Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [2]
I was brought up in an Italian-American family where becoming a Republican was equated with becoming an American, and where any mention of Eleanor Roosevelt was invariably followed by the comment “she should mind her own business,” usually uttered by one or the other of my grandmothers. Bess Truman, they never tired of saying, wore her corsage upside-down at the 1949 inauguration. My father, a World War II veteran who had fought in Europe and the Pacific and was one of the first Italian-Americans to hold an executive position in the Wall Street coffee trade, never got over Thomas Dewey’s loss or Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, my father’s hero. My mother was a Republican com-mitteewoman in Plainview, the middle-class Long Island suburb where we lived from 1955 to 1968; in 1956 she had my sisters and me walk up and down the street waving signs saying, “I Like Ike,” “I Like Dick,” and
“Vote Row A All the Way.” Jackie Kennedy, my fashion-conscious mother and grandmothers used to say, dressed beautifully, but why shouldn’t she, they would add, repeating a popular Republican rumor, she’d been given a million dollars by her father-in-law to stay married to his son. For some reason they didn’t mind Lady Bird Johnson, but LBJ had to go—before I got drafted. By then I was at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a raging radical—I’d even joined Students for a Democratic Society, although I never told my parents that.
And then, in 1970, I went to work at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where in reaction to the lockstep liberalism of the New York art world, I found myself returning to my Republican roots. I voted for Ronald Reagan for the first time in the 1976 Republican primary, when he unsuccessfully challenged President Gerald Ford. It seemed to me that the Reagans were being 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House unfairly portrayed by a largely Democratic press, which cast him as a B actor bozo invented and controlled as a politician by a sinister claque of ultraconservative Southern California tycoons, and her as the driven daughter of a John Bircher Chicago neurosurgeon who had played a major role in turning his dim-bulb son-in-law into a fanatical anti-Communist.
Somehow this didn’t square in my mind with a couple whose best friends were the fun-loving Bloomingdales and Jerry Zipkin, one of the most sophisticated men I had ever met. Zipkin had been friends with Warhol since the 1950s, and had taken me under his wing not long after I became editor of Interview; he was constantly calling with story ideas and sending gift subscriptions to his grand friends around the world.
And now here, at Le Cirque, was Nancy Reagan, the supposedly square and uptight First Lady, taking her social cues from Zipkin, who in his not too distant past had been known to give two cocktail parties on the same night—“Why waste the flowers?” he would explain—the first from five to seven for his international society friends, the second from seven to nine for “gents only.” And here was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge—one of his first acts was to have a portrait of
“Silent Cal” hung in the Oval Office—seeming perfectly comfortable, sitting in a peach-and-gray room lined with murals of cavorting monkeys in eighteenth-century court dress, surrounded by assorted European titles and jet-setters, exotic mystery women from Central Europe and Central America, and male and female homosexuals of varying degrees of closet-edness. Then again, he was also the first divorced president and the first movie star president. This president had dated Rhonda Fleming and Piper Laurie. In retrospect, the scene that evening—a circus crossed with a court—was a fairly accurate