The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

“I’ve never had a single cavity,” Patti declared.

To which her beaming mother replied: “And don’t think I’m not proud of that. And I aim to keep it that way.”

That was what television audiences saw. The memories of Nancy’s children tell a darker story, one that didn’t fit their image as America’s ideal family. The Screen Father of the Year, so often on the road, was inaccessible even when he was home. “He was easy to love but hard to know,” his son, Ron, wrote later. “He was seldom far from our minds, but you couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he remembered you once you were out of his sight.”

The vacuum that Ronnie left behind during his long absences was often filled by their mother’s anxiety and insecurity, which took control of family life when he was gone. Nancy hired and fired maids and cooks in quick succession. “What happened between arrival and departure was yelling. I remember sitting in my bedroom with my hands over my ears because I could hear my mother’s voice in the kitchen, yelling at the maid about dishes in the wrong cupboards or something not being prepared right. I would sing to myself to block out the sound,” Patti wrote in her 1992 memoir.

Nancy’s wrath landed on her children as well. Patti (who declined to be interviewed for this book) claimed that her mother beat her, starting when she was eight and escalating into “a weekly, sometimes daily, event.” The slaps and blows came at the end of arguments about nearly everything: over whether Patti was too chubby to be eating cookies, over Nancy’s demand that her daughter go to the bathroom before she went to bed, over Patti’s insistence that she be allowed to grow her hair as long as she wanted.

Patti also wrote that her mother abused prescription drugs—among them, the tranquilizer Miltown and Seconal for sleep. If so, Nancy was hardly alone among housewives in the 1950s and 1960s. They later became known as the “Miltown generation.” The male-dominated medical profession preferred the quick fix of sedating these women rather than taking the causes of their underlying mental health issues more seriously. Female patients were expected to accept without question this doctor-knows-best approach, and Nancy most likely would have, being the daughter of a physician herself. Patti said she once asked her father why her mother took so many pills, and Ronnie told her: “Because you upset her so much.”

Nancy, on the other hand, believed that the rage Patti directed at her was really about her high-strung daughter’s need for attention and “unresolved feelings about her father.” The implication was that Patti saw herself in a competition with Nancy for a place in Ronnie’s heart. They had been adversaries from the start. Patti’s toddler years had been tests of will. When Nancy appealed to her pediatrician for advice, he told her to ignore Patti’s antics and busy herself elsewhere. So, Nancy tried it one day when Patti refused to swallow her string beans. An hour and a half went by. Patti’s nap time passed. Her mother returned to check on her, only to find the two-year-old sitting there with her cheeks still full of beans. Patti said impishly: “What I got in my mouth, Mommy?”

Years later when Nancy drove the carpool to school, Patti always sat as far from her as possible. If they were walking, Patti dropped several steps behind rather than be at her mother’s side. Nancy would later contend that, if anything, she was too lenient with her daughter and too indulgent of Patti’s constant demands to be center stage in their home. Ronnie was no help in the discipline department. He dismissed Patti’s behavior as “only a phase” and seemed bewildered when Nancy raised the possibility that there might be something amiss in their family.

Ron, the more easygoing younger child, was known as Skipper and was the open favorite of both his parents. He told me he believes Patti’s claims about her mother’s abuse were exaggerated. “This is Patti’s story, and she’s entitled to it. This is what she thinks, and I don’t mean to take issue with it. But we grew up in the same house,” he said.

Ron did acknowledge there had been instances where Nancy hit Patti on the face. And he recalls that his father once smacked his sister for invoking the name of the Lord in anger. But Ron sees it from the perspective of the era, when that kind of punishment was widely considered an acceptable form of discipline. “We just weren’t a physically abusive household. A lot worse was going on in a lot of houses,” Ron said. “Jane Wyman used to beat Maureen and Mike with a riding crop. There was nothing like that that went on in our house.”

And while his mother was prescribed diet and sleeping pills, “my impression is that, a little like the abuse, that there’s a little bit of hyperbole there” in Patti’s version of events, Ron said. “They would prescribe something to calm you down. ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ kind of stuff. But I don’t know that my mother ever took them. I was aware. As a little kid, you go through every drawer in the house just looking to see what’s there. We had a medicine chest. Pills and stuff like that were in there. But they always seemed to be the same pills, and they were always full, the bottles.

“My mother didn’t like to drink much. She did not want to dull her senses,” Ron added. “She was too anxious, really, to give up that kind of awareness. So, no, she was not a zombie, by any means. She was hyperalert, if anything.”

What the baby of the family did see, however, was that their household became a battleground when Ronnie was away. Nancy—her long-buried fears of abandonment stirring—weaponized her