Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [191]
Betsy said Patti was a “sullen” child, and Patti describes how unhappy she was in her 1992 book, The Way I See It. She craved her father’s attention and dreaded her mother’s. Her father, she told reporter Nancy Collins years later, “was not terribly engaged” in family matters. Her mother, on the other hand, was “too engaged, her presence too much felt. Overwhelming. There was no balance.”80 In her telling, Patti and her mother argued about her clothes, her weight, her hair, her bathroom habits, even the way she would stare silently out the window of the car when her mother was driving her home from school. “Don’t you ignore me, young lady,” Nancy would scream. “Why can’t you just do what I say?”81
Patti wrote that her mother slapped her for the first time when she was eight, and that it became a regular occurrence, but in 2004 she told me that her memoir had been written in anger, with a certain amount of exaggeration.82 She also wrote that her mother’s rage was worst when her father was 3 0 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House away on his G.E. trips, and that when he came home, he refused to credit her complaints. On the contrary, he would tell Patti that her behavior was the reason Nancy was so nervous and had to take the tranquilizers that Patti had found in her mother’s medicine cabinet.83 “My mother is a woman who needs to control everything around her,” Patti concludes. “Yet, inside, she doubts her ability to do so.”84 From Nancy’s point of view, back then Patti was the control freak. “I remember at Christmastime my mother and father would be there, and Patti would write these little Christmas plays,”
she told me. “She’d give a part to Ron, but Ron never had anything to do.
He’d just be standing in the background. Finally, one day he walked off. He wouldn’t stand there anymore. It was always all about Patti. She had to be the center of attention.”85
Even Patti’s rosier memories seem to have strange endings. When she was eight, she recounted in a 1999 George magazine article, her pet fish, Blackie, died, and her father gave it a “fish funeral.” He dug a small grave in the backyard, tied two sticks into a cross, and gave a eulogy. “I was so into this ceremony, and I was having so much fun, that when it ended, and after my father had asked me if I felt better, I said, ‘Yeah, can we go kill another one?’ ”86
In 1959, at the recommendation of a child psychiatrist, Michael Reagan came to live with his father and Nancy. Now fourteen and severely troubled, he had not had an easy time of it since his mother eloped with Freddy Karger shortly after his father remarried. Jane’s second marriage had fallen apart within two years, and she had moved several times. In 1955, with Loretta Young as her godmother, Jane converted to Catholicism and had Maureen and Michael baptized alongside her. Maureen was dispatched to a Catholic boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, and in 1958 to Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia. Meanwhile, Michael was bounced from the Chadwick School to a public elementary school in Westwood—he would later claim he was sexually molested at age eight by a male counselor at an after-school gymnastics camp87—and then to the Good Shepherd Catholic school in Beverly Hills for fifth grade. He had to repeat that grade at St. John’s Military Academy, a Catholic boarding school in downtown Los Angeles, where he stayed for two years. He spent seventh grade at a private school in Newport Beach, where Jane briefly lived, and where he was a straight-D student. By then Jane had her own TV show at Revue Productions and was hardly ever at home, and when she was they fought bitterly.
The Group: 1958–1962
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He was thrilled