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children, Nancy Reagan whispers to one of his staff, ‘I’ve heard he wants to look like Diana Ross, but looking at him up close, he’s so much prettier than she is. Don’t you agree? I mean, I just don’t think she’s that attractive, but he certainly is.’
    Jackson’s employees are forbidden from discussing their employer, so he does not reply.
    ‘I just wish he would take off those sunglasses,’ continues Mrs Reagan, adding, ‘Tell me, has he had any surgery on his eyes?’
    There is still no reply. ‘Certainly his nose has been done,’ whispers Mrs Reagan, peering hard at Jackson, who is now talking to her husband. ‘More than once, I’d say. I wonder about his cheekbones. Is that make-up, or has he had them done too? It’s all so peculiar, really. A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don’t know what to make of it.’ She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head.
    The Jackson aide begins to think it may be rude to say nothing at all to the First Lady. ‘Listen, you don’t know the half of it,’ he says, with a conspiratorial smile. But the First Lady reacts as though she disdains such idle gossip.
    ‘Well, he is talented. And I would think that’s all that you should be concerned about,’ she snaps.

NANCY REAGAN
    DISAPPOINTS
ANDY WARHOL
    The White House, Washington DC
    October 15th 1981
    ‘The funny thing about movie people,’ says Andy Warhol to the First Lady over tea in the White House, ‘is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.’
    Nancy Reagan’s eyes, already preternaturally wide, grow still wider. She looks at Warhol as though he were unbalanced.
    ‘ I am a movie person, Andy,’ she replies.
    The interview has been stiff throughout. Mrs Reagan never reacts well to criticism, and can spot it from a great distance. It is written in her stars. ‘Cancers tend to be intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive and fearful of ridicule – all of which, like it or not, I am,’ she explains in her autobiography. ‘The Cancer symbol is the crab shell: Cancers often present a hard exterior to the world, which hides their vulnerability. When they’re hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves. That’s me all right.’
    Warhol himself has been notably crab-like in his advance on the Reagans. Two months before the 1980 presidential election, he befriended the Reagans’ son Ronald Junior, then their daughter Patti. Both sides are happy: the younger Reagans mix with the most famous artist in America, and in turn Warhol mixes with America’s imminent first family. Warhol likes Ronald Junior. ‘He turned out to be a really nice kid. God, he was so sweet ... and he’s very smart. Lispy and cute.’ At their first lunch together, Warhol is tongue-tied. ‘I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I was too shy and he was too shy.’ Warhol finds himself asking an awkward question about whether or not his father dyes his hair. Ronald Junior tries to change the subject. His mother, Nancy, is, he tells Warhol, ‘very sweet and very adorable’.
    Warhol seizes the moment. ‘So then I got sneaky and brought Ordinary People up, and I told him how much I hated Mary Tyler Moore, that afterI saw the movie if I saw her on the street I’d just kick her. And at that point he was almost going to say something about Nancy, but then somehow he got the drift of it and changed the subject. Because I think the mother in Ordinary People is just like Mrs Reagan. Really cold and shrewd.’
    They discuss what to order. Warhol tells Ronald Junior that he has never eaten frogs’ legs, ‘and he was so sweet he ordered them just so I could try it. He’s really sweet, a beautiful body and beautiful eyes. But he just doesn’t have a pretty nose. It’s too long.’
    Two weeks later, Patti Davis, Ronald Junior’s older sister, drops by the Interview office. ‘She looked sort of pretty to me, but