Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [247]
That year’s guest list included Cecil Beaton, Jules and Doris Stein, Freddie and Janet de Cordova, Ray and Mal Milland, Bill Frye and Jim Wharton, and Father Bill Kenney, the Paulist priest who had brought Alfred into the church. Also partaking of the champagne, caviar, and chili was the gadabout New York real estate heir who was fast becoming Nancy Reagan’s best male friend: Jerry Zipkin.
Neither Nancy nor Betsy could ever remember when they met “the divine Jerome,” as Pat Buckley called him, but from the late 1960s until his death in 1995 the three seemed inseparable. Betsy Bloomingdale told me that the commonly held assumption that he and Alfred had grown up together in Manhattan was not true, though they probably crossed paths at Elberon, a New Jersey shore resort frequented by well-to-do Jewish families in the 1920s. “Alfred and Jerry used to call it Albumen-by-the-Sea,”
she said, and her party books show that the first time Zipkin went to dinner on Delfern Drive was in 1960. Nancy Reagan told me she thought she Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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met Zipkin at one of Anita May’s parties in the 1950s. “But I’m really not sure,” she said. “It just seems like he was always part of my life.”23
In later years, Zipkin sometimes claimed that he had introduced Nancy and Betsy to each other. “All of a sudden, he was there,” said a friend of both women, who remembered meeting him at a dinner at the Jorgensens’ around the time Reagan became Governor. “Justin Dart took an instant dislike to him at that dinner. A lot of us wondered what Nancy and Betsy saw in Zipkin—all that spewing venom.”
“I’ll never forget, one day there was a lunch at Betsy and Alfred’s,” said Marion Jorgensen. “It was right after Ronnie was elected, and I don’t think he was there. Jerry was walking beside me as we were leaving the dining room, and Nancy was just ahead of us with Alfred. And Jerry said, ‘Look at her. She looks awful. Everything is wrong—the hair, the dress, the shoes.’ And she heard him and turned around. He said, ‘I said you look awful.’ She gave him a look. But a few minutes later I see them in a corner talking. And that’s when it began—their great friendship—I think.”24
For Nancy, their bond was based on much more than clothes: “Jerry had an eye,” she said in a long, wistful conversation we had a few days after he died, in 1995. “And whenever Jerry said something, he was right.
He was very instinctive about people. He was a great teacher. You could learn a lot from Jerry—about art, about books, about history—if you left yourself open to it. He enjoyed teaching you. Friendship was the basis of it all. Ronnie was very fond of Jerry, too. Jerry was a big defender. God help anybody who said anything against Ronnie to Jerry. And he never forgot. I’d forget, but he wouldn’t.”25
Controversial, cultivated, outspoken, and hilarious, Jerry Zipkin was a know-it-all who knew everybody from Diana Vreeland and Doris Stein to Liza Minnelli and Mick Jagger. Maniacally well organized, he traveled with greeting cards, wrapping paper, and Scotch tape, “in case I’m invited to a birthday party,” and finished his Christmas shopping by September, but didn’t feel left out of the holiday spirit because, as he told The New York Times, “I’m usually advising others what to buy.”26 His fourteen-room apartment on upper Park Avenue was a jungle of objets: eighteenth-century Meissen leopards, miniature Henry Moore sculptures, a gold-leaf portrait of his shoe done by Andy Warhol in the 1950s. He played up his reputation for nastiness by collecting all kinds of snakes—vipers, asps, co-bras, pythons—in crystal, bronze, silver, and porcelain, or on needlepoint 3 9 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House pillows. But he told House and Garden, “If I saw a real snake, I think I’d pass out.”27
Every June, Zipkin was at Claridge’s in London for the season; every July, at the Plaza Athénée in Paris for the haute couture, followed by two or three weeks in the South of France at the Cap Ferrat villa of