Bebe Rebozo, a self-made Florida millionaire who met Richard M. Nixon in 1950 and became his longtime friend, died on Friday night at Baptist Hospital in Miami. He was 85 years old, born two months before Nixon, the man who became the 37th President of the United States.
The Rebozo-Nixon relationship flourished on a shared history of hard-scrabble beginnings in the Depression -- one man's in Florida, the other's in California -- and innate reserve. Over more than four decades, through Nixon's triumphs and disasters -- Mr. Rebozo remained the quiet, loyal friend, never questioning and never judging Nixon's actions.
In 1960, Mr. Rebozo was the only outsider in Nixon's suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Nixon learned he had lost the Presidential election to John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Rebozo later paid a price for his friendship: years of intrusive examinations of his private and professional life by Senate and Federal investigators of the Watergate affair that led to Nixon's resignation in disgrace, a microscopic study of his finances by the news media and notoriety. Through it all, he kept his own counsel.
Had Mr. Rebozo not entered the halls of the mighty, his life and death probably would have gone largely unnoticed outside his community of Key Biscayne, Fla., a small island off Miami with fewer than 9,000 residents. His entry in Who's Who covers only seven lines, including his ZIP code and his former post as commodore of the Key Biscayne Yacht Club.
Mr. Rebozo was a real estate developer, then a banker. His initial meeting with Nixon occurred by chance. George Smathers, a classmate from Miami High School who had just won election to the Senate as a Democrat campaigning as a vehement anti-communist in the red-hunting era of Joe McCarthy, asked Mr. Rebozo to entertain a newly elected Senator from California. That was Nixon, who had also won election largely as an anti-communist candidate.
Mr. Rebozo offered to take Nixon fishing aboard the Cocolobo, his 33-foot ChrisCraft. But Senator Nixon, never a sport fisherman, took a pile of papers, which he worked on while on the boat. ''I doubt if I exchanged half a dozen words with the guy,'' Mr. Rebozo recalled 20 years later. But that was enough to cement a friendship, beginning with a warm thank-you note Nixon sent from Washington.
In future visits they swam, sunbathed and worked, too. ''Dick takes his briefcase, and I take mine,'' he said.
Over the years the friendship flourished in an atmosphere of shared leisure activities. They both liked Broadway show tunes, spectator sports and charcoal broiled steaks. At the White House and at Camp David, the Presidential retreat in northern Maryland, Mr. Rebozo usually picked the movies the Nixon family watched. His favors extended to Nixon's children. In 1973, he bought a house in Bethesda, Md., and rented it at a modest rate to Julie Nixon and her husband, David Eisenhower, for a year. He even paid for a bowling alley in the White House.
The friends often dined at Key Biscayne's English Pub, mostly ordering chopped steak, medium rare. They both enjoyed an occasional scotch or a martini. Mr. Rebozo invariably picked up the tab and tipped generously. But there was more to their relationship than food and drink.
Early on, Mr. Rebozo became something of an investment adviser to Nixon, as well as his real estate broker. Before the 1968 election, Nixon estimated his assets at $800,000, half of it in Florida real estate, which Mr. Rebozo had recommended.
Concerning all of this Mr. Rebozo was extremely discreet, usually refusing interviews. ''I'm not interested in politics myself,'' he said in 1970. ''He's my friend and my friend happens to be President. I know that people think because I see him a lot and I'm up there a lot we're talking about affairs of state, and that's not true.''
Mr. Rebozo's wealth was estimated to have increased from $673,000 in 1968, when he was still a registered Democrat (he switched that year to the Republicans), to $4 million a few years later. This and his closeness to the President drew the attention of the news media.
In 1971, Newsday published a long series that focused on the financial relationships of Senator Smathers, Nixon and Mr. Rebozo, particularly on such Florida land deals as Fisher's Island, which the three believed would become a real estate gold mine if connected with Miami Beach by a causeway. Nixon withdrew from the project in 1970, and Newsday said he had realized a huge profit from his Fisher's Island dealings. Nixon reacted fiercely, ordering that Newsday be denied any White House press privileges, including permission to accompany the President on foreign trips.
Two years later as the Watergate scandal was gathering momentum, The Washington Post carried a story asserting that Mr. Rebozo, through his Key Biscayne Bank, had ''cashed $91,500 in stolen stock in 1968.'' He vigorously denied this and sued The Post for libel, demanding $10 million. That case was settled out of court in 1983, with The Post agreeing to print his denial in full regalia.
As the scandal surrounding the break-in at Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate office complex evolved into the discovery of a White House cover-up, Mr. Rebozo became a target of Senate officials and Federal prosecutors investigating Watergate. In 1975 the Justice Department concluded there was ''no basis for indictment'' on accusations that Mr. Rebozo had converted Nixon campaign contributions to personal use.
But the Internal Revenue Service disputed his reporting of taxable income for 1970 and 1971. In January 1977 he agreed to pay $52,474 in back taxes plus interest, a settlement that became the subject of major news reports.
Mr. Rebozo was the chief executive of Key Biscayne Bank, which had the motto ''where other banks have branches, we have roots,'' from 1964 to 1990, and president and owner of the Key Land Company, a real estate concern.
Fittingly, the man who had taken Nixon on that first cruise in 1950, was a guest on board the yacht Sequoia when Nixon took his last cruise on the Potomac as President on Aug. 2, 1974.
Mr. Rebozo continued to help Nixon long after he had left the White House. In 1979, Mr. Rebozo bought an estate for $650,000 in San Clemente, Calif., for the Nixons.
A few years before Nixon's death in 1994, Mr. Rebozo described his friend as '' a strange animal, just not like anyone you'll ever know -- a very sensitive man, very thoughtful and of course very brilliant, with a memory like an elephant.''
Charles Gregory Rebozo was born Nov. 17, 1912, in Tampa, the last of nine children of Francisco and Carmen Rebozo. Francisco Rebozo was a cigar maker who had immigrated to Florida from Cuba. The family moved to Miami when he was 8. Bebe (pronounced BEE bee) was a nickname given to him by an elder brother who could not pronounce baby. It stuck.
His working life began in fifth grade, with a job killing and plucking chickens, ''the most distasteful'' of all his boyhood jobs, he recalled. Later he delivered newspapers and pumped gas. Darkly handsome, he was voted ''best-looking'' in the class of 1930 at Miami High School.
Freshly graduated, he pursued a high school junior, Claire Gunn, and persuaded her to marry him. Both were 18. The union was annulled three years later.
He worked briefly for Pan American Airways as a steward and then bought a gas station, later adding a tire recapping service. He had also begun to buy undeveloped land, the beginning of his career in real estate.
At the outset of World War II, Mr. Rebozo bought a Piper Cub and learned to fly. In 1943 he returned to Pan American and, after training as a navigator. helped ferry about 100 warplanes to North Africa for the Army's Air Transport Command.
He remarried his high school sweetheart, Claire, in 1946, but they divorced four years later. ''It just didn't work,'' he said.
Mr. Rebozo's mother died in 1978. He is survived by his wife, Jane Lucke Rebozo; and a sister, Mary Bouterse of Miami.
Stu Spelling Bee 