Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [174]
And I can’t get any of them to come to my parties, including Ronnie and Nancy, because they’re much too busy—seeing all the people who wouldn’t see them ten years before.”85
Despite the attitude of some of his snobbish friends, Frye grew fond of the Reagans. He sometimes went to dinner at San Onofre, and when Nancy asked for help in finding a live-in housekeeper, he recommended a Czechoslovak woman named Anne Allman. “Her sister Sophie worked for me,” Frye explained. “Anne was crazy about the Reagans. She was just a big, lovable, capable, country-type woman who could not cook fancy food. And she was on the shy side, never had married. She must have been awfully good with the Reagans, or they wouldn’t have kept her for thirty years. That’s a long time to keep help.”86
Even in those days, Frye found Nancy’s devotion to Ronnie endearing, and he admired the subtlety with which she advocated her husband’s cause. “She just adored him. He could do no wrong. I used Nancy and Ronnie together in maybe three G.E. episodes, and there was such a sweet-ness between them. . . . She was always behind him, but she never was pushy about it. Just to give you a comparison, I used Alan Ladd a few times on G.E., and I was crazy about Alan, but his wife could be the worst Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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pain in the ass! She would come in before he would, and say, ‘Who is going to play this part? How tall is she? Is she married?’ She wanted to know everything! Nancy never once came to the studio or interfered, with me at least. I always appreciated that. I mean, she knew what was going on. She knew that I’d offer Ronnie a part after it had been turned down by Charles Laughton, or Gregory Peck, or Jimmy Stewart. And she’d call me on it.
She’d say, ‘I heard Gregory Peck turned it down.’ Or, ‘So and so told me you sent her husband the script.’ But she was nice about it.87
“I remember the Wassermans invited me for the weekend in Palm Springs,” Frye continued. “And who should show up on Saturday morning but Nancy and Ronnie. Now, the Wassermans had two guest rooms, a smaller one, which I was in, and the larger one, which the Reagans took, with a bathroom in between, which we had to share. I got up in the middle of the night, and the bathroom door was locked. So I opened the sliding glass door and peed on the oleanders. The next morning I said to Nancy, ‘Please don’t lock the door tonight. I might have to do more than pee.’ And she laughed and promised she wouldn’t. But the same thing: I got up, the door was locked, and I peed on the oleanders.”88
An invitation from the Wassermans was considered a command performance. Nancy Reagan told me, “You had to be nice to Edie or she could make life difficult for you at the agency.”89 One of the trickier feats Nancy—or any Hollywood wife with social aspirations—had to manage was staying on the good side of the Wassermans while cozying up to the much more socially significant Jules and Doris Stein. “The Steins were it,”
explained Leonora Hornblow. “Jules thought very highly of Lew professionally, but he used to say, ‘I don’t have to have dinner with him.’ And Doris could not bear Edie.”90
“That was a very bad mix, unfortunately,” Richard Gully confirmed.
“Edie handled it very graciously, but it was endless snubbing— really un-kind. Doris was a very autocratic woman, a great hostess, wonderful . . . but she did like the spotlight, and she regarded Edie Wasserman basically as hired help.”91 Others said Edie Wasserman was less discreet about her feelings. “Edie Wasserman hated Doris Stein,” Bill Frye told me, “and she used to call Jules ‘the little eye doctor.’”92
Jules Caesar Stein, the Chicago ophthalmologist who founded the Music Corporation of America in 1924, and his imperious wife, Doris, who liked to forget that