Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [259]
A few weeks later, perhaps sensing something was wrong, Nancy invited her daughter to join her in New York, where she was speaking at a United Community Campaign of America luncheon. This had been Edith’s primary charity in Chicago, and now Nancy was national chairman of its women’s committee. Although Patti had not planned on even mentioning her failed affair, she was so upset that she found herself telling her mother the whole sad story. Much to her surprise, Nancy was understanding and comforting. Patti’s analysis of her mother’s reaction is insightful:
There have been comments from the media that she is more liberal politically than my father, but I don’t think her ideology or her morality are rooted in either liberalism or conservatism. One of my mother’s complexities is her ability to transform, adapt to situations for personal reasons. I was bringing her a personal crisis, showing her I needed her, and she adapted to that, became gentle, nurtur-ing, and non-judgmental.105
Yet when The New York Times’s Judy Klemesrud turned up at Nancy’s Waldorf Towers suite, she reverted to her public role as the no-nonsense wife of a conservative politician. She was “shocked,” she said, to read that a welfare family had recently been housed at the Waldorf. “I think the people of New York should be shocked, too. There must be somewhere else to put these people.” She was “appalled and ashamed” by the sex-oriented films Hollywood was turning out. “I think they’ve shown no sense of responsibility, no taste. . . . I’ve often said that it’s going to be cured at the box office if people stop going. But some people, even my friends, say they go ‘out of curiosity.’ I don’t see why they are so curious. A dirty picture is a dirty picture, and that’s that.” Even Love Story with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw went too far for her. “I thought it leaned too heavily on the four-letter words. I would have liked a little more tenderness.” As for Women’s Lib, “I’m in agreement with equal pay for equal jobs. . . . After 4 1 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that, I’m afraid they kind of lose me.” Hot pants? “I think a woman should look like a woman, with a little more femininity and elegance than hot pants offer. I don’t like fads.”106
As fate would have it, Patti no sooner returned to Northwestern than she was embroiled in what came to known as “the hot pants incident.”
This brouhaha started when she and a friend were approached in their dormitory lobby by a black man selling shorts out of a cardboard box; the friend called security, the man was arrested, and the press ran away with the story. reagan’s daughter in hot pants hassle was the headline on the Chicago Tribune’s front-page story the next day. Soon everyone from Loyal Davis to Eva Jefferson to the peddler’s brother, a local alderman, became involved. When Frank Sinatra read about the upcoming trial, he called Nancy, who told him she was on her way to Chicago. “He was in New York for some big fight,” recalled Nancy, “and he said, ‘Well, I’ll stop there on my way back to the Coast.’ We had dinner with Patti at the Drake.” As Patti remembered it, Sinatra gave her a lecture on law and order and sticking up for her rights, but others have suggested the dinner was merely a cover for an assignation between the singer and Nancy, who was staying at the hotel rather than at her parents’ one-bedroom pied-à-
terre. “Oh, please,” said Nancy when I asked her about these allegations.
“Frank? There was nothing.”107 It seems unlikely that someone as controlled as Nancy Reagan would have risked her husband’s political career for a fling with a man who was known to brag about his conquests.
In any event, the trial was postponed, perhaps because strings were pulled by Sinatra or the Davises, all of whom were friendly with Mayor Richard Daley, and Patti left Northwestern at the end of that semester. She spent the summer of 1971 at Oxford and then transferred to USC as a drama major. After two years she dropped out. “I can’t say we’re surprised,” her father told her.