Ronnie and Nancy (55 page)

De Cordova had been Bloomingdale’s best friend since the early 1930s, when he was an up-and-coming theatrical producer and Alfred was a Park Avenue boy who had just discovered showbiz and showgirls. His parents’

marriage had already unraveled by the time his father, a frustrated playwright who hated the retail business, took Alfred to his first Broadway play, at age fifteen. Soon after that he started hanging out at the Stork Club whenever he could get away from the Westminster School in Connecticut.

Although his teachers found him exceptionally bright, he squeaked through with a 66.3 average and went on to Brown University. He dropped out three months short of graduation in 1939, because of a serious football injury that would also keep him from serving in World War II.55

On November 13, 1940,
The New York Times
announced that Bloomingdale and two associates had formed a production company, and five months later their first play,
Your Loving Son
, opened on Broadway. It closed two days later, but Alfred, undeterred, took a suite of offices in the Empire 3 0 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Theater Building, formed an alliance with Lee Shubert, of the theater-owning family, and put $40,000 of his own money into
High Kickers
, a vaudeville revival starring George Jessel.56 It was a hit and provided the twenty-five-year-old Alfred with his first wife, a chorus girl named Barbara Brewster. “Alfred called me and said, ‘I’m going to New Jersey tonight. I’d like you to come along,’” recalled de Cordova. “I said, ‘I’ve been to New Jersey.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sort of visiting a justice of the peace. I’m being married and want you to be my best man.’”57 The marriage lasted less than two years, ending in divorce in 1943.58

By then Alfred had two successful shows running on Broadway: an updated version of
The Ziegfeld Follies
, starring Milton Berle, and
Early to
Bed
, a comedy. He was also a partner in a shipbuilding company in Rye, New York, and was elected treasurer of Tammany Hall, as the Manhattan Democratic Party organization was known, in 1944.59 But he missed the party’s convention in Chicago that summer and opted out of a second term. After losing more than $100,000 on
Allah Be Praised
, a musical, his interest in the theater also seemed to wane.60

In January 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to produce a movie called
Petty Girl
at RKO. “Alfred came out here looking for a wife,” a close friend recalled. “I think he thought it was time to settle down.” Nine months later, on September 15, 1946, he married Betsy. Fred de Cordova was the best man again, and because of the difference in religion the ceremony was performed by a superior court judge at the home of Alfred’s friend Buddy Adler, a producer at Columbia. “I’ll never forget that wedding,” Marion Jorgensen said. “Because only one of her parents was there—I forget which one. They were mad at her for marrying Alfred, just like my family when I married Milton.”61

That would soon change, as Betsy set out to transform her husband into something more to her parents’ liking. Two years after they married, Alfred converted to Catholicism and they had a proper church wedding.

By the 1952 election, he was involved in the Eisenhower campaign. “I started out as a Jew and a Democrat,” he liked to joke. “And the next thing I knew I was a Catholic and a Republican.” Like Earle Jorgensen and Bill Wilson—and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan—Alfred Bloomingdale would always try to give his wife what she wanted. According to their friends, he thoroughly enjoyed indulging her expensive tastes, and it was he who insisted she use the grander-sounding “Betsy.” As she herself told me,

“Alfred was divine. He was a fascinating man. And warm and cozy and
The Group: 1958–1962

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wonderful. He brought his barber from New York out here with him, and got him a job in a barbershop in Beverly Hills. He came to the house every evening to shave Alfred. Isn’t that funny?” At the time of their marriage, Alfred was still hoping to produce
Petty Girl
, but at Columbia, where he had been hired by Harry Cohn. “We went on Harry Cohn’s yacht,” Betsy Bloomingdale recalled. “He was a rough old coot. Alfred was supposed to be a producer, but he really didn’t like working at a studio. He was more of an entrepreneur.” His first venture involved installing soda machines in movie theaters. “No one had ever done that before,” said his wife. “But Alfred had so many businesses going. And then he started the Diners Club.”62

While Bloomingdale did not invent the credit card, as is often claimed, in 1950 he was the first to see the possibilities in an infant company called Dine and Sign, the brainchild of Frank X. McNamara, a Brooklyn savings-and-loan executive. Two years later he bought out McNamara and took over the renamed Diners Club.63 Until American Express introduced its card in 1958, Diners Club had a virtual monopoly on the credit card business. “Alfred Bloomingdale was a very colorful man,” said Richard Gully.

“I’ve never known a man with such bad table manners. And yet he was enormously likable. He really was beloved. I never met anyone who didn’t like Alfred Bloomingdale.”64

“Alfred had a great rapport with Ronnie,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me.

“He adored Ronnie. And Nancy adored Alfred.” Nancy Reagan concurred, saying, “Alfred was a wonderful man, and wonderful with Betsy. It was a good combination.”65

If Anita May was like a second mother to Nancy, Betsy was the sister she had never had, and one from whom she would learn much. Even more than Anita, Betsy was infatuated with the rituals and minutiae of entertaining on a grand scale, and while Nancy could not match either of her mentors’ collections of china, crystal, or silver at that time, she was eager to soak up their expertise.

When the Bloomingdales traveled to Europe, as they did every summer, Betsy kept notebooks of dinners they attended at private homes in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna, listing the guests and recording what was served and how the table was set. “I’ve always been fascinated by table settings,” she explained. “And I was very influenced by what I saw in Europe and New York.” After moving into the Holmby Hills house in 1959, she started keeping records of her own dinner parties.

“The first date I have for Ronnie and Nancy coming for dinner here 3 0 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House was April 7, 1962,” she said, reading from one of her party books. “I had the Wilsons, the Reagans, the Peter Douglases, and the Gordon Walkers.

Peter Douglas’s father was our ambassador to London then. And the Walkers were very social people here—she was in the Colleagues and was always a dedicated Republican. We had beef Wellington, zucchini, limestone let-tuce with two cheeses, strawberry sherbet, fresh raspberries, fresh strawberries, apricot sauce, oatmeal cookies, and Château Cheval Blanc.”66

Betsy was not only a social dynamo but also a dedicated mother of three, who believed in being very involved in her children’s upbringing. She often found herself giving advice to Nancy, who seemed to have a harder time raising her children, especially Patti—perhaps, as Richard Davis believed, because she harbored a lingering resentment toward her mother for not having been there during her early years; perhaps, as many others suggested, because she expended most of her emotional energy in keeping her husband happy. “She and my father were this country unto themselves,” Patti Davis told me. “And we were these little islands kind of floating out there. As an adult I can now look at their love and be very impressed and moved by it—

not so many of us can ever find a love like that. But I still recognize that as a child you absolutely got that you were excluded from that.”67

Nancy Reagan never saw it quite that way. “Both of us were always there for the children,” she told me. “We were not the people that they try to paint us as—you know, this disinterested mother and father. That’s just a lot of malarkey.”68 Her friends tended to take her side. One of them told me, “Nancy put a lot of time into those kids. Not him much, but she did, more than a lot of those Hollywood dames. She really loved them. Patti always gave her lip and trouble, but not little Ron. Nancy worshipped at the altar of little Ron.”

Both Reagan children attended the exclusive John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air, Patti starting pre-kindergarten in 1956, Ron in 1961. John Thomas Dye is where Betty Adams sent her children, as did Dick Powell and June Allyson, Bob and Ursula Taylor, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Ray and Fran Stark, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. Judy Garland’s younger daughter, Lorna Luft, was in the same class as Patti, who remembered being thrilled when the star of
The Wizard of Oz
turned up at Parents’ Day one year. “It was an elite atmosphere, but it didn’t seem so to us,” Patti later wrote. “We just accepted celebrity as a part of life.”69

The school had been founded in 1929 as the Brentwood Town and
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Country School by John and Cathryn Dye, and renamed in 1959 in honor of their son, who had died in World War II. Although the Dyes were upright Midwestern Republicans who believed in a strict classical education—

Latin and French were compulsory—they ran their school in a distinctly casual California way. The 280 students, from nursery school to the eighth grade, began their day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and an inspirational poem called “The Salutation of the Dawn.” The girls in the lower grades wore blue-and-white gingham dresses with heart-shaped abalone buttons and blue-and-white saddle shoes; the boys wore blue shorts and white shirts without ties. Set at the top of a ridge with spectacular views of the Pacific, the campus looked like a storybook horse farm, with its white fences and two-story yellow schoolhouse topped with a weathervane. Everyone called the headmaster and headmistress, who were in their sixties, Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn.

“The day before Thanksgiving, there would be turkeys roasting on a spit in the great big fireplace in the assembly hall,” said Lanetta Wahlgren, a Hershey Chocolate heiress who was one of Patti’s friends at the school.

“Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn sat in these red high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, and we would sit at their feet. Every once in a while Auntie Cathryn would let us sit in the chair with her and cuddle up.”70 At Christmastime, the children were robed in white and sang carols while their parents were served hot gingerbread and wassail. “Ronnie would saw wood for the school,” Betty Adams recalled. “And he and Bob Taylor would bring over piles of it, and we had our Yuletide drink, and Ronnie’s enormous logs burned away.”

She continued, “I happened to be president of the Mothers’ Club board. Right after I met Nancy at Amelia Gray’s and realized her daughter was going to the same school as my children, I said, ‘Oh, good, you can join the Mothers’ Club board.’ Then Mary Jane Wick came along with her kids. So I said, ‘Oh, good, Mary Jane, you can be on the board, too.’ The three of us practically ran the school.”71 When the main building burned down in the 1961 Bel Air fire, the Mothers’ Club raised a large part of the money to rebuild it, and Betty Adams and Mary Jane Wick arranged for classes to be held at the Westwood Methodist Church during the reconstruction. “Betty’s father had given the land for the church years back,” explained Mary Jane Wick. “And I taught Sunday school there.”72

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Mary Jane and Charles Wick, a show business lawyer who started a nationwide chain of nursing homes in 1956, would eventually become an integral part of the Reagan Group. In those days, however, the Wicks were not very social, and their friendship with the Reagans revolved around the school and the children. Charlie Wick, an inveterate joke-teller and all-occasion piano player, would eventually double as the Group’s court jester. When I asked him where he and Mary Jane were from, he immediately shot back, “She was from Minneapolis and I was from Cleveland, before it closed.” They met in Los Angeles in 1944. “Tommy Dorsey had sent me out here to buy the Casino Gardens in Ocean Park, where all the big bands played, and I was staying at Rudy Vallee’s house,” Wick recalled. “One Saturday I was coming down to the pool and there was this gorgeous creature sitting by the tennis court watching them play.”73 It was a case of opposites attracting: the short, dark, nominally Jewish Wick and the tall, fair, staunchly Protestant Mary Jane Woods were married in 1947 and had five children, one right after another. Their eldest son, Charles junior, whom everyone called C.Z., was in Patti’s class at John Thomas Dye, and their daughter Cindy was in Ron’s.

“A lot of mothers didn’t pick up their own children from school,” Mary Jane Wick told me. “They had nannies, and
they
picked them up. Nancy always picked up her children. I always picked up my children. And I think we became friends because we would always get there early. She would get in my car or I would get in her car—Nancy drove a red station wagon.

Nancy and Ronnie were both very involved with the school. They both worked in the hot-dog booth at the annual school fair in June, and they both came out with ketchup and mustard all over them when it was over.”74

Betty Adams recalled teasing Nancy about her station wagon. “I’d say,

‘Aren’t you ever going to sell that old Ford?’ She said, ‘You’ll be surprised when you see what I’m doing.’ So I said to Mary Jane, ‘Oh, she’s getting a new Ford station wagon.’ The next day she brought it to school, and she’d just had it repainted. That’s the way Nancy was. She saved everything.”

Adams added, “One year after I married Bob Adams, he had a heart attack, and they put him in bed from December to June. Nancy never forgot me. I couldn’t do anything for her, because my whole attention was to my husband, but she’d come by in the afternoon just to say hi.”75

Patti was such a good student that, like her father, she skipped third grade.

“She was smart, and musically talented, and one of the prettiest girls in our class,” recalled C. Z. Wick.76 According to Lanetta Wahlgren, she was also
The Group: 1958–1962