Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [204]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House congressman William Miller. Tuttle also kept quiet about how drunk Goldwater got after his “crazy acceptance speech,” according to one insider, who said, “Holmes had to put him on a plane back to Arizona.”
Tuttle’s pragmatism and deep sense of loyalty appealed to Reagan, who trusted him immediately. Marion Jorgensen told me, “Holmes was the one. Ronnie had confidence in Holmes, and Holmes had tremendous confidence in him.”61
Like Tuttle, Henry Salvatori was proud to call himself a self-made man, but he also saw himself as something of a classicist, a student of Socrates, Plato, and Cicero. Born near Rome in 1901, he had come to the United States with his parents as a toddler. His father started a small wholesale grocery business in Philadelphia, and the family lived on a farm in South Jersey.
Henry attended a one-room rural schoolhouse, public high school in Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a BS in electrical engineering in 1923. He was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York and given a scholarship to Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree in physics in 1926. For the next six years he worked in oilfields in Oklahoma and California, helping to develop the science of prospecting for oil by seismic methods. In 1933, with $9,000 in capital, he started the Western Geophysical Company in Los Angeles, and by 1955 he had built it into the largest offshore seismic contractor in the world, with operations in twenty-six countries. He merged the company with Litton Industries in 1960 but remained CEO until 1967.62
Salvatori met bubbly Grace Ford in Oklahoma in 1936, and she moved to Los Angeles later that year. He courted her by sending a rose to her hotel room every fifteen minutes from morning until midnight. “Mother was a ballet teacher in Tulsa,” their daughter, Laurie, told me. “One day a screenwriter from MGM came to her school and asked if Mother would take her students to Los Angeles for an audition. She was the chaperone, but at the end of the day, she got the contract and they didn’t. I have her 1936 Screen Actors Guild card. She was in the first horror movie Lionel Barrymore made, The Devil Doll. She played a mute. . . . Mother was not at all mute in real life.”63
That was Grace’s only movie. She married Henry in November 1937, and they soon had two children, Laurie Ann and her brother, Henry Ford.
The Salvatoris built their first house in 1940, on Bellagio Road in Bel Air, and quickly hit it off with their neighbors, Bill and Betty Wilson, whose The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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girls went to Marymount with Laurie. Grace threw herself into philanthropic work, most notably for the ten-year, $30 million drive to build the Los Angeles County Music Center, which was spearheaded by Buff Chandler, the wife of the Los Angeles Times publisher. After Grace raised almost $400,000 by raffling off a Cadillac Eldorado at the campaign’s kickoff event in 1955, she was named “Times Woman of the Year” and made vice chairman of the campaign’s executive board. “Grace Salvatori was Buff Chandler’s bag woman,” said Connie Wald. “She raised more money for the Music Center than anyone.”64
Meanwhile, Henry was embraced by the Committee of 25, becoming finance chairman of the L.A. County Republican Party in 1949 and state finance chairman two years later. Salvatori had been brought up a Republican—unlike Tuttle’s father, however, the senior Salvatori not only admired President Taft but also named one of Henry’s brothers William Howard in his honor. “It was only in the late 1940s when I became concerned with the Communist threat to the free world that I began to take an interest in politics,” Salvatori said years later. “I was in San Francisco during the formation of the United Nations. I believed then that it was a mistake, and I thought that the Democratic Party was totally unaware of the future threat of Communist Russia.”65
If Tuttle was the conciliator among Reagan’s backers, Salvatori was the ideologue,