Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [188]
“Alfred was divine. He was a fascinating man. And warm and cozy and The Group: 1958–1962
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wonderful. He brought his barber from New York out here with him, and got him a job in a barbershop in Beverly Hills. He came to the house every evening to shave Alfred. Isn’t that funny?” At the time of their marriage, Alfred was still hoping to produce Petty Girl, but at Columbia, where he had been hired by Harry Cohn. “We went on Harry Cohn’s yacht,” Betsy Bloomingdale recalled. “He was a rough old coot. Alfred was supposed to be a producer, but he really didn’t like working at a studio. He was more of an entrepreneur.” His first venture involved installing soda machines in movie theaters. “No one had ever done that before,” said his wife. “But Alfred had so many businesses going. And then he started the Diners Club.”62
While Bloomingdale did not invent the credit card, as is often claimed, in 1950 he was the first to see the possibilities in an infant company called Dine and Sign, the brainchild of Frank X. McNamara, a Brooklyn savings-and-loan executive. Two years later he bought out McNamara and took over the renamed Diners Club.63 Until American Express introduced its card in 1958, Diners Club had a virtual monopoly on the credit card business. “Alfred Bloomingdale was a very colorful man,” said Richard Gully.
“I’ve never known a man with such bad table manners. And yet he was enormously likable. He really was beloved. I never met anyone who didn’t like Alfred Bloomingdale.”64
“Alfred had a great rapport with Ronnie,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me.
“He adored Ronnie. And Nancy adored Alfred.” Nancy Reagan concurred, saying, “Alfred was a wonderful man, and wonderful with Betsy. It was a good combination.”65
If Anita May was like a second mother to Nancy, Betsy was the sister she had never had, and one from whom she would learn much. Even more than Anita, Betsy was infatuated with the rituals and minutiae of entertaining on a grand scale, and while Nancy could not match either of her mentors’ collections of china, crystal, or silver at that time, she was eager to soak up their expertise.
When the Bloomingdales traveled to Europe, as they did every summer, Betsy kept notebooks of dinners they attended at private homes in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna, listing the guests and recording what was served and how the table was set. “I’ve always been fascinated by table settings,” she explained. “And I was very influenced by what I saw in Europe and New York.” After moving into the Holmby Hills house in 1959, she started keeping records of her own dinner parties.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House was April 7, 1962,” she said, reading from one of her party books. “I had the Wilsons, the Reagans, the Peter Douglases, and the Gordon Walkers.
Peter Douglas’s father was our ambassador to London then. And the Walkers were very social people here—she was in the Colleagues and was always a dedicated Republican. We had beef Wellington, zucchini, limestone let-tuce with two cheeses, strawberry sherbet, fresh raspberries, fresh strawberries, apricot sauce, oatmeal cookies, and Château Cheval Blanc.”66
Betsy was not only a social dynamo but also a dedicated mother of three, who believed in being very involved in her children’s upbringing. She often found herself giving advice to Nancy, who seemed to have a harder time raising her children, especially Patti—perhaps, as Richard Davis believed, because she harbored a lingering resentment toward her mother for not having been there during her early years; perhaps, as many others suggested, because she expended most of her emotional energy in keeping her husband happy. “She and my father were this country unto