Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [292]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House would be a better idea if I came back there rather than go right to New York.” Reagan’s old colleague from the SAG board recommended the Stanley Holden Dance Center in West Los Angeles, where Ron worked hard to catch up with boys who had started studying ballet in their early teens. He also met and fell in love with Doria Palmieri, who worked at the school, came from a middle-class Italian-American family, and was seven years his senior. Nancy was not warm to the idea of another older woman, but at least Doria wasn’t married.28
In 1977 and 1978, Nancy stepped up her entertaining at San Onofre Drive. The Reagans gave a dinner for the Buckleys on their next visit, and another for the Edmund Borys, who owned Fauchon’s, the gourmet food emporium, in Paris. “Her dinner parties are lovely, formal but casual with great warmth,” said Jerry Zipkin, sizing up Nancy as a hostess. “And Ronnie always makes an amusing toast that is pertinent.” Betsy Bloomingdale added, “If there are 16 guests, Nancy . . . has two or three round tables in the atrium off the living room. The dinners are usually seated and served, with place cards and imaginative centerpieces like pottery centerpieces from Thailand.”29
Nancy even started her own party book, like Betsy’s and Marion’s, “but I wasn’t as good at keeping it up,” she told me. One dinner she recorded was for Jan and Gardner Cowles, on August 16, 1977. “We had,” she recited,
“crudités, salmon mousse with sauce verte, chicken parmesan, corn sauté, vegetable platter, raspberries and blueberries with Kirsch and whipped cream, brownies, and Mouton Rothschild ’52—Ronnie knew about wine.”
Their guests were the Tuttles, the Darts, the Jorgensens, the Bloomingdales, Zipkin, and Buff Chandler—the last a conciliatory gesture, Nancy Reagan said. It helped that the widow Chandler’s date, F. Patrick Burns, was a Reagan contributor.30
Since leaving Sacramento, Nancy had maintained her association with the Foster Grandparents Program. She also attended Colleagues meetings to plan the annual Glamour Clothes Sale, which drew as many as six thousand bargain hunters to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium the day before Mother’s Day. Marion was the head cashier, and Betsy ran the “fur department,” with help from the florist David Jones, who remembered, “One year this beautiful black lady came in and said she would buy this long mink Fendi coat with a mandarin collar and no sleeves if Betsy would autograph it. Betsy said, ‘Why does she want my autograph?’ I said, ‘Listen, we’re not Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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going to make this sale.’ So I gave Bets a brown paper bag, and she autographed it, and we made the sale. The most amazing thing was when Marion Jorgensen donated a full-length lynx coat, which was probably worth $300,000.”31 Connie Wald told me, “Nancy and her friends—Betsy, Marion, Harriet, Erlenne, Mary Jane—always sat together at the Colleagues meetings. They moved as a herd, and were quite content being part of the Group.”32
In December 1977, Betsy took Ronnie and Nancy to the New York Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Ball, which every year celebrated the opening of a new exhibition curated by Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor known as “the Empress of Fashion.” The ball was chaired by Jacqueline Onassis, and one had to be invited to buy a ticket by a committee of society ladies headed by Pat Buckley. That year’s exhibition was titled “Vanity Fair,” after a passage in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress about a town called Vanity, where “lusts, pleasures and delights of all types” were sold—a description Vreeland thought fit 1970s New York to a tee.33 Nancy, who had never attended the party before, was one of the stars of the evening, in a black strapless