West Coast gets its own East Room

It tops every social climber’s to-do list: Attend a celebration at the White House. But few people have the chance to check that one off. Until now. Well, almost -- ground will be broken Monday on the country’s first replica of the East Room of the White House, so West Coast social types can pretend they’re partying in their own Pennsylvania Avenue power venue.

Part of the proposed new Katherine B. Loker Center at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, the reproduction of the historic room will be faithful to the original, from its damask draperies to its life-size portraits of George and Martha Washington. The White House’s largest room is used for concerts, weddings, receptions and special events.

Washington’s arbiter of taste, Letitia Baldrige, loves the idea of the replica, providing “it’s dignified.”

Former White House curator Rex Scouten gives it a thumbs-up. “But I wouldn’t want to see anybody in the country re-create the entire White House,” he says. “One day it might fall into the wrong hands and be turned into a bar.” Cathy Fenton, social secretary and special assistant to President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, calls the concept “wonderful -- especially now, when we have had to curtail tours of the White House.”

On the Yorba Linda library’s drawing board for several years, the room, expected to be completed in November 2004, came closer to being a reality when philanthropist Katherine Loker made a $5-million lead gift toward the first expansion in the facility’s 13-year history. “When I started to think about all of the people who would see it, especially the ones who might never get to visit the White House, I got very excited about the project,” says Loker, a philanthropist whose father, Marti Bogdanovich, founded Star Kist Foods.

Sure, SoCal’s social-going public already has plenty of ballrooms and mansions in which to stage glittering affairs. But there’s nothing like a fresh locale to give an event a boost in attendance. Library management is counting on the public’s curiosity to lure event planners and visitors to the new attraction. “All presidential libraries have found that more than any other feature, visitors have a curiosity about life in the White House, three-dimensionally and tactilely,” executive director John Taylor says. “People want to know what it’s like to live and work in that environment. They like the sense of being in a place where great matters of national interest have transpired over the years.”

In the East Room, those events have ranged from laundry being strung wall to wall by Abigail Adams to Julie Nixon Eisenhower dancing at her sister Tricia’s wedding reception. “My most vivid memory of the East Room is when Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon took the oaths of office in a private ceremony,” Eisenhower says. “I remember it so well because it was the first time I met my future husband, David, grandson of the president.”

Baldrige, once Jacqueline Kennedy’s chief of staff, recalls a night in the ‘60s when actors performing “Hamlet” for guests of the first couple rushed off the East Room’s first stage -- “we had no Kennedy Center then,” she explains -- and smack into the walls. “They couldn’t find the exit doors because all of the room’s panels looked alike,” she says, laughing at the memory. “There were lots of smashed noses and everything else. It’s hysterical now but it was pretty sad at the time.” And then there was the ballerina who was “thrown up in the air and almost beheaded by one of the very low hanging crystal chandeliers,” she adds. “She ducked, then made a perfect swan dive.”

Designing and decorating the East Room replica, which is being built by Langdon Wilson Architecture and Planning of Newport Beach, will be a snap “because it has already been done,” says library board Chairman Donald Bendetti. “We’ll have the same beautiful moldings -- the room’s most important element, because they give the space its character -- windows, draperies, carpet, parquet floors, even the piano and the Washington portraits,” he says. “And while we won’t go so far as having the exact damask as the gold draperies in the East Room, we’ll have a very fine quality.”

The gala opening will feature a celebration that Bendetti hopes will be attended by all of the living U.S. presidents. “They will all be invited,” he says.