Ronnie and Nancy (2 page)

And now here, at Le Cirque, was Nancy Reagan, the supposedly square and uptight First Lady, taking her social cues from Zipkin, who in his not too distant past had been known to give two cocktail parties on the same night—“Why waste the flowers?” he would explain—the first from five to seven for his international society friends, the second from seven to nine for “gents only.” And here was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge—one of his first acts was to have a portrait of

“Silent Cal” hung in the Oval Office—seeming perfectly comfortable, sitting in a peach-and-gray room lined with murals of cavorting monkeys in eighteenth-century court dress, surrounded by assorted European titles and jet-setters, exotic mystery women from Central Europe and Central America, and male and female homosexuals of varying degrees of closet-edness. Then again, he was also the first divorced president and the first movie star president. This president had dated Rhonda Fleming and Piper Laurie. In retrospect, the scene that evening—a circus crossed with a court—was a fairly accurate metaphor for the decade to come.

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

5

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 had visited him in the hospital earlier that day, was giving a dinner party at an obscure German restaurant in Santa Monica for friends from Europe and New York, including Jerry Zipkin, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, and me.

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
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7

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, who called Muffie Brandon, the White House social secretary, who prevailed upon the First Lady to have him. A month later Mrs. Reagan was in New York for a party at the Lincoln Center library to promote her book about the Foster Grandparents Program,
To Love a Child.
I had just returned from Thailand and brought her some souvenir seashells from Phuket Island. She hugged and kissed me as if I had given her pearls, and everyone on the receiving line wondered what I had done to deserve such a display of affection. But I was beginning to realize that 8

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

9

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, she never let me see Ronald Reagan. She may have mellowed in other ways, but Nancy Reagan was not about to stop protecting her husband’s image when it needed protecting most. This was an exceptionally shrewd and determined woman, I came to realize, who did not give up, who never let go.

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).