Dear Mom and Dad, page 11
I don’t understand why you allowed people to be in your administration who believed that homosexuality was a sin, and even felt that AIDS was God’s punishment against them. But I know you were not in that camp and it’s painful to hear people suggest that you were. I keep stumbling over unknowns yet holding tight to the few truths I am certain of. Still, the blunders and neglect when it came to an epidemic that, by 1987, had taken the lives of more than forty thousand people in this country is a weight I can’t lift off you no matter how many other truths I assemble. I search for kindness—any kindness—coming from the White House during the vast sweep of AIDS and I find only failure. The lifeguard who pulled seventy-seven people from the perilous waters of a river where they would surely have drowned stood by passively while thousands died from a fatal disease. That’s not who you were, that was not your nature, yet that’s what you did.
When Rock Hudson died from AIDS in 1985, even the most die-hard people in your administration couldn’t turn your attention away from that. He had been a longtime friend, the two of you used to attend Screen Actors Guild meetings together, but he had hidden his illness from almost everyone, including you. It was the first time you publicly addressed the disease, but still the urgency that America needed to hear from you wasn’t there. Many years later, I learned that after Hudson’s death, you went to the White House physician, John Hutton, and asked him to tell you all about AIDS. After he did, you told him you had assumed it was like measles and would go away. According to Dr. Hutton, you said, “I always thought the world would end in a flash but this sounds much worse.” You did make a call to Tip O’Neill after that and made it clear you wanted more funding for AIDS research, so some progress was made, but not enough.
One puzzling aspect of this is that your sense of timing, Dad, was usually spot-on. I don’t know if it was instinctual or learned from your years as an actor, but your timing was impressive. It was part of what made you “the great communicator.” Yet, with AIDS, you were late on everything. In 1987, you learned about Ryan White, the Indiana teen who contracted AIDS from a blood-clotting medication he took for his hemophilia, when Landon Parvin wanted you to mention him in the speech he was writing for you. But he was overruled by the ultra-conservative members of your administration, and you allowed that to happen. You were not typically passive about things, yet when it came to AIDS, you were. There was no mention of Ryan in that speech.
Ryan White was thirteen when he contracted HIV-AIDS. He was then forbidden to go to school, he was ostracized in his hometown of Kokomo, and he was given six months to live. Ryan fought back against all of it. He became an eloquent voice in the fight against AIDS and against the prejudice of those who dismissed it as a “gay disease.” You could have joined with him while you were president, you could have stood beside him, yet you didn’t meet with him until you were out of office, in 1990. Less than a month later, Ryan White died. You wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about Ryan in which you said, “Nancy and I wish there had been a magic wand we could have waved that would have made it all go away.” Your piece didn’t go over well. A man named David Robinson wrote a response that began: “As a gay man who has been fighting AIDS for three years . . . I found Ronald Reagan’s tribute to Ryan White one of the most infuriating and embittering things I’ve read in a long time.” Robinson went on to say: “He may not have had a wand, but he had the next best thing: the presidency of the United States for the first 8 years of the AIDS epidemic.”
I reach for possible explanations, complexities that might offer some counterpoint to the icy reality of the facts. But I grab on to nothing but air. Years ago, after you were gone, I thought it might be helpful if the Reagan Library addressed the AIDS crisis that sits so heavily on your legacy. There is basically nothing about it at the library. I wrote a lengthy email to the appropriate people there and suggested tackling the subject, maybe even having an event where it could be discussed, because ignoring it was not going to work in anyone’s favor. I pointed out that keeping it in shadow, staying silent about that part of your history, only solidified the bitterness that many people have. I expressed my opinion that tackling the subject, having the courage to open the gates and let all viewpoints in, would benefit your legacy. I got a brief response of thank you, we’ll look into it, but nothing was ever done. So, I am left with the tides of anger that I still encounter from other people. I’m left with my own observations and my own disappointment. And, as usual, I’m left with unanswered questions.
There is another regret that haunts me, which conversely is about something I wish I had praised you for. In 1987, you and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the agreement reducing nuclear weapons, yet I didn’t congratulate you or express pride, and I should have. It was just so easy in this family to fall back into a stalemate of silence. It felt too much like home, so I kept going there, even though I longed for something different. Even though I knew that what you had done was historic. No other president, before or since, has done something so extraordinary—eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons. And yet I said nothing to you . . . until you were ill and far away, many years later, and I whispered to you how proud I was of you for making the world safer. Do you know that Gorbachev came to your funeral service in Washington, D.C.? It was the first and only time I met him. We shook hands and his eyes were soft and sad; he looked lonely—his wife, Raisa, had passed away in 1999. In somewhat broken English, he told me that he missed you, and I fought back the tears that fell so easily in those days after your death. I think God puts people together on history’s stage for an express purpose. Maybe they will fulfill that purpose, maybe they won’t. The two of you did.
A white wedding . . .
I was hardly surprised, Dad, when you won a second term in 1984. This time around, no one asked me to attend any inaugural balls, and I probably wouldn’t have if I had been asked. My attention was elsewhere. I had fallen in love, and neither of you had met him or knew anything about him.
So, you were understandably surprised, Mom, when I told you that I was going to marry the man I had been dating—and had been living with for a while. I said I wanted a real wedding, white dress and all. I don’t know what I expected, but the tone of your voice through the phone line chilled me. You said, “All right. Well, how do you plan to do that?” Paul was six years younger than me, a yoga instructor, and radiated a kind of clean innocence. Dad, when you and I finally talked about it and I told you that he taught yoga, you at first mis-heard me and thought I said “yogurt.” Perplexed, you asked how someone makes a living with yogurt. It was all very awkward. I’ve wondered over the years why I said I wanted a traditional wedding. It’s not exactly my style, and Paul would have been content to just get married on the beach at twilight with a few friends as witnesses. When I told him I wanted a wedding with a white dress and my father walking me down the aisle, he looked at me as if he weren’t sure who exactly he was marrying. At moments when I’m down on myself, I’ve wondered if my choice was spurred by some hidden agenda toward you, Mom. You didn’t have a white wedding. Two months pregnant, you got married in a tiny out-of-the-way church, wearing an austere gray suit with only William and Ardis Holden (his then-wife) as witnesses. Was I trying to one-up you? I’ve asked myself that several times and I’ve concluded that I wasn’t. It’s more likely that I was trying again to move away from always being the bad girl, the rebel. “Look,” I was saying, “I can be a normal girl in a wedding dress, with bridesmaids, walking down the aisle toward the man I am marrying.”
I wonder how the two of you would feel if you knew that, at the Hotel Bel-Air, where Paul and I were married beside the pond, with swans floating past and lush ferns and shade trees surrounding us, there is now a large photo of me and Dad walking down the aisle. A number of friends have told me about it; it seems to be hanging in a very conspicuous place as guests walk into the dining room.
Two memories from that day stand in stark contrast to one another. The first is just before the ceremony, when I was in the hotel room standing in front of the mirror in my long white dress and veil. Several other people, including my bridesmaids, were there. You walked in, Dad, and you never even glanced at me. You started telling a story about something—some current event, perhaps. You were being the entertainer, the quick-witted performer, the GE host—it came so naturally to you. I remember feeling invisible. If I were the person then that I am now, it’s possible I would have said something. Maybe, “Hey—it’s my wedding day, I’m right here.” But I said nothing, just curled in on myself, accustomed to the feeling of invisibility.
But then, after the ceremony, at the dinner, you stood up to give a toast. You talked about the tiny baby I once was, how my hand was swallowed by yours when you held it. You talked about time, how fast it moves, and how you had now given away my hand—a woman’s hand—in marriage. As I listened to you, tears welled up in my eyes. The two halves of our relationship loomed over my wedding day—the girl who craved more of her father’s attention, and the woman who grabbed on to her father’s words, squeezing every tear out of them, who decided that the latter was what she would lean into and embrace.
Mom, this is difficult to say, but throughout the wedding planning, I felt as if you resented me for getting married, for having the wedding you never had. I’m sure that’s why I started questioning myself, wondering if I’d chosen a traditional wedding just to get under your skin. But, truthfully, I’m not that conniving. After we were married, Paul and I saw you and Dad on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, if we didn’t travel to Montana to see his family, but there was no casual or frequent interaction between us. I’ve never known how to scale the walls you put up; at a certain point I had stopped trying.
I was speaking to Ron only occasionally, and on one of those occasions he told me that he had “signed off” from Secret Service protection. He’d researched it and discovered that, if the presidential offspring are not minors, it is possible to remove protection. I was elated. I had lived with a posse of heavily armed men following me for four years; now I was married to a man who I knew didn’t like this intrusion. I decided I was going to follow in my brother’s footsteps.
There is a procedure for this. You have to write a letter to the Secret Service. They then send it up the chain of command, and one of the higher-ups visits you for a serious and (he hopes) frightening conversation. I don’t know how much the two of you ever knew about this, so I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the conversation.
“You are putting yourself in grave danger by not having our protection. There are frequent kidnapping threats against members of the first family. We evaluate those all the time, and some of them are credible,” intoned the high-ranking Secret Service agent.
I countered with, “Well, it seems to me if a kidnapper with any kind of intelligence looked at the Reagan family, he wouldn’t say, ‘Let’s take Patti.’ I mean, who would pay the ransom?”
The high-ranking Secret Service agent almost laughed but caught himself.
So, without my cadre of armed agents, Paul and I had a pretty simple life—almost normal. He taught yoga classes, I was helping to support us with my backup career—acting. I was doing small guest parts on some network shows, but all I really wanted to do was write. When I came up with an idea for a novel and got a publishing deal, I had unwittingly stepped into another quagmire.
Homefront, my first book, was an innocuous and somewhat naive novel that ascribed to the basic literary rule of “write what you know.” Like many writers, with some notable exceptions, I don’t want anyone to go back and read my first book, for such books are about finding your voice, honing your skills, unearthing confidence in the mysterious relationship between your brain and words. I wrote about a family steeped in politics, in which the father was a governor with soaring presidential ambitions, a family in which a rebellious daughter was at odds with her father’s politics. Familiar territory, but I made the daughter older than I was. She was an activist during the Vietnam War when I was still in high school. And the relationships in my quasi-fictional family were actually warmer than the relationships in our family. The mother and daughter had conversations, they even went shopping together.
None of that made any difference when the book was published. I believed then, and still believe, that neither of you ever read the book. The media pounced on me because I had already solidified my image as the bad girl of the family. The novel was regarded as a slash-and-burn attack on the two of you. One journalist even voiced disgust that, in one scene, the mother was wearing a red suit. Mom, you called several people who were scheduled to interview me and asked them to cancel; they did. My publishers called me with the bad news and said they’d never quite seen anything like this. Dad, you injected a critical comment about the book in a press conference. The book did deserve criticism—for not being a very good book. But it didn’t warrant the barrage of insults that came my way. It certainly didn’t warrant the death threats that came my way.
When I had finished the novel, I was proud of it. I thought it was a good story and, as a novice writer, I felt I had successfully straddled the line between fiction and real life. But as soon as it was published, not a shred of my pride remained. I felt like I was at the bottom of a junk pile that had been tossed on top of me, and I was trying to claw my way out from under it. I wonder, if you had actually read the book, would you have seen it as the somewhat innocuous story it was?
Years later, a journalist was interviewing me for a subsequent book—I believe my third or fourth by then—and she said, “I remember when your first book came out. Things were so brutal for you, I figured you would never write again.”
I’ve thought of her words occasionally, and about the fact that it never occurred to me to stop writing. Truman Capote once said about himself that he had “something peasant-like and stubborn” in him and he was “in it till the end of the race.” Looking back, I guess that’s who I decided I was going to be. The irony, Dad, is I think I got that from you.
All this drama put a strain on my marriage, although it’s possible that Paul and I were just never well suited for each other. He wanted a mellow life, teaching yoga and practicing his meditation. Being married to the president’s daughter didn’t exactly fit that recipe, and if you add in the built-in dramas of the Reagan family, a mellow life was not really attainable.
I suppose I could have chosen to write only happy novels where everyone got along, but instead, in 1992, when you were out of the White House, I wrote an autobiography. I have said in the past to you both, and will say again, that I regret writing that book. I was angry that I had been attacked for the piece of fiction that was my first book, so I thought, Fine—I might as well tell the truth. Then everyone can see how mild the family in my novel was. I was also driven by the fact that I have a rabid desire to tell the truth, since in our household truth was a movable object.
There was something else going on too. Partially influenced by my husband and his spiritual work, I had started working on how I viewed things internally, what lens I was looking through. I began focusing on forgiveness and trying to understand why people behave the way they do. I did bring much of that to my writing, but I was still in first grade when it came to a more spiritual way of thinking. Here is my take on my autobiography, the title of which I refuse to even mention: I emphasized that forgiveness is the answer to everything, but I was so new to that way of thinking, I then leapt to, but let me tell you everything I’m forgiving them for—in detail.
I learned an important lesson from writing that book, and from once again going through public backlash—I learned that while telling the truth is important, not every truth needs to be told in excruciating detail to the entire world. I think of this every time a famous person writes a memoir and says they wanted to put everything out there and hold nothing back. Something catches in me, some small voice whispers, “Uh-oh.”
Saying goodbye . . .
By the time my marriage ended around 1993, we were long into another arctic winter in our relationship. I don’t even remember if I told the two of you that I was getting divorced. What followed was an empty, desperately bleak time when I stumbled into an abusive relationship that ultimately propelled me out of California to the East Coast, where I knew no one. Looking back, I see now that I had never before felt so lost in the vast emptiness of having no family to turn to. I don’t say that to cast blame; it’s simply a fact. I’ve wondered, Mom, if you ever felt anything like that in the years when Dad retreated into Alzheimer’s. You had never opened yourself up to the embrace of a family. You had never tried to pull our family together, and by that time you had no idea how to do it. Did you ever lie awake at night and imagine what life might have been like if our family wasn’t such a fractured mess? If, in the midst of grief and loss, you could have relied on a family that enveloped you with love?
I was scraping by in New York writing magazine pieces, finding my way in a city that can be overwhelming—it moves at lightning speed and you have to keep up or be swallowed by it. I was making friends, but I was also fighting tidal waves of depression, a persistent feeling that I was an utter failure in everything I did. We had no interaction during that time. When I read in the newspaper, Mom, that you were coming to the city and would be appearing with Charlie Rose at the 92nd Street Y for an interview, I called your office staff and asked if I could arrange to see you. Then I bought tickets to the event for myself and two of my friends—a gay couple whom I had become very close to. I was given an appointment to see you in your hotel room the morning of your event.
