Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [4]
In the meantime, Nancy Reagan had started calling me at the office, causing no end of envy in Andy. She always had an ostensible excuse, such as asking what I thought Ron or Doria might like for their birthday, but invariably she would end up urging me to persuade her son and daughter-in-law not to give up their Secret Service protection. Both the Libyans and the Puerto Rican Liberation Front were threatening to kidnap Ron, she said.
Then I got the idea of putting her on the cover of Interview. I called Zipkin, who called Michael Deaver, the White House aide closest to Mrs. Reagan, who liked the idea because he thought associating her with Andy Warhol would help lighten her imperious image. Unfortunately, Andy and Nancy did not hit it off when we went to the White House to interview her. “The funny thing about movie people,” he told her, “is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.” Looking at him as if he were unbalanced, she replied, “I am a movie person, Andy.” Doria later told me that her mother-in-law had said she didn’t understand how I could work for Andy. Whenever the interview got on track, she said, he seemed to undermine me. When the December 1981 issue hit the stands, the entire New York art world seemed to rise up in horror and outrage. How could I put that googoo-eyed harridan, that overdressed housewife, on the cover of Andy Warhol’s magazine? The Village Voice even ran a parody by Alexander Cockburn in which Andy and I went to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and asked him the same softball questions we had asked the First Lady.
In January 1982, Mrs. Reagan invited me to attend the State of the Union speech with Ron and Doria. In June she came up to New York to Le Cirque: 1981
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attend the premiere of the movie Annie, which had been produced by Ray Stark, an old and close friend of the Reagans’. I remember her calling me over to her table at the party afterward and introducing me to her dinner partners, Cary Grant and John Huston, who had directed the film—and whose father, the great actor Walter Huston, she told me, had played on Broadway with her mother back in the 1920s. Jerry Zipkin was also at her table, along with retired CBS chairman Bill Paley; Elizinha Moreira-Salles, the ex-wife of the richest man in Brazil; Greek shipping tycoon George Li-vanos and his wife, Lita; and Rosemarie Marcie-Rivière, an aging Swiss socialite who had been married almost as many times as Etti Plesch. It was the same kind of mix—Old Hollywood’s A-list and charter members of the jet set—that one would find at the small private dinners Mrs. Reagan liked to give upstairs at the White House.
I remember her having me tracked down at a friend’s house in Southampton one weekend that summer and keeping me on the phone for nearly two hours, asking again and again, “Why does the press hate me so much?” She had been under constant attack since the day her husband was elected, it seemed—for trying to get the Carters to leave the White House early, for borrowing designer clothes and jewelry, for ordering up expensive White House china, for attending the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer with an elaborate security entourage. But nothing raised the ire of the East Wing press corps—mostly younger feminists—
more than the way she gazed at her husband with rapt adoration during his speeches. By the end of their first year in the White House she had the highest disapproval rating of any first lady in modern times. No wonder she sounded so hurt and bewildered. I agreed that the press had been unduly hard on her. Yet it crossed my mind that Nancy Reagan, like my grandmothers and mother, seemed to have a talent for playing the martyr.
In September, I was invited to a state dinner for President and Mrs.
Marcos of the Philippines. Much to Andy’s dismay, he wasn’t. So I called Zipkin,