Bebe Rebozo, a self-made Florida millionaire who met Richard M. Nixon in 1950 and became his longtime friend, died 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 hardscrabble beginnings in the Depression. 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.
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.
Mr. Rebozo was introduced to Nixon by George Smathers, a classmate from Miami High School who had just won election to the U.S. Senate.
Mr. Rebozo offered to take Nixon fishing aboard the Cocolobo, his 33-foot ChrisCraft. “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.
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 that Mr. Rebozo had recommended.
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. The case was settled out of court in 1983, with the Post agreeing to print his denial in full.
Mr. Rebozo continued to help Nixon long after he had left the White House. In 1979, 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 youngest 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 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 that was “the most distasteful” of all his boyhood jobs, he recalled. Later he delivered newspapers and pumped gas.
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 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.
