Private Agony of a Reagan Son : Autobiography Recalls Years of Anger, Pain of a ‘Troubled’ Man Who Says He Was ‘Sick’

His autobiography, “Michael Reagan: On the Outside Looking In,” will be on the racks March 21 and the President’s eldest son--the other Reagan offspring--is a hot item.

Appetites for a potentially sizzling “Mommy and Daddy Dearest” about the First Family were whetted last spring when Penthouse magazine published snippets from the book outline in which Michael Reagan told of having been sexually molested at age 7 by a male camp counselor, a man from whom he had sought the fatherly affection he said was denied him at home.

It has also been no secret that this Reagan, adopted by Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman when he was an infant, has been at times a mild embarrassment to the family. In 1981, for instance, he used his father’s name in a letter soliciting military clients for the airplane parts company for which he worked.

Now, it’s his turn to be heard. First off, he says in an interview in his publicist’s Los Angeles office, he’s fed up with being referred to as “the adopted son of the President of the United States and Jane Wyman. I’m 43 years old and people still talk about me as if I was four days old.”

For most of those years (he will turn 43 on Friday), he says, he has been angry enough “to wrestle an alligator.” Angry at Wyman for not having more time for him, angry at his birth mother for giving him away, angry at Nancy Reagan for claiming so much of his father’s attention--and, most of all, angry at a child molester whose name he no longer remembers for causing him to carry on his shoulders “400 pounds of guilt.”

Almost none of his anger is directed toward Ronald Reagan, the weekend father that the child Michael adored, the “man’s man” that the adult Michael so wanted to emulate but whom he could never get close to.

The President, Michael writes in his book, “can give his heart to the country but he just finds it difficult to hug his own children.” The book, for which Michael Reagan will tour the country starting Sunday, is more conciliatory than angry. He wrote it largely as “catharsis” and he discusses it and his life almost as a neutral observer who no longer sees his family as “villains.”

But some things still haunt him. In 1983, he says, his family suggested he get psychiatric help after a Secret Service agent told them he was a kleptomaniac who had been seen shoplifting items including a child’s dress and a candy bar. He demanded and got a letter of absolution from the Secret Service and apologies from his family, he says.

But by then his rage against his family had escalated to the point where he was breaking glass doors and plotting a different book, one that would bring down Ronald and Nancy Reagan and also Jane Wyman. “I wished they were dead,” he recalls.

Michael Reagan’s themes--the insecurity of the adoptee (he was 4 when he learned he was adopted), the scars carried by the molested child, the burden shared by children of the famous--are the underpinnings of his autobiography but it is, as well, the confessional of a troubled man. “I was sick,” he acknowledges in the interview.

As a teen-ager, he was sent to live with “Dad” and Nancy in Pacific Palisades, he writes, and was so infuriated at not having his own room (his siblings, Ron and Patti, had rooms) that “when Nancy’s Lincoln Continental accidentally rolled off the hill in front of our house and was totalled, I laughed and was only sorry she wasn’t in it.”

There was another incident as a teen-ager that took place after he and Jane Wyman moved to Newport Beach, where he learned she had given his dog away and planned to enroll him at Loyola High as a boarder.

Taking out a bicycle that Wyman had given him, he writes, he went out to ride one day and found the chain had come loose. He took a hammer and “beat the bike until it was unrecognizable. With every smashing blow I thought of that bike as my mother, hoping if I somehow destroyed it I was also destroying her.”

For much of his life, he appears to have had a love-hate relationship with both “Mom,” who comes across as the heavy, and Nancy, with whom he says he is now building a good relationship.

When word circulated that Reagan was writing a “Daddy Dearest,” he writes, Nancy called to say, “Your dad doesn’t need another book written by a family member.” (Patti Davis’ autobiographical novel, “Home Front,” put distance between mother and daughter.)

But Nancy Reagan, described by Michael as “the consummate protector” of her husband, will find little criticism of him in her stepson’s book. When Michael describes the President as “old-fashioned,” it is a term of endearment. To Michael, he is a “pussycat . . . caring, loving and compassionate.” A handsome hero afraid of only one thing--bees.

Still, as Michael perceived it, there was always one problem: The Great Communicator had difficulty communicating with his eldest son. “He always seemed to be uncomfortable,” he writes, “whenever he and I embarked on anything resembling a personal discussion.”

And, he writes, “For 35 years (Ronald and Nancy Reagan married in 1952) I feel as if I have been in the middle of a battle between Mom and Nancy. . . . Nancy didn’t like Mom any better than she does today . . . when I spoke badly of Nancy, Mom was pleased . . . it appeared that the only time we communicated was when we talked derogatorily about Dad and Nancy.”

The ‘Dragon Lady’

When they were children, Michael writes, his sister Maureen, the daughter of Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, nicknamed Nancy “Dragon Lady.”

Michael tells in the book how a bad report card once evoked from Nancy an ultimatum: “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image, and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.”

“Fine,” he responded. “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with so at least when I walk out the door I’ll know what name to use.”

“OK, Mr. Reagan,” he quotes Nancy Reagan as replying. “I’ll do just that.”

A week later, he writes, Nancy Reagan told him he was the illegitimate son of a World War II soldier and a Kentucky farm-girl-turned-actress. (But it wasn’t until October, 1987, that a telephone call from a woman in Orange County led him to a half-brother, Barry Lange, a former Los Angeles TV writer now living in Ohio, who affirmed that he was the son of Irene Flaugher, now dead, whose stage name was Betty Arnold, and that he was indeed born of her wartime affair.)

In the wake of the incident with Nancy, he writes, it became apparent that one did not criticize Nancy to his father or vice versa: “In my view, Nancy had turned my father against me, and I now had a real excuse to hate her.”

Besides, he confesses, “I have always been intimidated by Nancy because I feel she can see right through me.”

Reagan recalls only one argument between his father and his stepmother, in 1963, and it was over whether he should run for governor. He writes: “I don’t think Dad ever had really strong ambitions to be a politician, but Mommy--his name for Nancy--prodded him.”

‘Made Dad Look Too Old’

During Reagan’s first presidential campaign, Michael writes, he and Maureen, who was then 35, “felt as though Nancy was pushing us out of the family circle and trying to bring Ron and Patti in,” despite their disinterest, because “the campaign staff . . . felt we made Dad look too old.”

He sees both Nancy Reagan and Jane Wyman as “perfectionists,” but with a difference. “Mom gets lost in her work. Nancy gets lost in Dad.”

Elaine Crispen, Mrs. Reagan’s press secretary, said Sunday that both the First Lady and the President had read the book at Camp David over the weekend but she had no comment on their response, if any.

Wyman, who was divorced from Ronald Reagan when Michael was a preschooler, is depicted in the book as regularly punishing her son by whacking him with a riding crop, 10 strokes to the calf of each leg. His childhood, Michael Reagan recalled, was one of being “farmed out” to boarding schools, raised by nannies and maids (“I didn’t know whether adoptive families kept you forever or could give you back,” as they did maids and nannies).

Wyman could be warm and loving, he writes, but “never seemed to miss an opportunity to make me feel guilty about accepting a gift from her” and she so resented Maureen and Michael’s involvement in their father’s political career that she told them they’d been deleted from her will.

Even so, he speaks of his affection for her, his continuing struggle to please her. And the last words in the book are, “Thanks, Mom and Dad! Love, Mike.”

Of late, he says in the interview, “we have not really been talking. She has not been happy with the fact that the book was being written.” She has always perceived him, he adds, as a “con man.”

Michael says he sent a copy of the book last week to Wyman, now 72, together with a letter telling her that he had found his biological family. She has not responded, he said, and that, as he writes in the book, is “the story of my life . . . she is still too busy for me.”

Wyman’s agent and 24-year friend, Robert Raison, reached Saturday in New York, said, “She’s too much of a lady, too polite, too educated, too classy to be interested in responding to any of these things.”

For Reagan-watchers, Michael’s book offers some intriguing anecdotes.

There was the time when 14-year-old Patti asked Michael to come and sign her out of boarding school in Arizona, explaining, “I have fallen in love with a dishwasher” and intended to run off with him. Michael told a family confidante, who informed Patti’s parents.

There was a telephone call from a distraught Ronald Reagan, reporting that he and Nancy, returning early from a trip, had found Ron Reagan entertaining a young woman for the weekend, complete with breakfast in the Reagans’ bed. Ron had dropped out of Yale to become a ballet dancer and, Michael writes, the Reagans had been concerned by insinuations that Ron might be homosexual.

Responding to the call, Michael writes, he made a good news-bad news joke. “ ‘The good news is that you found out he isn’t gay.’ There was a moment of silence on Dad’s end of the line. Finally he said, ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re absolutely right. I guess it is a blessing. Thanks, Mike . . . I must tell Nancy.’ ”

He’s the President

There was the night of Reagan’s first inauguration when, arriving at one of the nine inaugural balls, he stopped, straightened his white tie and “all of a sudden he turned to us (Michael and his wife, Colleen) and, with a wink, jumped straight up in the air and clicked his heels. ‘I’m the President of the United States!’ he said. . . .”

And Michael, in conversation, tells of flying to Washington after the assassination attempt on the President. As a distraught Patti sat with her head on his shoulder, he recalls thinking to himself, “I’m the only one who has his blood type. If only they would give him my blood, our blood would finally flow together and I would truly be his son.”

He added: “You know, our father came very close to death. He came (and he snaps his fingers) that close.”

Michael Reagan’s book, published by Zebra, commanded an advance that he says “was in six figures but under $500,000, way under.”

It wasn’t close to the $2 million up front he says he could have gotten for the venomous book he considered writing two years ago. Since then, with therapy, he says he has come to understand that he spent his life “painting pictures of traps and falling into them on purpose so I could feel sorry for myself.”

The book he ultimately wrote, and its attendant publicity, are “a coming out party” for him, he says, after 36 years of “blackmailing myself” with the nude photograph taken of him by his molester during a camp hike.

“Just the thought of that picture being out there, the thought that someday it might show up,” possibly during his father’s political campaigns, “annihilated me,” he says.

“I did things to my family out of terror,” he adds. “My self-esteem for years has been in the toilet. . . . There’s been so much turmoil going on inside.”

Revealing His Secret

He revealed his dark secret to President and Mrs. Reagan during a visit last April to their Santa Barbara ranch. Until then, he says, he couldn’t tell his father “because I was scared I would lose him.”

Looking back, Michael Reagan sees himself as the perpetual child, screaming silently, “Look at me . . . I want to be seen, I want to be heard.”

He tells in the interview of a friendless adolescence, and in the book writes of stealing money from his father to visit prostitutes--”It seemed I couldn’t get enough sex to bury those pictures”--once paying a woman he picked up in a Hollywood bar just to hold him. He tells of flunking out of Arizona State, running up $40,000 in debts using the Reagan name, ricocheting from job to job.

He raced boats, and won world championships, wanting to be “a winner, just like Dad” and still the press identified him as “the adopted son of. . . .”

Self-pity enveloped him, he recalls. “I have a President as father, and an academy award winner as mother. How do you rise above that? Where do I rise to?”

Reagan, who lives with his wife and his two children, daughter Ashley and son Cameron, in the Los Angeles area, is now hoping to build an acting career and talks of starting an organization to counsel parents of molested children.

And at last, he says, he is making peace with himself and feels closer to his family, though “I don’t think I’m all the way in yet. . . . I think the start was being honest.

“For the first time in my life I feel as if my Dad and Nancy are supporting. They have just been really wonderful through the whole thing.

“Mom and I have yet to get started. We need to communicate. Even if she’s mad and wants to get me with the riding crop, it’s a start.”