Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [177]
close friends were mostly people Ronnie had known before he met Nancy—
the Holdens, the Taylors, Dick Powell and June Allyson, Frances and Edgar Bergen, Bob and Goldie Arthur. But gradually Nancy began reaching out to a wider circle, first among their Hollywood acquaintances and then to a whole social set beyond the film industry. These new friends—Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Walter and Lee Annenberg, Earle and Marion Jorgensen, Bill and Betty Wilson, Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale—would come to be called the Group, and they would help to forge Ronald Reagan’s entire political future.
Nancy had known Armand Deutsch since her MGM days, but after she married Ronnie and Ardie married Harriet, the two couples crossed paths only occasionally. Then, according to Harriet Deutsch, “Nancy called me 2 8 5
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House one day, and said, ‘Couldn’t the four of us just have dinner alone?’ We went to Trader Vic’s. And from then on we became very close friends.”1 The Polynesian-themed Trader Vic’s had opened in the new Beverly Hilton in 1955, and it instantly became a favorite of the Beverly Hills in crowd, of which the Deutsches were very much a part. Deutsch left MGM in 1957, along with his mentor and boss, Dore Schary, and would cap his career in the entertainment business three years later by producing The World of Carl Sandburg, starring Bette Davis, on Broadway. But as the grandson of a Sears, Roebuck partner and reportedly its largest shareholder, he still commanded a prized seat at the tables of such leading hostesses as Buff Chandler and Edie Goetz, and he would later be appointed to the Warner Bros. board. He and Harriet had been introduced by producer Ray Stark and his wife, Fran, in 1951, shortly after Ardie divorced Benay Venuta and Harriet was widowed by director Sylvan Simon, the heir apparent to Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Fran Stark, the daughter of the legendary comedienne Fanny Brice, was one of Harriet’s two best friends. The other was Cohn’s niece, Lee Annenberg, the wife of the powerful newspaper and magazine publisher Walter Annenberg.
A slim beauty who had been a salesgirl and model in New York before coming west, Harriet was a clotheshorse of the first rank, one of Amelia Gray’s best customers and Jimmy Galanos’s earliest devotees. Perhaps more than any other woman in the Group, she fit the press image of a flighty socialite largely concerned with gowns, parties, and social status. But she could be warm, generous, and loyal, particularly to Nancy Reagan. According to Harriet, the loyalty went both ways. “Nancy has the capacity of being a great friend,” she told me. “Never ever has Nancy forgotten a birthday or an anniversary of ours in forty-five years.”2
“We used to go to parties a lot on San Onofre Drive,” Ardie Deutsch added. “They often had barbecues for eighteen people—show business people pretty much. Bill and Ardis Holden. George Burns and Gracie Allen.
And Jack Benny, who always referred to Ronnie as Governor—I don’t know why, but he did. We also used to go to the Reagans’ every Christmas morning for eggnog, and her mother and father were always there. I remember Loyal and I were sitting on the sofa one day, and I said, ‘Loyal, I hear you’re to the right of Attila the Hun. Is that true?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just a bit conservative.’ I said, ‘Do you hear that I’m to the left of Stalin?’ He said, ‘Never actually heard it.’”3
Ardie Deutsch was the lone Democrat among the husbands of Nancy’s The Group: 1958–1962
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new friends. He had refused to sign a loyalty oath at MGM and gotten away with it because of Schary’s protection. In 1952, Deutsch and Reagan had joined forces with labor leader Roy Brewer and screenwriter Philip Dunne in the Democratic primary to oppose California state senator Jack Tenney, who they believed had unfairly criticized the film industry’s anti-Communist efforts. Now, when the Reagans went to dinner at the Deutsches’, the political discussions between the increasingly conservative