Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [234]
But it was in Los Angeles that the couple truly reigned, and there that the social rituals that would turn the Reagan Group into something akin to a royal court took hold. The first of these was Nancy’s annual birthday celebration, which began as a ladies’ lunch at Betty Adams’s house in July 1967. “I had a cozy little group—Amelia Gray, Betsy, Harriet, Marion, Erlenne, Mary Jane, and Betty Wilson,” Betty Adams told me.94 This lunch was later moved to the Bistro, and some years was supplemented by a coed dinner at Chasen’s for a larger group, including Mervyn and Kitty LeRoy, Jules and Doris Stein, Billy Haines and Jimmie Shields, and, if they were in town, Walter and Lee Annenberg. The Tuttles, Salvatoris, and Darts were included in the dinners, but Virginia, Grace, and Punky were not part of the lunches. “She usually had the same group,” Betsy Bloomingdale explained. “Because what we did then was to have her pick one thing out, and everybody bought it—maybe a very nice chain from Ruser, which used to be the jeweler. You know, instead of everybody bringing her lots of things that she didn’t need.”95
In 1968, Betty Wilson launched the Western-theme party that would be given every Fourth of July weekend as part of Nancy’s birthday festivities. The first two or three were tailgate picnics on an undeveloped piece of property the Wilsons had bought in Temecula, a remote area of Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles. “It was pretty land,” said Bill Wilson. “It had some nice oak trees. But there was nothing there, so we had 3 7 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to take tables and benches and barbecues down there. Ronnie used to insist on taking a couple of .22 rifles, because he couldn’t stand the idea of these little ground squirrels chewing up the roots of the trees. So if one of them would pop his head out of a hole, Ronnie would take a shot at him and see if he could get him. His security guys would really go into orbit when Ronnie would hand me a rifle and we’d start walking out through the bushes. But I think Ronnie did that pretty much to tease them, as well as so the two of us could just go out and have some fun shooting gophers or ground squirrels together.”96
“There was nothing there,” Marion Jorgensen said of the first party at Temecula. “They had a little landing strip, and Tex Thornton flew us down on his plane—Irene Dunne, Earle, and me. It was a Cessna, it didn’t hold more than about six people. I remember sitting on logs. We spread out everything on the ground. It really was a picnic.”97
The Reagans, the French Smiths, and the Schreibers had all bought tracts adjoining the Wilsons’ that year. The developers of the area called it Rancho California, and there was an understanding that roads and utilities would be extended into it. The Reagans paid $347,000 for their 778
acres, which they could well afford, having sold the Malibu Canyon ranch to 20th Century Fox for $1.9 million just before he became Governor. By the early 1970s, with Rancho California still undeveloped, the Wilsons bought an avocado farm north of Santa Barbara, and Betty started giving Nancy’s Western parties there. A few years later, the Wilsons acquired a huge spread in northern Mexico, and the Reagans bought the 688-acre Rancho del Cielo, on a mountaintop above the Wilsons’ old avocado farm, for $527,000, and sold their Rancho California tract for $856,000.
From then on, Betty Wilson, joined