Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [187]
she admitted. “I always thought it was kind of hokey.”53
“I introduced Alfred to Betsy,” said Hollywood producer Fred de Cordova.
“I was doing a picture with Robert Hutton, who was a young star at Warners, and he was going with Nathalie Thompson, Betsy’s closest friend from Marlborough. Nathalie said, ‘I’m going out with Bobby Hutton tonight. Why don’t you take Betsy?’ I said, ‘I’d love to. Her father is my dentist. Maybe he’ll learn to not hurt me so much.’ So I met Betsy, and after that I introduced her to Alfred.”54
De Cordova had been Bloomingdale’s best friend since the early 1930s, when he was an up-and-coming theatrical producer and Alfred was a Park Avenue boy who had just discovered showbiz and showgirls. His parents’
marriage had already unraveled by the time his father, a frustrated playwright who hated the retail business, took Alfred to his first Broadway play, at age fifteen. Soon after that he started hanging out at the Stork Club whenever he could get away from the Westminster School in Connecticut.
Although his teachers found him exceptionally bright, he squeaked through with a 66.3 average and went on to Brown University. He dropped out three months short of graduation in 1939, because of a serious football injury that would also keep him from serving in World War II.55
On November 13, 1940, The New York Times announced that Bloomingdale and two associates had formed a production company, and five months later their first play, Your Loving Son, opened on Broadway. It closed two days later, but Alfred, undeterred, took a suite of offices in the Empire 3 0 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Theater Building, formed an alliance with Lee Shubert, of the theater-owning family, and put $40,000 of his own money into High Kickers, a vaudeville revival starring George Jessel.56 It was a hit and provided the twenty-five-year-old Alfred with his first wife, a chorus girl named Barbara Brewster. “Alfred called me and said, ‘I’m going to New Jersey tonight. I’d like you to come along,’” recalled de Cordova. “I said, ‘I’ve been to New Jersey.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sort of visiting a justice of the peace. I’m being married and want you to be my best man.’”57 The marriage lasted less than two years, ending in divorce in 1943.58
By then Alfred had two successful shows running on Broadway: an updated version of The Ziegfeld Follies, starring Milton Berle, and Early to Bed, a comedy. He was also a partner in a shipbuilding company in Rye, New York, and was elected treasurer of Tammany Hall, as the Manhattan Democratic Party organization was known, in 1944.59 But he missed the party’s convention in Chicago that summer and opted out of a second term. After losing more than $100,000 on Allah Be Praised, a musical, his interest in the theater also seemed to wane.60
In January 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to produce a movie called Petty Girl at RKO. “Alfred came out here looking for a wife,” a close friend recalled. “I think he thought it was time to settle down.” Nine months later, on September 15, 1946, he married Betsy. Fred de Cordova was the best man again, and because of the difference in religion the ceremony was performed by a superior court judge at the home of Alfred’s friend Buddy Adler, a producer at Columbia. “I’ll never forget that wedding,” Marion Jorgensen said. “Because only one of her parents was there—I forget which one. They were mad at her for marrying Alfred, just like my family when I married Milton.”61
That would soon change, as Betsy set out to transform her husband into something more to her parents’ liking. Two years after they married, Alfred converted to Catholicism and they had a proper church wedding.
By the 1952 election, he was involved in the Eisenhower campaign. “I started out as a Jew and a Democrat,” he liked to joke. “And the next thing I knew I was a Catholic and a Republican.” Like Earle Jorgensen