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The whole notion of society in a city as new and spread out as Los Angeles was seen as something of a joke by East Coast experts and snobs in general—“Los Angeles Society,” Ethel Barrymore once said, “is anybody who went to high school.” Cleveland Amory, the ultimate arbiter of society in America, called the city a “social melee.”30 A 1957 New York Times article on California society noted that San Francisco had its own edition of the Social Register, but Los Angeles did not.31 All of which may be why some of the local grandees took so much comfort in looking down their noses at Hollywood, and others felt the need to import New York socialites and titled Europeans to validate their place in the great scheme of things.

“I was Nancy’s first California friend outside pictures,” Betty Adams told me. “Before Betsy, before Marion, before Betty Wilson. I met Nancy at Amelia Gray’s shop in Beverly Hills. She had told Amelia, ‘I’d like to meet some girls out of the picture industry.’ Just because she wanted to broaden 2 9 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House her base and get into a little different group. Amelia said, ‘I have the perfect person for you.’ So we all had a sandwich at Amelia’s office. We just had the best time, laughing and enjoying it. Nancy said that she belonged to the Junior League, but none of her Hollywood friends did, and she didn’t want to go alone. She said, ‘Would you go with me?’ I said, ‘I haven’t been in years, but we should go.’ So we went and sat through the whole boring meeting, and decided we didn’t have to go anymore.”

Adams was reminiscing over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air in 1999. A tall, slim woman then nearing eighty, she was still attractive and still very much a part of the Group. A widow, she had been married three times, and all three of her husbands were from prominent Los Angeles families.

The first, Alphonzo Bell Jr., was the son of the developer of Bel Air—

“This hotel used to be my father-in-law’s office,” Adams pointed out.

From 1956 to 1959 the younger Bell was chairman of the California Republican Party, and two years after they divorced, in 1958, he won a seat in Congress, which he held until 1977. Her second husband, Harry See, was an heir to the See’s Candies family, which had shops all over the state.

Her third and longest marriage was to Robert Adams, whose family had been established in Los Angeles since the 1890s, when they developed the city’s first exclusive residential enclave, West Adams, near downtown.

Betty Adams’s father, Paul Helms, was the multimillionaire owner of Helms Bakery, which sold its goods in neighborhoods throughout the city from a fleet of five hundred trucks. He was also a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Republican Party. “My father and Paul Hoffman, the head of Studebaker, went over to France to convince Eisenhower to run for president in 1952,” Adams recalled. “And the first time President Eisenhower came to Palm Springs, he stayed with Mom and Dad at their home in Smoke Tree. I just loved President Eisenhower.” She was wearing the gold-and-diamond cross her father, a Methodist, had given her for her sixteenth birthday, on a white Chanel suit.

According to Adams, Nancy “was really anxious to know the Wilsons and the Bloomingdales and the Jorgensens. I had a dinner party in 1958

so she and Ronnie could get to know those people.”32 Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and Betsy Bloomingdale were all well-established social figures by then, and along with Adams members of the Colleagues, an elite charity organization that raised money for unwed mothers and was limited to fifty women. Their husbands were equally prominent: Earle Jorgensen had run his own steel-and-aluminum company since the 1920s; The Group: 1958–1962

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Bill Wilson’s family went even further back, in the oil equipment business; Alfred Bloomingdale was president of the Diners Club. While none of these couples knew the Reagans well at that point, the Bloomingdales sometimes saw them at the Mays’ and the Steins