Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [1]
Both women were wearing fur coats. Mrs. Reagan’s was mink, Mrs. Bloomingdale’s sable.
They were followed by the retired media tycoon Gardner Cowles and his wife, Jan, pillars of the Republican establishment, who had homes in 1
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House New York, Southampton, and Miami and had been friends with the Reagans since the 1950s. Then came Jerry Zipkin, the acid-tongued Park Avenue bachelor who was Nancy Reagan’s best friend in New York— Women’s Wear Daily, which for years had dismissed him as “the Social Moth,” now called him “the First Walker,” walker being its term for a single man who escorts society ladies to parties when their husbands are unavailable. On one arm Zipkin had Claudette Colbert, the ageless movie star, who knew the Reagans from their Hollywood days. On the other he had Etti Plesch, an Austrian-born dowager from Monte Carlo known for her prize-winning racehorses and her six rich husbands.
All eyes were on the presidential party as Le Cirque’s owner, Sirio Mac-cioni, showed them to the best table in the house—the corner banquette just to the right of the entrance, which Jerry Zipkin and his nemesis, WWD publisher John Fairchild, always fought over. Betsy Bloomingdale, who was giving the dinner, directed the seating, putting the President between her and Claudette Colbert, and the First Lady between Zipkin and Alfred Bloomingdale. One couldn’t help but marvel at how young—fit, tan, handsome—the President looked for a man who had just turned seventy. He beamed when the model Janice Dickinson, sitting a table away with Peppo Vanini, the owner of Xenon, a midtown disco that rivaled Studio 54 in exclusivity and decadence, raised her champagne glass and, in a voice loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, announced how proud she was to be an American now that Ronald Reagan was in the White House. The entire room erupted into applause again.
Sirio had obviously packed the place with friendly faces, having consulted the day before with Zipkin about who should, or should not, get reservations. Among those at tables near the President’s were the octogenarian New York Post fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard and her regular walker, Earl Blackwell, the octogenarian publisher of Celebrity Service; Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, of Salzburg and Paris, and the billionaire Spanish banker Alfonso Fierro, whose wife was an old friend of Zipkin’s.
I had been invited to Le Cirque that night by one of Zipkin’s favorite couples, Carolina Herrera, the Venezuelan socialite who was just beginning to establish herself as a New York fashion designer, and her aristocratic husband, Reinaldo, whose family had lived in the same house in Caracas since the sixteenth century. The Herreras’ other guests were Bianca Jagger, who had almost turned down their invitation, she told me that afternoon, because of Reagan’s campaign attacks on her native Nicaragua’s leftist San-Le Cirque: 1981
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dinista government; the Italian movie producers Franco Rossellini and Countess Marina Cicogna, the latter with her longtime companion, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan; and Andy Warhol, who published Interview magazine, of which I was the editor. “Gee, Bob, this is so glamorous. Oh, it’s just so glamorous,” he said, with his flair for repetition. He had voted for Jimmy Carter.
I had voted for the winner. Like the majority of voters in forty-four states, I was fed up with the