Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

  As the Reagans entered their first autumn in the White House, their daughter, Patti Davis, was making headlines. Smart, headstrong, and outspoken, Patti, then twenty-eight, was a proud liberal who saw little need to hide her political views simply because her father was president of the United States. For most of her life, and by her own admission, she’d been dramatic and willful. When she was fourteen, Patti made plans to run off with a dishwasher working at the private school she attended. She dropped out of college and lived with the guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Eagles.I “I was pretty feisty,” she recalled in a 1981 interview. “My idea of beauty was total beatnik: black turtleneck and black skirt, black around the eyes and white lipstick. I thought I looked ravishing.” Her casual attitude toward drug use—“I don’t think pot is such a terrible drug,” she once said—deviated sharply from her parents’ views.II

  Shortly after the president’s election, Patti, an aspiring actress, signed a six-figure contract with NBC.III In May 1981 she filmed one of her first roles, as the girlfriend of a male stripper in a TV movie entitled For Ladies Only. Asked about whether or not such a role might embarrass her parents, Patti told reporters that she was a professional actress and didn’t pick roles based on the impact they might have on her famous parents.IV Patti admitted that she was taking advantage of the opportunities presented to her as First Daughter. “It’s the biggest break I’ve ever had,” she told People magazine. “People are interested in me—maybe not for the right reasons, but they’re interested. There are a lot of starving actors and actresses, some of them real talented, whom you’ll never hear of because they didn’t get the right break. But any of these people, if they had the break, would take advantage of it.”V (Her agent, Norman Brokaw of the powerful William Morris talent agency, had represented Marilyn Monroe as well as Patti’s mother when Nancy was under contract to MGM.)VI

  A month later, Reagan wrote a letter to his friend William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, in which he confided his troubles with his outspoken daughter.VII He thanked Buckley for providing information rebutting the assertions of the antinuclear crowd, and shared that information with his daughter “during a good, long discussion” at the Reagan ranch in California.VIII The president had even enlisted his science advisor, Jim Keyworth, to talk to Patti about her nuclear concerns.IX

  But it wasn’t Patti’s advocacy that worried the president. He wrote Buckley: “I think my biggest problem is, believe it or not, her friendship and admiration for Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.” Ms. Fonda had married Hayden, a longtime liberal activist, in 1973. (They divorced in 1990.)

  Like other members of the administration, the president was uncomfortable with Jane Fonda’s controversial activities during the Vietnam War. She was a regular participant in demonstrations against the war, but her activism sometimes crossed the boundaries of normal protest. In 1973 she attacked returning American prisoners of war as “liars and hypocrites” when they recounted being tortured by their captors.

  The previous year, she made a high-profile visit to Hanoi. At one point, she posed for a photo while sitting in a Vietcong antiaircraft vehicle, which outraged many and was widely viewed as a propaganda victory for Communist North Vietnam. As a father—not just as a politician—Reagan was concerned about such a person holding influence over his daughter. “I told her bluntly I could not share those feelings because both [Fonda and Hayden], in my mind, were traitors to their country,” he wrote Buckley. “I didn’t really try to argue the point with her because I know there’s nothing harder than driving a wedge between friends—and she believes they are friends.”X His clear intimation was that Ms. Fonda was taking advantage of Patti to further her own political agenda.

  This could have made the viewing of On Golden Pond, which starred Ms. Fonda and two acting legends—her father, Henry Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn—much more interesting. I knew little about the inner workings of the Reagan family at the time. When I saw the film, I paid attention to the story but didn’t have a clue about the other, more personal subtexts the film offered the president and First Lady. Of these, there were many.

  As it happened, Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn were longtime friends of the Reagans. The president had known Fonda from Reagan’s days as head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the union for film actors (Reagan was president of SAG from 1947 to 1952 and again in 1959–1960), though they tended to be on opposite sides of debates. Reagan was a Democrat then. He was a very effective union president who fought hard to win concessions for actors regarding payment and residuals, and even organized a famous 1960 actors strike, the first such action in the history of Hollywood.

  Mrs. Reagan was close to Hepburn for many years. The blunt and vivid Hepburn had been a friend of Nancy’s mother, Edith Luckett Davis, an accomplished Broadway actress, and had occasionally visited the Davis home. Another frequent visitor was Spencer Tracy, Ms. Hepburn’s paramour on and off the screen, whom Nancy remembered as “the most charming man I have ever known.”XI When Nancy’s stepbrother, Dick Davis, came home from college to stay with his parents during those years, he woke up one morning to find Ms. Hepburn having coffee in the kitchen. “She was in Chicago because Spencer Tracy, who had a drinking problem, was hospitalized by my dad,” Dick recalled. “She was so dynamic, extremely bright, with such a good sense of humor.”XII

  When Nancy moved to California, Hepburn had even loaned Nancy the use of her car, a late-1930s “wooden convertible,” as Dick called it, with a braking system of questionable reliability.XIII The Davises knew about and disapproved of Hepburn’s long-running secret affair with the married Tracy, which would span twenty-six years, up until his death in 1967. Nancy became friends with Tracy’s wife and once allowed their deaf and disabled son to stay on her couch when he visited New York. “He enjoyed musicals,” Mrs. Reagan remembered. “Somehow he sensed the music through the vibrations he felt.”XIV

  Despite her misgivings about Tracy’s and Hepburn’s scandalous romance, young Nancy came to admire Hepburn as an actress. When Nancy first considered an acting career, she went to Hepburn for advice.XV Ms. Hepburn sent her a long, candid letter warning her that she knew only the glamorous parts of the job. It was a hard profession, Hepburn noted. Most would-be actresses ended up as waitresses and receptionists, not the stars her mother had befriended.XVI

  Undaunted, Nancy went to New York to pursue her ambitions and occasionally visited Hepburn at her Eighty-Ninth Street apartment for dinner. Ms. Hepburn hated to go out, Nancy remembered. Dining in public made her nervous and sick to her stomach. The two women remained close for years until the relationship went sour—inexplicably, at least, to Mrs. Reagan. Hepburn had decided to cut off ties once she learned that Nancy was a Republican.XVII

  In the years that followed, Mrs. Reagan heard from her former friend only periodically, although Hepburn was not above using her prior relationship with the Reagans to lobby for a cause. On Christmas Eve 1981, for example, the star fired off a terse telegram to the First Couple demanding that they intervene in plans to destroy—or “ruthlessly toss away” as she put it—the Morosco, a landmark theater on Broadway.

  On Golden Pond was the second-highest-grossing film of the year (after Raiders of the Lost Ark), bringing in more than $100 million.XVIII The film centered on the dysfunctional relationships between Henry Fonda’s Norman Thayer Jr., a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, his wife, Ethel (Hepburn), and their estranged daughter, Chelsea (played by Jane Fonda).

  The plot centers on the aging Norman and Ethel spending the summer at their family lakeside cabin. The summer marks an important milestone for Norman—his eightieth birthday—which only seems to make him more glum and cantankerous. For the occasion, their daughter, Chelsea, comes to visit for the first time in years. Her fiancé, Bill, a dentist played by Dabney Coleman, and his young son, Bill Jr., accompany her. Over the weeks that follow, Norman and Billy bond over fishing. When Chelsea returns, she is angry and jealous that the t
eenager has formed an attachment with her father that she never could, leading to a pivotal and long-overdue confrontation between father and daughter.

  Jane Fonda knew this role would be her last chance to appear on-screen with her father, who was in declining health. A passion project for her, she purchased the rights to the play on which the movie was based. Ms. Fonda was taken so much with the idea of the film because the parts that she and Henry Fonda would play—the conservative, private father and the headstrong daughter clamoring for his love and attention—echoed their real-life relationship.XIX “Imagine a woman with a difficult relationship with her father finds a play in which the father and daughter so paralleled real life,” she said once about the film. “And I was able to buy the rights!”XX

  On Golden Pond would, in fact, turn out to be Henry Fonda’s last film and the last major one for Hepburn, who was suffering from a pronounced neurological condition that caused involuntary tremors. True-to-life aging was a major theme of the film. Fonda’s character, Norman Thayer Jr., suffered from heart palpitations and memory loss, and viewed the passage of time with fear and bitterness.

  The differences between the characters in the film and the Reagans themselves were stark. Reagan was never preoccupied with his age, except to make light of it. He joked frequently about taking naps during Cabinet meetings, even though the president did not nap.

  That wasn’t always the case with his staff, however. One weekend at Camp David, we saw the 1951 musical Show Boat, and with all due respect to Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel, it was the most boring movie ever shown at Camp David. By far. But the Reagans loved it. At least, I think so. After a few minutes, I dozed off and woke up only when the lights came back on. Naturally I did not say anything during the post-movie comment period, and was almost out the door when the president tapped me on the shoulder and said with a wink and a big smile, “Guess you were pretending it was a Cabinet meeting.”

  Like most of his supporters, I didn’t really think of Ronald Reagan as “old.” But looking back years later at the experience of watching On Golden Pond with him, with its poignant story of aging, I recalled one of the few times that Reagan’s advanced age did hit me.

  As a former president, Ronald Reagan traveled to Dallas for an event requiring an overnight stay in a hotel. Every time we would go to Dallas, whether during the White House years or after, Reagan’s Secret Service detail seemed nervous. I thought maybe I was just imagining it, but I finally asked a senior agent if what I sensed was correct. He admitted it was, and I asked why. He explained that there were some mentally ill people “out there” who would be thrilled to pull off a copycat-type killing of a president, at least in terms of locale, so the agents were always especially happy to be leaving Dallas without an incident.

  On this particular trip, Fred Ryan, the chief of staff, had to stay back in Los Angeles, and President Reagan’s longtime executive secretary, Kathy Osborne, came with us. We did whatever was scheduled in the evening and escorted the president to his suite. Kathy told the president she would pick him up at his suite at a certain time the next morning. I would meet them in the holding room near the speech site.

  The next morning, just as I was done shaving and showering, the phone rang. It was Kathy, who sounded distressed. She had gone to the president’s suite at the appointed hour, knocked on the door—hard, several times—but received no reply. She asked the Secret Service agent stationed outside if he’d heard any rustling, and he had not. Kathy was worried and thought it would be better for a male to enter the suite under these circumstances, just in case. I dressed, raced to the suite, and asked the agent to open the door. I entered a pitch-black sitting room and stumbled my way into the bedroom. I could make out a shape in the bed but could not tell if he was breathing. So I approached the foot of the bed and said in a loud voice, “Mr. President. Mr. President.” Nothing. I did it again, even louder. Nothing. I then yelled, “Ron! Ronnie!” several times. No response.

  Finally, I summoned the courage and shook the foot of the bed. The president moved, sat up groggily, and said, “Yes?”

  “It’s Mark. Sorry to wake you, sir, but it’s time to get started.”

  He put on his glasses, looked at the clock on the nightstand, and said, “Oh, good Lord. I’m sorry. I took out my ears [meaning his hearing aids] last night and guess I did not hear the alarm.” I told him not to worry about it and that Kathy and I would be right outside whenever he was ready.

  Coping with aging was not the only theme of On Golden Pond. A major theme was about healing relationships, especially between parents and their children, something the Reagans understood well. The film contained one poignant, pivotal scene. After several instances in which Norman and Chelsea fail to connect with each other and hurt each other’s feelings, the daughter makes one last tearful effort to reach her father.

  “Norman, I want to talk to you.”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “It occurred to me that we should have the relationship that a father and daughter are supposed to have.”

  “What kind of relationship is that?”

  “It just seems that you and I have been mad at each other for so long.”

  “I didn’t know we were mad. I just thought we didn’t like each other.”

  In the scene, Chelsea puts her hand on her father’s arm. It may be the first time she’s touched him in years. “I just want to be your friend,” she says through tears.

  Henry and Jane Fonda had rehearsed this scene many times, but she’d never touched him during those practice runs. Ms. Fonda recalled later she wanted to save that moment until it could be captured on film, so she could get her father’s honest reaction. When Jane Fonda as Chelsea touched her father, the tears that welled up in his eyes came from both Norman Thayer Jr. and Henry Fonda himself. “The emotions hit him, tears came to his eyes, then anger again as he tensed up and looked away,” Jane recalled.XXI

  The message of that scene was that despite all the differences between father and daughter, there was still great love there. I can’t be certain what was going through the Reagans’ minds when we watched that scene at Camp David, but I have to imagine they couldn’t help but think of their own daughter. The same forces of love and tension played on that relationship as well.

  That Ronald and Nancy Reagan deeply loved their daughter is without question.

  Some thought Ronald Reagan was a cold or distant parent. The infrequency of Patti’s visits to the White House was cited as evidence. I always felt that Ronald Reagan was a loving father and quite capable of expressing it. In 1954, when she was twenty-one months old, Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to his infant daughter while he was off filming Cattle Queen of Montana. He apologized for being away from her. “You see we always want you to be surrounded with love so you’ll know how important it is,” he wrote.XXII

  When Patti was fifteen, Reagan was again the attentive father, admonishing his daughter for smoking at her Arizona boarding school, a violation of the rules. “There are two issues here, dear Patti,” he wrote. “One is the fact that for two years you broke not only school rules but family rules, and to do this, you had to resort to tricks and deception.” He added, “We are concerned that you can establish a pattern of living wherein you accept dishonesty as a fact of life.”

  But he made a point of reaching out in ways that he hoped would be helpful. Knowing of her interest in screenwriting, in April 1968, when Patti was sixteen years old, Governor Reagan sent her a page from the script for the recent hit Bonnie and Clyde so that he could discuss with her the art of screenwriting. Patti is a gifted writer, a skill I suspect she inherited from her father.

  And there is no doubt Patti deeply loved her father. In 1981, when he was shot, Patti flew to Washington to be at her parents’ side. She held her father’s arm as he left the hospital.

  Like Jane Fonda, Patti was also working out her complicated relationship with her father on the public airwaves. Just around
the time that we watched On Golden Pond that fall, Patti was interviewed on a California local radio program hosted by, of all people, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Both women avoided discussing politics, but instead commented on being the “child of a national monument.” Noting that as the daughter of Henry Fonda, she had been drawn into “some alienations and rebellions,” Ms. Fonda asked Patti if anything like that had happened to her.

  “Yes,” said Patti, “and I think there’s a tendency to go overboard with that because you encounter a situation of your identity being threatened; your individuality being threatened just by people perceiving you as someone’s daughter. And so the tendency is to go ‘But I’m me.’ ” She admitted that she could be “a little headstrong” and that she had occasionally been difficult to deal with as an adolescent. But she added, “I think now we’ve worked through a lot of that.”XXIII As it turned out, that was wishful thinking. In the years that followed, Patti would write a roman a clef that painted her father as cold and removed and her mother as a controlling, hectoring drug addict.

  While Patti’s estrangement with her parents would continue on and off throughout her father’s presidency and afterward, her friend Jane Fonda appeared to have found some peace from her work on On Golden Pond. The film brought Henry Fonda his only Oscar, which many viewed as long overdue. Since he was too ill to attend the ceremony, Jane Fonda accepted the award on his behalf for a film she had made happen. It was “the happiest moment of my life,” she recalled.

  “My father is so happy,” she said in her acceptance speech. “He feels so fortunate to have been able to play the role of Norman Thayer, a character that he loves a lot and understands very well.” She headed right to his bedside to hand him the Oscar.

  Henry Fonda died of heart disease five months later at age seventy-seven. As befit his private nature, the actor requested that no funeral be held, and he was promptly cremated. In a statement, President Reagan remembered him as “a true professional dedicated to excellence in his craft. He graced the screen with a sincerity and accuracy which made him a legend.”