Party animal

In a Republican fundraising world littered with fortunate sons, Tuttle says, he admires Freeman for being "self-made," joking, "I went to Stanford but my dad got me in."

"That's not true," Freeman shoots back. "He got you your appointments."

Tuttle, the chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art and also a Bush Pioneer and Ranger, was the Reagan White House presidential personnel chief for four years. Tuttle's fundraiser father, Holmes Tuttle, is credited with persuading Reagan to run for governor in 1966.

If the Bush administration espouses conservative Christian precepts, Freeman's family values seem to owe more to Hollywood. Twice divorced with a married daughter, Freeman is a 25-year bachelor with a reputation for squiring models. He took Liz Taylor as his date to a State Department dinner in December 2002, prompting fellow Bush Ranger Stuart Bernstein, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, to joke to W magazine, "This is the first date Brad's had who's over 19."

"It's a different one every time I see him," Riordan elaborates, asking a reporter: "Did you date him?"

At the moment, Freeman is seeing an age-appropriate philanthropist. "I told the president, 'I finally figured out that dating one 50-year-old is better than two 25-year-olds," Freeman says. "It took me 40 years to figure that out."

In that time, Freeman went from Fargo, N.D., to Stanford on a football scholarship and on to Harvard Business School. Next he worked at Dean Witter in Los Angeles with Spogli. He would have begun political fundraising early in his career, Freeman said, but "I had no money, no contacts, and no one would answer my phone calls."

That was beginning to change around the time Spogli introduced Freeman to the Bushes, on a trip to Midland, Texas, in 1979. Freeman invested in the younger Bush's ill-fated Arbusto oil company and joined Bush senior's elite "Team 100" of fundraisers. He and Spogli formed a partnership with Riordan, who contributed the capital to invest in rising companies.

Freeman's friends still call him "Fargo." But now he gathers with such powerful men as Colin L. Powell and Henry A. Kissinger at Bohemian Grove in Northern California for what has been called the world's biggest frat party. He personally knows such global figures as Saudi Prince Bandar ibn Sultan.