Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [194]
The year Nancy became a Colleague, Kurt Niklas, the popular maître d’
at Romanoff ’s, opened the Bistro in Beverly Hills with the director Billy Wilder. Backed by Alfred Bloomingdale and David May, among others, the restaurant became the Group’s canteen. Nancy and her friends now had their own charity, their own designer, Jimmy Galanos, their own hairdresser, Julius of Saks, their own flower arranger and party planner, David Jones, and their own interior decorator, Billy Haines, as well as a regular place to lunch. They also had their own resident political philosopher—and no one found him boring. “Ronnie was always so fantastic about talking after dinner,” said Erlenne Sprague. “He would talk about the government and how it was just too big and this and that. And we would sit there absolutely spell-bound, listening to him. Everybody thought he was great.”110
Betty Adams agreed: “Ronnie was easy to understand, and he was one of the sweetest, most thoughtful men I ever met. I would have rather talked to Ronnie at a dinner party than anybody. We’d get talking head to head, because we talked politics. He was interested in history and remembered everything. This country was his life. He felt it was the greatest in the world, and he brought it up to people everywhere. And we all thought he and Nancy were so wonderful together.”111
“Our next anniversary will be our tenth,” Nancy told Lydia Lane of the Los Angeles Times, who interviewed her while she was visiting her husband on the G.E. Theater set in June 1961. “So I feel [our marriage is] a success.
A man should be the captain of the ship. I don’t feel it’s the woman’s place to run things.” She added, “A wife can’t let her housework and her children blot out her husband. I know this isn’t easy when she does all the work herself, but we can’t get away from the fact that romance is kept alive by keeping up appearances.”112
C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N
THE KITCHEN CABINET
1963–1966
I know it sounds corny, but these men were good men. They believed in the good. They believed in this country and all it stood for.
Marion Jorgensen to author, November 4, 1997
Most of them were self-made men. They were all tough and crusty and very patriotic and strongly anti-Communist. They really felt that the system had allowed them to come from very humble beginnings to wonderful lives that I don’t think they had ever even dreamed of when they were small children—and they were very, very grateful for that. I think those were the values they shared with Ronald Reagan. What really irritated all of these guys was to be called fat cats. That was how you got under their skin. Boy, my dad hated that.
Robert Tuttle, son of Holmes Tuttle, to author, November 19, 1997
ABOUT THE SAME TIME NANCY REAGAN BECAME A COLLEAGUE, RONALD
Reagan became a Republican. As she moved up socially, he moved right politically. He had supported Eisenhower and voted Republican for the first time in 1952. But his instincts remained liberal, and he campaigned for Los Angeles’s reformist mayor Fletcher Bowron against a Republican candidate handpicked by Asa Call and the Committee of 25, whom he then characterized as “a small clique of oil and real estate pirates.”1 Just seven years later he and Nancy were among a handful of stars who refused to attend a gala at 20th Century Fox for Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev.2 The following year he wrote Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner to complain about favorable articles on Charlie Chaplin and Dalton Trumbo, who was writing his first screenplay under his own name since the blacklist, for Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. Unlike most 3 1 3
3 1 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people in Hollywood, Reagan still refused to admit that there had ever been a blacklist.
He backed Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, even though he had long-standing doubts about the vice president’s integrity. After a conversation