HER GRACE of the SLICKS

Ronald Reagan crooned in her ear, Richard Nixon came out of hiding for her, and L.B. J. ("the best white hunter I've ever had") took her hunting. Petroleum queen Bonnie Swearingen is the Martha Mitchell of corporate America, and BILL ZEHME tells how she managed it

Bonnie Swearingen does not take down her Christmas tree after the holiday season. The large artificial tree in her Chicago living room has been standing, fully decorated, for four years continuously. Spread out around it are several dozen gift boxes, many of them empty under their gold and lavender wrappings. She says she likes to think of the tree display as a memorial shrine to her late mother, whom she worshiped, and to two recently deceased friends. Those who know her do not question the sustaining presence of the tree. Indeed, in the opinion of one observer, it poetically symbolizes the three most prevalent urges that seem to guide her: festivity, sentimentality, and eccentricity.

To suggest that Bonnie Swearingen lives Christmas fifty-two weeks a year would hardly be presumptuous. Her life is unquestionably a charmed one. She is famously forthcoming, and has accordingly been called corporate America's answer to Martha Mitchell, a comparison Bonnie usually takes as a compliment. ("Martha was the perennial southern belle," she says. "It was so easy to relate to her.") Through three upwardly mobile marriages, she has established a unique global power base as a madcap woman of means and also as the uncontested queen bee of high-society outrage. She tends to adopt first families, whom she has met through her husbands. She's coached Nancy Reagan in public speaking. She's golfed with Jerry Ford and Dwight D. Eisenhower. She's played around the pyramids with the Sadats and bent over the shah of Iran's deathbed. Lyndon Johnson took Bonnie deer hunting on his ranch. "He was the best white hunter I've ever had," she chirps. Rumor has it that L.B.J., though he claimed to be impressed by her aim, always insisted she stand in front of him when she was shooting. Although she is blind in one eye, Bonnie has bagged her share of trophies. "Killing has never bothered me," she says cheerfully. "I just adore venison." A Chicago columnist once nicknamed her The Mouth in referring to her flip quips and bubbly brags to reporters, whom she sometimes phones from her bathtub or from her bed, which she jokingly calls her desk.

Shortly after her marriage to Swearingen, Bonnie allegedly announced to the press that she regularly prepared breakfast for him while wearing nothing but emeralds. She has since denied ever having uttered the comment, although not long ago she confessed to W: "We have breakfast au naturel if we are lucky enough to have a morning totally alone."

John Swearingen never discusses his wife publicly. A man of imposing presence and position, whose general intolerance of frivolity is legendary, he fiercely guards his privacy. I learned this on the sticky summer morning I first visited the palatial Swearingen condominium overlooking Chicago's scenic Lake Shore Drive. Clad in Top-Siders and a pullover sport shirt, he answered the door himself and ushered me to a chair next to the Christmas-tree shrine. I hinted that living with his wife must be an extraordinary adventure. He smiled wanly, lit his pipe, and quietly acknowledged the humidity.

Among major industrialists, John Swearingen is very much the fat cat's meow, the man who put Standard Oil of Indiana on the map. He started there in 1939 at the age of twenty as a research chemist and retired in September 1983 as the monolithic chairman of the

He said, "I want you to meet the smartest man in the oil business." And she said, "I just divorced the smartest man in the oil business."

board, at which point the company ranked tenth on Fortune's list of the five hundred top corporations in America. His shrewd dealings in the energy business have earned him international respect, fabulous wealth, prominent cronies, and a blond bombshell of a wife. Last July, while he was off fishing with the prime minister of Australia, he received an urgent summons to Washington, where he was asked to consider forsaking his retirement. The United States government had just forked over an unprecedented $4.5 billion to bail out the

foundering Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago, and it needed a well-seasoned troubleshooter with an exemplary track record to take the helm as controlling C.E.O.

The next day, for the first time in her life, Bonnie Swearingen became a banker's wife.

A woman who clearly values continuity, Bonnie has made a habit of marrying oilmen. World powers know Bonnie Swearingen as the American Princess of Petroleum, Her Grace of the Slicks. She is fond of saying, "I adore the smell of gasoline. If they'd bottle it, I'd wear it as a perfume." Her first two husbands were Texas crudes, the second of whom was the gregarious Houston tycoon Oscar Wyatt, Jr. That marriage, which lasted only ten months, was said to be stormy. Of that period in her life Bonnie has revealed little. To one interviewer she simply sighed, "I should have gone to work for him, not married him."

Swearingen, the refined refiner, entered her life at the Greenbrier resort, in West Virginia, where she had just finished a golf lesson with Sam Snead. According to Bonnie, "Another oilman introduced us, saying to me, 'I want you to meet the smartest man in the oil business.' And I said, 'I just divorced the smartest man in the oil business. I do not wish to meet another.' " They wed in 1969, after Swearingen ended a twenty-six-year marriage that had produced three daughters. Bonnie moved to Chicago to become the new First Lady of Standard Oil, a position she grudgingly relinquished upon Swearingen's retirement. When her husband accepted the Continental Bank job, she told me, "There will always be oil in my life!" I asked what she meant. "Stocks," she purred. "I own a lot of oil stock."

She was bom Bonnie Bolding and she rose from the Deep South, a belle-inwaiting. She and her four sisters were known as the Alabama Gabors. Her father was an itinerant evangelical minister; her mother ran the household and reared the seven Bolding offspring. Family funds were scarce. In pursuit of college-scholarship money and glamour, Bonnie entered the Miss Alabama Pageant four times and once came as close as first runner-up. She often tells the story of how she traveled to Atlantic

City that year as the alternate and prayed for the winner to break her leg. "I would have been a better Miss Alabama," she says matter-of-factly. "She was not right for the role, and I was." Bonnie's first taste of royalty arrived when she was crowned Miss Cascade Plunge; her fiefdom was a private swimming pool in her hometown of Birmingham. "It was worth winning," she declares with a slight twinkle. "I'm happiest when I'm in the water."

In 1955 Bonnie Bolding went Hollywood. She bounced her golden tresses and Pepsodent pearlies out to the Pasadena Playhouse, where she studied acting and got noticed. For her first Paramount screen test, she recited lines from Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When Elizabeth Taylor later signed to star in the movie version, it is said, she watched Bonnie's screen test over and over in order to parrot her authentic southern drawl.

Though she never set the entertainment industry on its ear, she managed to work consistently. She appeared in only a handful of movies, one of which was called Bundle of Joy, with Debbie Reynolds; Bonnie played Eddie Fisher's girlfriend. Most television casting directors saw her as a tangy-looking frontierswoman (she still looks like a hickory-smoked Doris Day), and before long Bonnie began turning up in such horse operas as Gunsmoke, Sugarfoot, and Have Gun, Will Travel.

To stave off the clutches of the casting couch, Bonnie had taken her mother west with her. "You soon separate the men from the boys when your mama is on the scene," she says dryly. Among the men Gertha Bolding permitted her daughter to date in California were Hugh O'Brian, Mike Todd, and visiting Texas oil playboy John Manley III, whom Bonnie married and left Hollywood for.

She shares a birthday with George Washington and celebrates it at roughly a dozen parties a year thrown in her honor around the world. She never divulges her age, although one of her former Alabama schoolmates figures it to be fifty-two. She is well maintained. A few years ago she posed for a life-size nude sculpture (in a bikini), called Earth Angel by its creator, artist Victor Salmones. The statue, of Bonnie in full arabesque, now stands beside the pool outside the Swearingens' winter retreat in Palm Desert, California. Chicago heiress Abra Prentice Anderson says of Bonnie, "She has a beautiful body, a beautiful face, and a lot of flair. People are jealous of her." Another local socialite says, "She has this wonderful, magical quality of always being seventeen years old. I mean, she still flirts. She can either charm the pants off you or tell you where to stick it. But that's part of being a coquette."

Bonnie has been quoted as saying that she spent one of her previous lives as Scarlett O'Hara—a role she carries over to the here and now with definitive aplomb. Like any self-respecting belle, she is always late for appointments. I had to wait for her twice for our interview sessions, which she crammed into her social schedule by cutting lunch dates short. One day she greeted me in a white negligee and sat fanning herself and sipping iced tea laced with mint leaves (she won't touch a mint julep unless it is spiked with Taittinger champagne). In conversation, she tends to gravitate from impatient haughtiness to conspiratorial warmth and candor. By the end of our meetings, she was addressing me as "honey" and laughing at herself a good deal.

John Swearingen, in his highly succinct fashion, once described his wife to a friend in two words: "Predictably unpredictable." She thinks quickly on her feet and is always ready to brandish a disarming opinion on any topic. For instance, when I asked her how she feels about men, she replied unhesitatingly, "Oh, I adore them. I respect them and look up to them. Maybe that's part of the southern upbringing. I certainly wouldn't want to be in a world without them. Someone once asked me what makes a southern woman different. I began to explain how my husband ran this and that. Then she asked, 'Well, isn't there anything you run?' I said, 'Of course, dear. I run my husband.' Really the whole key to being a southern belle is never to let people become aware of what you run. Especially when it comes to men."

A needlepoint pillow plopped on the couch near the Christmas tree reads: NAPOLEON LIVES.. .WE'RE MARRIED!! This is a private joke. Bonnie, who has always idolized Napoleon, refers to him as "the poor darling," and gets misty when discussing Waterloo. "I used to dream about him often," she remarks hazily. "Strange dreams. Always I would meet him under the same tree at the fork of the Seine river. We'd discuss battles and the theater." She claims to have stopped dreaming of the little emperor the day she met her husband. "John is my Napoleon," she sighs. The Swearingens honeymooned on Elba, where Napoleon was exiled. "I cried for him there," Bonnie recalls.

At a dinner party, Ronald Reagan sat next to her crooning "Boop-Boop-DittemDattem-Whattem-Chu'' all evening.

The Swearingens are devout Republicans. "I could not be married to a man who thought differently from me politically," Bonnie asserts soberly. When she goes to rallies and conventions, she always wears royal blue, which she calls "Reagan blue" for no apparent reason except that it pleases her to do so. She recalls attending a dinner party at which Ronald Reagan sat next to her and crooned "Boop-Boop-Dittem-Dattem-Whattem-Chu" all evening. "If he hadn't made it as a president," she insists, "he certainly could have made it as a singer." Her praise for Richard Nixon, another frequent dining partner, is even more unrestrained. It was Bonnie who sweet-talked the former president out of hiding half a decade ago, goosing him to show up at a Boys Club fund-raiser in Chicago. Nixon remarked at the time, "You can't say no to Bonnie." She regards the Boys Club as her favorite charity and has helped to raise several million dollars for the cause because, she claims, it assuages her greatest regret: never having had children of her own.

Bonnie considers herself both frugal and extravagant. She likes poking through thrift shops, yet she swears by Adolfo. She always flies tourist on commercial jets, yet she almost wept when her husband retired and lost access to Standard Oil's cushy private jet. "Ooooh, my airplane..she mockwhimpers for my benefit. "I don't think I'll ever get over it." With the most sincere expression on her face, she later speaks of her "love for all the things that grow in the earth, like diamonds and pearls and furs."

Of all the gifts her husband has showered upon her, she especially cherishes his love poems. "He writes the most beautiful poetry in the world," she says. "Which I never really told anyone. I have a book of poems he's written for me and had privately published. It's called Bonnie's Book. No one's ever read them but me.

"He does things in such a quietly beautiful way," she contiriues. "Aside from the beautiful jewelry and the beautiful furs and the beautiful homes, I guess the thing that really throws me is when we've been on a trip abroad for about three weeks and suddenly I'm just dying for a Snickers bar. I'll say, 'Oh, I would give my diamond ring for a Snickers bar!' And, whether we're in Afghanistan or in Africa, he always produces one for me."

She takes marriage very seriously. "Being my husband's wife is a fulltime job," she says. "Sometimes I have to be very playful to get John down off the treadmill of business, whether that means being a little girl or being a big girl." She says she frets for his health, and claims that she advised him against taking on the rigorous demands of rebuilding Continental Bank. "John is not twenty-one," she announces with firmness. "He promised me when we married that he would live to be eighty-seven. And he is going to live to be eighty-seven/" She laughs girlishly and adds, "lam determined."

I ask her what title she would give her life story. "It's already been chosen," she says peevishly. "I would have loved to call it Lace. I'm fascinated by the delicacy of lace. But lace can also be very strong. And durable." She points out a large unfinished portrait of herself that hangs in the hallway. The painting, of a serene blonde in white ballwear, was abandoned by the artist fifteen years ago. Bonnie scrutinizes it and frowns. "I look sixteen," she says with a pout, then suddenly twists her frown into a half-cocked smile. "But when you think about it, honey, I'm never that far from being sixteen."