Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [183]
“I met Ronald Reagan at a party at Jack and Mary Benny’s house,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “He was married to Jane Wyman—but we don’t mention that.” Sitting in the spacious Billy Haines–designed living room of the Bel Air house she had lived in since marrying Earle Jorgensen in 1953, she recalled her initial impression of the Warner Bros. actor who would eventually become one of their dearest friends: “He was good-looking, but I thought the idea of him as a leading man was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. He wasn’t a Clark Gable, he wasn’t even a Bill Holden. He wasn’t the kind of man that I would even think of in that way.
That’s what made me laugh when I read about how sexual he was in that book Dutch—before I threw it away. I remember he used to wear that white jacket, you know, typical movie star—it had a kind of belt in the back that made it fuller on top and tight in the middle. Milton had a gray one—they went to the same tailor, Mariani—and I hated Milton’s. I used to say to him, ‘Please don’t wear that.’ It looked so Hollywood to me.”33
Marion Jorgensen, a decade older than Nancy Reagan and most of their friends, was called “the General” by her husband, and the name stuck. She was born Marion Newbert, the daughter of a well-to-do couple from Chicago who, in her words, “came out here on their honeymoon and never left.” The money came from her grandfather, Thomas Griffin, an Irish immigrant who founded the Griffin Wheel Company, which made wheels for freight trains, in Baltimore in 1877; by 1923 the company’s thirteen plants were turning out 1.5 million wheels annually. “My father never worked, it’s that simple,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “We lived in Hancock Park, but we moved out to Beverly Hills when it was still half farmland. We lived on the corner of Sunset and Alpine, and across the street lived Wallace Beery.” Marion, however, continued to attend the exclusive Marlborough School in Hancock Park, which didn’t accept the daughters of Jewish families. “It sounds so silly,” she explained, “but people who lived in Hancock Park didn’t know picture people.”
At eighteen, Marion Newbert “ran away and married” the twenty-2 9 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House seven-year-old Milton Bren—who was not only Jewish but in the movie business—before completing her senior year at Marlborough. Ironically, she had met Bren at the debutante party her mother insisted on giving her even though “they really didn’t have them out here then,” she said. “It was at the Ambassador Hotel, and somehow Milton got invited as a stag. And he was the only one there that intrigued me. The others were sort of puny-looking things, but he was already a man and already successful.”34 As for Marion, as Connie Wald recalled, “My brother always said she was the best-looking blonde in town. And she had the best legs.”35
Milton Bren was an agent when he married Marion in 1930, but within a few years he was producing movies at MGM, starting with the Topper series starring Cary Grant. He also made money in Southern California real estate. The marriage produced two sons but ended in divorce in 1948.
Shortly after they split, Bren married actress Claire Trevor, and Marion married insurance heir Tom Call, whose father, Asa Call, was the chairman of Pacific Mutual Life. Call senior was known as Mr. Big because of the enormous power he wielded as head of the secretive Committee of 25, the clique of Republican businessmen who dominated Los Angeles politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Along with his best friend, Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, Call was the driving force behind the rise of Richard Nixon from congressman to president. Marion’s marriage to his son ended in divorce in 1952.
Marion had just turned forty when she was introduced to Earle Jorgensen, who was fifty-four and also divorced. “My friend Lucy Toberman, who was head of volunteers for the Red Cross, said to