Patti Davis remembers a hot afternoon at her maternal grandparents`
Arizona home, when she was a little girl. Her mother, Nancy Reagan, convinced that Patti had told her yet another fib, drew back her hand to slap her, shrieking, ”Why do you always have to make things up? Why can`t you tell the truth?”
Some 30 years and three thinly disguised, quasi-autobiographical novels later, Patti Davis claims she finally is doing just that in her just-published autobiography, ”The Way I See It” (Putnam, $22.95). Nancy Reagan, depicted by her daughter in the book as a habitual child abuser and virtual addict to prescription drugs, may well wish she had bitten her tongue that long-ago summer afternoon.
Maybe the book is not ”Mommie Dearest,” as Putnam publicist Marilyn Ducksworth is fond of saying. But it`s certainly ”Nancy Dearest,” as the New York Daily News splashed across its front page last week with a dueling set of mother-daughter pictures: a sultry, smiling Patti and a pop-eyed, slightly demented-looking Nancy.
Sitting in her room at the Regency Hotel here, on the first day of a three-week, 10-city national book tour, Patti Davis insists that although it was never her intention to cause pain to her family through this book, she knew it was inevitable. ”Yes, I did. Absolutely,” she says, evenly.
At 39, Davis is a tall, svelte woman with long, brown hair, her mother`s large, brown eyes, an engagingly articulate manner and a warm, husky voice that holds echoes of her father. A body-builder, who will happily roll up her jacket sleeve to display an impressive bicep, she is dressed in a black suit whose bandage-tight, micro-miniskirt tops thigh-high suede boots-a style she cheerfully calls ”Fredericks of Hollywood meets the `60s.”
”I have committed the cardinal sin in this family: I have decided to tell the truth,” she continues.
Indeed, by far the most nightmarishly intimate account of family life in the Reagan household, the truth, as Patti Davis sees it, is cold, hard and intriguingly shocking-even by the scathing standards of Kitty Kelley, whose unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan bludgeoned the family image this time last year.
There is Nancy Reagan of the tight coif and tighter smile, a woman who made perfection and ladylike demeanor her hallmark in the White House, slapping Patti regularly, even daily, for infractions ranging from failing to answer questions to refusing to urinate on demand. This went on, Davis says, from the time she was 8 years old until she was a sophomore in college. Davis says her mother did not engage in the same behavior with her younger brother, Ron.
There is Nancy Reagan, the First Lady who made the war against drugs her crusade and ”Just Say No” her slogan, regularly taking pills from a medicine chest stocked with a changing arsenal of prescription tranquilizers and sleeping pills, such as Miltown, Seconal, Librium, Valium, Quaaludes and Dalmane.
There is former president Ronald Reagan, an affable but disengaged father, ”whose presence felt like an absence,” refusing to believe that Nancy ever struck Patti, while warning his daughter that the effect of her misbehavior on her mother`s nerves could ultimately prove fatal to Nancy.
There is Ronald Reagan, who never mentioned to Patti that she had a half- brother, Michael, and a half-sister, Maureen-his children by actress Jane Wyman- until Patti was seven years old and then 14-year-old Michael showed up to live with them.
No teen angel
Davis doesn`t make herself particularly likeable, either. She portrays herself as a rather churlish, pudgy child, who constantly lied, initially in self-defense and later by reflex. A lonely child who craved attention, she admits she eventually provoked some of her mother`s abuse. ”Any kind of contact is preferable to absence,” she writes. ”I preferred my mother`s anger to my father`s absence.”
She also details her own long addiction to drugs, ranging from diet pills as a teenager through marijuana, acid and cocaine, and chronicles a promiscuous love life that began with her deflowering by a tennis coach at age 18 and progressed through the dishwasher at her boarding school to affairs with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Bernie Leadon of the Eagles rock group and actors Tim Hutton, Peter Strauss and Kris Kristofferson .
Even as a 26-year-old, an age when most people can reasonable be expected to be self-supporting, she carps about having to pawn her grandmother`s jewelry ”to get by,” because her parents refused to give her money.
In essence, it`s a sad, tawdry tale.
For the love of money?
In response to the release of the book last week, the Reagans issued a statement saying they were ”saddened and pained” by the stories Davis tells in the book. ”It contains many hurtful and shocking claims including charges of physical mistreatment and substance abuse which, for the record, are absolutely false. We have always loved Patti and hope the day will come when she rejoins the family.”
Many people, most notably her parents, are probably wondering how Patti Davis could do this? Why would she? How dare she?
But, if half of what Patti Davis, who began using her mother`s maiden name as a surname in 1974, says is true, the better question might be: How could she resist?
Or, more cynically, how could she resist the reported $500,000 advance she got for the book, which neither she nor her publishers will confirm.
”I didn`t do this for the money,” she says bluntly. ”If money and exploitation were my thing, I would have put out an autobiography when I was really angry. Anger sells. I would have made a ton of money.
And, she says, she didn`t do it for revenge, pointing out that she could have issued this story during her father`s two election campaigns-a move that not only might have been more lucrative but certainly more devastating to her parents.
In fact, she denies that her writing career, ironically something her mother tried to discourage in favor of acting, has been waged as a sort of literary vendetta. All of her novels have referred, to greater and lesser extent, to her life, starting with her first novel ”Home Front” in 1986, followed by ”Deadfall,” her 1989 novel that spun off her father`s support of the Nicaraguan Contras and finally, 1991`s ”House of Secrets,” a novel that amounted to a dress rehearsal for her autobiography.
Then why?
”I did this now,” she says of her current book, ”because I thought it was the right thing and I think the value of it is two-fold. This is about my family, but there is a broader canvas here. What went on in my household isn`t that unusual and I think it`s important for anyone to feel entitled to talk about their siutation. And, to realize that, to the degree they hang onto a wounded childhood, they`re going to have a wounded adulthood. And that really is sort of the point of this.”
In finally forgiving her parents for what they did to her, by realizing that they never intended to hurt her but were victims of their own family histories-a broken one in the case of her mother and an alcoholic one in the case of her father and that they did the best they could-she says, she has completed a healing process in herself.
Ironically, she also hopes that her revelations of her mother`s drug habits may, in fact, counteract the beating Nancy Reagan has taken from those who viewed her anti-drug campaign as a farce and her abrupt withdrawal of support in 1989 for a Phoenix House drug rehabilitation center in Los Angeles- citing opposition by the neighborhood-as the ultimate proof that she was a fraud.
”When she withdrew from Phoenix House, I didn`t see it as cold or an act of abandonment. I saw it as an act of panic,” says Davis, who also considered it an ”act of denial and cry for help.”
Alone again, naturaly
But how are people to be convinced that all this finally is the truth, given Davis`s her previous pussyfooting around with her family life in semifictional novels and even in the light of her longtime drug use. ”I`ve done a lot of drugs-but my memory`s real good,” she says with a grin.
Divorced in 1990 from Paul Grilley, her yoga-teacher husband of seven years, estranged from her mother since 1989, from her father since last year, from all of her siblings since 1986, and currently without a romantic relationship, Patti Davis` current life has a lonely ring. If, as she says, she`s forgiven her family, is reconciliation a possibility?
”You know, I don`t know what this family is supposed to be in the future,” she muses. ”I know my parents in their quote (in their statement issued on the book) used the words `rejoin the family.`
”There`s no `re` anything with this family, because there`s no foundation there for a relationship,” she says simply. ”The times we came together, as an image, I sort of think of building a house on sand. It lasted for a moment, but then the next wind came.
”We`re supposed to learn something from each other. I don`t know yet what it is. It might be to just let each other go and realize that being in each other`s presence just doesn`t work.
”There`s a certain grace in that.”
