Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [245]
On December 13, 1968, the Los Angeles Times named Nancy “Woman of the Year,” an honor accompanied by an article titled “A Model First Lady.”
“Nancy Reagan treaded the intricate paths of politics, state and national, with never a misstep,” the paper declared, and went on to commend her for doing “a job few women would envy for long if they understood the day in, day out grind that ceremonial duties can become. She was poised, friendly, informed, interested and beautifully turned out day after day, not just when she felt like it.” There were laudatory quotes from her mother, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and the recently widowed Anita May, who said, “Nancy has never changed. She has always been a wonderful wife and mother with time for her family, time for her friends, time for everybody.
When my husband was ill she never came to town without coming up to see him.”10
The kudo was but a temporary truce in the ongoing battle between the Reagans and the paper’s publisher, Otis Chandler. The liberal Otis had 3 9 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House succeeded his father as publisher in 1960 at age thirty, though the conservative Norman remained chairman of the Times Mirror Company. Under Norman the paper had turned big profits; under Otis it started winning Pulitzers. The younger Chandler’s elevation had been pushed by his mother, the formidable “Buff ” Chandler, over the objections of the rest of the family, who favored Norman’s younger brother, Philip, a patron of the John Birch Society. The Times had endorsed Reagan for governor, but as David Halberstam has written in The Powers That Be, both Otis and Buff disapproved of him and his policies.11 Unfortunately, Buff also found Nancy insufferable, and Buff was the power behind her son’s throne.
According to Marion Jorgensen, “Otis never really took over. He was the most useless human being I ever saw in my life. It was Buff. It was all Buff. The paper gave a hard time to the Reagans. She was very snobbish about it. She had no reason not to like them. But the Chandlers were used to having their hand in, and she didn’t pick Ronnie.”12
Dorothy Buffum, as she was christened in 1901, was the daughter of the owner of Buffum’s department stores in déclassé Long Beach, and she was always looked down on by her right-wing Pasadena in-laws, which may explain why she constantly nudged her husband toward the center. When Norman refused to switch his support from Taft to Eisenhower in 1952, she told him, “No Ike, no sex,” or words to that effect, and it worked.13 The paper had been in the Chandler family—and the Republican Party’s vest pocket—since 1882, when it was bought by Norman’s maternal grandfather, Colonel Harrison Grey Otis. Norman took over in 1944, upon the death of his father, Harry, who was said to be the richest man in Los Angeles. Shortly after that, Buff went to work as her husband’s “administrative assistant.” She helped him start the afternoon Los Angeles Mirror in 1947, launched the Times Woman of the Year award in 1950, and won it herself the following year, for heading the Save the Hollywood Bowl Committee.
Her most important accomplishment was the building of the $30 million Los Angeles County Music Center. When the downtown elite didn’t come up with enough money, she turned to the Westside and ended up naming two of the center’s three buildings, the Mark Taper Forum and the Ah-manson Theater, after rival Jewish savings-and-loan tycoons.14 The third, and largest, was named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
“She was tough, old Buff,” said producer Jim Wharton. “She had a list of what she thought everybody should give, and you were on that list for $25,000, $50,000, $1 million, or whatever. And,