Ronnie and Nancy (92 page)

That weekend, an article headlined close reagan business friends; they seem to personify his values appeared on the first page of
The New York
Times
business section, with profiles of Holmes Tuttle, Justin Dart, Ted Cummings, Earle Jorgensen, Jack Wrather, and William French Smith, who was described as “a possible Attorney General.” Tuttle, the
Times
reported, 5 0 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“expects to help screen appointees for Mr. Reagan, as he did in California.” Dart, still feisty at seventy-three, despite a hip replacement and heart troubles, announced that he would head a presidential advisory board on productivity, “the nation’s No. 1 problem.”159 The Executive Advisory Committee was so sure their boy was going to win that they started calling themselves the Transition Advisory Committee.

On election night, Tuesday, November 4, 1980, they were all at Earle and Marion Jorgensen’s house in Bel Air: Holmes and Virginia Tuttle, Henry and Grace Salvatori, Justin and Punky Dart, Bill and Betty Wilson, Jack and Bunny Wrather, William and Jean French Smith, Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Charles and Mary Jane Wick, Bob and Betty Adams, Voltaire and Erlenne Perkins, Tex and Flora Thornton from Litton, Tom and Ruth Jones from Northrop. Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale took Jerry Zipkin, who wore a “Reagan for President” button on his lapel and, for a change, told all the women how fabulous they looked. Walter and Lee Annenberg had voted early that morning in Philadelphia, then boarded their jet and picked up Charles and Carol Price in Kansas City on the way out.

The Jaquelin Humes arrived from San Francisco, and Old Hollywood was represented by the Jimmy Stewarts, the Robert Stacks, and the Ray Starks.

Of the campaign staff, only Ed and Ursula Meese, Mike and Carolyn Deaver, and Peter and Casey McCoy were included. Nancy’s hairdresser, Julius Bengtsson, was there, too. So were the Reagan children—Patti, Ron with Doria, Michael with Colleen, Maureen with her new fiancé, Dennis Revell, a lawyer she had met through the Young Republicans—and Neil and Bess Reagan.160 Ronnie’s brother, now seventy-two and retired to posh Rancho Santa Fe, told everyone not to worry, Dutch was going to win in a landslide.161

Marion Jorgensen told me she served the same food she served at her election night parties in 1966 and 1970—veal stew and coconut cake. “But that night was so different than when he was governor,” she said. “The Secret Service came five or six days ahead and put telephones all over my house. They even put in the ‘red telephone.’ They were looking for a private place to put it, so they put it in Earle’s dressing room. I have a picture of Ronnie sitting in a chair in Earle’s dressing room with that phone—it was a call from the King of Saudi Arabia, congratulating him on just being elected president.”162

The party began at the usual time—4:30 in the afternoon. By then the polls had started closing in the East, and forty-five minutes later NBC’s
Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

5 0 5

John Chancellor was the first to call the election. “NBC News now makes its projection for the presidency,” he announced, as a hush fell over the Jorgensens’ party and the Reagans’ closest friends and family stood transfixed in front of the five television sets Marion had placed around the living room, library, and den. “Reagan is our projected winner. Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, a sports announcer, a film actor, a governor of California, is our projected winner at 8:15 Eastern Standard Time on this election night.”163 Reagan would carry forty-four states and trounce Carter 51 percent to 41 percent in the popular vote, with 7 percent going to John Anderson.

Ronnie was in the shower, and Nancy was in the bathtub, with the TV

in the bedroom turned up extra loud, when she heard Chancellor declaring her husband the winner. “I leaped out of the tub,” she recalled, “threw a towel around me, and started banging on the shower door. Ronnie got out, grabbed a towel, and we ran over to the television set. And there we stood, dripping wet, wearing nothing but our towels, as we heard that Ronnie had just been elected! Then the phone started to ring. It was President Carter, calling to concede, and to congratulate Ronnie on his victory. I was thrilled, and stunned. We hadn’t even gone to the Jorgensens’ yet!”164

“They were late,” Marion Jorgensen recalled, “and they were
never
late. I got a call from Nancy’s secretary, Elaine Crispin, who said they were just a little bit detained. And pretty soon the helicopters and the motorcade came—I never saw anything like it. A Secret Service man came in and tapped me on the shoulder, so we knew, Earle and I, to go out and greet them. And he said to us, ‘Now, you know how to do this?’ I said, ‘Sure, I know how to do it. We’ve done this many times before.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, you haven’t. You haven’t greeted the president of the United States before.’ . . . The minute Ronnie became president, I called him ‘Mr. President.’

And he said to me, ‘Wait a minute. What’s this?’ I said, ‘Well, you
are
. And that will be forevermore now.’ And he said, ‘Not with you, my friend. Not with Earle. Not with my good friends.’ I said, ‘Well, I will say this: Around anybody, it’ll be Mr. President. When we’re just a few of us longtime friends, O.K., it’ll be Ronnie.’”165

“Oh, what an evening that was,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, recalling the triumphant procession of the Reagans and their friends from the Jorgensen house in Bel Air to the official victory party at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City.166 “Jerry was with us, and Alfred was a fast driver and he followed the Reagan motorcade, and all along Beverly Glen there were crowds 5 0 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House of people screaming and yelling and waving flags. Alfred had a Mercedes with a sunroof, and Jerry was hanging out of the sunroof, screaming and yelling, and we were waving at the people—oh, that was such fun! When we got to the Century Plaza Hotel, we all
ran
in. Alfred just left the car there. He said, ‘The hell with the car.’ And we went upstairs to the suite where Nancy and Ronnie were.”

Acknowledgments

I owe so much to so many, starting with Nancy Reagan, without whose cooperation this book would not have been possible. Mrs. Reagan has been extraordinarily generous with both her time and memories; she made herself available to my seemingly endless phone calls, granted me special access to the personal papers of the Reagan and Davis families held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and on two occasions invited me to her house in Bel Air, which was generally off limits to visitors during the former president’s long illness. I especially valued our lunches at the Hotel Bel Air, sometimes with the tape recorder running, sometimes not. I am also exceedingly grateful for her introduction to her stepbrother, Dr. Richard Davis, at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, and to Dr. Davis for the five lengthy telephone interviews he gave in which he shared his recollections and insights regarding their family life with frankness and sensitivity.

In addition, because I had Nancy Reagan’s blessing, her closest friends, many of whom have a built-in allergy to journalists and biographers, welcomed me into their homes in Los Angeles and Palm Springs and granted me interviews. These include Betty Adams, Lee Annenberg, Frances Bergen, Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Anne Douglas, Marje Everett, William Frye and the late James Wharton, Merv Griffin, David Jones, Jean French Smith, Erlenne Sprague, Robert Tuttle, Connie Wald, Charles and Mary Jane Wick, William Wilson, and Mignon Winans. I am especially grateful to Betsy Bloomingdale and Marion Jorgensen for opening their social records to me, and for never tiring of my requests for yet another guest list or menu. I am also indebted to Jane Gosden, Wendy Stark Morrissey, and Denise Hale for their wisdom and advice about the world of the Reagans and their friends.

I am deeply beholden to Joanne Drake at the Office of President and 5 0 7

5 0 8

Acknowledgments

Mrs. Reagan for reviewing and granting permission to quote from documents in the personal papers of President and Mrs. Reagan; to archivist Cate Sewell for her cheerful and unstinting help at the Ronald Reagan Library; and to Frederick Ryan, chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, for including me among the foundation’s friends at such events as the Reagan administration alumni reunion in Simi Valley in 1999 and the christening of the USS
Ronald Reagan
in Newport News, Virginia, in 2002. Also deserving of special mention is Robert Higdon, for employing his special brand of diplomacy on my behalf in countless ways, including arranging an interview with former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in London.

Others who gave me very useful and much appreciated interviews for this first of two volumes and the
Vanity Fair
articles that preceded it were Martin and Annalise Anderson, Brooke Astor, Howard Baker, James A.

Baker III, the late Bill Blass, Robert and Justine Bloomingdale, Frank Bogert, Tom Bolan, William F. Buckley Jr., Serena Carroll, William Clark, Eleanor O’Connor Clarke, Judy Hargrave Coleman, Jan Cowles, Douglas Cramer, Sue Cummings, Arlene Dahl, Michael Dart, Carolyn Deaver, Michael Deaver, the late Fred de Cordova, Janet de Cordova, Angie Dick-enson, Barry Diller, Eric Douglas, Mica Ertegun, William Fine, Ron Fletcher, James Galanos, Angie Galbraith, John Gavin, Kenneth Giniger, the late Katharine Graham, the late C.Z. Guest, the late Richard Gully, Homer Hargrave Jr., Ed Helin, Reinaldo Herrera, Marcia Hobbs, Nancy Holmes, Leonora Hornblow, Linda LeRoy Janklow, Morton Janklow, the late Steven Kaufman, Nan Kempner, Arthur Laffer, Kenneth Jay Lane, Paul Laxalt, Liza Lerner, Gordon Luce, Aerin Magnin, Martin Manulis, the late Jacques Mapes, the late Jean Wescott Marshall, Jean Hayden Mathison, Peter McCoy, Bruce McFarland, Edwin Meese III, Nolan Miller, George Montgomery, Chase Morsey, Patricia Neal, Lyn Nofziger, China Ibsen Oughton, Charlotte Galbraith Ramage, Bess Reagan, Lyn Revson, Nancy Reynolds, Daniel Ruge, Ann Rutherford, Lily Safra, Laurie Salvatori, São Schlumberger, Peter Shifando, George Shultz, Tina Sinatra, Stuart Spencer, the late Robert Stack, Rosemarie Stack, Kevin Starr, Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Michael Thornton, Tucker Trainor, Florence van der Kemp, Helene von Damm, Lanetta Walhgren, Mike Wallace, Anne Washburn, John Wellborne, Nicholas Wetzel, Abra Rockefeller Wilkin, Pete Wilson, Alice Pirie Wirtz, Mickey Ziffren, and Peg Zwecker.

During the six years since I decided to write this book, I have been
Acknowledgments

5 0 9

dependent on an ever-changing but consistently able team of editorial assistants, researchers, and transcribers, including Georgia Flight, Chris Lawrence, Frank Banfi, Ted Panken, and Jonelle Lennon in New York and Long Island; Lisa Leff, Mack Polhemus, Todd O’Keeffe, Iris Berry, and Carol Bua in Los Angeles; and Steve Hammons in Washington, D.C. Bill Troop has stuck with this project almost from the beginning; I most appreciate his creative suggestions and persistence in tracking down those elusive things called facts. In the final crunch Matt Pressman, helped by Molly Fox and Matthew Williams, did an exceptionally thorough job on my endnotes, bibliography, and permissions.

Photo researcher Ann Schneider brought her usual diligence and taste to ferreting out previously unseen, striking, and revealing images of the vast cast of characters who were part of the Reagans’ lives. She was aided considerably in this task by Steve Branch, the audio-visual archivist at the Reagan Library.

Special thanks to Slim Aarons for his glamorous jacket photograph of the Reagans, taken in Acapulco on a weekend hosted by D.K. Ludwig, and to my pal Jonathan Becker for his most flattering author’s photo.

Thanks also to graphic designer Martin Saar for his overall visual advice.

I would also like to thank Brian and Mila Mulroney, Kiron Skinner, Maureen Smith, Kristina Stewart, and John Loring for their suggestions and introductions to sources, Bennett Ashley of Janklow, Newborn & Ashley for drawing up my contracts, Devereux Chatillon of Sonnerschein Nath & Rosenthal for her legal reading of my manuscript, Norman Switzer for showing me the General Electric house, Marc Short, former Executive Director of Young America’s Foundation, for his tour of Rancho del Cielo, Judith Wolfe at the Amagansett Public Library, Ron Marlow of the First Christian Church of Dixon, Valerie Yaros at the Screen Actors Guild, Nancy Young at Smith College, Judy Canter at the
San Francisco
Chronicle
Library, radio historian J. David Goldin, Marion Jorgensen’s social secretary Diane Felterer, Chris Harris and Gary Bradherring of MapEasy, Inc., and Frank Bowling, formerly of the Hotel Bel Air, my home away from home on my research trips.

At
Vanity Fair
I am most indebted to Graydon Carter for his original assignment and his continuing support after it turned into a seemingly never-ending book project, Chris Garrett for her patience and fairness in working out my numerous leaves of absence, Aimee Bell, David Harris, Lindsay Bucha, and Abby Field.

5 1 0

Acknowledgments

At Warner Books, my gratitude goes to Jamie Raab for being the first to see that there was a book in those articles, and for her many extensions; Rick Horgan for his most useful editorial comments and guidelines; Anne Twomey, Ivan Held, Robert Castillo, Harvey-Jane Kowal, and Jimmy Franco.

For constant moral support and encouragement over the long haul, I thank my agents Anne Sibbald and Mort Janklow; my friends Brigid Berlin, Colin Shanley, Claudia Cohen, Virginia Coleman, Isabel Rattazzi, Eric Freeman, Ross Bleckner, Paul Wilmot, Adam Lippes, Doris Ammann, and George Frei; and my sisters Suzanne Mead and Barbara Williams.

After Nancy Reagan, there is no one more responsible for making this book a reality than my longtime
Vanity Fair
editor and friend, Wayne Lawson, whose intelligence, taste, and sense of fairness are reflected on every page.

Bob Colacello

Amagansett, New York

August 2004

Notes

Chapter One: Early Ronnie, 1911–1932

1. Neil Reagan oral history, p. 9.