Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [5]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House once Nancy Reagan liked you she really liked you. (Just as once she didn’t, she really didn’t.)
When I quit Interview the following February, a rumor arose that I was under consideration for a job in Nancy Reagan’s office. That was followed by a second rumor: a photograph of me dancing with Truman Capote at Studio 54 had come to the FBI’s attention, ruling me out. The truth was that I soon signed a contract with Vanity Fair and didn’t have as much contact with Mrs. Reagan, partially because Tina Brown, the editor, preferred to deal with the White House herself, partially because Doria Reagan no longer worked for me. She and Ron moved to Los Angeles with the Joffrey Ballet not long after I left Interview.
But I remained close to Jerry Zipkin, and when he died of lung cancer in 1995, I was assigned to write his obituary by Graydon Carter, Tina Brown’s successor at Vanity Fair. I called Mrs. Reagan at her house in Bel Air. She and her husband had been out of the White House for six years by then; he had announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease in a letter to the nation the year before. Our conversation took off as if we had spoken days, instead of years, before, and as usual with her, it was a long conversation. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” she said several times. “I feel as if I’ve lost the two most important men in my life now.
Well, Ronnie’s still here, but . . .” She told me she had visited Zipkin at his apartment just before he died, and had sat at his bedside for two hours. “I feel very strongly that he stayed alive until he saw her,” their mutual good friend the designer Bill Blass told me. “It was all very planned, his departure.”
In 1997, Graydon Carter called me into his office and said that he thought it was time to take a look back at the Reagan years, and that he wanted me to write the article. “I know you like them, which is why their friends will talk to you,” he said. “But you will have to become neutral when you sit down at the typewriter.” There is no such thing as true neutrality in journalism, and access is a two-edged sword, but I believe I was fair and balanced in the two-part article that was published in July and August 1998. In any case, I like telling stories more than making judg-ments, especially when writing relatively soon after the fact. I also like writing about the social side of life, not only because it is amusing but also because I have learned from experience that what seems silly often has serious repercussions, and that what seems superficial often reveals deeper Le Cirque: 1981
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truths. And if any subject was about the confluence of the serious and the frivolous, the social and the political, it was the Reagans and the era they came to represent.
I spent a large part of the next four years in California, researching first that article and then this book, and in the process growing much closer to Nancy Reagan than I ever would have thought possible that night at Le Cirque. We had many long lunches at the Hotel Bel-Air, which she liked because it was five minutes from home and her ailing husband. We spent many afternoons meticulously going through her White House scrapbooks at the former president’s office high above Avenue of the Stars in Century City. She invited me to numerous events at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, including lunches for George W. Bush and John McCain during the 2000 primary campaign. But although she had me to their house on St. Cloud Road,