Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  At eighteen, Marion Newbert “ran away and married” the twenty-2 9 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House seven-year-old Milton Bren—who was not only Jewish but in the movie business—before completing her senior year at Marlborough. Ironically, she had met Bren at the debutante party her mother insisted on giving her even though “they really didn’t have them out here then,” she said. “It was at the Ambassador Hotel, and somehow Milton got invited as a stag. And he was the only one there that intrigued me. The others were sort of puny-looking things, but he was already a man and already successful.”34 As for Marion, as Connie Wald recalled, “My brother always said she was the best-looking blonde in town. And she had the best legs.”35

  Milton Bren was an agent when he married Marion in 1930, but within a few years he was producing movies at MGM, starting with the Topper series starring Cary Grant. He also made money in Southern California real estate. The marriage produced two sons but ended in divorce in 1948.

  Shortly after they split, Bren married actress Claire Trevor, and Marion married insurance heir Tom Call, whose father, Asa Call, was the chairman of Pacific Mutual Life. Call senior was known as Mr. Big because of the enormous power he wielded as head of the secretive Committee of 25, the clique of Republican businessmen who dominated Los Angeles politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Along with his best friend, Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, Call was the driving force behind the rise of Richard Nixon from congressman to president. Marion’s marriage to his son ended in divorce in 1952.

  Marion had just turned forty when she was introduced to Earle Jorgensen, who was fifty-four and also divorced. “My friend Lucy Toberman, who was head of volunteers for the Red Cross, said to me, ‘Homer and I would like to take you out to dinner to meet Mr. Earle Jorgensen.

  He’s chairman of the Los Angeles Red Cross now.’ I made all kinds of excuses. I really wasn’t going out with anybody. You know, you can’t have two marriages and then start over that fast. I just didn’t feel like it. Finally, I was invited to a Christmas party at the old Romanoff ’s, and so were the Tobermans. So Lucy started in again. I said, ‘All right, Lucy, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you and Homer bring Mr. Jorgensen and pick me up at my house and we’ll go together?’ So that’s what we did. Earle was driving his car, and they were in the back seat. And when we got down to Robert-son and Wilshire—there was quite a lot of light there—I looked at him and I thought, ‘Damn, he’s not bad at all.’ Three months later we were married.”36

  The marriage lasted forty-six years, until Earle died in 1999 at the age The Group: 1958–1962

  2 9 7

  of 101. He was still running his company in his nineties when he gave an interview to photographer Pat York for her book Going Strong. “Have courage, confidence, and determination is my motto,” he told her. “I picked it up as a kid along with ‘Never say die; say damn.’ . . . I have enjoyed working hard since I started as a very young man. My dad died when I was about 13, and when I was 15 we ran out of money. I had to go to work as an office boy to support my mother. . . . The one thing my mother taught me when we were poor was the importance of neatness and cleanliness. I’ve followed that all through my life. In all my plants, you can eat off the floor.”37

  Jorgensen’s parents were immigrants from Denmark who settled in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century. His father was a sea captain, and he sometimes took his wife and three children on his trips. “I remember going around Cape Horn when I was six, in his schooner,” Jorgensen told York.38

  After serving in the Army Tank Corps during World War I, Jorgensen moved to Los Angeles in 1921, arriving shortly after the discovery of oil at Signal Hill near Long Beach. He started the Earle M. Jorgensen Company, which provided shipyard surplus and scrap metal to oil drillers, his wife told me, “by selling his extra suit and getting two dollars and a half. That was the beginning of Earle. So to say the least he was a self-made man.”39

  “By 1923, he had created in essence a supermarket for steel and aluminum,” according to the Los Angeles Times, buying in bulk from large manufacturers such as Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel and selling to local businesses.40 With the emergence of the aircraft industry on the West Coast during the 1940s, his customers came to include Boeing and Hughes Aircraft, and by 1960 annual revenue was approaching $100 million.41 Almost universally well liked for his modest, plainspoken manner and fun-loving attitude—he was known to stand on his head at parties—

  he was nonetheless a player in the Los Angeles business and political community: a generous Republican Party contributor who sat on the boards of the Chamber of Commerce, the Citizens National Trust and Savings Bank, the California Institute of Technology, and Occidental College, as well as the executive committee of Northrop Aircraft. Typical of the time—and of the Reagan Group in general—Jorgensen saw no contradiction in supporting the National Conference of Christians and Jews while belonging to the highly restrictive Los Angeles Country Club.

  Although the Jorgensens had occasionally crossed paths with the Reagans at “buffets and things” in the early 1950s, it wasn’t until Betty Adams 2 9 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House got them together that a closeness began to develop. “Ronnie was working for General Electric,” Marion Jorgensen recalled. “And they were such a great couple. We saw quite a bit of them in the evening. We’d go to Chasen’s to dinner. Nancy and I often had lunch.” Even though they quickly became good friends, she observed that “I don’t care how close a friendship you might have with Nancy, if she doesn’t want to go your way, she doesn’t go your way. Nobody could influence Nancy that much.

  Nancy’s Nancy, you know.”42

  Nancy and Marion were usually joined for lunch by Betty Wilson, Marion’s best friend. Her nickname was the Infanta, although some called her the Little General. “Betty was a little mighty mite, and she ran a tight ship,” said Frances Bergen. “Betty and Marion were both generals. Neither one of them was an adjutant.”43 Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson called each other every morning at seven to coordinate their social schedules, and their husbands were good friends. Bill Wilson was on Earle Jorgensen’s board and had known him since 1936, when he went to work in his father’s business, Webb Oil Tools, which bought metals from the Jorgensen Company.

  William A. Wilson, a native Angeleno, graduated from Stanford University that year and married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth “Betty”

  Johnson, upon her graduation two years later. Her father, Luther H. Johnson, who died shortly after they were married, had founded the Pennzoil Company of California in 1913 and built it into one of the largest oil companies in the country. Her mother, a devout Catholic from an Italian immigrant family, had grown up in a Victorian mansion in downtown Los Angeles, and Betty was educated at Marymount, the elite Catholic girls school in Westwood. Bill Wilson, who was born an Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism when they were married. According to a close family friend, Betty’s mother gave the couple $1 million “to help set them up.”

  David Jones told me, “Betty Wilson ran Bill—she’d tell him, ‘You wear this, you wear that.’ ”44 Not long after the Wilsons met the Reagans, Bill left his family’s business and became president of L.N.W. Investments, which mainly invested his wife’s money.

  As Bill Wilson remembered it, he and Betty were introduced to the Reagans in the late 1950s at the Brentwood home of Bill and Frances Hawks. (Bill Hawks, a producer, was the brother of director Howard Hawks.) Wilson also recalled attending Betty Adams’s dinner party for the The Group: 1958–1962

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  Reagans not long after that. “Ron and I hit it off pretty well,” he said. “He had a little ranch up in the Malibu mountains then, and I like horses, so we had some things in common. And, of course, Betty and Nancy got along very well.” Wilson made the point that the women saw each other more often than the men did, but Nancy’s friends generally acknowledged that Bill was the husband who would bec
ome the closest to Ronnie. With his extended sideburns and well-cut suits, the lanky, good-looking Wilson came across as an old-fashioned gentleman cowboy. “I always thought that Ron was very open and easy to talk to,” Wilson told me, adding, “Ron wasn’t born here, and he didn’t really grow up here, but it does seem like he fit into California perfectly. He liked the outdoors. He liked horses. I think he was at heart a true Californian.”45 Like Justin Dart, Bill Wilson was a member of the exclusive men’s riding club Rancheros Vistadores.

  The Wilsons were also long-standing members of the Los Angeles Country Club, extremely conservative politically, and probably the squarest, most right-wing couple in the Group.

  Marcia Hobbs, one of their two daughters, told me that the Reagans were frequent dinner guests in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “It would just be the two families. I was ten or eleven, and Mr. Reagan would talk about world politics at the dinner table. He was very instructive, and he opened my eyes to many things that were going on.”46

  Of all the Reagans’ new friends, the Bloomingdales were the most fun, the most sophisticated, and the most adventurous. Alfred was a big, tall man, not handsome but attractive because of his tremendous energy and charm.

  Betsy, with her curly locks and wide-eyed enthusiasm, sometimes came across as a high-fashion Shirley Temple, but that was something of an act, belying a sharp mind, a keen eye, and a strong will. The Jorgensens and the Wilsons may have been big-time in Los Angeles society, but the Bloomingdales set their sights higher and cast their nets wider.

  “Alfred and I had a premarital agreement never to go to Pasadena,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me, implying that the snooty suburb was unbearably provincial. More than any other couple in the Group, the Bloomingdales mixed with both society and Hollywood. Anita May gave Betsy her first baby shower, and her son David and Alfred were card-playing buddies. But the Bloomingdales also had the Old Guard—the Dohenys, the Ducom-muns, the Kecks—to their parties. Betsy saw herself as another Doris Stein, a cosmopolitan hostess who rose above the local divisions. She idolized 3 0 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Merle Oberon, the glamorous 1940s movie star who had married the Mexican industrialist Bruno Pagliai, and was proud of the fact that when the British royal family’s favorite photographer and artist, Cecil Beaton, came to Los Angeles to design the sets for My Fair Lady in 1963, “he only did two portraits—Merle’s and mine.”47

  As an heir to the Bloomingdale’s department-store fortune and a co-founder of the Diners Club, Alfred Bloomingdale was both to the manor born and a self-made multimillionaire who maintained offices in Los Angeles and New York and frequently traveled to Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Bloomingdale family was very much part of New York’s German-Jewish elite known as Our Crowd, and was related through marriage to three-time Democratic governor Herbert Lehman. Alfred and Betsy kept an apartment at the Carlton House on Madison Avenue, and she was a favorite of the fashion press, cited for her high style in the same breath as Jackie Kennedy, Babe Paley, and C. Z. Guest. The Bloomingdales’ house in Holmby Hills was a big 1930s Spanish colonial that had been transformed into a modern Palladian villa and filled with an eclectic but elegant mix of English furniture, French paintings, and Oriental antiques by Billy Haines, whose work Betsy had first admired as a young woman invited to dine at the Jack and Ann Warner estate.

  “My mother was Australian, and my father was English and Australian,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me, sitting in her library on a red-and-green printed-linen sofa designed by Haines forty years earlier. “Daddy went to Harvard, to the medical school, and he loved America and wanted to live here. So he went home to Adelaide and got my mother and brought her back. I grew up right here on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, and I made my First Communion at the Good Shepherd Church. Life hasn’t changed much, but there have been many wonderful things in between.”48

  She was born Betty Lee Newling in Los Angeles in or about 1922. (She managed to keep her birth date a secret from even the FBI when it investigated Alfred for a possible ambassadorship in 1981.) Her father was an orthodontist who also taught at the University of Southern California. “I grew up never knowing Hollywood people at all,” she told me. “They were patients of my father’s, but Daddy wasn’t so crazy about Hollywood people.”49 A longtime family friend told me, “The father was as dull as they come. The mother was a big Australian woman, extremely outgoing and ambitious.” David Jones, who credited Betsy Bloomingdale with launching his career as a florist in the 1950s, recalled dining with Mrs.

  The Group: 1958–1962

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  Newling in her later years. “She was called Vinnie. She was very funny.

  Very elegant. And she always called Betsy ‘Betty.’ ”50

  The Newlings were members of the Los Angeles Country Club, and Vinnie saw to it that her only child, who was as tall, vivacious, and ambitious as she was, had a proper upbringing. Though the Newlings were Catholic, Betsy was sent to the Marlborough School, graduating in 1939, one year behind Betty Adams. She was then sent east to Bennett Junior College in horsey Millbrook, New York. One summer she took courses at the Hillcliffe School of Cookery in Beverly Hills, because “my mother firmly believed that every young woman should attend cooking school before marriage.”51 In 1941 she was a bridesmaid at the teenage Gloria Vanderbilt’s scandalous but stylish wedding to the playboy Hollywood agent Pat di Cicco in Santa Barbara.52 By then she had already decided that Los Angeles society was limiting. “I always had my nose up about the West,”

  she admitted. “I always thought it was kind of hokey.”53

  “I introduced Alfred to Betsy,” said Hollywood producer Fred de Cordova.

  “I was doing a picture with Robert Hutton, who was a young star at Warners, and he was going with Nathalie Thompson, Betsy’s closest friend from Marlborough. Nathalie said, ‘I’m going out with Bobby Hutton tonight. Why don’t you take Betsy?’ I said, ‘I’d love to. Her father is my dentist. Maybe he’ll learn to not hurt me so much.’ So I met Betsy, and after that I introduced her to Alfred.”54

  De Cordova had been Bloomingdale’s best friend since the early 1930s, when he was an up-and-coming theatrical producer and Alfred was a Park Avenue boy who had just discovered showbiz and showgirls. His parents’

  marriage had already unraveled by the time his father, a frustrated playwright who hated the retail business, took Alfred to his first Broadway play, at age fifteen. Soon after that he started hanging out at the Stork Club whenever he could get away from the Westminster School in Connecticut.

  Although his teachers found him exceptionally bright, he squeaked through with a 66.3 average and went on to Brown University. He dropped out three months short of graduation in 1939, because of a serious football injury that would also keep him from serving in World War II.55

  On November 13, 1940, The New York Times announced that Bloomingdale and two associates had formed a production company, and five months later their first play, Your Loving Son, opened on Broadway. It closed two days later, but Alfred, undeterred, took a suite of offices in the Empire 3 0 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Theater Building, formed an alliance with Lee Shubert, of the theater-owning family, and put $40,000 of his own money into High Kickers, a vaudeville revival starring George Jessel.56 It was a hit and provided the twenty-five-year-old Alfred with his first wife, a chorus girl named Barbara Brewster. “Alfred called me and said, ‘I’m going to New Jersey tonight. I’d like you to come along,’” recalled de Cordova. “I said, ‘I’ve been to New Jersey.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sort of visiting a justice of the peace. I’m being married and want you to be my best man.’”57 The marriage lasted less than two years, ending in divorce in 1943.58

  By then Alfred had two successful shows running on Broadway: an updated version of The Ziegfeld Follies, starring Milton Berle, and Early to Bed, a comedy. He was also a partner in a shipbuilding company in Rye, New York, and was elected treasurer of
Tammany Hall, as the Manhattan Democratic Party organization was known, in 1944.59 But he missed the party’s convention in Chicago that summer and opted out of a second term. After losing more than $100,000 on Allah Be Praised, a musical, his interest in the theater also seemed to wane.60

  In January 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to produce a movie called Petty Girl at RKO. “Alfred came out here looking for a wife,” a close friend recalled. “I think he thought it was time to settle down.” Nine months later, on September 15, 1946, he married Betsy. Fred de Cordova was the best man again, and because of the difference in religion the ceremony was performed by a superior court judge at the home of Alfred’s friend Buddy Adler, a producer at Columbia. “I’ll never forget that wedding,” Marion Jorgensen said. “Because only one of her parents was there—I forget which one. They were mad at her for marrying Alfred, just like my family when I married Milton.”61

  That would soon change, as Betsy set out to transform her husband into something more to her parents’ liking. Two years after they married, Alfred converted to Catholicism and they had a proper church wedding.

  By the 1952 election, he was involved in the Eisenhower campaign. “I started out as a Jew and a Democrat,” he liked to joke. “And the next thing I knew I was a Catholic and a Republican.” Like Earle Jorgensen and Bill Wilson—and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan—Alfred Bloomingdale would always try to give his wife what she wanted. According to their friends, he thoroughly enjoyed indulging her expensive tastes, and it was he who insisted she use the grander-sounding “Betsy.” As she herself told me,