Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [220]
After Spencer’s remark was printed in Vanity Fair in 1998, Nancy Reagan called me to object. “It was exactly what Ronnie said. Pat Brown had sworn in eighty-four judges since the election, and Ronnie wanted to cut him off. I didn’t even know Jeane Dixon at the time. I met her once in Washington. I never had any conversation with her.” In his book on Reagan’s governorship, Lou Cannon concludes, “The real reason for the timing of the midnight ceremony was not astrological but political,” and he confirms that Brown appointed or promoted some eighty judges in the last two months of 1966, including his own brother, and that as late as January 1, 1967, he appointed his son, future governor Jerry Brown, to the State Narcotics Board.9
Ed Helin told me that both Pat Brown and his predecessor, Goodwin Knight, were clients of his boss, Carroll Righter. According to Helin, Righter also advised “almost all of the Kitchen Cabinet,” though he was vague on specific names. Marion Jorgensen said she was not a devotee of Righter’s but had consulted with other astrologers on occasion. “A lot of us did that,” she said. “It was fun. But one of them said I would have a serious automobile accident in the next three months. I was so frightened I almost did have an accident. I said, ‘Never again.’ ” What did she think of the rumor that Nancy had set the swearing-in time based on the advice of 3 5 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House a stargazer? “Horsefeathers. She was never that big on that astrology stuff.
It was not serious. At least I didn’t think it was serious.”10 It seems only fair to note that while Nancy usually took the heat for relying on astrologers, Ronnie was also “incurably superstitious,” in the words of Michael Deaver, who would soon become one of the Governor’s closest aides. “If he emptied his pants pocket you would always find about five good-luck charms that people had sent him. I am sure he read his horoscope every day.”11
It was almost one in the morning on January 2 when the limousine of California’s new chief executive and first lady, followed by those of the Kitchen Cabinet and their wives, made its way to the Governor’s Mansion, where Betty Wilson had organized a buffet supper. The ninety-year-old Victorian house bore a marked resemblance to the Addams family’s residence and was in obvious need of extensive repairs, but the Infanta had done the best she could to camouflage the superficial defects of its main rooms. “Betty went in there and really fixed it up,” Harriet Deutsch recalled. “She had everything done in candlelight. She didn’t want the cobwebs to show. She put white camellias everyplace. Very dim lights.” Marion Jorgensen added, “We all looked very peculiar. It was the day of the very short sleeveless dress—you know, Norell, Courrèges, the whole bit.”12
Sacramento, a city of 200,000 whose major industry after politics was fruit canning, had never seen anything quite like Nancy and her fashion-plate friends. The women of the Group may have been in their forties and fifties, but there was nothing matronly or dowdy about the way they looked. These were Sunbelt socialites, sleek, up-to-the-minute, almost Pop. The Sacramento Union’s Mae Belle Pendergast devoted many column inches to describing the designer outfits Nancy wore to the week’s inaugural events. For the swearing in, she borrowed a black-and-white se-quined Galanos cocktail dress so shiny that in photographs it looked as if it were coated in plastic. For Wednesday night’s inaugural concert, which featured the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, opera singer Marilyn Horne, and Jack Benny, she