Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [246]
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through.”15 Betsy Bloomingdale concurred: “I was terrified of her. I remember she came to dinner one night and I had on these new earrings from Harry Winston that Alfred had given me. They had these marvelous pear-shaped diamonds, and she said to Alfred, ‘Just one of those little diamonds, if you gave it to the Music Center . . .’ Alfred did give money, and our name is on the wall.”16 Among the Reagan Group, it was gospel that Grace Salvatori had been the real rainmaker of the ten-year building drive.
“Gracie Salvatori raised more money right out of her telephone than Buff Chandler ever thought of raising,” Marion Jorgensen told me. “We were with the Salvatoris the night the Music Center opened, in 1964. Buff Chandler got up and made a speech, talked about Welton Beckett, the architect, and never ever said one word about Gracie Salvatori. It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. The cruelest worst.”17
When the Mark Taper Forum opened in April 1967, Governor and Mrs. Reagan were photographed with Buff Chandler; Nancy was wearing her white Galanos gown from the inaugural ball. Buff Chandler liked clothes, too, and she had her dresses made by Balenciaga in Paris and Norman Norell in New York. She was also a devotee of Carroll Righter’s, so much so that she once threatened to fire an editor who wanted to drop his astrology column.18 In the picture, the two women seem worlds apart.
Only a week before, Reagan’s then chief aide Philip Battaglia had gone public about the Governor’s unhappiness with his press coverage.
Battaglia complained that it was considered perfectly proper for Mrs.
Chandler to raise money from the private sector for her Music Center,
“yet when a bipartisan group of private donors started a fund drive for a new Governor’s residence, a seemingly parallel situation, it’s tagged editorially as illegal. It makes you wonder.”19 Mrs. Chandler was not amused.
The Reagans and the Bloomingdales slipped out during intermission because, it was said, they disapproved of the opening night play, John Whiting’s The Devils, about a libertine priest and a wanton nun, which had been condemned by the archdiocese of Los Angeles and the County Board of Supervisors.20
In 1968, when Buff Chandler launched the Blue Ribbon 400—a women’s group that would provide continuing funds for the center by requiring each of its four hundred members to donate $1,000 a year—the Governor’s wife was conspicuous in her lack of support. The first meeting was held at Doris Stein’s Misty Mountain, with Grace Salvatori and Anne Douglas as co-chairs, and everyone from Anita May to Virginia 3 9 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Tuttle as founding members. “Nancy loathed Buff Chandler,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “She didn’t want us to join the Blue Ribbon 400.
Punky Dart and I were the last holdouts, as I recall. Marion, Betty Wilson, Erlenne, Harriet—they all joined. I never joined. I didn’t really need to be involved in that, and Nancy didn’t want us to be.”21
“The paper was terrible to Ronnie all during the governor’s years,”
Nancy Reagan recalled wearily. “And Buff was a very strong woman. But at least we knew where we stood with her. Her son was trickier. I remember the son asked us to dinner and afterward we had to go into his trophy room. It was filled with all these animal heads and guns. And he told us about shooting each one. It was as if he was trying to prove his masculinity.”22
The fact that Betsy was almost alone in taking Nancy’s side against the fear-some matriarch of the Los Angeles Times was an indication that by the second year of the governorship she had become first among equals at the budding Reagan court. Her husband’s behind-the-scenes role had also grown during that time; it was said that Nancy called Alfred frequently to ask for his advice on anything from staff problems to how to help Ronnie deal with recalcitrant legislators. On December 31, 1968, Ronnie and Nancy were at the Bloomingdales’ New Year’s Eve party for the fourth year running,