Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [226]
“We all made $5,000 profit—we never felt Ronnie and Nancy owed us anything.”49 Nonetheless, the press carped.
Reporters also carped when Nancy turned to her friends for help in furnishing the house and arranged for their gifts to be tax-deductible.
Betsy gave her an English-style mahogany dining room table that seated twenty-four, and Marion provided the chairs. Virginia Milner, the wife of steel heir Reese Llewellyn Milner and a member of the Colleagues, donated Nancy’s favorite piece—an antique French Regency fruitwood secretary—and other items reportedly totaling $17,000.50 “The furniture belongs to the state, not to us,” Nancy explained to George Christy, Sacramento: 1967–1968
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“but wouldn’t you know that some politicians tried to make a brouhaha of it.”51
Meanwhile, Reagan asked Leland Kaiser to raise $500,000 to build a new Governor’s Mansion. The legislature had gone along with Pat Brown when he submitted plans for a glass-and-marble palazzo that would have cost $750,000; the only reason it wasn’t built was that there were disagreements over its location. But Reagan’s effort came under heavy attack for relying on private funding, and Kaiser compounded the problem by sending a letter to lobbyists asking them for contributions. The project was temporarily shelved, and Kaiser was eased out of the Kitchen Cabinet.52 However, Nancy kept on complaining—“When I go to other states and see how the governors live, I’m embarrassed”—and the press kept on carping.53
Nothing wounded Nancy more than a June 1968 Saturday Evening Post profile by Joan Didion, the dryly brilliant chronicler of California’s history and society. Didion was the sister-in-law of Dominick Dunne, a good friend of the Bloomingdales’, and Nancy thought the day they spent together at the 45th Street residence had gone well. Unbeknownst to Nancy, Didion had once stayed at the Governor’s Mansion with Earl Warren’s daughter and considered it her “favorite house in the world.”54 It is hardly surprising that she mocked the suburban Tudor Nancy was so proud of as “a stage set . . . for a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”55 Nancy was furious at Didion for implying that her constant smiling was nothing more than the obvious insincerity of a second-rate actress. From then on, whenever Didion’s name came up, Nancy would snap, “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled?” Because of Didion’s skill and reputation this piece would set the tone for much of the coverage of Nancy that followed—at least that is what Nancy and her friends believed.
“That article hugely affected how Nancy Reagan responded to the press,” said Betsy Bloomingdale’s daughter-in-law Justine. “Betsy told me that Nancy was just stunned by the way she was ripped up one end and down the other. It was the first time she had been excoriated like that.” As it happened, Justine’s sister Serena Carroll was taking a writing course taught by Joan Didion at UCLA that summer. “She talked about interviewing Nancy Reagan—repeatedly—and about how cold she was,” Carroll told me.
“Joan Didion intensely disliked Nancy Reagan.”56
Apparently Didion wasn’t alone. An article published a year earlier in 3 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the California News Reporter summed up the contradictory impressions people had of the controversial First Lady:
She is a beautiful, charming, talented lady, a devoted mother and wife, a warm, friendly, gentle and unpretentious