Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [255]
and supposedly unaware of the tensions between the Annenbergs and the Bruces—she invited David and Evangeline Bruce. At the dinner, Evangeline refused to make conversation with Lee, and Walter later declared that he would never speak to Katharine Graham again.79 According to Marguerite Littman, a longtime American resident in London and a leading hostess, the fault lay as much as with the Annenbergs as with the Bruces. “They went around trashing the Bruces. Lee said they didn’t use fingerbowls, and silly things like that—that Winfield House was falling apart.”80
Even before Annenberg presented his credentials to Queen Elizabeth that April, his wife had flown over Billy Haines and Ted Graber to begin work on a six-month, $1 million renovation of the ambassador’s residence. The thirty-five-room Georgian-style mansion in Regent’s Park had been built in 1937 by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who donated it to the American government after the war. “The first dinner we gave at Winfield House was for Governor and Mrs. Reagan,” Lee Annenberg told me. “Walter had arranged for Ronnie to be a speaker at the Institute of Directors, held in the Royal Albert Hall. There must have been six thousand people there, and then we gave a dinner for thirty or forty.”81
Although no one realized it at the time, among the corporate executives at the Royal Albert Hall that night in November 1969 was Denis Thatcher, who went home and told his wife, Margaret, then minister of education in the government of Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, how impressed he had been by the California governor’s ideas and delivery. Reagan had received a standing ovation, apparently a tribute that only former prime minister Harold Macmillan had ever received. “I started to cry,” Nancy later said. “I noticed a woman next to me also crying, and I was touched that she’d been as moved as I was.”82
“That was the English part of the trip,” Betsy Bloomingdale said. “I was in charge of the French part.” The high point of their Paris stay was a dinner in the Reagans’ honor at Versailles, hosted by its then curator, Gerald van der Kemp, and his American wife, Florence. “I had called Florence,” Betsy Bloomingdale said, “because Nancy had always been so fascinated by the stories of the dinners we’d gone to in Versailles. And being a big Republican anyway, Florence was thrilled to give a dinner for the Governor of California. . . . The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were 4 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House there, and a lot of terribly sophisticated French people—you know, Alexis de Redé, Ghislaine de Polignac, all that crowd that we’d known for years.
Real sophisticates. So nobody really cared who Ronald Reagan was. He was a nice, handsome-looking actor from Hollywood, I think they thought, with a very pretty wife and what have you. But Ronnie was fabulous that night. He got up—did a little bit in French—and then really started to speak. And after dinner they all knew who Ronald Reagan was.
They were mad for Ronald Reagan.”83
For Nancy, nothing compared with meeting the woman for whom a king had given up his throne. The aging Windsors, who were renowned for their exquisite taste in everything from decor to dogs, held sway over international society from a petit palais in the Bois de Boulogne. “The Duchess was the star of the evening, the absolute star,” Nancy told Women’s Wear Daily’s Jody Jacobs. “Her yellow Givenchy dress over pants was so beautiful even Ronnie mentioned it. . . . It’s not just that she looks so good. It’s her charm and the way she has of making you feel you’re the most important person in the world when she’s talking to you.” Nancy said of the Duke, “Oh, he was wonderful. . . . He told Ronnie, ‘I’m completely behind what you stand for.’ ”84 Jacobs had hoped to conduct her interview with Nancy at Winfield House, but Lee nixed that. According to Jacobs, Lee said that “she had spent too much time and effort on the house to