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powerful, and nice. I’m not saying this against her. I agreed with her.”16 Her feelings toward Lee were more complicated. The two women had much in common—both were shipped off to relatives as children, grew up tantaliz-ingly close to fame and power, went to fancy private schools and elite colleges, and married men in their forties who were coming out of failed marriages. But Lee already inhabited a social universe that for Nancy was still a long way off. They understood each other, however, and enjoyed each other’s company. Like Nancy, Lee didn’t smoke or drink, and she was finely attuned to her husband’s moods and needs. “I’m a pleaser,” she once said.

“And my first goal was to please Walter.”17

Like Ronnie, Walter was a loner at heart. Both men were fanatically neat, a sign of needing to control the world around them, and capable of spending long stretches of time alone, lost in their own plans and visions.

And for both, their wives were everything: lovers, confidantes, and protectors. Walter called his wife Mother.

Every August, Lee and Walter Annenberg took a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Socially speaking, August was to Los Angeles what October was to New York or June to London—a time for parties and more parties, many of them for visiting New Yorkers and Europeans. The Deutsches, The Group: 1958–1962

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the Starks, and Jules and Doris Stein all lined up to give dinners in honor of the Annenbergs. So did Anita May, the grande dame of the Beverly Hills social set and another of Nancy Reagan’s fashionable new friends.

Anita May and her husband, Tom, the chairman of May Company Department Stores, have generally been overlooked by Reagan chroniclers, perhaps because both were dead by the time the Reagans reached the White House. But in the late 1950s and 1960s they were at the very center of what became the Reagan Group, and Anita especially played a significant role in promoting Ronnie politically and Nancy socially. As Richard Gully attested, “Anita May was a great power. And she helped Nancy Reagan a lot.”18

“My ex-mother-in-law was very close to Nancy. Nancy virtually sat on her knee,” said Ann Rutherford, who was married to the Mays’ son, David, in the 1950s.19 “Anita was a wonderful woman. Generous, kind, giving,”

Nancy Reagan told me. “And if she liked you, she wanted all the people she liked to like you, too.”20 “If she didn’t like you, watch out,” said Dr. Herbert Roedling, who was married to another one of David May’s ex-wives. “She had teeth. Tom was the opposite—he liked everybody.”21

Anita Keiler May, a bourbon heiress from Kentucky, had come to Los Angeles in 1922, after marrying Tom May and persuading his father to open the first California branch of the family’s St. Louis–based department store chain. Tom and Anita built a ballroom they called the Casino on a lot next to their white-pillared mansion on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills, and gave elaborate parties there even during the war years. In the late 1940s they sold the house, tore down the Casino, and had the architect Sam Marx put up an ultramodern ranch in its place. When the Beverly Hilton opened in 1955, the Mays moved into the penthouse, where Anita entertained on a grand scale. They also had a weekend place in Palm Springs. All of the May residences were done by Billy Haines, the openly gay silent screen star who had reinvented himself as Hollywood’s foremost interior decorator, and who, along with his lifelong companion, Jimmie Shields, was a regular on the social scene.

“Anita was the style queen out here,” said society florist David Jones, who started doing the flowers for her dinners at the Hilton. “Everything had to be just perfect. She had a daytime chauffeur and an evening chauffeur.

She had a daytime maid and an evening one. She had a series of cooks—the same cook didn’t do every meal. But most important was how pretty the table was.”22

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Ann Rutherford said that Anita would spend a month in New York in the spring and another in the fall, staying at the Hampshire