‘We’ve all been wounded’: Patti Davis on secrets, abuse and life as Ronald Reagan’s daughter
When I ask Patti Davis what she’d like people to take from the new memoir she has written about her long and often mind-boggling family history, she has no trouble finding an answer. “You have a choice,” she says. “You can live as the person who you were … I did that for a long time – like, ‘Let me tell you what a victim I was, let me tell you how I was wounded.’ But we’ve all been wounded in some ways. And it’s not about going into denial about that – it’s about looking at it from a different perspective.”
From someone else, those words might sound like psychobabble. But in Davis’s case, they highlight what has arguably defined her life – trying to make sense of being the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan – and a story that mixes politics and power with the more human themes of anger, emotional estrangement, damage and broken relationships.
Davis talks to me via video call from her home in Santa Monica, having just taken her dog for a very early morning walk. We begin at 8am, her time, and I wonder if it’s too early to plunge into the complex and often traumatic experiences that have been scattered through her 71 years. But, with bracing honesty and a warm sense of humour, she talks about them all: her lifelong sense of distance from her parents, her hugely difficult relationship with her mother, and how politics always threatened to remove her father from her life – something that reached a hideous extreme when he underwent an assassination attempt in 1981.
Davis has been writing professionally since the mid-1980s. In 1992, she poured seething anger about her family into The Way I See It, the autobiography she now calls “the book that shall not be named”. It was peppered with revelations and allegations – not least about her mother’s problems with prescription tranquillisers and bursts of violent rage, and her father’s questionable take on the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency: a “witch-hunt”, as he apparently saw it.
More than 30 years on, she has now tried to make amends with Dear Mom and Dad, which takes the form of a moving, elegantly written letter to her parents – intended as “a final chapter” in her family’s saga, which combines bracing honesty with glimpses of a closeness and warmth that, at one point in her life, she had seemingly almost forgotten. She was reminded of this part of the story, she says, while going through home movies that she had considered compiling into a documentary with the working title The Reagans Before the World Moved In, until she decided to use them as the starting point for the new book.
The most striking thing she saw centred on her mother. “My father had one of those roll-up screens and a projector,” she tells me. “We’d sit there in the living room, and he’d play these home movies. It took me a long time to look at them from a wider perspective and say, ‘Look – there was love there. My mother was really tender, seemingly getting a lot of joy out of this chubby little toddler paddling around like I was.’
“That’s part of our story, too,” she says. In its own modest way, this seems to have been a revelation.
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Davis was born in 1952, 14 years before her father left behind his career as an actor and was elected governor of California, the office he held until 1975. Nancy – like her husband, a screen actor – was Reagan’s second wife. Two children from his earlier marriage to the actor Jane Wyman only became part of Davis’s life when she was eight, within limitations that often seem cruel: in the new book, she recalls that when the rest of the family went on shared summer vacations, her stepbrother Michael would be sent – alone – to summer camp.
Meanwhile, Davis’s own relationship with her mother was gradually consumed by Nancy’s habitual bursts of rage, and what the new book calls “arctic winters” of motherly disapproval. In one particularly bracing passage, Davis says that she cannot remember “ever walking into our home with a sense of security and a feeling that I belonged”. What life with Nancy did to Davis’s view of motherhood was symbolised by her decision, aged only 24, to opt for tubal ligation. She later described this as “a quick surgery that cuts and cauterises the fallopian tubes so that the eggs are stopped in their tracks”.
“I think it changed when my brother was born,” she says. That’s Ron, born in 1958. “My mother always did better with males than females. I was growing into a little girl and she had a new baby boy. So, you know, the tenderness got shifted there.”
Davis eventually learned about one key aspect of her mother’s backstory. Nancy’s mother, Edith Luckett Davis, had been a touring stage actor – and for six of her daughter’s formative years, she had been almost completely absent, leaving her in the care of an aunt and uncle. “Three to nine: that’s a very formative time in a child’s life,” Davis says. “And she was dumped with relatives who I believe she’d never even met before that. Her mother came back when she was nine and said: ‘Oh, I met this wonderful doctor. We’re moving to Chicago. You have a new father.’”
Did Nancy ever talk to her about any of that?
“No, never. My mother was such an expert at editing and redacting her own history. She would say: ‘Oh, you know, Mother had to go on the road and do her acting work. I completely understood.’ She was three. She didn’t understand anything, except: ‘Mommy just left me.’ But in her mind, she was an expert: she could just turn something around and make it what she wanted it to be.”
Dear Mom and Dad contains an even more horrific story about Edith Luckett Davis sexually assaulting her granddaughter: “It was always when no one else was around, so I knew I could never say anything about it and be believed.”
“I never spoke about that to anyone, for all the reasons that people don’t: it’s embarrassing and it’s shameful, and all of that,” Davis says now. “And I want to be really clear about the reason that I put it in this book: to say that this was why I didn’t go to her funeral service. But if I were the person then that I am now, I would have gone. That’s the point I was trying to make.”
That’s quite a thing to imagine yourself doing. Most people would not even consider it, would they?
“Exactly,” she says, before she explains what she means. “I think to rise above something that another person has done to you means that you can be the bigger person. You remember that person, and what they forgot about themselves: that they’re supposed to be kind and nurturing to people, that they aren’t supposed to touch children like that … So you are the bigger person and you remember that about them, right? Because they’re gone now. They’re going to have to atone for what they did on the other side.”
Did she ever tell Nancy about what her grandmother had done?
“I would never have told her.”
Why not?
“Well, first of all, she would have called me a liar. Although when I was writing this book, it suddenly occurred to me that I might not have been the first person my grandmother did that to. I mean, I’m not making an accusation. I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that a similar thing happened to my mother, but she would have blocked that out. And she never would have forgiven me for saying it. It just would have been too hurtful. Too damaging.”
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Early in her life, Davis knew that her father – whose family history revolved around an alcoholic dad – had big political ambitions, and a set of very clear ideas. “There were lots of dinner table conversations about government being too big: ‘We’re being taxed too much and government’s too much in our lives.’ All I wanted to talk about was, you know, how this kid was bullying me on the school bus, and what happened on the playground that day. But he saw something that he didn’t think was right. And obviously, that grew and grew.”
When he was first elected president, in 1980, Davis – who had long since adopted her mother’s maiden name – was placed under the constant supervision of a security detail. By that point, she had moved in a very different direction from her parents, in terms of both her lifestyle and her politics. For a while, she lived with Bernie Leadon of the Eagles (they co-wrote I Wish You Peace, the closing track on the band’s 1975 album One of These Nights), and tended homegrown weed. Her chosen political cause, meanwhile, was ending the US’s arms race with the Soviet