The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

request,” Ronnie wrote in his February 1, 1984, diary entry. “Now S.S. went to her & asked if she would accept it for no more than a week until they could get this informant out of Lebanon & check the story. She said yes. But today’s the 4th day & she’s screaming again about invasion of her privacy & last night she abused the agents terribly. I said take them away from her so she’s again without protection. Insanity is hereditary—you catch it from your kids.”

Even as she battled to guard her privacy, Patti became more public in her liberal activism. A rebuke of Ronnie’s conservative policies by his own daughter guaranteed news coverage. This had been the case since early in his presidency. In June 1981 she was among the speakers at the fourth annual “Survival Sunday” antinuclear rally and rock concert at the Hollywood Bowl. “The fact that my father is president doesn’t take away my right as a citizen to speak my mind,” twenty-eight-year-old Patti told a news conference before the event. But the fact that her father was president surely figured in the organizers’ decision to give her a spotlight before an audience of eighteen thousand in a lineup that included Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared there as well. Both her parents told her she was “being used.”

Patti nonetheless saw an opportunity to connect the president and people in his administration with some of the leading voices in the antinuclear movement. Ronnie was amenable enough to agree to meet with Patti and Australian physician Helen Caldicott, who had founded several activist organizations. They each had conditions: Caldicott demanded that the president come alone, without aides. Ronnie made it clear to his daughter that he did not want either of them to comment publicly about their December 1982 session. The exchange in the White House library lasted an hour and a half—an enormous block of time in a president’s schedule—and grew heated. According to Caldicott’s later account, Ronnie called the Soviets “evil, godless Communists,” and said the way to prevent nuclear war was to build more weapons; she asked him insultingly whether he had gotten his arguments from Reader’s Digest. Ronnie wrote in his diary that Caldicott “seems like a nice, caring person but is all steamed up and knows a lot of things that aren’t true. I tried but couldn’t get through her fixation. For that matter, I couldn’t get through to Patti. I’m afraid our daughter has been taken over by that whole d—n gang.”

In the summer of 1984 Patti married her yoga instructor Paul Grilley. He was six years younger than she was, and his background could hardly have been more different from hers. Grilley, the son of a building contractor and a secretary, had grown up near Glacier National Park in Montana. The marriage would last six years. Whatever misgivings Patti’s parents might have had about her choice of a mate, Nancy was thrilled that her daughter wanted to have a traditional wedding and that she sought her mother’s help in planning the private ceremony at the Hotel Bel-Air. Patti picked out her own dress, an off-the-shoulder creation of white silk lace and charmeuse. Following a traditional wedding custom, Nancy provided Patti something to wear that was old (a bracelet that had belonged to Edie’s mother) and something blue (a garter). Patti completed it by finding something to borrow: a ring from a friend. The Presbyterian service was conducted under a flower-and-vine-bedecked gazebo on the hotel’s serene Swan Lake Terrace. Ronnie gave a charming and sentimental toast in which he recalled how Patti as a baby would wrap her tiny fingers around his big one, gripping so tightly that he could still feel it. News accounts noted Ron and Maureen were there, and that Michael had been invited but did not attend.

It probably was not a coincidence that the timing of Patti’s honeymoon meant she would not be sitting in the presidential box in Dallas when her father accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term. “I had hoped that Patti’s wedding would signal a new, happier stage in our relationship, but that was not to be,” Nancy wrote later. “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 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.”

With the 1986 publication of Patti’s novel Home Front, the breach became deeper. According to the author, the night before she started her book tour, she got a call from her brother, Ron, who told her not to expect kudos from anyone for trashing their parents. He added that he had only thumbed through the book and had no intention of reading it. “Ron’s reaction hurt me more than anyone else’s, and I wish he had read the book before judging me,” Patti recalled. “He, better than anyone, would know the differences between the Canfields and the Reagans, and if he had read the story, I don’t think he would have found any unkind motivation in it.”

Ron offers a different version. “To the best of my recollection, that particular falling out with Patti occurred at a small party one evening in the apartment I shared with Doria on Devon Avenue in Westwood,” he told me. “Patti was excited that night about her book and about being the center of so much attention. She also stood to make what, for her, was a considerable amount of money. But she was bitter and complaining about her parents’ failure to energetically promote the book. I tried explaining several