From the archives: Nancy Reagan, a first lady smitten with the city

This story originally appeared in Newsday on June 9, 2004 after former President Ronald Reagan's death. 

While President Ronald Reagan favored trips home to the West Coast, Nancy Reagan loved the Big Town - and with Le Cirque, Bill Blass and the Waldorf Towers just a short trip from the stuffy corridors of Washington, it was a journey she made often.

"You couldn't ask for a better friend," restaurateur Sirio Maccioni said yesterday, reminiscing about the former first lady's forays to Le Cirque, where she liked broiled flounder, and was often accompanied by high-society pals like Betsy Bloomingdale.

Maccioni, who credits Reagan with helping bring his restaurant to prominence, bonded with the first lady when his young son suffered a collapsed lung in a 1982 injury similar to one once endured by presidential son Ron Reagan Jr.

"My son was in the hospital, but there were complications and we couldn't find a doctor," Maccioni said. "I called her at one o'clock in the morning in Washington and she stayed on the phone with me all night until we could find a doctor who had done the procedure."

Nancy Reagan spent more time in Manhattan without her husband than with him, but she was never alone. Jerry Zipkin, the international socialite and high-society escort, was Nancy Reagan's lifelong friend and entrée to the Manhattan high-life.

Reagan's other close friends here included Casey Ribicoff, widow of Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff, and Louise Grunwald, whose husband, Henry, had been named ambassador to Austria by Ronald Reagan.

She would often connect with Bloomingdale, Brooke Astor or Carroll Petrie for lunches. And at night she would step out on the town with media friends like Barbara Walters and Mike Wallace, meeting up with them at Le Cirque or Le Perigord in the East 50s, one of the city's last classic French restaurants.

The presidential suite at the Waldorf Towers is the "official" residence of the president and first lady when they come to town, and Nancy Reagan often stayed there. But on private visits and shopping sprees, she had a penchant for the Carlyle Hotel.

Before the 1981 presidential inauguration, Reagan traveled to New York unaccompanied to purchase a coat from Maximilian, the prestige furrier on 57th Street. On subsequent visits, she would often be fitted for two or three dresses at a time from designers like Bill Blass, whose tailored suits were favored by the first lady.

Reagan was also a supporter of the city's arts scene.

In 1981, she flew to town for a performance of Lena Horne's one-woman show "The Lady and Her Music." Later that year, she was back to see son Ron dance with the Joffrey Ballet at City Center. In 1989, she again made a special trip to see "Metamorphosis," starring her sometime dancing partner Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Perhaps most notable, friends say, New York was where Nancy Reagan's sense of humor really shined, where she was most comfortable poking fun at her image in the press.

During the Alfred E. Smith charity dinner at the Waldorf in 1981, Reagan joked about a best-selling Washington, D.C., postcard of the time, which depicted her as "Queen Nancy."

"I'd never wear a crown," she told the assemblage. "It messes up your hair."