Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [186]
“Alfred and I had a premarital agreement never to go to Pasadena,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me, implying that the snooty suburb was unbearably provincial. More than any other couple in the Group, the Bloomingdales mixed with both society and Hollywood. Anita May gave Betsy her first baby shower, and her son David and Alfred were card-playing buddies. But the Bloomingdales also had the Old Guard—the Dohenys, the Ducom-muns, the Kecks—to their parties. Betsy saw herself as another Doris Stein, a cosmopolitan hostess who rose above the local divisions. She idolized 3 0 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Merle Oberon, the glamorous 1940s movie star who had married the Mexican industrialist Bruno Pagliai, and was proud of the fact that when the British royal family’s favorite photographer and artist, Cecil Beaton, came to Los Angeles to design the sets for My Fair Lady in 1963, “he only did two portraits—Merle’s and mine.”47
As an heir to the Bloomingdale’s department-store fortune and a co-founder of the Diners Club, Alfred Bloomingdale was both to the manor born and a self-made multimillionaire who maintained offices in Los Angeles and New York and frequently traveled to Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Bloomingdale family was very much part of New York’s German-Jewish elite known as Our Crowd, and was related through marriage to three-time Democratic governor Herbert Lehman. Alfred and Betsy kept an apartment at the Carlton House on Madison Avenue, and she was a favorite of the fashion press, cited for her high style in the same breath as Jackie Kennedy, Babe Paley, and C. Z. Guest. The Bloomingdales’ house in Holmby Hills was a big 1930s Spanish colonial that had been transformed into a modern Palladian villa and filled with an eclectic but elegant mix of English furniture, French paintings, and Oriental antiques by Billy Haines, whose work Betsy had first admired as a young woman invited to dine at the Jack and Ann Warner estate.
“My mother was Australian, and my father was English and Australian,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me, sitting in her library on a red-and-green printed-linen sofa designed by Haines forty years earlier. “Daddy went to Harvard, to the medical school, and he loved America and wanted to live here. So he went home to Adelaide and got my mother and brought her back. I grew up right here on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, and I made my First Communion at the Good Shepherd Church. Life hasn’t changed much, but there have been many wonderful things in between.”48
She was born Betty Lee Newling in Los Angeles in or about 1922. (She managed to keep her birth date a secret from even the FBI when it investigated Alfred for a possible ambassadorship in 1981.) Her father was an orthodontist who also taught at the University of Southern California. “I grew up never knowing Hollywood people at all,” she told me. “They were patients of my father’s, but Daddy wasn’t so crazy about Hollywood people.”49 A longtime family friend told me, “The father was as dull as they come. The mother was a big Australian woman, extremely outgoing and ambitious.” David Jones, who credited Betsy Bloomingdale with launching his career as a florist in the 1950s, recalled dining with Mrs.
The Group: 1958–1962
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Newling in her later years. “She was called Vinnie. She was very funny.
Very elegant. And she always called Betsy ‘Betty.’ ”50
The Newlings were members of the Los Angeles Country Club, and Vinnie saw to it that her only child, who was as tall, vivacious, and ambitious as she was, had a proper upbringing. Though the Newlings were Catholic, Betsy was sent to the Marlborough School, graduating in 1939, one year behind Betty Adams. She was then sent east to Bennett Junior College in horsey Millbrook, New York. One summer she took courses at the Hillcliffe School of Cookery in Beverly Hills, because “my mother firmly believed that every young woman should attend cooking school before marriage.”51 In 1941 she was a bridesmaid at the teenage Gloria Vanderbilt’s scandalous but stylish wedding to the playboy