Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [181]
The store’s couture salon was run by Anita’s best friend, Sophie Gimbel, its resident designer and the wife of the owner of Saks and Gimbels.
Anita’s shoes and handbags were also custom-made in New York. In Los Angeles, she shopped at Amelia Gray’s for “Palm Springs things,” as Rutherford put it, but after Gimbel retired, Galanos became her preferred couturier. And she made a fetish of her makeup brands. “One time I was going off to Tahiti,” David Jones recalled. “And Anita said, ‘Isn’t that a French colony?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ She said, ‘Here’s $5,000. I want my mas-cara. It’s a French product, and I can’t buy it anymore in this country.
Bring me back as much as you can. And keep the change.’ ”23
May was already in her sixties when she discovered Nancy. “She kind of adopted four gals,” explained Harriet Deutsch. “Anne Douglas, Edie Wasserman, Nancy Reagan, and me. We were her special girls.” May loved giving her protégées advice on everything from clothes to china to how to handle their husbands’ idiosyncrasies. She was also known to shower her favorites with gifts. According to Leonora Hornblow, if Nancy thought a dress was too expensive, “Anita would buy it. And if you were at Anita’s house, you had to be careful. She was like the Spanish. You couldn’t say,
‘Oh, isn’t that pretty.’ It would be bundled up at once and in your car.”24
“Anita did things with such class,” said Anne Douglas, who had landed in Beverly Hills from her native Paris after marrying Kirk in 1954. “And with such taste. She never overdressed. She had the best jewelry—one of the most superb blue-white diamonds in the 20-carat range, that Tom gave her. Tom was a lovely man, and he adored his wife. He knew that everything she did was perfect, and she did everything that he admired. She really put her personal taste and her personal feelings into a party. Nobody was badly seated. Nobody had a bad time. And the caviar was flowing.”25
The Reagans were invited regularly to the Mays’ parties at the Hilton, where the guest list—“a mix of Hollywood and the Hillcrest Country Club,” as Ann Rutherford put it26—often included Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Frances and Edgar Bergen, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Dinah Shore, and the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Anita, an ardent Republican who liked talking politics, grew very fond of Ronnie and predicted great things for him. “She was the first one to tell me, ‘Ronnie is going to be governor,’ ” remembered Denise Hale, who became another of Anita’s The Group: 1958–1962
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girls after she married director Vincente Minnelli in 1960. “And when Anita May said something was going to happen, it usually came true.”27
As Ann Rutherford pointed out, Anita respected Nancy’s total belief in her husband. “Nancy simply idolized him. There was no competition. I think she saw in him what Anita saw in him. I’m sure Nancy had no idea whether he was going to go far in the theatrical business or what. But she knew that wherever Ronnie sat was the head of the table.”28
As the Reagans moved up on the Beverly Hills A-list, Nancy was seeking out another group that had little to do with the entertainment industry and was more connected to the Republican Party and the downtown Los Angeles business establishment. To be sure, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, and the Bloomingdales had Hollywood friends and lived on the Westside, not in old-money Hancock Park or ultraconservative Pasadena. But they were considered “society” as opposed to “Hollywood,” and in Los Angeles in the 1950s there was a strong distinction. As Dore Schary’s daughter, Jill Robinson, writes: “All the society-oriented people in Los Angeles made a point of excluding show business people from their ranks. Show business people, like gypsies, were usually excluded from schools . . . from country clubs, and even from the society pages of the Los Angeles Times (except for Jimmy Stewart, who made it after he became an Air Force General, and Irene Dunne, who was such an active and charming