Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [184]
He’s chairman of the Los Angeles Red Cross now.’ I made all kinds of excuses. I really wasn’t going out with anybody. You know, you can’t have two marriages and then start over that fast. I just didn’t feel like it. Finally, I was invited to a Christmas party at the old Romanoff ’s, and so were the Tobermans. So Lucy started in again. I said, ‘All right, Lucy, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you and Homer bring Mr. Jorgensen and pick me up at my house and we’ll go together?’ So that’s what we did. Earle was driving his car, and they were in the back seat. And when we got down to Robert-son and Wilshire—there was quite a lot of light there—I looked at him and I thought, ‘Damn, he’s not bad at all.’ Three months later we were married.”36
The marriage lasted forty-six years, until Earle died in 1999 at the age The Group: 1958–1962
2 9 7
of 101. He was still running his company in his nineties when he gave an interview to photographer Pat York for her book Going Strong. “Have courage, confidence, and determination is my motto,” he told her. “I picked it up as a kid along with ‘Never say die; say damn.’ . . . I have enjoyed working hard since I started as a very young man. My dad died when I was about 13, and when I was 15 we ran out of money. I had to go to work as an office boy to support my mother. . . . The one thing my mother taught me when we were poor was the importance of neatness and cleanliness. I’ve followed that all through my life. In all my plants, you can eat off the floor.”37
Jorgensen’s parents were immigrants from Denmark who settled in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century. His father was a sea captain, and he sometimes took his wife and three children on his trips. “I remember going around Cape Horn when I was six, in his schooner,” Jorgensen told York.38
After serving in the Army Tank Corps during World War I, Jorgensen moved to Los Angeles in 1921, arriving shortly after the discovery of oil at Signal Hill near Long Beach. He started the Earle M. Jorgensen Company, which provided shipyard surplus and scrap metal to oil drillers, his wife told me, “by selling his extra suit and getting two dollars and a half. That was the beginning of Earle. So to say the least he was a self-made man.”39
“By 1923, he had created in essence a supermarket for steel and aluminum,” according to the Los Angeles Times, buying in bulk from large manufacturers such as Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel and selling to local businesses.40 With the emergence of the aircraft industry on the West Coast during the 1940s, his customers came to include Boeing and Hughes Aircraft, and by 1960 annual revenue was approaching $100 million.41 Almost universally well liked for his modest, plainspoken manner and fun-loving attitude—he was known to stand on his head at parties—
he was nonetheless a player in the Los Angeles business and political community: a generous Republican Party contributor who sat on the boards of the Chamber of Commerce, the Citizens National Trust and Savings Bank, the California Institute of Technology, and Occidental College, as well as the executive committee of Northrop Aircraft. Typical of the time—and of the Reagan Group in general—Jorgensen saw no contradiction in supporting the National Conference of Christians and Jews while belonging to the highly restrictive Los Angeles Country Club.
Although the Jorgensens had occasionally crossed paths with the Reagans at “buffets and things” in the early 1950s, it wasn’t until Betty Adams 2 9 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House got them together that a closeness began to develop. “Ronnie was working for General Electric,” Marion Jorgensen recalled. “And they were such a great couple. We saw quite a bit of them in the evening. We’d go to Chasen’s to dinner. Nancy and I often had lunch.” Even though they quickly became good friends, she observed that “I don’t care how close a friendship you might have with Nancy, if she doesn’t want to go your way, she doesn’t go your