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Nancy’s Nancy, you know.”42

Nancy and Marion were usually joined for lunch by Betty Wilson, Marion’s best friend. Her nickname was the Infanta, although some called her the Little General. “Betty was a little mighty mite, and she ran a tight ship,” said Frances Bergen. “Betty and Marion were both generals. Neither one of them was an adjutant.”43 Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson called each other every morning at seven to coordinate their social schedules, and their husbands were good friends. Bill Wilson was on Earle Jorgensen’s board and had known him since 1936, when he went to work in his father’s business, Webb Oil Tools, which bought metals from the Jorgensen Company.

William A. Wilson, a native Angeleno, graduated from Stanford University that year and married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth “Betty”

Johnson, upon her graduation two years later. Her father, Luther H. Johnson, who died shortly after they were married, had founded the Pennzoil Company of California in 1913 and built it into one of the largest oil companies in the country. Her mother, a devout Catholic from an Italian immigrant family, had grown up in a Victorian mansion in downtown Los Angeles, and Betty was educated at Marymount, the elite Catholic girls school in Westwood. Bill Wilson, who was born an Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism when they were married. According to a close family friend, Betty’s mother gave the couple $1 million “to help set them up.”

David Jones told me, “Betty Wilson ran Bill—she’d tell him, ‘You wear this, you wear that.’ ”44 Not long after the Wilsons met the Reagans, Bill left his family’s business and became president of L.N.W. Investments, which mainly invested his wife’s money.

As Bill Wilson remembered it, he and Betty were introduced to the Reagans in the late 1950s at the Brentwood home of Bill and Frances Hawks. (Bill Hawks, a producer, was the brother of director Howard Hawks.) Wilson also recalled attending Betty Adams’s dinner party for the The Group: 1958–1962

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Reagans not long after that. “Ron and I hit it off pretty well,” he said. “He had a little ranch up in the Malibu mountains then, and I like horses, so we had some things in common. And, of course, Betty and Nancy got along very well.” Wilson made the point that the women saw each other more often than the men did, but Nancy’s friends generally acknowledged that Bill was the husband who would become the closest to Ronnie. With his extended sideburns and well-cut suits, the lanky, good-looking Wilson came across as an old-fashioned gentleman cowboy. “I always thought that Ron was very open and easy to talk to,” Wilson told me, adding, “Ron wasn’t born here, and he didn’t really grow up here, but it does seem like he fit into California perfectly. He liked the outdoors. He liked horses. I think he was at heart a true Californian.”45 Like Justin Dart, Bill Wilson was a member of the exclusive men’s riding club Rancheros Vistadores.

The Wilsons were also long-standing members of the Los Angeles Country Club, extremely conservative politically, and probably the squarest, most right-wing couple in the Group.

Marcia Hobbs, one of their two daughters, told me that the Reagans were frequent dinner guests in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “It would just be the two families. I was ten or eleven, and Mr. Reagan would talk about world politics at the dinner table. He was very instructive, and he opened my eyes to many things that were going on.”46

Of all the Reagans’ new friends, the Bloomingdales were the most fun, the most sophisticated, and the most adventurous. Alfred was a big, tall man, not handsome but attractive because of his tremendous energy and charm.

Betsy, with her curly locks and wide-eyed enthusiasm, sometimes came across as a high-fashion Shirley Temple, but that was something of an act, belying a sharp mind, a keen eye, and a strong will. The Jorgensens and the Wilsons may have been big-time in Los Angeles society, but the Bloomingdales set their sights higher and cast their nets