Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [244]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy was in a cheerful mood, too, since the Reagans would be staying at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ sumptuous estate in Rancho Mirage, along with the President-elect and his daughter Tricia. The 32,000-square-foot neo-Mayan palace had been completed two years earlier at a cost of $5 million. Set on a square mile of erstwhile desert and enclosed by pink stucco walls, with a gatehouse at the corner of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope Drives, the house had been designed by Quincy Jones, the dean of USC’s architecture school, and decorated by Billy Haines and Ted Graber in vibrant corals, yellows, and greens. Its 6,400-square-foot living room was shaped like a tent, with walls of volcanic rock and enormous picture windows looking out onto Walter’s private nine-hole golf course. There was a meditation garden for Lee, still a devoted Christian Scientist, as well as a cactus garden and two hothouses, one just for orchids. The house contained a good part of the Annenbergs’ art collection, including masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse.3 The first time the Reagans had visited Sunnylands in 1967, Nancy wrote in the guest book,
“Sheer heaven! How can you ever bear to tear yourself away?”4
“The Eisenhowers came to us for lunch while Nancy and Ronnie were our guests,” Lee Annenberg said of that visit. After leaving the White House in 1961, Ike and Mamie spent their winters in a bungalow on the eleventh fairway of the Eldorado Country Club, the most exclusive of the private gated communities around Palm Springs, and the Annenbergs became their friends. “You know, when you played golf with General Eisenhower, no one ever spoke,” she continued. “There was this silence. He was very serious about his golf. And he always wanted to be called ‘General.’
He was a chef. He loved to cook steaks, and he would put on an apron and a high, tall chef hat and do delicious barbecued steaks. They had their friends at the club—the Darts and the Gosdens and the Tuttles. The Firestones were at Thunderbird. It was like a big, happy group. They had us over from time to time, and they came here from time to time. He came here for golfing and fishing. We had the lake stocked with fish, and as he got older and it was harder for him to play golf, he would come over here and fish.”5
The three-day Republican Governors’ Conference was “quite a production,” according to Helene von Damm, who was there as Bill Clark’s secretary. “The Walt Disney studio masterminded the weekend. They issued each Governor a car with a personalized license plate. The entertainment, including a manufactured ‘afternoon on the range’ complete with cowboy Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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hats and chaps for the men and bonnets and umbrellas for the women, and a western barbecue made getting any work done pretty challenging.”6
Most of the governors were staying at the Riviera Hotel, but the real action was at Sunnylands. On Saturday, Walter invited Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford, then the GOP minority leader in the House, to join him, Nixon, and Reagan in a round of golf. (Eisenhower had been hospitalized earlier that year and could not attend the conference.) Pointedly excluded was Maryland governor and vice president–elect Spiro Agnew, who Walter thought was “the bottom of the barrel” and who had embarrassed himself at the opening ceremony the night before by saying how pleased he was to be in “Palm Beach.”7
“That weekend was when Nixon asked Walter to be his ambassador to Great Britain, right then and there on the spot,” Lee Annenberg told me.
“Walter said, ‘Leave my paper? Well, maybe for two years.’ Nixon said,
‘Oh, you’ll love it. I know you’ll stay longer.’”8 According to other accounts, a stunned Annenberg—fearful that the confirmation process would dredge up his father’s imprisonment and overturn everything he had