Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [254]
There was a little note that it was from Mrs. Marcos, and it was quite clear that she wanted me to wear it to that evening’s dinner. Mike said, ‘You look gorgeous.’ I couldn’t stand, but I did look pretty good. And I walked into the Reagans’ suite, and Nancy has got on the worst-looking outfit I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t have huge sleeves, it’s not beaded, it’s like a proletariat farmer’s dress. This had not been by accident. Nancy said, ‘Where did you get that dress?’ I said, ‘It was on my bed.’ She said, ‘ This was on my bed. Can you believe it?’ Of course, Imelda came out in something more resplendent than ever.”72
On their second day, while Reagan met with President Marcos, Nancy and the children were given a tour of Manila. When they passed a river-bank slum, Patti asked her mother if she felt guilty. “Of course not,”
Nancy answered.73 Their cease-fire was obviously over by then. For Nancy 4 0 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reynolds, who was also on the trip, “Patti was a sullen, ungrateful little girl with a lot of anger and bitterness. I never saw her have a warm glance, a warm word, a warm anything toward Nancy.”74
“The favorable remarks about the exceptionally able manner in which you, Nancy and your children represented the United States at the opening of the Philippine Cultural Center continue to reach me,” Nixon wrote to Reagan on October 8. “You were superb Ambassadors of goodwill and I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated your efforts. . . . Pat joins me in sending warm personal regards to you and Nancy.”75
The following month the Reagans were off to London and Paris with the Bloomingdales. It was Nancy’s first trip to Europe since she had toured the Continent with Edith and Loyal when she was twelve, and Ronnie’s since 1949, when he filmed The Hasty Heart in London. “The wives flew over on one plane, and the husbands on another,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “In those days Ronnie and Nancy didn’t fly together because of the children.”76 Although this was a private trip, in London the Reagans stayed with the Annenbergs at the ambassador’s residence, Winfield House. The Bloomingdales, who were not as close to Walter and Lee, took a suite at Claridge’s.
As Walter Annenberg had predicted, his confirmation had been a real struggle. His predecessor at the Court of St. James’s had been the quintes-sential Eastern establishment career diplomat David K. Bruce, whose elegant and erudite wife, Evangeline, made no secret of her dismay at their being followed by a couple she considered nouveau-riche social climbers from California. “I’ve never even heard of these strange people,” Evangeline told friends as she set about poisoning the well for Walter and Lee in both London and Washington.77 The Bruces’ choice for the most desirable post in the U.S. diplomatic service had been CBS chairman William Paley, who along with his wife, Babe, had openly sought the appointment.78
More seriously, Annenberg’s nomination was opposed by Democratic senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and strongly criticized by The New York Times, which editorialized that Annenberg had bought the nomination with campaign contributions. (In fact, he had not given money to Nixon’s 1968 campaign, but several of his sisters had.) When The Washington Post joined in with a Drew Pearson column reminding readers that Moses Annenberg had been jailed for tax evasion in the 1940s, Walter called the Post’s owner, Katharine Graham, and accused her of betraying their friendship. Graham found herself in an awkward Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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position: she was scheduled to host a dinner in honor of the Annenbergs at her house in Georgetown a few days