Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [256]
A year later, at the 1970 Republican Governors’ Conference in Sun Valley, Nancy made a new friend, Katharine Graham. The shy, vaguely dowdy publishing heiress, who had taken over The Washington Post after her husband’s suicide seven years earlier, and the fashion-conscious former actress were an unlikely match, but they seemed to have an immediate affinity for each other. They had been encouraged to seek each other out by an even more unlikely go-between. “I must say, we kept this rather a dark secret,” Graham told me in 1998, sitting beneath a Diego Rivera painting in the drawing room of her R Street mansion. “Because what we actually did was meet through Truman Capote. And both of us felt slightly embarrassed—you know, because people kept asking all through the Reagan years, ‘How did you happen to meet? How did you happen to be friends?’ And at that point, for some reason, we didn’t think it was suitable. I don’t exactly know why. But we never much said that in fact we did meet through Capote. After In Cold Blood he was very interested in the death penalty, and he had gone out to California in pursuit of death row Sacramento II: 1969–1974
4 1 1
interviews. In the course of doing that he met Governor and Mrs. Reagan.
He said to me, ‘I know you won’t believe me, honey, but you’d really like them,’ and encouraged me to look them up. It happened quite accidentally, because I was invited to speak at the Republican governors’ meeting in Sun Valley, on a panel about the press. I flew out there all alone and feeling very unsure of myself—I’d only gone to work in ’63. At one of the first receptions—it was a terribly cold winter night and everyone went out to the dinner in sleds—I met the Reagans. And because of Truman, you know, Nancy and I got to know each other.”86
“Truman Capote came to the house for lunch a few times in Sacramento,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you really should know Kay Graham. If you knew her, you’d like her.’ Ronnie used to do a funny imitation of him. So we went to Sun Valley, and I walked into this lodge where we were having dinner. And there was Kay standing in front of the fireplace. So I walked up to her and said, ‘Well, I think it’s time we really met.’”87
California’s First Lady had become much more sure of herself by the end of her husband’s first term. Since 1968 she had been hosting annual poolside parties at the Executive Residence for legislators and their wives with entertainment provided by Hollywood friends such as Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Red Skelton. She had found a cause she loved in the Foster Grandparents Program, which arranged for lonely senior citizens to spend time with institutionalized children. As she told the Sacramento Union, “I think it is wonderful because it benefits both sides—the older people whose families are grown, and the children who receive an extra amount of love and attention.”88 The federally funded program had been started by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver in 1965, and was still quite small when Nancy became aware of it on a visit to Pacific State Hospital. She soon took charge, and eventually expanded the program to all state hospitals. She also made regular visits to soldiers wounded in Vietnam at military hospitals around the state. “Hospital visiting is a natural thing for me to do,” she said. “I used to watch my father operate.”89 After these visits, she would call the servicemen’s parents, wives, or girlfriends and pass on messages. These activities were well suited to Nancy’s nurse’s side—they also were her way of showing her support for Ronnie’s very vocal pro-war stance. On October 15, 1970, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched on Washington to demand that Nixon pull out of Vietnam, the Governor’s 4 1 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House press office invited TV crews to accompany the First Lady on a visit to an Army hospital in San Francisco. “It’s a symbolic visit,” Nancy admitted. “I want the boys here to know there are a lot of people