 the years, the Reagans and their friends almost came to resemble a court, and their social life took on an aura of ritual. Nancy Reagan set the tone, orchestrating the guest lists and the seating charts, establishing the pecking order, and maintaining a delicate balance between the private and the public. Her three best friends were like ladies-in-waiting: Betsy Bloomingdale, the wife of Diners Club co-founder Alfred Bloomingdale; Marion Jorgensen, the wife of steel magnate Earle Jorgensen; and Betty Wilson, the Pennzoil heiress and the wife of oil-equipment manufacturer William Wilson. The Kitchen Cabinet was led by three outspoken conservatives—auto dealer Holmes Tuttle, drugstore magnate Justin Dart, and oilman Henry Salvatori—who raised money for Reagan and advised him on appointments and policy. Somewhat removed but extremely influential were the group’s only billionaire, Walter Annenberg, the owner of TV Guide and President Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, and his wife, Lee, who were based in Philadelphia but who spent several months each year in California.
Like almost all of the Reagan intimates I interviewed, Armand Deutsch, a retired movie producer and an heir to the Sears, Roebuck fortune, and his wife, Harriet, would see me only after getting the O.K. from Nancy Reagan, who is still very much the First Lady of this tight-knit group, or what is left of it. Most members of the Kitchen Cabinet are gone, including Holmes Tuttle, Justin Dart, and Henry Salvatori, who died last year at the age of 96. The Salvatori house, an all-white Bel Air mansion reminiscent of Mount Vernon, recently sold for a reported $18 million. William French Smith, the corporate lawyer who went to Washington as Reagan’s first attorney general, died eight years ago; his widow, Jean, lives in Bel Air in a gated community near the Getty Museum. Betty Wilson’s funeral was held at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church in Brentwood in July 1996, and Walter Annenberg, Armand Deutsch, and Earle Jorgensen were honorary pallbearers. William Wilson, ambassador to the Vatican under Reagan and now in his early 80s, is one of a handful of trusted friends who play golf with the former president on Saturdays at the exclusive Los Angeles Country Club. “My father would carry him around the golf course if he had to,” says Wilson’s daughter Marcia Hobbs.
Since November 1994, when Reagan revealed in an open letter to the nation that he was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Nancy Reagan has become all the more protective of his well-being and image. She no longer entertains at home or gives interviews. I saw her socially, however, on three occasions in Los Angeles last fall. The first was at a lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air, where she had her usual Cobb salad, followed by peanut-butter, oatmeal, and chocolate-chip cookies, baked especially for her. One night Betsy Bloomingdale gave a small dinner party at home which included the Deutsches, Mary Jane and Charles Wick, who was head of the U.S. Information Agency under Reagan, and Ray Stark, the Old Guard movie producer, whose late wife, Fran, was an auxiliary member of the Group.
In Los Angeles, she goes out several times a week, if not with the ladies of the Group, with Merv Griffin and other showbiz friends, including Johnny Mathis. This March, Lee Annenberg sent a plane to bring her and Betsy Bloomingdale to Walter’s 90th-birthday party in Palm Springs. But she also spends many evenings at home with her husband, often reading her White House diaries and watching videos of state dinners and official trips—perhaps in preparation for a mini-series on the Reagans which TBS Superstation will air in 1999, and for which they are receiving a sum said to be in the mid six figures.
By all accounts, this lasting love affair has been the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s political career. He had the big ideas he believed could change the country and the world for the better. She created the atmosphere and forged the friendships which made it possible for him to carry out what both of them saw as his destiny.
At the time, Reagan considered himself a New Deal Democrat. He had campaigned for Truman in 1948, and was one of a group of well-known Democrats who signed a telegram urging Eisenhower to become their party’s candidate in 1952. His movie career was nearly over, but he was still a key player in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position he held from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960. And although he had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, about Communist infiltration of movie-industry unions, he managed to do so without naming names. Jane Wyman asked for a divorce that same year because she was bored by his growing political interests.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan bought their first house, a four-bedroom ranch on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, for $42,000. The Gregory Pecks, the Joseph Cottens, and the Lawrence Welks lived nearby. She abandoned her movie career and had her first child, Patricia Ann, in October 1952. He was so desperate for work that he briefly tried stand-up comedy in Las Vegas. Then, in late 1953, Taft Schreiber, an agent at MCA—who a decade later would become one of the early members of the Kitchen Cabinet—found Reagan the job that would not only bring him financial security but also gradually transform him from a Hollywood labor-union leader into a national spokesman for the free-enterprise system. As host of the CBS weekly television series General Electric Theater, Reagan received a salary of $150,000. His duties included promoting G.E. and its products around the country—he always traveled by train or car because he was afraid to fly. Over the next eight years, he visited all 139 G.E. plants in 38 states, addressing business organizations and meeting 250,000 of the company’s workers.
It was mainly through the Deutsches, in the 1950s, that the Reagans grew closer to the Annenbergs, although Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg had struck up a friendship in the late 1930s, when the Philadelphia publishing scion would go out to Hollywood to check on one of his father’s magazines, Screen Guide. Lee Annenberg, a niece of Columbia Pictures czar Harry Cohn’s, and Harriet Deutsch had been best friends since they were in their early 20s and married to their first husbands, Las Vegas casino owner Beldon Katleman and movie director Sylvan Simon, respectively. Lee was married a second time, to Schenley liquor king Lewis Rosenstiel, before marrying Walter Annenberg—who had also been previously married—in 1951, the same year the Deutsches tied the knot.
Betty Wilson was a member of the Colleagues, an elite charity organization limited to 65 women which raised money for the children of unwed mothers. So were Marion Jorgensen and Betsy Bloomingdale. Nancy Reagan was made a member in 1962—the year Ronald Reagan became a Republican. His rightward drift, it seems, paralleled her social progress.
All three of Nancy Reagan’s new best friends were natives of Los Angeles and had been educated at local private schools: Betty Wilson at Marymount in Westwood, Marion Jorgensen and Betsy Bloomingdale at Marlborough in old-money Hancock Park. Betty Wilson was from the richest family, and is invariably described as “the only brunette in the Group.” A devout Catholic whose mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants, she fell in love with Bill Wilson at Stanford University in the late 1930s. An Episcopalian, he converted after he married her. His father owned a Los Angeles–based oil-equipment manufacturing business, which was a customer of Earle Jorgensen’s steel company.
Marion Jorgensen, whose husband calls her “the General,” was the grande dame of the trio. She had met Ronald Reagan at Jimmy and Gloria Stewart’s house when he was married to Jane Wyman—“We don’t mention that,” she says—and she was married to Hollywood producer Milton Bren. Her second husband was Richard Call, the son of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance chief Asa Call, a major behind-the-scenes player in the Republican Party and one of the closest allies of Norman Chandler, then the all-powerful publisher of the Los Angeles Times. She married Earle Jorgensen, who had also been married twice before, in 1960. The son of Danish immigrants from San Francisco, he’d made his way to Los Angeles just after the First World War, and started Jorgensen Steel & Aluminum “by selling his extra suit and getting two dollars and a half,” to quote Marion, who, well into her 80s, still wears Chanel suits and has the legs of a showgirl.
The daughter of an Australian-born, Harvard-educated orthodontist who had settled in Los Angeles in the 1920s, Bloomingdale was a bridesmaid at the teenage Gloria Vanderbilt’s scandalous 1941 Santa Barbara wedding to playboy Howard Hughes’s sidekick Pat di Cicco. In 1946 she married Alfred Bloomingdale, an heir to the New York department-store fortune, who had come out West to produce movies, and proceeded to transform him, as he himself often said, from a Jewish Democrat into a Catholic Republican. In 1952 he bought control of Diners Club, one of the