhoods throughout the city from a fleet of five hundred trucks. He was also a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Republican Party. “My father and Paul Hoffman, the head of Studebaker, went over to France to convince Eisenhower to run for president in 1952,” Adams recalled. “And the first time President Eisenhower came to Palm Springs, he stayed with Mom and Dad at their home in Smoke Tree. I just
loved
President Eisenhower.” She was wearing the gold-and-diamond cross her father, a Methodist, had given her for her sixteenth birthday, on a white Chanel suit.

According to Adams, Nancy “was really anxious to know the Wilsons and the Bloomingdales and the Jorgensens. I had a dinner party in 1958

so she and Ronnie could get to know those people.”32 Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and Betsy Bloomingdale were all well-established social figures by then, and along with Adams members of the Colleagues, an elite charity organization that raised money for unwed mothers and was limited to fifty women. Their husbands were equally prominent: Earle Jorgensen had run his own steel-and-aluminum company since the 1920s;
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Bill Wilson’s family went even further back, in the oil equipment business; Alfred Bloomingdale was president of the Diners Club. While none of these couples knew the Reagans well at that point, the Bloomingdales sometimes saw them at the Mays’ and the Steins’, and Marion Jorgensen had known Ronnie slightly since his early days at Warners, when she was married to her first husband, Milton Bren, an agent and producer.

“I met Ronald Reagan at a party at Jack and Mary Benny’s house,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “He was married to Jane Wyman—but we don’t mention that.” Sitting in the spacious Billy Haines–designed living room of the Bel Air house she had lived in since marrying Earle Jorgensen in 1953, she recalled her initial impression of the Warner Bros. actor who would eventually become one of their dearest friends: “He was good-looking, but I thought the idea of him as a leading man was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. He wasn’t a Clark Gable, he wasn’t even a Bill Holden. He wasn’t the kind of man that I would even think of in that way.

That’s what made me laugh when I read about how sexual he was in that book
Dutch
—before I threw it away. I remember he used to wear that white jacket, you know, typical movie star—it had a kind of belt in the back that made it fuller on top and tight in the middle. Milton had a gray one—they went to the same tailor, Mariani—and I hated Milton’s. I used to say to him, ‘Please don’t wear that.’ It looked so Hollywood to me.”33

Marion Jorgensen, a decade older than Nancy Reagan and most of their friends, was called “the General” by her husband, and the name stuck. She was born Marion Newbert, the daughter of a well-to-do couple from Chicago who, in her words, “came out here on their honeymoon and never left.” The money came from her grandfather, Thomas Griffin, an Irish immigrant who founded the Griffin Wheel Company, which made wheels for freight trains, in Baltimore in 1877; by 1923 the company’s thirteen plants were turning out 1.5 million wheels annually. “My father never worked, it’s that simple,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “We lived in Hancock Park, but we moved out to Beverly Hills when it was still half farmland. We lived on the corner of Sunset and Alpine, and across the street lived Wallace Beery.” Marion, however, continued to attend the exclusive Marlborough School in Hancock Park, which didn’t accept the daughters of Jewish families. “It sounds so silly,” she explained, “but people who lived in Hancock Park didn’t know picture people.”