Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  . . . I had seen that sort of concentration a thousand times in half-darkened theatres during rehearsals or Saturday matinees: The understudy examines the star’s performance and tries to figure how it is done. An actor prepares, I said to myself: Mr. Reagan is planning to go into politics. With his crude charm, I was reasonably certain that he could be elected mayor of Beverly Hills.”47

  The convention was a major social event, with such Rockefeller friends as New York Herald Tribune publisher John Hay Whitney and CBS chairman William F. Paley and their wives—the fashionable Cushing sisters, Betsy and Babe—flying in from the East Coast, and oil-rich Goldwater backers from Texas entertaining lavishly in Nob Hill’s grand hotels. Colleen Moore Hargrave and Hope McCormick were there to write an article for the society page of the Chicago Tribune. “They went to all the parties with The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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  their little notebooks,” said Homer Hargrave Jr., who was a Goldwater delegate. “The California delegation was two sections behind Illinois, and every time Reagan came down the aisle, he’d stop and say hello to me.”48

  Eisenhower’s entourage included the Justin Darts and the Freeman Gosdens—both couples had weekend houses at the Eldorado Country Club near Palm Springs, where the Eisenhowers had been given a retirement villa. According to Dart, no one was more upset by Goldwater’s harshly uncompromising acceptance speech—which ended with those fatal lines “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—than Eisenhower, who had hoped Pennsylvania governor William Scranton would be able to stop the Arizonan at the last minute. “Ike was sick, absolutely sick,” said Dart.49 Ike and Mamie spent the weekend following the convention at the Darts’ summer house in Pebble Beach. “Ike never liked Goldwater,” one of the guests told me.

  “He’d get that pained Eisenhower expression on his face when Goldwater’s name came up. He thought Goldwater was one-dimensional. Not subtle.

  He said the conservative cabal had taken over the party. We asked Ike,

  ‘What do we do?’ ‘You’re going to hold your nose and vote for him.’ ”50

  Eisenhower was far from alone in his distaste for Goldwater’s candidacy: the entire Eastern wing of the Republican Party was up in arms.

  Walter Annenberg’s Philadelphia Inquirer, which had endorsed every Republican candidate since Lincoln, supported Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater

  “was a smart-aleck, a dope, and he drank too much,” Annenberg later said. “He wasn’t fit to be president.”51 Babe Paley stomped off the dance floor at a post-convention party in Los Angeles at Anita May’s when her dancing partner, Billy Haines, crowed, “Isn’t it great? We got Goldwater nominated.”52

  The Reagans went to the convention with Holmes and Virginia Tuttle and Henry and Grace Salvatori. Henry Salvatori, the multimillionaire head of the Western Geophysical oil company, was Goldwater’s finance chairman in California, and Holmes Tuttle was also heavily involved in fund-raising for the campaign. “Holmes and Salvatori were true believers,” a moderate Republican friend of theirs told me. “We’d roll our eyes when they got going. Not that they were John Birchers.” Salvatori had found Goldwater’s speech “exhilarating,” and said years later, “I don’t understand to this day what’s wrong with that statement.”53 Both he and Tuttle had been greatly impressed by Reagan’s ability to draw crowds and articulate the conservative message during the primary.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Although the Reagans didn’t know the Tuttles or the Salvatoris well at that point, they had many mutual friends. Both couples went back a long way with Betty Adams, through her Republican Party connections. The Salvatoris lived next door to Bill and Betty Wilson and were friends of the Bloomingdales’—Grace was the godmother of Alfred and Betsy’s second son. Holmes Tuttle, who had been selling cars to Ronnie since the 1940s, was a close pal of Earle Jorgensen’s. Tuttle’s son, Robert, told me, “My father could always count on Earle to write a check.”54

  “To look at Holmes Tuttle you would never believe that he was one of the biggest movers and shakers in L.A.,” said David Jones, who did the flowers for the Tuttles’ dinners at their Tudor mansion in Hancock Park. “He was a man who was at ease with himself, and very firmly grounded,” said Robert Tuttle. There was something about this tall, balding, pleasant-looking man that inspired confidence. As Betsy Bloomingdale put it, “Everybody listened to Holmes. He was an oracle. He knew what should be done and saw that it got done.”55

  The seventh of ten children, Tuttle was born in 1905 on a cattle ranch in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma; his mother was half Chickasaw. The family fell on hard times after World War I, and upon his father’s death in 1922, Holmes left high school to work on the assembly line at a Ford plant in Oklahoma City. Four years later he set out for California, hitchhiking part of the way and arriving, legend has it, in a boxcar. By the time he married Virginia Harris, a schoolteacher, in 1934, he had worked his way up to sales manager of Cook Brothers Ford in downtown Los Angeles. Charles and Howard Cook, who also owned the Community Bank, backed him in a dealership in West Hollywood in 1946, and by the 1960s, Tuttle had Ford and Lincoln-Mercury dealerships in Beverly Hills, Irvine, Tucson, and Spokane, making him one of the most successful automobile dealers in the country.

  Tuttle was very much part of the downtown establishment—a director of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, a member of the California Club and the Los Angeles Country Club, and a bosom friend of the mighty Asa Call, whom he considered his political mentor. Virginia Tuttle was a founder of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Music Center, and socially the couple, who had lived in Pasadena before moving to Hancock Park, saw mostly a WASPy, conservative crowd. “Virginia was a very nice woman, and she did a lot for Holmes,” said a long-The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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  time friend from the business world. “Much as I hate to use the word, she was a little pushy, not ambitious exactly, but always very concerned about being in the right group. I don’t think the other ladies—Betsy, Marion, and Betty Wilson—were all that fond of Virginia.”56

  Politically, Holmes Tuttle was not as conservative as he seemed. His father had been a Bull Moose Republican who supported Teddy Roosevelt against William Howard Taft in 1912, and Holmes himself got in trouble with his Pasadena cronies for switching his support from Senator Robert Taft (President Taft’s son) to Eisenhower when the general entered the race in 1952. Some even whispered that Tuttle was a liberal Republican. “I have never liked that, when they begin to put labels on you,” Tuttle later explained. “I was not a so-called liberal Republican; I was just a Republican. . . . Sure, I was a Taft man. I think he was a great man, a great senator, and would have made a great president. But I felt that Eisenhower . . .

  certainly had a better chance to win. . . . So I changed.”57

  Tuttle’s political involvement began in earnest with Eisenhower’s reelection campaign in 1956; that campaign also marked the beginning of his friendship with Justin Dart, who was Eisenhower’s chief fund-raiser in California. “I never will forget the day that ‘Jus’ walked into my office, closed the door, and said, ‘Holmes, I want a $5,000 contribution [for President Eisenhower].’ I said, ‘Jus, you’ve lost your cotton-pickin’ mind!’

  Well, ‘Jus’ is a pretty persuasive person. He not only got the $5,000, but he put me to work. I was working morning, noon, and night assisting him in the fund-raising.”58

  “They were a formidable fund-raising pair,” said Robert Tuttle.

  “They’d sit in Justin’s office up on Beverly and La Cienega, get a guy on the speakerphone, and go to work on him. They’d play good cop, bad cop.

  Millions and millions of dollars were raised in that office over the years.”59

  Dart put Tuttle on the board of his drugstore conglomerate in 1958, and the two tycoons raised money for Nixon in 1960 and 1962. In the 1964

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mary, however, Dart joined forces with tire king Leonard Firestone to co-chair Rockefeller’s campaign—“[Nelson] told me not to work too hard, because he financed most of it himself,” Dart recalled. He claimed he was too busy expanding his business to help Tuttle raise money for Goldwater in the general election.60 Tuttle, meanwhile, continued to give his all to the Goldwater campaign, even though he had been disappointed when the senator rejected his advice to balance the ticket by choosing the moderate Scranton as his running mate, instead of conservative New York 3 2 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House congressman William Miller. Tuttle also kept quiet about how drunk Goldwater got after his “crazy acceptance speech,” according to one insider, who said, “Holmes had to put him on a plane back to Arizona.”

  Tuttle’s pragmatism and deep sense of loyalty appealed to Reagan, who trusted him immediately. Marion Jorgensen told me, “Holmes was the one. Ronnie had confidence in Holmes, and Holmes had tremendous confidence in him.”61

  Like Tuttle, Henry Salvatori was proud to call himself a self-made man, but he also saw himself as something of a classicist, a student of Socrates, Plato, and Cicero. Born near Rome in 1901, he had come to the United States with his parents as a toddler. His father started a small wholesale grocery business in Philadelphia, and the family lived on a farm in South Jersey.

  Henry attended a one-room rural schoolhouse, public high school in Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a BS in electrical engineering in 1923. He was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York and given a scholarship to Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree in physics in 1926. For the next six years he worked in oilfields in Oklahoma and California, helping to develop the science of prospecting for oil by seismic methods. In 1933, with $9,000 in capital, he started the Western Geophysical Company in Los Angeles, and by 1955 he had built it into the largest offshore seismic contractor in the world, with operations in twenty-six countries. He merged the company with Litton Industries in 1960 but remained CEO until 1967.62

  Salvatori met bubbly Grace Ford in Oklahoma in 1936, and she moved to Los Angeles later that year. He courted her by sending a rose to her hotel room every fifteen minutes from morning until midnight. “Mother was a ballet teacher in Tulsa,” their daughter, Laurie, told me. “One day a screenwriter from MGM came to her school and asked if Mother would take her students to Los Angeles for an audition. She was the chaperone, but at the end of the day, she got the contract and they didn’t. I have her 1936 Screen Actors Guild card. She was in the first horror movie Lionel Barrymore made, The Devil Doll. She played a mute. . . . Mother was not at all mute in real life.”63

  That was Grace’s only movie. She married Henry in November 1937, and they soon had two children, Laurie Ann and her brother, Henry Ford.

  The Salvatoris built their first house in 1940, on Bellagio Road in Bel Air, and quickly hit it off with their neighbors, Bill and Betty Wilson, whose The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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  girls went to Marymount with Laurie. Grace threw herself into philanthropic work, most notably for the ten-year, $30 million drive to build the Los Angeles County Music Center, which was spearheaded by Buff Chandler, the wife of the Los Angeles Times publisher. After Grace raised almost $400,000 by raffling off a Cadillac Eldorado at the campaign’s kickoff event in 1955, she was named “Times Woman of the Year” and made vice chairman of the campaign’s executive board. “Grace Salvatori was Buff Chandler’s bag woman,” said Connie Wald. “She raised more money for the Music Center than anyone.”64

  Meanwhile, Henry was embraced by the Committee of 25, becoming finance chairman of the L.A. County Republican Party in 1949 and state finance chairman two years later. Salvatori had been brought up a Republican—unlike Tuttle’s father, however, the senior Salvatori not only admired President Taft but also named one of Henry’s brothers William Howard in his honor. “It was only in the late 1940s when I became concerned with the Communist threat to the free world that I began to take an interest in politics,” Salvatori said years later. “I was in San Francisco during the formation of the United Nations. I believed then that it was a mistake, and I thought that the Democratic Party was totally unaware of the future threat of Communist Russia.”65

  If Tuttle was the conciliator among Reagan’s backers, Salvatori was the ideologue, the most committed to the conservative cause. A founding investor in the National Review, Salvatori also funded Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and started his own Anti-Communism Voters League, “whose purpose was the evaluation of all candidates for all offices on the basis of how well they were aware of the Communist threat.”66 He was a major contributor to the American Security Council, which was founded by General Douglas MacArthur and Henry and Clare Booth Luce in 1954 and aided the U.S. government’s anti-Soviet efforts overseas. (It would be repeatedly branded a CIA front by its leftist critics.) In the early 1960s, the Salvatoris gave $1 million to the University of Southern California to establish the Research Institute of Communist Strategy and Propaganda. “My father was very proud of being an American,” Laurie Salvatori said. “He believed that capitalism and the freedoms we enjoy as Americans have to be defended at all costs.”67

  Salvatori was a consistent supporter of opportunities for African-Americans, making six-figure donations to Howard University and the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education. After the 1965 Watts riot, 3 3 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he anonymously gave $250,000 to rebuild community institutions. “I’m a member of a minority myself,” he liked to say, and his daughter pointed out that her parents had no hesitation about bringing the distinguished black architect Paul Williams to dinner at Chasen’s. “They didn’t get their usual table,” she said, “and there were quite a few people staring at them.”68

  In 1964 the Salvatoris commissioned Williams, who had designed the MCA headquarters for Jules Stein and Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, to build their new house. Williams was popular with conservatives—one of his earliest clients was ZaSu Pitts—who loved his “historical revival fantasies.”69

  Williams was actually quite conservative himself and kept his distance from the civil rights movement. (“I am an architect . . . I am a Negro,” he once wrote. “We march forward singly, not as a race. Deal with me, and with the other men and women of my race, as individual problems, not as a race problem, and the race problem will soon cease to exist!”)70

  For the Salvatoris he created a $700,000, thirty-three-room, twelve-thousand-square-foot neo-Georgian colonial that looked like Mount Vernon transported to a Bel Air hilltop. Betsy Bloomingdale declared it the most beautiful house in Los Angeles. Billy Haines did the interiors and designed most of the furniture, but at one point he walked off the job because he found Salvatori overbearing. “He and Henry had words,” recalled Haines’s associate Jean Hayden Mathison, who conspired with Grace to persuade Haines to complete the project. “Grace Salvatori was a delight—

  a crazy, wonderful lady, always enthused about everything,” Mathison added.71 “Oh, she was something,” a friend said. “She had this extremely outgoing personality.”

  After the San Francisco convention, the Goldwater cause became something of a family affair for the Reagans. With Salvatori’s backing, Reagan was made co-chair of California Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, the campaign’s main volunteer organization. At Ronnie’s suggestion, Neil Reagan, who was West Coast vice president of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, was hired to produce Goldwater’s TV and radio ads. In Phoenix, Edith threw herself into raising money for her neighbor Barry. Nancy did her bit, too, plastering “Vote Goldwater” bumper stickers on their station wagon and her late-model Lincoln Continental.

  As Anne Douglas remembered, Nancy was at least as gung ho for Goldwater as Ronnie was. “Young Ron and my son Eric were best buddies at John Thomas Dye,” she told me. “They would spend one weekend with us The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966<
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  and one weekend with the Reagans at the ranch. You know how kids pick up what they hear at home—my husband and I didn’t care for Goldwater, and we must have discussed it. Anyway, I dropped Eric off at their house one Saturday morning, and about fifteen minutes later I got a call from him, crying and saying, ‘Come and pick me up.’ What happened was, he saw the Goldwater sign on the station wagon and said, ‘Boo Goldwater!’

  Nancy was so furious she gave him a dressing down, and he started to cry.

  He didn’t know what he had done. He was only six. Later on Nancy laughed about it, but at that moment she was serious. I went to pick him up, and that evening I talked to Nancy. She said, ‘I don’t know what your political opinions are, but you should keep the kids out of it.’ So she was off me for a while. It was the one time Nancy and I had a falling out.”72

  Reagan had recommended Neil to Goldwater during the primary.

  Though the brothers were finally in the same party, they had hardly seen each other since Nelle died. “All of a sudden, one day, I got a call from Ronald,” Neil recounted. “Ronald said, ‘I told Barry Goldwater to call you.

  I think you can help him.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ And he said, ‘Well, he’s getting all kinds of criticism of his TV commercials.’ Well, the criticism they were getting—I found out—was not necessarily [on the] content; it was the production. . . . [But] I was the most surprised person in the world that he told Barry to call me, because I always operate on the theory that he doesn’t even know I’m breathing, and he’s probably suspicious that I don’t know or care whether he’s breathing or not.”73