Authors: Bob Colacello
At 8:04 a.m. on May 20, 1958, the eight-and-a-half-pound Ronald Prescott Reagan arrived.101 Reagan again admitted that his primary emotion was relief that his wife had survived. For Nancy, a dream had come true, and people soon sensed that the little boy was her favorite.
That’s certainly what five-and-half-year-old Patti felt. “As much as I wanted to participate in this new adventure of having a baby in the house,”
she recalled, “I was usually ushered out of my brother’s room. I didn’t know it then, but Ron’s and my relationship was being defined at that point. There were nights when I snuck into his room and stared at him sleeping, smelled his baby smells, listened to his breathing. I had to be very quiet because there were intercoms in both his room and mine. I knew I was taking a risk, but it was worth it. I used to ask my mother if I could hold Ron, but the answer was always the same. ‘No. You might drop him.’”102
The Reagans asked the Taylors to be Ron’s godparents, and in 1959 they became the godparents of Bob and Ursula’s daughter, Tessa. In March of that year, Ronnie and Nancy celebrated their seventh anniversary, and when his G.E. contract came up for renewal not long after that, he was given 25
percent ownership of the show, making him a partner of MCA/Revue. The new contract also reduced his time on the road to ten weeks a year.103
“He was always glad to come home,” a close family friend told me.
“He knew Nancy would be there waiting for him with open arms. To be treasured like that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I’ve never seen a marriage like that. He was nuts about her. He’d come into a room and look at her like she was the flower of the Nile.”
C H A P T E R T W E LV E
THE GROUP
1958–1962
My mother always said, “You’re known by the company you keep.” And it’s true.
Nancy Reagan to author, February 7, 1999
Nancy cherry-picked her friends.
A close friend of the Reagans’ to author
Motion-picture people engage in civic, cultural and charitable activities, and individually appear occasionally in the doings of “downtown” society.
But it is axiomatic that any function where movie people turn out in force automatically is not “society.”
Gladwin Hill, “California Society Stems from Gold Rush,”
The New York Times
, February 18, 1957
DURING THE FIRST FIVE OR SIX YEARS OF THE REAGANS’ MARRIAGE, THEIR
close friends were mostly people Ronnie had known before he met Nancy—
the Holdens, the Taylors, Dick Powell and June Allyson, Frances and Edgar Bergen, Bob and Goldie Arthur. But gradually Nancy began reaching out to a wider circle, first among their Hollywood acquaintances and then to a whole social set beyond the film industry. These new friends—Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Walter and Lee Annenberg, Earle and Marion Jorgensen, Bill and Betty Wilson, Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale—would come to be called the Group, and they would help to forge Ronald Reagan’s entire political future.
Nancy had known Armand Deutsch since her MGM days, but after she married Ronnie and Ardie married Harriet, the two couples crossed paths only occasionally. Then, according to Harriet Deutsch, “Nancy called me 2 8 5
2 8 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House one day, and said, ‘Couldn’t the four of us just have dinner alone?’ We went to Trader Vic’s. And from then on we became very close friends.”1 The Polynesian-themed Trader Vic’s had opened in the new Beverly Hilton in 1955, and it instantly became a favorite of the Beverly Hills in crowd, of which the Deutsches were very much a part. Deutsch left MGM in 1957, along with his mentor and boss, Dore Schary, and would cap his career in the entertainment business three years later by producing
The World of
Carl Sandburg
, starring Bette Davis, on Broadway. But as the grandson of a Sears, Roebuck partner and reportedly its largest shareholder, he still commanded a prized seat at the tables of such leading hostesses as Buff Chandler and Edie Goetz, and he would later be appointed to the Warner Bros. board. He and Harriet had been introduced by producer Ray Stark and his wife, Fran, in 1951, shortly after Ardie divorced Benay Venuta and Harriet was widowed by director Sylvan Simon, the heir apparent to Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Fran Stark, the daughter of the legendary comedienne Fanny Brice, was one of Harriet’s two best friends. The other was Cohn’s niece, Lee Annenberg, the wife of the powerful newspaper and magazine publisher Walter Annenberg.
A slim beauty who had been a salesgirl and model in New York before coming west, Harriet was a clotheshorse of the first rank, one of Amelia Gray’s best customers and Jimmy Galanos’s earliest devotees. Perhaps more than any other woman in the Group, she fit the press image of a flighty socialite largely concerned with gowns, parties, and social status. But she could be warm, generous, and loyal, particularly to Nancy Reagan. According to Harriet, the loyalty went both ways. “Nancy has the capacity of being a great friend,” she told me. “Never ever has Nancy forgotten a birthday or an anniversary of ours in forty-five years.”2
“We used to go to parties a lot on San Onofre Drive,” Ardie Deutsch added. “They often had barbecues for eighteen people—show business people pretty much. Bill and Ardis Holden. George Burns and Gracie Allen.
And Jack Benny, who always referred to Ronnie as Governor—I don’t know why, but he did. We also used to go to the Reagans’ every Christmas morning for eggnog, and her mother and father were always there. I remember Loyal and I were sitting on the sofa one day, and I said, ‘Loyal, I hear you’re to the right of Attila the Hun. Is that true?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just a bit conservative.’ I said, ‘Do you hear that I’m to the left of Stalin?’ He said, ‘Never actually heard it.’”3
Ardie Deutsch was the lone Democrat among the husbands of Nancy’s
The Group: 1958–1962
2 8 7
new friends. He had refused to sign a loyalty oath at MGM and gotten away with it because of Schary’s protection. In 1952, Deutsch and Reagan had joined forces with labor leader Roy Brewer and screenwriter Philip Dunne in the Democratic primary to oppose California state senator Jack Tenney, who they believed had unfairly criticized the film industry’s anti-Communist efforts. Now, when the Reagans went to dinner at the Deutsches’, the political discussions between the increasingly conservative Reagan and the steadfastly liberal Deutsch sometimes got out of hand.
“Ronnie, that’s enough of the political talk,” Harriet remembered Ardie saying. “That’s enough of that.”4
In 1960 the Deutsches moved into a new house on Coldwater Canyon Drive, a sprawling white-brick-and-glass ranch with a matching annex behind the pool for their screening room (which Harriet, like most Hollywood hostesses, kept well stocked with big bowls of M&M’s, Milky Ways, and Snickers). The only guests at their first dinner party were the Reagans and the Annenbergs, who were visiting from Philadelphia, where Walter’s company, Triangle Publications, was based. The Deutsches’ guest book records that intimate housewarming dinner:
Being the first houseguests of Harriet and Ardie is a privilege and responsibility of which we are proud. We are grateful for the privilege and find the responsibility inspirational.
Always devotedly,
Lee and Walter Annenberg
We have no hesitation, indeed it is with pride we take second billing to Lee and Walter. And besides, we’d sign anything anywhere just to be at the Deutsches’.
Ronald Reagan
Me too. Nancy. XX
Next to the kiss-kiss symbol, Nancy drew a little “happy face.”
Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg first crossed paths in 1937, when Ronnie was a fresh face at Warners and Walter was a young publishing scion overseeing one of his father’s publications,
Screen Guide,
and they both sought the affections of June Travis. Their paths crossed again when Reagan was traveling for General Electric. “On several occasions,” Lee Annenberg 2 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House recalled, “Walter and I would be coming back from New York to Philadelphia on the train, and there would be Ronald Reagan.”5 Annenberg would later disclose that, as the owner of
TV Guide
, he had put in a good word with one of G.E.’s top executives when Reagan was up for the job: “I told him Ron was a great speaker, that he had been a very effective and respected head of the Screen Actors Guild, that he was a good-looking guy, genial and very able on his feet.”6 Lee shared her husband’s high opinion of the actor. “As far back as I remember, he was always interested in issues,” she told me. “I always thought he was a very thoughtful and discerning man.
He wasn’t just a Hollywood star, he was a thinking man. A lot of people didn’t realize that.”7
Reagan was on the cover of
TV Guide
in 1958 and 1961, but it was mainly through Nancy’s growing friendship with Harriet Deutsch that the Reagans came to see more and more of the Annenbergs. Harriet and Lee had been inseparable since they were in their early twenties and married to their first husbands. They thought alike, dressed alike, and changed their hairdos in tandem—somewhere along the way the brunette Harriet and the redhead Lee both went blond. Yet there was always a lady-in-waiting quality to Harriet’s relationship with the richer, more forceful Lee.
Leonore Cohn was born in New York in 1918. Her mother died when she was seven, and she and her sister were taken in by their Uncle Harry, who was considered the most tyrannical of the studio moguls. Cohn was an admirer of Mussolini and made a point of working on Yom Kippur even though he was Jewish—Lee herself would later admit that “his character was third-rate.”8 His wife, Rose, a convert to Christian Science, managed to instill a strong sense of faith in Lee. Aunt Rose was also an indefatigable hostess, who gave impeccably organized dinner parties for everyone from Irving Berlin to Rita Hayworth. By the time Lee and her sister were teenagers, they had sailed on the
Normandie
and stayed at the Dorchester in London and the Ritz in Paris, but as Annenberg biographer Christopher Ogden notes, “nothing was theirs. They were always treated as wards, never as family members.”9
Lee graduated from Stanford in 1940. Her first two marriages, both largely motivated by her desire to escape Uncle Harry, were disasters. The first, in 1941, to Beldon Katleman, the son of a parking lot tycoon, whom she had met at the Hillcrest Country Club, and who later owned the Las Vegas casino where Reagan had declined to perform in 1954, produced a daughter but lasted less than three years. The second, in 1946, to Lewis
The Group: 1958–1962
2 8 9
Rosenstiel, the Schenley liquor king, a manic-depressive widower nearly twice her age, produced a second daughter.10 Lee was still married to Rosenstiel in February 1950, and was spending the winter in Palm Beach, when Harriet and Sylvan Simon took her to a party where she met Walter Annenberg. The forty-one-year-old publisher, a somewhat stiff and formal workaholic, had just been asked for a divorce by his first wife, with whom he had two children. “We started to dance and we just kept dancing,” recalled Lee Annenberg. “It was magic and magnetic,” said Harriet Deutsch.11
It was a year and half before Rosenstiel would let Lee go, and then only on the condition that she leave everything he had given her behind, including her 10-carat diamond engagement ring and their daughter. Walter bought Lee a 27-carat diamond ring and put his lawyers to work on securing partial custody of the child. They were married in September 1951 at his mother’s Fifth Avenue apartment. A few weeks later the newlyweds bought Van Gogh’s
Les Oliviers
for $68,000 and Monet’s
Femme à l’Om-brelle
for $27,000, thus beginning what would become one of the greatest private art collections in the world. Annenberg’s income was then said to be $1 million a year.12
In many ways his rise had been as torturous as his new wife’s. His father, Moses, a German-Jewish immigrant, started out in the newspaper business as a henchman for the Hearst organization in the Chicago circulation wars of the early 1900s and went on to make a fortune after buying the
Daily Racing Form
in 1922. When Walter was twelve, the family moved into a thirty-two-room mansion in Great Neck, Long Island. After graduating from the Peddie School in New Jersey, he spent a year at the Wharton School of Finance and then started working for his father. In 1936, Moses Annenberg bought the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, the nation’s oldest daily newspaper. Three years later he was indicted for income tax evasion, some historians say because of his paper’s relentless attacks on FDR. He spent two years in jail and died a month after his release in 1942, leaving his family in disgrace and Walter in charge of the nearly bankrupt Triangle Publications.
Within four years Walter had paid off his father’s $5 million debt to the IRS and launched
Seventeen
magazine. He then began buying up radio and television stations in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and California, and started up
TV Guide
in 1953. His marriage to Lee was also a success, a love match that gave them both the sense of security that they had previously lacked. Lee redecorated Inwood, his fourteen-acre estate 2 9 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and began entertaining the city’s leading political and business figures.13 Like her husband, she took an active interest in politics, and she was appointed to Pennsylvania’s electoral college in Eisenhower’s second term.14
By the 1960 presidential election, Walter was considered one of the most influential Republican media magnates in the country, right up there with his friends Time-Life chairman Henry Luce,
Los Angeles Times
publisher Norman Chandler, and Gardner Cowles, the owner of the
Des Moines Register
and
Look
magazine. Despite his disappointment over the defeat of Richard Nixon, whom he counted as a friend, he was careful not to repeat his father’s mistake of being overly partisan. When Jacqueline Kennedy called to ask him to donate a 1767 portrait of Benjamin Franklin valued at $200,000 for her White House redecorating project, he readily agreed, and soon after that he and Lee were invited to a small private dinner by the new President and First Lady.15