The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

on Ronnie, who stared straight ahead. After a long and awkward pause, Jane said: “Nancy, don’t worry about a thing. Ron and I have had our pictures taken together before. If you’d like to join us, fine. Now, Ron, come on. The photographer’s waiting.” The groom was exasperated to see his younger half brother also join the group.

Of Nancy’s relationships with the four Reagan children, none was so fraught as hers with Patti. After high school, her daughter went to Northwestern University. Patti made that choice not for any academic considerations, or because it was her grandfather’s alma mater, but because she was having an affair with her married English teacher from high school and believed he was taking a job there. He took a post in Pennsylvania instead, and after he failed to show up for a rendezvous they had planned, Patti was devastated. Nancy happened to be visiting New York and invited her daughter to join her. Patti poured out all the tawdry details of her romance with her teacher. She was at her lowest, and desperate for the balm of a rare moment of grace in her relationship with her mother. “I needed her right then—I needed her to be a mother. My mother. I needed her to listen to me, not judge me, to understand that I was in pain. I don’t know why I was so certain she would do all those things, but I was,” Patti recalled in an essay she wrote for Time shortly after Nancy’s death.

“It’s terrible that he took part of your youth from you,” Nancy told her. “You should have been going to school dances, going steady.” Not only was she the gentle, nurturing mother her wounded nineteen-year-old daughter needed at that moment, but it turned out that Nancy—her radar ever on—had known about the affair for two years. She figured out what was going on when Patti, in an act of brazenness, invited both the teacher and his wife to the Reagan home in Pacific Palisades over a Christmas break from her boarding school. During that visit, Patti had noticed her mother standing back from everyone, unusually quiet as they all, including her grandparents, gathered at the Christmas tree in the living room. “So, for all that time, she’d kept her suspicions to herself, even from my father. She didn’t want to upset him, but she also knew that she had to let me go through the pain and the drama. If she had interfered, it would have made things worse,” Patti wrote.

That memory, Patti reflected many years later, “towers above all the others. Because I know that the mother she was on that day was who she really longed to be… but so many things had gotten in the way.”

Among those many things was Patti’s defiant nature. At Northwestern, she befriended Eva Jefferson, the feminist and antiwar activist student body president who became famous when she debated Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970 on national television. Patti sought her out specifically because her father had told her not to have anything to do with “a very radical black girl named Eva Jefferson.” She found Jefferson not to be the fire-breathing revolutionary of Ronnie’s imagination, but someone who was “soft-spoken, intelligent, and seemed to be respected by everyone.” Patti also connected with women’s movement leaders on campus, and discovered in their new and controversial way of thinking another avenue by which she could reject Nancy and everything she represented: “We were all rebelling against mothers who advocated ‘letting the man wear the pants in the family.’ So we made a point of wearing pants, of not wearing bras, leaving our legs and underarms unshaven, and dressing in black. I immediately threw out my Lady Schick razor and my bras, and loaded up on black turtlenecks.”

By the end of her freshman year, in the spring of 1971, Patti decided to leave Northwestern to study drama at the University of Southern California. For a while, she lived at home in Pacific Palisades and commuted to school, giving her ample opportunity to steal tranquilizers from her mother’s medicine cabinet to trade for diet pills: “I was using her habit to support mine.” Patti’s uncle Dick Davis remembers family holidays punctuated by political arguments. Loyal, who had brooked no backtalk from Nancy or Dick while they were growing up, was outraged when his granddaughter challenged her elders’ views. Dick recalled: “When Patti tried to sound important and knowledgeable about a nuclear plant in California one year at Christmas, my father just destroyed her on the spot and said, ‘You’re talking to your father, who’s extremely knowledgeable, and I’m your grandfather. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’ ”

Patti moved out of her parents’ home and, by the end of her junior year, had dropped out of college. She was getting more heavily into drugs, including LSD and cocaine. The governor’s daughter also grew and sold marijuana. A talented songwriter, she had an on-and-off fling with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and moved in with guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Eagles, one of the biggest rock bands of the 1970s. Her parents were furious and embarrassed. Ronnie told Patti that living together outside of marriage was sinful. “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,” Nancy wrote. “It was that they were living together, which we just couldn’t accept.”

Patti and Leadon cowrote a song titled “I Wish You Peace.” It was featured at the end of the Eagles’ fourth album, One of These Nights, which sold more than four million copies and was the band’s first to reach number one on the Billboard LP chart. While trying to figure out what to call herself for the writing credit that would appear on the album, Patti decided to declare a new identity.