Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [6]
I have also been fortunate in having access to the Reagan Group, as Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s oldest and closest friends in Los Angeles are called, and to what’s left of its political subset, the Kitchen Cabinet, the wealthy businessmen who came together to elect Ronald Reagan governor in 1966, and who continued to support him through his bids for the presidency in 1968, 1976, and 1980, when he was finally triumphant. Most of these friends met the Reagans during the early years of their marriage.
Some had known them separately before they married. Almost none of them had ever talked about the Reagans to a journalist or biographer (and they almost invariably checked with Nancy Reagan before talking to me).
In the case of those who had died, I was usually able to interview their children, several of whom worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns and, in two cases, in his White House.
Mostly in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, the surviving members of the Reagan Group were proud of their long association with Ronnie and Nancy, as they always called the Reagans, and were still jealous of one another’s closeness to them. They actually referred to themselves as the Group. “She wasn’t in the Group as early as some of us were,” said Betty Adams, who took credit for introducing Nancy Reagan to many of the women in the Group in 1958, referring to Erlenne Sprague, who said she 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had sponsored Nancy’s membership in the Colleagues, the exclusive Los Angeles charity, in 1962. “There were a lot of Johnny-come-latelys,” Jean French Smith, the widow of the Kitchen Cabinet lawyer who became attorney general in the first Reagan administration, told me, “who say they were in the Kitchen Cabinet from the beginning but weren’t. If you turn off your tape recorder, I’ll tell you which ones.”
The Kitchen Cabinet—the term goes back to the gang of cronies who unofficially advised President Andrew Jackson—was led by three self-made multimillionaires, auto dealer Holmes Tuttle, oilman Henry Salvatori, and drugstore tycoon Justin Dart, all long gone. Alfred Bloomingdale, steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, and oil equipment manufacturer William Wilson, the husbands of Nancy Reagan’s three best friends, Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, and Betty Wilson, were also in the inner circle. Somewhat removed but extremely influential were the Group’s only billionaire, Walter Annenberg, the owner of TV Guide and President Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, and his wife, Lee, who were based in Philadelphia but who spent several months each year in California.
Over the years, the Reagans and their friends came to resemble a court, and their social life, with its fixed calendar and closed guest list, took on the aura of ritual. Every Fourth of July these same couples trekked to the Santa Inez Mountains for Nancy Reagan’s birthday picnic at the Reagans’ Rancho del Cielo. Every New Year’s Eve they celebrated at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ palatial Palm Springs estate. Every New Year’s Day they went to Holmes and Virginia Tuttle’s bungalow on the grounds of the Eldorado Country Club. Every election night they watched the returns at the Jorgensens’ house in Bel Air. When President Reagan turned seventy in 1981
and seventy-five in 1986, his black-tie birthday parties at the White House were paid for by the Annenbergs, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, and the Armand Deutsches, who were also longtime members of the Group. “We all stood up when Ronnie cut the cake,” recalled Harriet Deutsch, sitting in the screening room of their Beverly Hills house, surrounded by dozens of framed photographs of the Reagans and their friends. “Oh, he was so darling. The most loving, sweet man. I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body. And Nancy