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At the Washington meeting, the U.S. First Lady was taken aback by her Soviet counterpart's relentless questioning about historical and cultural minutiae during a tour of the White House. "I'm afraid I'm not much help," admitted Nancy, who was recovering from breast-cancer surgery and mourning the recent death of her mother. "Their face-off was extraordinary," said one who saw the pair in action. "They didn't seem to understand each other." As a result, Nancy decided to tour Leningrad this week only if Raisa did not come along. Instead, Mrs. Reagan's official escort will be Soviet President Andrei Gromyko's wife Lidiya. Perhaps compatibility charts should have been drawn: Raisa, a Capricorn ("overexacting, rigid"), vs. Nancy, a Cancer ("touchy, unforgiving").
In any case, the American First Lady is ready to launch a counterattack. East Wing scouts have collected photographs of every site where the two women will meet, and Nancy has an eye on every detail -- from where to sit to be out of the wind to the color of towels in the powder rooms. It should be a meeting to remember. How will Nancy's homework compare with Raisa's recent English lessons? Will Raisa's hair, which was formerly hennaed in the salon of Moscow's exclusive International Hotel, match the brilliance of Nancy's, which is touched up with Clairol's Moongold and Chestnut? Will the Soviet First Lady return to the gold-lame sandals she wore in London in 1984? Will the American First Lady shock the world by wearing red, her favorite color, in Red Square?
The second popular caricature is "Wrap It Up" Raisa, the Soviet Lorelei Lee who, after admiring British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's diamond earrings on a 1984 trip to London, dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card. In Paris she asked Yves Saint Laurent for a bottle of his perfume Opium ($175 an ounce) and received it free. In London she canceled a visit to the tomb of Karl Marx for a chance to see the crown jewels. She owns four fur coats and wore three of them in one day in Washington. Mikhail Gorbachev was once overheard quipping, "That woman costs me not only a lot of money but also a lot of worry." Seeing her in several outfits a day, some Soviet women, who often have to line up for food and clothing, are apt to scowl. "It's so insensitive," says a Moscow language instructor. "She ought to have more sense."
Next there is Raisa the Unknown. Considering that she is the wife of the leader of one of the world's superpowers, there are wide gaps in the public record, at home and abroad, about her early life. Only within the past few years has there been general agreement in the West on Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev's birth date, Jan. 5, 1932, and that she was born in the Siberian town of Rubtsovsk. Her father was a railroad engineer named Maxim Titorenko. That is about all there is to her official biography.
But speculation abhors a vacuum. Thus there have been reports that she is the niece of Gromyko (not true), that she is of Tatar descent and her actual patronymic is not Maximovna but the rather Asian-sounding Maksudovna ("I am absolutely Russian," she countered last year), that her father was a prominent official exiled to Siberia by Stalin (unlikely), that she has a brother-in-law who was a minor party official until he somehow embarrassed her husband (unconfirmed).