My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  Patti attended the John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air, and then, when she was thirteen, she went to the Orme School in Arizona. Orme was a wonderful school, and Patti had already been there for a summer at camp, and for tutoring in math. (Like me, she was weak in math and science.) On most weekends, she stayed with my parents in Phoenix. Orme was located on a working ranch, and Patti loved to ride. Her psychiatrist had suggested that it might be good for her to have something of her own to take care of, and so we gave her a horse.

  I wish she had used more of her talents and brains in school, but I guess she had other things on her mind. When she was fourteen, she tried to run off with the school’s dishwasher! Because her stepbrother, Michael, was twenty-one, Patti asked him to drive to Arizona and sign her out of school. Michael told our business manager, who called me at home. Patti has never forgiven Michael for betraying her.

  Although Ronnie and I often discussed Patti, he usually thought that whatever problem she was experiencing was “only a phase.” I often wished he would be more assertive with Patti, and he now regrets that he wasn’t.

  I remember one time when he got mad at Patti, after she got mad at him. She wanted to live in a coed dorm in college, and Ronnie wouldn’t even consider it. Patti was furious. “I can’t believe you’re saying this,” she told him. I guess she expected that I would be the one to object—which I did!

  After dropping out of college only a year before graduation, Patti left our home and went to live with Bernie Leadon, a guitarist with the Eagles, a popular rock group. Both Ronnie and I were very much opposed to this. You have to remember that we come from a different generation, and the idea of living together without being married was foreign to us.

  During Patti’s years with Bernie, we had virtually no contact. It wasn’t because she was living with a rock musician, although the Eagles were not exactly a mother’s dream. And when I finally met Bernie, I found him very likable. It was that they were living together, which we just couldn’t accept.

  One afternoon I was talking to a friend on the phone, and from the bedroom window I saw Patti’s red Toyota come zooming into the driveway. At this point we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years, but she had a serious personal problem and wanted my advice. I was sorry she was upset, but I was also moved that she had come to me for help. We talked for hours, and when she finally left the house that night to go back to Bernie, Ronnie and I stood in the driveway and watched her pull away. Naturally, I was in tears.

  It was shortly after that incident that Patti moved back home. This time, everything was different between us. For the first time ever, we were close. We went shopping together, we talked for hours—it was wonderful. Suddenly I had a daughter! This was the way I always thought mothers and daughters should be, and for the months that it lasted, I was incredibly happy.

  When Patti decided she wanted to be an actress, I helped her get into the Screen Actors Guild, just as my mother had helped me. She soon found a part in a summer stock production of Vanities in Michigan, and she asked Ronnie and me not to fly out to see her perform. I understood; if we had been there, the attention would have been on us, instead of where it should have been—on her. In fact, I think that’s been part of our problem with Patti all along. She would like the limelight to be on her, but that’s hard when your father is so famous.

  Patti was always drawn to acting, and she has never hidden her disappointment that her father gave it up and went into politics. The night Ronnie was elected governor, the first person we called was Patti, who was in Arizona. There was a tumultuous celebration going on in our suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, which was all the more exciting because Ronnie was winning by a bigger margin than anybody had expected. In the midst of it all, Ronnie and I slipped into the bedroom to call our daughter.

  When we told Patti the good news, she burst into tears and said, “How could you do this to me?”

  Granted, she was only fourteen, but I have never forgotten that moment. I didn’t understand why Patti couldn’t be happy for her father, even if she did hate politics. And I felt so badly for Ronnie. Patti and her generation have always defended the right of each person to do his or her own thing. Shouldn’t that same right also apply to parents? Didn’t Patti’s father have the right to do his own thing, even if it wasn’t what she would have chosen?

  For a while during Ronnie’s presidency, Patti was active in the antinuclear movement. Here, I believe, she was used by people with their own political agenda. People can disagree on the best way to prevent a nuclear war, but I have always resented the implication from the peace movement that Ronnie and other conservatives who believe in peace through strength were somehow in favor of war.

  During Ronnie’s first term, Patti asked him to meet with Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent antinuclear activist. The meeting lasted an hour and a half. To carve out that amount of time from the president’s schedule wasn’t easy, but Ronnie did it for Patti. It was supposed to be a private meeting, with neither one talking to the press afterward. But when Dr. Caldicott went public after the meeting and complained about Ronnie’s views, he was furious.

  Given our recent history, I was delighted when Patti asked for my advice and help in planning her wedding to Paul Grilley, her yoga teacher, in the summer of 1984. We were in the middle of Ronnie’s reelection campaign, but a wedding is a wedding, and there was no way that Ronnie and I were going to miss this one.

  They had originally planned to be married in an evening ceremony in a hotel, but when I heard that, I said to Patti, “I can’t see you and Paul doing that. You two just don’t strike me as indoors, nighttime people. You both love the outdoors. Have you considered the Hotel Bel-Air, where you used to go to dancing school? Maybe you could get married outside in the garden.”

  Which is what they did. To my surprise, Patti wanted a traditional wedding, with a gown, train, and veil, bridesmaids, a wedding cake, and all the trimmings. (I don’t know if her intention was to make me happy, but she certainly did.) Patti made her own arrangements for the dress, but I provided “something old”—my maternal grandmother’s bracelet—and “something blue”—a garter belt. “Something new” was her wedding dress, and “something borrowed” was her girlfriend’s ring.

  It was a beautiful wedding, and Patti looked absolutely radiant. When she walked down the aisle with Ronnie, carrying a bouquet of stephanotis, I had an enormous lump in my throat. It just didn’t seem possible that this was the same little baby that the nurse had brought to my arms thirty-two years ago in the hospital. Despite the struggles we’ve had over the years, your child is still your child. I love Patti, and I thought she was a beautiful bride.

  Later, when it came time to cut the cake, Ronnie and I went up on the stage with the new bride and groom. Ronnie told a story of how when Patti was a baby, she used to grab hold of his little finger. Before he was finished, mother and daughter were both in tears.

  I had hoped that Patti’s wedding would signal a new, happier stage in our relationship, but that was not to be. She came to Ronnie’s second inauguration in 1985, but just for the day. When they took the family photograph, she was hiding in the back, and Ronnie kept saying, “Step forward, Patti, so we can see you.” But she wouldn’t do it. And Paul didn’t come at all, which hurt me. He said he had to work, but it seemed to me that if you explained that you were taking a couple of days off because your father-in-law was being sworn in as president of the United States, most people would understand.

  The following year we heard that Patti was writing a book, although she had never mentioned this to us. She sent us a copy when it was published in 1986, and I read it with sorrow and anger. It was a thinly disguised, self-pitying autobiographical novel about a young woman with left-wing politics whose conservative father becomes the president.

  When Ronnie was asked about the book, he replied, correctly, that it was fiction. He did not add, as I was tempted to, that it was deeply hurtful to both of us.

&
nbsp; A few weeks after sending us her book, Patti called her brother Ron to say that she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t heard from us. Ron was incredulous. “What did you expect?” he said. “You’ve trashed us all in a terrible book. You made Mom and Dad into cartoon characters! Did you expect them to call you and tell you it’s great?”

  Patti hung up on him, and they haven’t spoken since.

  The book was bad enough, but then came the author’s tour. On March 4, 1986, I began the day by watching Patti on Good Morning America, followed by Patti on Donahue. Believe me, this wasn’t exactly how I had hoped to spend our wedding anniversary! After the book was published, Patti was bumped from a couple of talk shows. Because Merv Griffin and Joan Rivers are friends of mine, some people assumed I had a hand in that. I didn’t. But Merv may have done it out of loyalty, and Joan, who was hosting the Tonight show at the time, is very attached to her own daughter, and I suspect she just didn’t care for what Patti had done to me in her book.

  Ronnie and I said very little publicly about it, and Ron was always careful when he was asked about it. “It’s always difficult to talk about someone in your family,” he said on Good Morning America, “but I think Patti’s book was wrong, and in bad taste.” In another interview, he said, “I think someday she’ll regret it.”

  I hope he’s right.

  Now, I recognize that it can be difficult to be the child of well-known people, which was something I learned long before Ronnie went into politics. I’ll never forget the day that Ronnie and I took Patti and Ron to Disneyland—just the four of us. We had all been looking forward to it, but our visit was a complete disaster. Having seen us in the movies and on television, so many people wanted to talk to us, and ask for autographs, that we never made it onto any of the rides. Finally, we just gave up and went home. The kids were bitterly disappointed, and I felt terrible for them and for us. We had looked forward to enjoying this occasion with our children, but it just wasn’t to be.

  The following week we arranged for some friends to take our children to Disneyland, but I always felt cheated that it had to be this way, and I’m sure Patti and Ron did, too.

  To some extent, then, I empathize with Patti. It is difficult to be the daughter of celebrities. It is hard to work out your identity while the whole country is watching. It is awkward when your father becomes governor, and then president—especially when he stands for positions which you oppose.

  But you can’t spend your life dwelling on these problems. I get impatient when I hear people complain that their parents are well known and successful, and therefore they have all these terrible problems. There’s another side to it: My parents are well known and successful, and how fortunate I am! There are real advantages to having prominent parents. Ronnie and I were in a wonderful position to help our kids because of the people we knew, just as Mother was able to make things easier for me because of her many friends and connections. There are always pluses and minuses in life, and somehow you have to learn to concentrate on the positive—otherwise you’ll be engulfed by the negative.

  When Patti decided she wanted to be an actress, our friend Jimmy Cagney offered to help her, but Patti wasn’t interested. As far as I know, Jimmy had never made such an offer to anybody, and it could have been a wonderful opportunity for her. But she probably saw Jimmy as too old-fashioned—not to mention that he was a friend of the family, which for her was the kiss of death. But when I think how much she could have learned from that man!

  I also regret that Patti didn’t take advantage of the opportunities that were open to her as the president’s daughter. She could have gone on trips with us, she could have met Gorbachev, and witnessed any number of historic events. I realize that she doesn’t like politics, but you don’t have to like politics to take an interest in historic events. Such opportunities are open to very few people in the world, and they are not available forever.

  My worst time with Patti came in 1987, when Mother died. Patti had called me a few days earlier, shortly after my cancer operation, and we had had a brief conversation on the telephone—the first one in a long, long time. But when my mother died there was no visit, no call, no wire, no flowers, no letter—nothing. My mother deserved a lot better than that, and so, for that matter, did Patti’s mother.

  Yes, I made mistakes with Patti, and with all the children. But one of the things I learned from the drug program is that parents are not always responsible for their children’s problems. When your child has a difficult time, it’s only natural to blame yourself and think, What did I do wrong? But some children are just born a certain way, and there’s very little you can do about it.

  And yet I remain optimistic. There is still time for us to improve our relationship, and now that our public years are over, I’m hoping Patti and I will be able to reach some kind of understanding.

  I also hope Patti doesn’t turn out to be an “if only” child. I’ve known people who, years after their parents had died, were still saying, “If only I had told my mother that I loved her,” or “If only I had made peace with my father.” What a terrible burden that must be to carry.

  One of the great blessings of my life is that I’ve never felt that way. I had occasional moments of tension with my parents, but they both knew that I loved them, and I always knew that they loved me.

  I hope and pray that before my own life is over, Patti and I will be able to put the past behind us and arrive at that same point. Nothing would make me happier than to work that out.

  As a baby, Ron had such a cheerful disposition that his father used to call him Happy Jack. Like many second children, he was considerably easier than his older sister. But in fairness to Patti, I was also much more relaxed as a mother with Ron. I had been there before, and I wasn’t nearly as nervous. With Patti, I had always been terrified of making a mistake.

  In some ways, however, Ron had a harder time than Patti, because he had to make so many adjustments. Patti was already in high school in Arizona when Ronnie became governor, whereas Ron had to change schools and move with us to Sacramento at the age of eight. The day after the election, the kids in Ron’s third-grade class were so excited that they picked him up and carried him around the room on their shoulders.

  Although Ron was now the governor’s son, I did everything I could to make his life as normal as possible. He bicycled around the neighborhood like every other kid. He went to school in a car pool just like his classmates. When it was our turn to drive, we used a regular car, and one of the policemen assigned to the house would take off his cap and his jacket, put on a sweater, and take the kids to school.

  But it’s impossible to have a completely normal life when your father is the governor. I remember going out to watch Ron play football on his sixth-grade team and hearing the boys on the other team saying, “There’s Reagan. Let’s hit him hard.” They practically had to hold me back to keep me from going after those kids.

  But Ron never complained. He has always had the inner resources to deal with things like that, and small setbacks have never gotten him down.

  As first lady of California, I had a busy schedule and was often off visiting hospitals or attending meetings, luncheons, and other events. But I made a firm rule that no matter what was going on, I was home when Ron came home from school. The staff grumbled a little, but I refused to budge. I wanted to be there.

  One afternoon, a young woman came to interview me. She asked if it was true that I was always home by four, and I told her it was. In the middle of our conversation, Ron came home, stuck his head in, said, “Hi, Mom,” and went off to play. Whereupon the reporter said, “I don’t understand. He didn’t even come in here. What difference does it make if you’re home?”

  Well, I thought it was important for a child to come home from school and find his mother there. Even if they don’t talk about anything right then, he knows she’s there. I don’t think the writer really understood the point, but I felt it strongly, and I still do.

  When Ron
was fifteen, he told Ronnie and me one night at the dinner table that he dared us to go on a backpacking adventure with him. We had sold the ranch when Ronnie became governor, and perhaps Ron needed some assurance that his parents still enjoyed the outdoor life—or that we could still handle it. He just wanted to go off on a trip alone with us, not realizing that this wasn’t possible anymore.

  Ronnie and I proposed a four-day horseback trip in the High Sierras. There would be no tents—just sleeping bags, horses to ride, and mules to carry the supplies. None of us had done anything like this before, but Ronnie was dying to try it. I was apprehensive, especially about riding through the mountains, because I have a fear of heights. But I wouldn’t have missed this experience for anything.

  It was a magnificent trip, with beautiful scenery, fresh mountain streams, and starlit nights. On the morning of our last day, we were riding along a narrow trail, with Ronnie in front and Ron bringing up the rear. I was tired and saddlesore and was looking forward to having a hot bath and sleeping in my own bed. Then Ron called out: “Mom, you’re doing all right. I figured you’d only last about one day and then find an excuse to go home.” When I heard that, nothing could have gotten me out of there.

  It happened to be my birthday. When we stopped for lunch, Ron raised his tin cup and proposed a toast, and promised he would have the words engraved for me on that cup when we got home. I still have the cup, and I treasure it. The inscription reads: “To the World’s Greatest Camper—Sport—and Mom.”

  Suddenly I felt fine. We rode down a steep, narrow trail into the valley of Yosemite National Park, but I felt no fear. When we reached the bottom, Ronnie turned around to ask if I was all right.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”