Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [3]
When we got up to leave, the Reagans and their friends were still dining.
I headed straight for the coat-check room, trying hard not to stare at their table. Andy, who pretended he never knew what to do, followed me.
Everyone else with us filed past the President’s table, where they were introduced to the Reagans. As we stood waiting for our coats, I heard Alfred Bloomingdale’s booming voice: “Where the hell is Bob Colacello? He’s the only Republican in this group.” “I think they want you at that table,”
Andy said. Coat in hand, I approached the table, with Andy still following. “Mr. President,” Bloomingdale said, “I’d like you to meet the great American artist Andy Warhol, and Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview Le Cirque: 1981
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magazine. He’s a real Republican.” We shook hands. Then Alfred introduced first Andy, then me, to Mrs. Reagan. Taking my hand in hers, she looked me right in the eyes and said, “I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you from Ron and Doria.” She was referring to their son Ron and his wife, Doria, who had recently started working as my secretary. “I’ve heard so much about you from Ron and Doria” was all I could think to say, but it made her laugh—a big coquettish laugh, sparkling, knowing, and warm, that was unexpected from someone who looked so proper. The moment we were on the street, Andy moaned, “She held your hand for so long. I think she really loves you.”
Jerry Zipkin called early the next morning. “You played it just right,”
he pronounced, “not rushing over to the table with all the Italians and Brazilians and God-knows-whats. She said to me, ‘Bob Colacello is so not pushy.’ ”
That evening I saw President and Mrs. Reagan again, from afar, at the Metropolitan Opera House, where Ron Reagan was making his debut with the Joffrey II Ballet Company. Zipkin had a few friends up to his apartment on Park Avenue at 93rd Street—“I live on the hem of Harlem,”
he liked to say—for chicken salad and champagne before the ballet. The friends included Jan Cowles, modern art collector Lily Auchincloss, society columnist Aileen Mehle (who wrote under the name Suzy), Andy, and me. We had orchestra seats at the Met, and rose to our feet with the rest of the audience when the Reagans entered the center box with Doria and the Bloomingdales. As young Ron leapt and spun through an abstract piece called Unfolding, we all agreed that he was pretty good for someone who had started dancing only four years before, at age eighteen. The second half of the program was a concert by Diana Ross. As she sang “Reach out and touch somebody else and make the world a better place to live,” the President took his wife’s hand, and she took Doria’s. “That’s your secretary up there, Bob,” said Andy.
The next day every paper in New York ran a photograph of Ron, in full makeup and a terry cloth robe, being embraced backstage by his mother, in an off-the-shoulder Galanos evening gown, while his father, in a tuxedo, stood beside them smiling proudly. It wasn’t exactly Camelot, but it was a long way from home on the right-wing range.
Two weeks later a madman named John Hinckley shot and almost killed Ronald Reagan in a misguided attempt to impress the movie star Jodie 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Foster. For the next seven and half years, there would be no more presidential dinners at Le Cirque, and Nancy Reagan would be obsessed with her husband’s security (to the point of secretly consulting with a San Francisco astrologer about his schedule and travels). Within months Alfred Bloomingdale would be stricken with cancer and then engulfed in a tabloid scandal when his long-secret mistress, a Hollywood playgirl named Vicki Morgan, sued him for palimony as he lay on his deathbed. Betsy Bloomingdale went to Mass every morning, gathered her children and grandchil-dren close to her, and held her head high. “Nancy called every single day when Alfred was ill,” she later told me. “She knows what a friend is.” On the night Alfred Bloomingdale died, Betsy, who