Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [219]
We separated at the airport. Betty was going to help Nancy decorate Ronnie’s office—she was always an amateur decorator and she had a decorating license. Well, she never did anything for anybody, but she did have a license. I was to find a restaurant where we could give a party for the Reagans before the swearing-in ceremony. See, he was going to be sworn in at 3 5 1
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House one minute past midnight on New Year’s Day evening. But when I went to these places, they were all going to be shut that day. I had read in a magazine about the Firehouse, so I went over there, and I thought it was charming. The owners were two brothers from San Francisco who happened to be good Republicans, and they said, ‘All right, you can have it for a private party.’ So that’s where we gave the dinner. I remember they had those big flares as you walked through the walkway to go into the restaurant. There was a toast given that night, and I know Earle gave it, and he said, ‘To the Governor! Who knows, one day he may be our president.’ ”2
Among those applauding Earle Jorgensen’s toast were the three men most responsible for launching Ronald Reagan’s political career: Cy Rubel, Holmes Tuttle, and Henry Salvatori. The Bloomingdales and the Deutsches were there, too, as were the Jaquelin Humes from San Francisco. The Wilsons and the French Smiths had flown up from Los Angeles with Jack and Bunny Wrather on the company Convair.
The Firehouse guest list also included Loyal and Edith, Richard Davis and his second wife, Patricia, and Neil and Bess Reagan. Nancy’s cousins Charlotte Ramage and Marguerite Grebe came from Atlanta and Chicago, respectively, with their families. Three of the four Reagan children were there: Maureen with her then husband, Lieutenant David Sills; fourteen-year-old Patti, who had complained, “How could you do this to me?,” when her father phoned her at Orme on election night;3 and eight-year-old Ron, whom everyone called the Skipper, accompanied by the Reagan housekeeper, Anne Allman. Michael was snowed in at Lake Tahoe, where his mother had taken him for the holidays.4 Jane Wyman was not invited to any of the five-day inaugural festivities. “Why would she be?”
said Marion Jorgensen, who recalled flying back to Sun Valley, the fashionable Idaho ski resort where the Jorgensens owned a condominium, the next day and skipping the rest of the week’s events. “Can you imagine staying in Sacramento that long?”5
According to Nancy Reagan, the Sunday night swearing in was supposed to be a private affair for family and friends, to be followed by the official inauguration on Thursday, January 5. But more than thirty TV crews were waiting in the ornate rotunda of the capitol to watch Ronald Reagan assume the governorship of the most populous state in the union. As State Supreme Court Justice Marshall McComb held the four-hundred-year-old Bible of Father Junipero Serra, one of the state’s first Spanish settlers, Reagan repeated the oath of office, and Nancy stood by, her big eyes brimming with Sacramento: 1967–1968
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pride and adoration. “Well, George, here we are on The Late Show again,”
the freshly installed Governor quipped to his old co-star Senator George Murphy, who had preceded him at the rostrum. When the laughter died down, Reagan delivered a brief and surprisingly religious speech in which he promised to try to “bring to public office the teachings and the precepts of the Prince of Peace.”6 This was clearly the son of Nelle speaking, not the heir of Barry Goldwater.
There has been much speculation as to why this ceremony was held at such an odd hour. The reason, Reagan always said, was to put a stop to Pat Brown’s last-minute judge-appointing binge as soon as legally possible.
The outgoing Governor had another theory. “My only guess is that it