Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [178]
“Ronnie, that’s enough of the political talk,” Harriet remembered Ardie saying. “That’s enough of that.”4
In 1960 the Deutsches moved into a new house on Coldwater Canyon Drive, a sprawling white-brick-and-glass ranch with a matching annex behind the pool for their screening room (which Harriet, like most Hollywood hostesses, kept well stocked with big bowls of M&M’s, Milky Ways, and Snickers). The only guests at their first dinner party were the Reagans and the Annenbergs, who were visiting from Philadelphia, where Walter’s company, Triangle Publications, was based. The Deutsches’ guest book records that intimate housewarming dinner:
Being the first houseguests of Harriet and Ardie is a privilege and responsibility of which we are proud. We are grateful for the privilege and find the responsibility inspirational.
Always devotedly,
Lee and Walter Annenberg
We have no hesitation, indeed it is with pride we take second billing to Lee and Walter. And besides, we’d sign anything anywhere just to be at the Deutsches’.
Ronald Reagan
Me too. Nancy. XX
Next to the kiss-kiss symbol, Nancy drew a little “happy face.”
Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg first crossed paths in 1937, when Ronnie was a fresh face at Warners and Walter was a young publishing scion overseeing one of his father’s publications, Screen Guide, and they both sought the affections of June Travis. Their paths crossed again when Reagan was traveling for General Electric. “On several occasions,” Lee Annenberg 2 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House recalled, “Walter and I would be coming back from New York to Philadelphia on the train, and there would be Ronald Reagan.”5 Annenberg would later disclose that, as the owner of TV Guide, he had put in a good word with one of G.E.’s top executives when Reagan was up for the job: “I told him Ron was a great speaker, that he had been a very effective and respected head of the Screen Actors Guild, that he was a good-looking guy, genial and very able on his feet.”6 Lee shared her husband’s high opinion of the actor. “As far back as I remember, he was always interested in issues,” she told me. “I always thought he was a very thoughtful and discerning man.
He wasn’t just a Hollywood star, he was a thinking man. A lot of people didn’t realize that.”7
Reagan was on the cover of TV Guide in 1958 and 1961, but it was mainly through Nancy’s growing friendship with Harriet Deutsch that the Reagans came to see more and more of the Annenbergs. Harriet and Lee had been inseparable since they were in their early twenties and married to their first husbands. They thought alike, dressed alike, and changed their hairdos in tandem—somewhere along the way the brunette Harriet and the redhead Lee both went blond. Yet there was always a lady-in-waiting quality to Harriet’s relationship with the richer, more forceful Lee.
Leonore Cohn was born in New York in 1918. Her mother died when she was seven, and she and her sister were taken in by their Uncle Harry, who was considered the most tyrannical of the studio moguls. Cohn was an admirer of Mussolini and made a point of working on Yom Kippur even though he was Jewish—Lee herself would later admit that “his character was third-rate.”8 His wife, Rose, a convert to Christian Science, managed to instill a strong sense of faith in Lee. Aunt Rose was also an indefatigable hostess, who gave impeccably organized dinner parties for everyone from Irving Berlin to Rita Hayworth. By the time Lee and her sister were teenagers, they had sailed on the Normandie and stayed at the Dorchester in London and the Ritz in Paris, but as Annenberg biographer Christopher Ogden notes, “nothing was theirs. They were always treated as wards, never as family members.”9
Lee graduated from Stanford in 1940. Her first two marriages, both largely motivated by her desire to escape Uncle Harry, were disasters. The first, in 1941, to Beldon Katleman, the son of a parking lot tycoon, whom she had met at the Hillcrest Country Club, and