The Hidden Star : Nancy Reagan’s ‘Friend’

Joan Quigley knew it was going to be a trying week.

She saw it in her stars.

“I’m an Aries,” the San Francisco socialite explains. “There’s a major conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which is going to be terrible for many people. Accidents. Fires. Troubles. It’s just a very difficult time.”

And a very public one, now that she has been identified as Nancy Reagan’s mysterious “friend” who former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan claims in his new book affected “virtually every major move and decision” made by the President during two terms in office.

The uproar has unnerved Quigley, to say the least. “To be in this position is very awkward and very uncomfortable,” she says. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

And what an uproar it has been, following her from San Francisco, to Paris and then back home again over the weekend, touching on almost every major White House event of the last 7 1/2 years, from the Reagan-Gorbachev summits and the President’s surgery to his 1981 attempted assassination.

It has prompted one comedian to wonder if there will be a “secretary of Health, Education and Voodoo” soon, and a newspaper columnist to suggest that the next step for the Reagan clan might well be channeling. Nevertheless, Quigley predicts that President Reagan will weather this flap just as well as he has withstood the other furors of his Administration.

After all, she says, Reagan has much in common with “those other great Presidents”--Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. “They’re all Aquarians. They all have great vision.”

Specifically, “Reagan has a lot of Capricorn in his chart because he’s very practical,” she explains. “Also he has three planets in their exaltation, which is a very good quality. It means his life is a very important one.”

Now that the truth has come out about her consulting, friends say Quigley--an heiress, Vassar graduate, Junior League alumna and author of two books on astrology (with a third one in the works) who once hid her passion for the stars because her father thought it was too bizarre--has long kept a low profile in her extraterrestrial profession.

It was apparently such a low profile that Kim Jordan, editor of the San Francisco Pocket Astrologer, which keeps tabs on the city’s community of seers, never heard of her. And one of Quigley’s colleagues in the Junior League readily admits: “I didn’t know anything about this astrology bit.”

Not Quigley’s Style

Another friend explains that it simply wasn’t Quigley’s style to talk about it in public. “One would have to bring up the subject.” Still, she always was looking for converts. “She did my chart, but I didn’t ask her for it,” says one of her Nob Hill neighbors.

With her background of wealth and social position, Quigley comes from the creme de la creme of San Francisco gentility, exactly the sort of woman whom Mrs. Reagan has embraced again and again as friends in California, New York and Washington.

Quigley’s father, John, was a Kansas lawyer when he moved to San Francisco in 1942 after buying the old Drake-Wilshire Hotel. President of the California State Hotel Assn. in 1951 and director of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce from 1949-1952, he owned and operated the establishment at 340 Stockton St. for more than 30 years. (It is now the Campton Place Hotel, one of the city’s most elegant smaller inns.)

John Quigley died of cancer in 1985 at 80; his wife, Zelda, passed away a year later. Their daughters, Joan and Ruth, who are both in their 60s, stayed at home with their parents their whole life. They decided to continue living in the family apartment on California Street, opposite the Pacific Union Club in one of the plush Nob Hill buildings owned by the same management as the nearby Huntington Hotel. A one-time financial analyst in San Francisco’s Financial District, Ruth Quigley took after her father as a Republican Party activist and, like him, was a member of the San Francisco Republican Central County Committee.

Joan Quigley, however, took after her mother, who was the first member of the family to become interested in astrology.

The way Joan Quigley explains it, she was 15 when her mother decided to visit a San Francisco astrologer one afternoon as a lark. When she told the astrologer the date of her husband’s birthday, the astrologer knew right away that he had lost his mother at age 11. “That’s when my mother began to think this was serious,” Joan Quigley remembers. “Because it was true.”

Zelda Quigley quickly ordered horoscopes for herself and her two daughters. Joan began to read up on the subject and by the time she was graduated from Vassar with a degree in art history, she found that “everything” in the chart had come true, especially about her boyfriends.

She decided to ask her mother’s astrologer, a Scotswoman known to her only as Mrs. Jerome Pearson, to teach her everything she knew. “The woman was in her 80s and had never been able to pass on her knowledge to anyone,” Quigley recalls. “It took about a year.”

Friends say Quigley’s family generally disapproved of her chosen profession but didn’t interfere with her work. But their father in particular “disapproved heartily,” Quigley said. As a result, Quigley did her Junior League charity work openly and her charts in secret.

For a time, Quigley went to New York and consulted under a nom de plume , sitting in hotel rooms and constructing charts for clients she never met.

With practice, she began developing her own style to her forecasts. And, just as her astrologer predicted she would eventually “improve” on her teacher’s methods, “I have,” Quigley boasts. “I have done so much since.”

She met Nancy Reagan through entertainer Merv Griffin, who was one of her clients, she says. For 13 years--from 1972 to 1985--she became a regular guest on his syndicated talk show. Through him, she became interested in working up the horoscopes of political figures. In 1972, for instance, Griffin requested she construct charts for all the presidential candidates for one of her appearances on his show.

“I had made many predictions for Merv, and he always said they were correct,” she says. It then occurred to Griffin one day, she adds, that the First Lady, who shared his birth date of July 6, might also want her horoscope worked up. “And so he introduced me to Nancy by telephone and so forth.”

Griffin was traveling in Omaha with actress Eva Gabor, according to a spokesman, and could not be reached for comment.

Quigley says she first began giving Nancy Reagan her “serious, professional” astrological advice in the late 1970s, then continued it through the 1980 presidential campaign. By the time Reagan was in the White House, Quigley says she knew his horoscope “upside down.”

After the 1981 attempt on Reagan’s life, Quigley says the First Lady began to consult her again more heavily. She would not comment, however, on whether she had warned of the assassination try.

Quigley, who says she consulted with Mrs. Reagan by telephone, usually from Camp David, only met the President once--during her sole visit to the White House, attending a 1985 state dinner for Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid. The news that evening was filled with Reagan defending his plans to visit a cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where Nazi SS troops were buried.

She is reluctant to go into specifics about the advice she gave the Reagans. But, by her own account, it included data about when would be the best times for them to make their speeches, trips, appearances and other major scheduling decisions. This included telling Mrs. Reagan when it was safe to fly, or when her husband should have a news conference.

Schedule Changes

But, according to Regan’s book, the relationship was so close that the First Lady once complained to him in budgetary terms about revisions in her husband’s schedule. “I wish you’d make up your mind,” Regan quotes her as saying testily. “It’s costing me a lot of money, calling up my friend with all these changes.”

Quigley declined to say what she charged the First Lady, or any of her clients, for her consultations.

She also denied, among other things, Regan’s claims that she interfered with the 1985 Gorbachev-Reagan summit--though Regan wrote that she was called on to choose “auspicious moments” for meetings and also “to draw up horoscopes that presumably provided clues to the character and probable behavior of Gorbachev.”

She says she takes a “scientific” approach to astrology, unlike such well-known star-gazers as Jeane Dixon and Linda Goodman whom she dismisses merely as “pop” amateurs.

“I’m more intellectual about it,” she says. “I’m a serious, professional astrologist. On top of that, I’m a professional writer, so I can express myself.”

Her method of doing astrological charts for years involved looking into a “little book of symbols and figures--called an ephemeris--to find the relations of the planets to the sun and the moon,” she says. Then she would construct a chart and then start analyzing it.

Now, however, she employs computers to do her calculations--helped by the Astronumeric Service and an assistant, whom she identifies as Nicki Michaels.

“I no longer do the rote part,” she says, concentrating instead on just “the creative part--straight interpretation,” which she claims is “more strenuous and more demanding mentally.”

Nostradamus Prediction

Many of Quigley’s crowd have been asking what she thinks about the 16th-Century prediction by French astrologer Nostradamus that there will be an earthquake in Los Angeles sometime this month, possibly today. “It’s very interesting,” she admits.

Still, when pressed about a possible shaker, she says cryptically, “I don’t specialize in this. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised.”

Presently, Quigley is working on her third book on astrology and says her publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston and Prentice-Hall, have “never changed one word of anything I wrote.”

However, in her first book, “Astrology for Adults,” which sold more than 160,000 copies when it was issued in 1969, the publisher did take out a chapter in which she detailed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ horoscope.

Quigley, who spent 2 1/2 years researching and writing it, told her agent to wait until the stars were right before submitting the book to the publisher.

By the 1970s, when she was doing charts for her circle of friends and the babies of her friends, she decided on the subject for her second book, “Astrology for Parents of Children and Teen-Agers.” It was published in 1971, and once again she used the Kennedy family as an example: the relationship between John Kennedy Jr. and his mother, which she described as “erratic.”

Her third book, tentatively titled “Stars to Light Your Way,” is taking her longer than usual to finish. “I’ve done three revisions so far. I’m working on the final one now,” she says. Although it does not yet have a publisher, Quigley calls it the “definitive New Age work,” an attempt to “explain the meaning of astrology and the significance of it in terms of living for people in the New Age.”

Before the 1968 presidential election, Quigley says she told her family that she would burn all her astrology books if Richard Nixon lost. She says Nixon had a horoscope for “realizing hopes and wishes” while his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, had a horoscope showing he lost elections.

As for the 1988 presidential race, Quigley explains that, so far at least, she has stayed uninvolved astrologically. “I’m so tired,” she says with a sigh. “I don’t have time to do this.”

The reason, apparently, is that she and her sister lead active social lives. Like most of the city’s well-heeled, they turn up frequently in the society columns--tidbits about which fashionable restaurant they were seen dining in or which Nob Hill party they were seen at.

Formal Parties

In December, for instance, they attended San Francisco’s annual black- and white-tie Cotillion honoring 19 debutantes and went on to celebrate at hot spot Trader Vic’s. Quigley’s escort was Hart Smith, whose family built the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

Quigley also supports several local and national charities, including Achievement Rewards for College Scientists, a nonprofit foundation supporting the education of science scholars whose active San Francisco chapter includes such top-drawer names as Gordon Getty. Friends say her interest in the organization stems from her desire to help move astrology out of the realm of the occult and into the domain of science.

Though Quigley is reluctant to discuss her clients, her friends say that over the years she has built up a clientele on both coasts made up of prominent personalities, including corporation heads, celebrities and socialites like herself. She has been able to choose quality over quantity, sources say, because of her personal wealth.

Quigley acknowledges that her clients number only “a very few. I don’t see a dozen people in a day, for instance, because I do their work in great depth.”

What they all have in common, she adds, is “that they have important lives that need this sort of thing.”

Quigley firmly believes that the Reagans shouldn’t be embarrassed about their more-than-casual interest in horoscopes: “Intelligent people through history have used an astrologer. It’s an intelligent thing to do.”

“If you were swimming in an ocean of cosmic forces, you would want to go with the tide instead of against it.”