Nancy Reagan convinced the future president, Ronald Reagan, to marry her after getting pregnant by him in 1952, their first-born, Patti Davis, reveals in a new memoir.
‘I tend to doubt that getting pregnant was a result of carelessness,’ writes Davis in her new book, ‘Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew,’ which is out of February 6.
Davis, now 71, who had a life-long rocky relationship with her mother, asserts that Nancy’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy carrying Patti, was the secret reason for her parents’ union.
Nancy, unsuccessful as an actress, was one of the women then Hollywood star Reagan was dating after his divorce from his first wife, the Academy Award winner Jane Wyman. During their nine-year marriage, Wyman had two children, Michael and Maureen, and a third, Christine, who died shortly after birth.
According to Patti’s account, her father and Wyman had ‘made a pact’ that he wouldn’t remarry before she did.
The future two-term commander-in-chief was happy playing the field ‘and was not exactly anxious to get married again’, writes Davis.
But it was a dinner date with Ronnie at the Hollywood celebrity restaurant Chasen’s where Nancy dropped the shocker that she was two months pregnant.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis, 71, reveals in a new memoir her mother’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was the secret reason for her parents’ union. Ronald and Nancy are pictured at their wedding
The Reagans were married on March 4, 1952, and Patti was born on October 4 of that year. Patti is pictured with her parents in a 1957 photo
Davis, now 71, who had a life-long rocky relationship with her mother, asserts that Nancy’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy carrying Patti, was the secret reason for her parents’ union
Reagan reportedly spent the first year of his marriage to Nancy cheating on her with actress Christine Larson, pictured
Patti writes that her father immediately excused himself from the table and telephoned Wyman, telling his ex-wife that he couldn’t honor their no marriage pact, that marriage was now in the cards for him because Nancy had become pregnant with his child.
‘Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew,’ is out of February 6
The Reagans were married on March 4, 1952, and Patti was born exactly six months later on October 4. Reagan and Wyman’s divorce had been finalized in June 1949.
During the first year of their union, according to Nancy’s biographer, Kitty Kelley, Reagan continued to date an actress named Christine Larson, telling her that he had been ‘tricked’ into marriage by Nancy.
Kelley even claimed Reagan was with Larson when Patti was born – although she wrote that Nancy was no angel either and accused her of an affair with Frank Sinatra while in the White House.
In her slender, but revelatory 186-page memoir, written like a letter to her late parents, Patti writes that her birth was the one flaw in her mother’s ‘romantic illusion’ with Reagan.
‘Traveling back, you realize that the whole story of your family is bigger, messier, and often more tender than you once believed,’ she observes.
She says she felt compelled to write about her world-famous parents – a father she adored and a mother with whom she was locked in a lifelong battle.
The Reagans, Ronnie and Nancy, have long been considered America’s golden first couple who during his presidential reign in the 1980s ruled, governed and partied like royalty.
But according to Patti, life at home before the highly public White House years was often hell on earth, especially regarding her relationship with her mother.
Oddly, she would change her last name to Davis, her mother’s maiden name, and the woman with whom she would have a lifelong battle, in order to have an independent career as a writer and actress.
So bad was home life in ritzy Pacific Palisades that Patti often got high and much later darkly considered suicide, she reveals.
Patti states that life at home was ‘stiff and strict’ under her mother’s rule, while her father was loving – teaching her to ride horses, fly kites, and have loving discussions about God, angels and ‘the blue waters of heaven’.
After divorcing his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, Reagan was happy playing the field ‘and was not exactly anxious to get married again,’ writes Davis
According to Patti’s account, her father and Wyman had ‘made a pact’ that he wouldn’t remarry before she did. The pair shared two children, Maureen and Michael
Regarding Nancy, Patti writes, ‘I never stood a chance with you. The intractable war between you and me, Mom, kept brewing often to a boil – it was a dark tide moving beneath us.’
She describes her mother, a future power as First Lady in the White House during Reagan’s eight-year reign, as being ambivalent and cold, a woman of ‘formidable’ rages who had a serious negative impact on Patti’s life – from childhood onward.
Patti claims that Nancy withdrew her affection from her because she felt Patti was a ‘difficult baby’ who demanded too much attention and spit up too much.
Because of Nancy, Patti declares, ‘I don’t remember ever walking into our home with a sense of security and a feeling I belonged.’ She states that as a little girl, she never felt comfortable in the family home, and charges that the family was riddled with secrets.
For instance, she admits that until she was eight, she didn’t even know she had half siblings – a brother and sister, Michael and Maureen, from her father’s first marriage. It wasn’t until Maureen once visited that Patti learned she was her half-sister.
Meanwhile, Michael – who Reagan and Wyman had adopted – was 14 when out of the blue he came to live with Patti’s family, and was treated miserably by Nancy.
According to Patti, Nancy was furious that Ronnie had had a whole other family before her, and out of apparent spite would not give Michael his own bedroom so he slept on a living room couch and used a powder room instead of a bathroom.
Further, she claims, the boy was excluded from Reagan family vacations at the beach, and sent off to a faraway camp.
Patti describes her mother, a future power as first lady in the White House during Reagan’s eight-year reign, as being ambivalent and cold
Patti states that life at home was ‘stiff and strict’ under her mother’s rule, while her father was loving – teaching her to ride horses, fly kites, and have loving discussions about God, angels and ‘the blue waters of heaven’
When Patti was six in 1958, her brother, Ron Jr (left) was born. Patti writes that didn’t even know she had half siblings until she was eight years old
Despite discovering her new siblings, Patti writes that she sank further into what she described as her ‘cocoon of aloneness’ and developed a defensive posture of anger that helped her through what she described as the ‘arctic winters of Nancy’s disapproval.’
When Patti was six in 1958, her brother, Ron Jr., the Reagans’ second and last child, was born.
Eventually sent off to a boarding school in Arizona, Patti turned to getting high on marijuana to deal with her emotional issues. When she returned home, she began growing her own pot, and reveals that when her father was governor for two terms from 1967 to 1975, she often got stoned in the governor’s mansion pool in Sacramento, the state capital.
During that time, Patti reveals, she’d take one of the state cars, a Lincoln Continental and get stoned while driving the 20 miles to Folsom Prison where she’d shop at the prison gift shop for inmate-produced items.
On one occasion she writes she bought a model stagecoach with a carved gunrack and wheels that moved that reminded her of when her father hosted the TV show ‘Death Valley Days’ from 1964 to 1966, and gave it as a Christmas gift to her parents. Patti writes that she thought her father would love the model’s attention to detail and proudly display it, but it was never to be seen again.
In 1980, when the Republican conservative Reagan was elected president, Patti was a rebellious 28-year-old liberal political activist, involved in the anti-nuclear movement. As a result, her loving ties with her father were breached over his conservative politics.
During the AIDS epidemic, which the Reagan administration had refused to address, Patti was kept from talking about it with her father. At the time, she often stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.
‘I had more truthful and raw conversations with Lincoln’s ghost than I was able to have with you,’ she writes, addressing her late father.
Patti Davis, now 71, had a life-long rocky relationship with her mother
Patti confesses that she sometimes had dark feelings of failure and considered taking her life.
The first time it happened was when she was a student at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, and later in 1994 when her father was in the depth of Alzheimer’s Disease.
She writes: ‘As strange as it might sound, your Alzheimer’s was the rope that kept me from drowning. I wanted to be there for you. I decided God’s plan couldn’t be for me to die in a small bathroom by my own hand, with the blue glow of a street lamp…’
‘I feel you brush past me sometimes on the wind. I still look at the moon and hear your voice.’
‘Dear Mom and Dad’ is not the first book Patti’s penned critical of her parents, especially her mother.
In 1986, with her parents still in the White House, Patti, then 33, ignited a firestorm with the publication of a thinly veiled novel, Home Front, a bestseller about the first family.
Nancy called the book ‘hostile’, and the President ‘dismissed it as pulp fiction, declaring, ‘I just hope she makes a lot of money,’ according to Kelley’s unauthorized biography Nancy Reagan.
Reagan, the 40th U.S. president, died at 93 in 2004 after having Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade. Nancy passed away at 94 of heart failure in 2016. They are buried together at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.