Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [193]
On July 25, 1962, Nelle Reagan died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-nine in a nursing home in Santa Monica.100 “Mother’s passing was peaceful and without pain,” Reagan wrote to Lorraine Wagner, a fan who had become a regular correspondent. “It was just a matter of going without waking. I’m sure it was what she wanted, too, because these past few years have found her unable to do any of the things that had always made her life meaningful.”101 Neil’s wife, Bess, told me that she thought Nelle had Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t called that then, and Reagan himself said as much to Edmund Morris.102 In 1954, Nelle had told Wagner in a letter, “I have hardening of the arteries in my head—and it hurts just to think.”103 By 1957 she was complaining of memory lapses and heart problems. That summer she wrote friends in Dixon: “I am a shut in. I can’t drive a car any more so it was sold this last week. I will be 74 years young this month of July, and am grateful to God, to have been spared this long The Group: 1958–1962
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life. Yet when each attact [sic] comes I whisper—‘Please God, let it be now, take me home.’ ”104
“She had a lady who came and lived with her,” Bess Reagan told me, adding, “Ronald paid for it.”105 In 1958, Nancy arranged for Nelle to be put into the nursing home, and most of her possessions were moved to Neil’s house in Bel Air, which burned to the ground in 1961. The only things Neil and Bess managed to save were their silverware and Nelle’s Bible.106
In 1962, Nancy was made a member of the Colleagues, signifying her full acceptance into Los Angeles’s hardest-to-crack social clique. Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and Betty Adams had all been members for several years. The private charity had been founded in 1950 by nine society women headed by Lucy Toberman, whose husband’s grandfather was mayor of Los Angeles in the 1870s—and who had introduced Marion to Earle Jorgensen—and Onnalee Doheny, whose husband’s grandfather discovered oil downtown in 1892. “I was part of the original group,”
said Erlenne Sprague, who was then married to her first husband, Voltaire Perkins, a wealthy lawyer who played the judge on television’s Divorce Court.
“They just picked out women that were very socially involved.”107
The Colleagues met once a month for lunch at one another’s houses, which was one reason they limited membership to fifty. Every Saturday before Mother’s Day, they held their annual “Glamour Sale,” at which the ladies—clad in “Colleagues Blue” smocks—sold their old furs, designer clothes, and jewelry and gave the proceeds to the Big Sister League’s homes for unwed mothers. The sale was originally held in Carlotta Kirkeby’s ballroom—her husband owned the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, the Drake in Chicago, the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, and La Quinta resort near Palm Springs. By 1960 it had become so popular that it was moved to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and everything from art and antiques to sheets and children’s clothes were added to the inventory. At the time Nancy joined, the Colleagues was almost exclusively Gentile, and only a few Hollywood wives had made the cut, including Mal Milland and Clark Gable’s fourth wife, Kay Spreckels, an heiress to the sugar fortune. The membership was expanded to sixty-five in the early 1970s, which is when Harriet Deutsch and Fran Stark, among others, were asked to join.108
“I sponsored Nancy,” said Erlenne Sprague. “I sponsored a lot of these girls—Marion, Betsy, Betty Adams—because they were good workers 3 1 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and good friends and it just made the whole group so special.” As Sprague explained, the Colleagues continued to grow over the years, adding two auxiliary organizations—Les Amis (“the mothers and aunts and grandmothers of some of us”) in 1962, and the Chips (“our daughters and granddaughters