Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [258]
Sinatra had made a few appearances for Reagan in 1966, after taking of-fense at Pat Brown’s an-actor-killed-Lincoln ad. This time around, he was angry at Jesse Unruh, who had been a major Bobby Kennedy booster, for not doing enough to carry California for his friend Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In the intervening years Sinatra had seen more of the Reagans socially through the Annenbergs and the Deutsches; the latter had been spending New Year’s at the singer’s desert compound since the early 1960s. He went all-out for Reagan in 1970, staging glitzy benefits throughout the state, usually with Dean Martin at his side, and raising more than $500,000 of the campaign’s $3.5 million total.100
On election night in November, the Reagans went to the Jorgensens’
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House before proceeding to the Biltmore, as they had four years earlier. “Ronnie decided it was good luck,” explained Marion Jorgensen. “So when he ran a second time, Nancy called me up. I said, ‘Oh, are we having the cocktail party?’ She said, ‘Yes, but there will be a few more people.’ It was astonishing how many more popped up that night.” Almost the entire Kitchen Cabinet was on hand this time, as well as outgoing Nevada governor Paul Laxalt, who had become a close ally of Reagan’s; the Deavers and Nancy Reynolds; and Gloria and Jimmy Stewart. Marion made a point of having not only the same food—veal stew and coconut cake—but also the same employees from the same caterer.101
Demonstrators carrying Vietcong flags hurled four-letter words and oranges at Ronald Reagan as he was sworn in for a second term on the steps of the capitol, on January 4, 1971. But that didn’t stop the Governor, who was only a month away from his sixtieth birthday, from completing his address.
“They’re like mosquitoes and flies. They’re part of the world, and you have to put up with them, I guess,” he said of the protesters who now plagued most of his public appearances.102 For them, he was now “Ronald Ray-gun,”
a term that Joan Baez had coined at Woodstock in 1969.
Nancy had decided that the inaugural ball should be white-tie, and had asked Sinatra to produce the inaugural gala at the Sacramento Municipal Auditorium. She also asked Frank, who was between marriages to flower-child actress Mia Farrow and former Las Vegas showgirl Barbara Marx, to escort Patti to the ball. Years later, after Kitty Kelley alleged that Nancy had a long-term affair with the crooner that began around this time, Patti told an interviewer, “When I read about my mother and Sinatra in Kitty’s book, I thought, Well, God, I spent this whole evening with him and he never came on to me. Of course, I was jailbait at the time, but he was very gentlemanly. We talked about music; he was going to teach me to sing. And then I thought, Maybe he did come on to me and I just didn’t recognize it. . . . Maybe there was something to those singing lessons after all.”103
By then Patti was a freshman at Northwestern University, her grandfather’s alma mater. That wasn’t why she chose it; she had thought her English teacher from Orme was going to get a job there, but that didn’t work out, and he ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. Her father had spoken at her high school commencement the previous June, and she had agreed to make her debut at Las Madrinas, the top cotillion for Los Ange-Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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les society girls, in December to appease her mother, but in Evanston she drew the line at pledging for a sorority. Instead, she befriended the very person her father had warned her to avoid, student body president Eva Jefferson, who he had been told was a radical black activist. When Patti finally managed to fly to Philadelphia to see her paramour, he picked her up at the airport with his wife and kids. He then promised her a rendezvous in Chicago, but didn’t show up on