Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Controversial, cultivated, outspoken, and hilarious, Jerry Zipkin was a know-it-all who knew everybody from Diana Vreeland and Doris Stein to Liza Minnelli and Mick Jagger. Maniacally well organized, he traveled with greeting cards, wrapping paper, and Scotch tape, “in case I’m invited to a birthday party,” and finished his Christmas shopping by September, but didn’t feel left out of the holiday spirit because, as he told The New York Times, “I’m usually advising others what to buy.”26 His fourteen-room apartment on upper Park Avenue was a jungle of objets: eighteenth-century Meissen leopards, miniature Henry Moore sculptures, a gold-leaf portrait of his shoe done by Andy Warhol in the 1950s. He played up his reputation for nastiness by collecting all kinds of snakes—vipers, asps, co-bras, pythons—in crystal, bronze, silver, and porcelain, or on needlepoint 3 9 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House pillows. But he told House and Garden, “If I saw a real snake, I think I’d pass out.”27

  Every June, Zipkin was at Claridge’s in London for the season; every July, at the Plaza Athénée in Paris for the haute couture, followed by two or three weeks in the South of France at the Cap Ferrat villa of W. Somerset Maugham, the rich, cynical, and closeted homosexual British author who entertained international society and deposed royalty in the grand manner that Zipkin came to assume as his own. After Maugham’s death in 1965, Zipkin took to floating around the Mediterranean on cosmetics king Charles Revson’s yacht, the Ultima II. In August he headed to L.A.

  “He would come out with all his vermeil boxes,” said set designer Jacques Mapes, “and spread them out in his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

  Mapes also told me about the night in 1965 when Zipkin came to pick him up at Kennedy Airport and insisted they have dinner in Queens.

  “Jerry wasn’t invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball,” Mapes explained. “He was really very, very distraught about that. And he wanted to be able to truthfully say he was out of town.”28

  Jerome Robert Zipkin, the son of Annette Goldstein and David Zipkin, a real estate operator, was born on December 18, 1914, in New York City.

  The family was well off but not particularly social, something young Jerry seemed determined to change as soon as possible. He first attracted the notice of The New York Times at age fifteen, when he recited a hymn at the dedication of the new Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. In 1932 he entered Princeton University, which accepted very few Jewish students in those days.

  Although he kept it secret from almost all of his friends, he was quietly expelled in his junior year for stealing a copy of Terrasi’s Life of van Gogh from the university store. According to one friend, he had a nervous breakdown.

  He completed his education at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, where, he liked to joke, he “majored in canoeing.”29 Mickey Ziffren, the wife of the prominent Los Angeles lawyer Paul Ziffren, was his classmate there:

  “We both fell in love with the same Italian exchange student—a count to boot—and I got him. Jerry wasn’t visibly anything. He always kept a veil around his private life.”30

  Zipkin liked to tell friends that he spent the war “gathering information for the OSS at the Stork Club.” The Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services have no record of him working for the precursor to the CIA, but it is fascinating to speculate that he may have been the agency’s man Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  on Nancy Reagan. In any case, he was always very mysterious about what he did between lunch and dinner. “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” he would proudly announce to anyone who inquired. But he was listed as president of his father’s company as early as 1941, and his good friend the designer Bill Blass told me that in the 1950s “Jerry went to his office every day. He ran the business until he realized it was interfering with his social life, so he sold it. And from then on he specialized in friendship. It became his profession.”31

  After his father’s death in 1944, Zipkin started taking his mother on shopping trips to Europe. “He bought her a lot of clothes,” said family friend Steven Kaufman, of the Pittsburgh department store dynasty. “Jerry was madly insane for her, and she for him. They were both ardent Republicans, to the point of nausea.”32 Zipkin and his mother shared the Park Avenue apartment until she died in 1974, which might explain why he was so good with grande dames—that and his passion for card games. In fact, it was a letter of introduction from his canasta chum Sophie Gimbel that brought him to his original Los Angeles patroness, Anita May. Soon he counted Claudette Colbert, Joan Bennett, and ZaSu Pitts among his closest friends. He also became “inty-inty” with Billy Haines and Jimmie Shields, as well as Mapes’s companion, Ross Hunter, the producer of the 1950s Doris Day movies. In 1963, when Zipkin found out that ZaSu Pitts was terminally ill, he persuaded Hunter to offer her a part. Given this roster of friends, it seems as if a friendship with Nancy Reagan was all but inevitable.

  By the late 1960s he was close to not only California’s First Lady but also half the women in the Colleagues. “We always got along very well,”

  said Marion Jorgensen. “He used to call me and say, ‘I’m coming out. Can you arrange a card game?’ He loved to play 10-cent canasta. So it was Carlotta Kirkeby, Kay Gable, Jerry, and me. That was our usual game. We’d start at eleven in the morning, have sandwiches right at the card table, and keep playing until 5:30. There was a lot more to Jerry than some people gave him credit for. Betty Wilson was hysterical over him. She never understood him at all. He scared her to death. I think she was afraid of him criticizing and going out and talking about her. She covered that up by saying she couldn’t stand him.”33

  Zipkin befriended the Governor’s wife’s staff as well as her social set.

  Nancy Reynolds, the daughter of an Idaho senator, was his favorite, which meant she was not exempt from his unsolicited fashion critiques. “One time 4 0 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House when we were in New York, I wore a sweater that I just loved, and he said,

  ‘That is the most awful thing that I have ever seen in my life! Are you going to a Mexican fiesta?’ It had bright colors, which is why I liked it, but I never wore it again.”34

  According to Reynolds, Nancy Reagan knew that Zipkin was not universally liked among her friends. “She definitely was very defensive of him.

  She just loved him, and she looked forward to his calls. I think she really relied on his judgment and followed his advice. She learned a lot about New York and a lot about Europe, which she didn’t really have much knowledge of, from Jerry. And Jerry entertained Ronald Reagan, who was delighted his wife had that friendship she could count on. The Reagans felt he was a hundred-percenter, and in politics there are very few hundred-percenters.”35

  In January 1968, Nancy Reagan was named to the International Best Dressed List, coming in ninth out of twelve, ahead of Princess Alexandra of Kent and Faye Dunaway but behind Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, Charlotte Ford Niarchos, Lee Radziwill, Lauren Bacall, and Lynda Bird Johnson. The list, started in Paris in 1922 and taken over by New York fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert after the war, was based on the votes of two thousand “fashion experts, designers, socialites and other observers of the international scene.”36 A place on it became so coveted in café society and jet-set circles that Lambert found herself being offered bribes of as much as $50,000 to jigger the results.37

  Nancy was named again in 1971, and by the following year she was in second place; the Begum Aga Khan led that year’s list, which included Parisian hostess São Schlumberger, designer Carolina Herrera, Cher, and Twiggy.38 In 1974, having been on the list the requisite three times, she was elevated to the Hall of Fame, “the Valhalla of clotheshorses,” as the society columnist Suzy wrote, “may they dress in peace.”39 Nancy had finally caught up with Anita May, who made the Hall of Fame in 1964, and Betsy Bloomingdale, who ascended in 1970. It took Jerry Zipkin until 1985 to get on the men’s list.40 (I can still hear the shrieks from some of the
fashion editors who determined the final cut over lunch at Lambert’s apartment every year whenever his name came up: “Those horrible bright linings he has put into his suits!” “Those big vulgar cuff links!” “So what if he’s the First Lady’s best friend!”)

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  Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  In January 1969, the Reagans attended the inauguration of Richard Nixon, who, according to Barry Goldwater, made a point of snubbing them.41

  They had barely arrived back in Sacramento when the Governor was confronted with a strike at Berkeley called by the Third World Liberation Front, a newly formed alliance of student radicals and outside agitators who demanded that the university set up an autonomous college for black, Asian, and Mexican studies. On February 5, after two weeks of escalating violence, including numerous attempts to firebomb university buildings and assaults on students trying to attend classes, Reagan declared “a state of extreme emergency” and sent in the California Highway Patrol. “Those who want to get an education,” he said, “should be protected . . . at the point of a bayonet if necessary.”42

  Reagan’s hard-line approach to campus unrest, which bedeviled him throughout his first term, won him the approval of the middle-class, law-abiding parents whose ungrateful children were taking over administration buildings at Columbia and Duke, staging sit-ins at Harvard and teach-ins at the University of Michigan, shutting down San Francisco State for months on end. “We have been picked at, sworn at, rioted against, and downgraded until we have a built-in guilt complex,” he told The New York Times in August 1968:

  This has been compounded by the accusations of our sons and daughters who pride themselves on “telling it like it is.” . . . [A]s for our generation I will make no apology. No people in all history paid a higher price for freedom. And no people have done so much to advance the dignity of man. We are called materialistic. Maybe so. . . . But our materialism has made our children the biggest, tallest, most handsome, and intelligent generation of Americans yet. They will live longer with fewer illnesses, learn more, see more of the world, and have more successes in realizing their personal dreams and ambitions than any other people in any other period of our history—because of our materialism.43

  For Reagan, it was the Hollywood strike of 1945–46 all over again: Berkeley was a hotbed of “communism and blatant sexual misbehavior”; the protesters were “criminal anarchists” and “off-campus revolutionar-ies.”44 His sarcasm knew no bounds. A hippie, he liked to crack in speeches, is “a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Another oft-repeated line: “Their signs said, ‘Make love, 4 0 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House not war.’ But it didn’t look like they could do either.”45 For some, such gauche remarks were indicative of Reagan’s fundamental anti-intellectual-ism. Buff Chandler, for example, stepped down from the University of California’s Board of Regents in 1968. Reagan was happy to see her go. He appointed William French Smith in her place and made him chairman.46

  Reagan’s crackdown on the Berkeley agitators was overwhelmingly endorsed by the regents at their March 1969 meeting. Even Jesse Unruh voiced approval of the Governor’s handling of the situation, perhaps because the Democrats’ own polls “showed 80 percent in favor of discipli-nary action against students and teachers engaged in disrupting campus life.”47 On March 14, the Third World Liberation Front announced that it was suspending the strike and entering negotiations with university officials. A “gratified” Reagan said he was glad they were taking their dispute indoors, where it should have been all along.

  On March 17, Reagan bragged about the turnaround in a letter to fellow Republican governor Jack Williams of Arizona, who evidently had also had a run-in with campus rebels. “I’m convinced we win when we defy the little monsters, as you did,” Reagan wrote. “Two days ago at Berkeley an outdoor rally was broken up by a thunder shower, and now the students have called off hostilities while they take their quarterly exams. We are still on the side of the angels, but a little clout here and there is in order. After all, the Lord took a club to the money changers in the temple.”48

  The Governor and First Lady began their spring break in Los Angeles, at a black-tie dinner dance for six hundred given by Jules and Doris Stein to celebrate the opening of the Sheraton-Universal hotel at MCA’s Universal City. The Steins had flown in two planeloads of friends from New York and Paris—Emilio Pucci, Estée Lauder, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Kenneth Jay Lane, Adam and Sophie Gimbel, Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, Clare Booth Luce, Artur Rubinstein—and greeted them at the airport with “a kilted band of Scottish bagpipers.” The three-day extravaganza—medical philanthropist Mary Lasker called it “the most wonderful weekend in the history of mankind”—included the premiere of Universal Pictures’s Sweet Charity the following night, but the Reagans, more cog-nizant now of how their highfalutin socializing played in Sacramento, had decided to skip that.49

  It was just as well, because that morning brought sad news: Dwight Eisenhower had died at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda after a long Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  struggle with heart disease. The Reagans went on to Phoenix as planned, but then flew to Washington for the March 31 funeral. Edgar Gillenwaters, who worked as the Governor’s liaison in Washington, accompanied them to the National Cathedral and later remembered that General Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, was seated in the pew in front of them. “I was fascinated at one point to notice that his aide was writing on a small piece of paper,” Gillenwaters said. “ ‘Ronald Reagan’ was all I could read; it was in French. De Gaulle put the paper in his pocket and, in a most uncharacteristic move, did a complete turn around in the pew of the church and looked eyeball to eyeball with Ronald Reagan for an extended period of time. He was fascinated and probably had heard—must have heard—so much about him in order to do that uncharacteristic thing in a serious funeral setting. Then after the services were over, as we were leaving the pew, de Gaulle made a move to come to Ronald Reagan and shake his hand. It was a very extended handshake and, if you believe in

  ‘vibes,’ the exchange was loaded with vibes, back and forth. No conversation, nor [the] usual courtesies, no ‘nice-to-meet-you’ type exchange. He also took Nancy Reagan’s hand and made the same gesture to her.”50

  Perhaps de Gaulle, whose government had nearly been toppled by rioting Paris students in 1968, and who himself would pass on in 1970, was trying to express his support for Reagan’s tough stance against California’s alienated youth.

  On April 18, the Berkeley Barb, a local underground newspaper, ran a column calling for the establishment of “a cultural, political, freak-out and rap center for the Western world” on a vacant plot of university-owned land four blocks from the campus. Two days later, about one hundred street people, hippies, and New Left activists, dragging sod, plants, and playground equipment, occupied the site, which they named People’s Park.51 On April 30 the university announced that it was going ahead with plans to convert the land into athletic fields, but the squatters refused to leave. At dawn on May 15, 250 policemen moved into the makeshift park and forcibly evicted them; by noon an eight-foot-high steel-mesh fence surrounded the area, and three thousand protesters, mostly students, had gathered in Sproul Plaza outside the university’s main gate. “Let’s go down and take over the park!”

  shouted student president-elect Dan Siegal.52

  In the ensuing “Battle of Berkeley,” heavily outnumbered police and Alameda County sheriff ’s deputies used tear gas and shotguns loaded with 4 0 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House birdshot to control the rock-throwing crowd. When they ran out of birdshot, they switched to buckshot; one demonstrator was hit in the stomach and later died, another was blinded, and a highway patrolman was stabbed.

  In response to pleas from local law enforcement authorities, Reagan s
ent in two thousand National Guardsmen and imposed a curfew on the city, in effect placing Berkeley under martial law. The protesters, he said, were “challenging the right of private ownership in this country.”53 But the marches, violence, and arrests continued for four more days, until May 20, when a low-flying National Guard helicopter tear-gassed the campus, outraging students and professors but quelling the unrest. It wasn’t until June 2 that Reagan withdrew the National Guard, commending its troops for “the remarkable restraint they displayed in the face of extreme provocation.”54

  The Governor was weeping a few days later as he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of his close friend Robert Taylor, dead of lung cancer at fifty-seven. Nancy was distraught, too. “I think Bob’s death hit me as hard as anything in my life,” she later wrote. “The last time I saw him, I left the hospital to go back to Sacramento, telling Ursula I’d see her in a few days.

  I got out in the hall, and something made me turn back. I returned to his room and kissed him on the cheek. When I landed in Sacramento, they told me he had died. . . . I flew back on the next plane to be with Ursula.

  She asked if Ronnie would deliver the eulogy and, of course, he said yes.

  But the morning of the funeral he confessed to me that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get through it without breaking up.”55

  Ursula Taylor would later tell Laurence Leamer that Nancy “took over for me. . . . I was in shock. She made all the phone calls, all the arrangements, picked out my wardrobe—everything. Nancy could never separate herself from Ronnie for more than a day if she could help it, and she stayed with me several days and took care of me.” Within the week, Ursula turned to Nancy again, when her twenty-three-year-old son by her first marriage, Michael Theiss, was found dead in his bed of a drug overdose. Ursula recalled that of all the condolence notes she received, sixteen-year-old Patti’s was “so sensitive . . . the most beautiful.”56