Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [248]
“He would come out with all his vermeil boxes,” said set designer Jacques Mapes, “and spread them out in his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
Mapes also told me about the night in 1965 when Zipkin came to pick him up at Kennedy Airport and insisted they have dinner in Queens.
“Jerry wasn’t invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball,” Mapes explained. “He was really very, very distraught about that. And he wanted to be able to truthfully say he was out of town.”28
Jerome Robert Zipkin, the son of Annette Goldstein and David Zipkin, a real estate operator, was born on December 18, 1914, in New York City.
The family was well off but not particularly social, something young Jerry seemed determined to change as soon as possible. He first attracted the notice of The New York Times at age fifteen, when he recited a hymn at the dedication of the new Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. In 1932 he entered Princeton University, which accepted very few Jewish students in those days.
Although he kept it secret from almost all of his friends, he was quietly expelled in his junior year for stealing a copy of Terrasi’s Life of van Gogh from the university store. According to one friend, he had a nervous breakdown.
He completed his education at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, where, he liked to joke, he “majored in canoeing.”29 Mickey Ziffren, the wife of the prominent Los Angeles lawyer Paul Ziffren, was his classmate there:
“We both fell in love with the same Italian exchange student—a count to boot—and I got him. Jerry wasn’t visibly anything. He always kept a veil around his private life.”30
Zipkin liked to tell friends that he spent the war “gathering information for the OSS at the Stork Club.” The Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services have no record of him working for the precursor to the CIA, but it is fascinating to speculate that he may have been the agency’s man Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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on Nancy Reagan. In any case, he was always very mysterious about what he did between lunch and dinner. “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” he would proudly announce to anyone who inquired. But he was listed as president of his father’s company as early as 1941, and his good friend the designer Bill Blass told me that in the 1950s “Jerry went to his office every day. He ran the business until he realized it was interfering with his social life, so he sold it. And from then on he specialized in friendship. It became his profession.”31
After his father’s death in 1944, Zipkin started taking his mother on shopping trips to Europe. “He bought her a lot of clothes,” said family friend Steven Kaufman, of the Pittsburgh department store dynasty. “Jerry was madly insane for her, and she for him. They were both ardent Republicans, to the point of nausea.”32 Zipkin and his mother shared the Park Avenue apartment until she died in 1974, which might explain why he was so good with grande dames—that and his passion for card games. In fact, it was a letter of introduction from his canasta chum Sophie Gimbel that brought him to his original Los Angeles patroness, Anita May. Soon he counted Claudette Colbert, Joan Bennett, and ZaSu Pitts among his closest friends. He also became “inty-inty” with Billy Haines and Jimmie Shields, as well as Mapes’s companion, Ross Hunter, the producer of the 1950s Doris Day movies. In 1963, when Zipkin found out that ZaSu Pitts was terminally ill, he persuaded Hunter to offer her a part. Given this roster of friends, it seems as if a friendship with Nancy Reagan was all but inevitable.
By the late 1960s he was close to not only California’s First Lady but also half the women in the Colleagues. “We always got along very well,”
said Marion