Maureen Reagan Kept Her Grim Secret for 20 Years

--For more than 20 years, Maureen Reagan hid from her parents that she was beaten and abused by her first husband, the oldest child of former President Ronald Reagan and actress Jane Wyman reveals in her upcoming autobiography. “At the age of 20, I married a man who was about 10 years older than I was. It turned out to be the worst single mistake of my entire life,” she writes in her book, “First Father, First Daughter,” to be published later this month and excerpted this week in People magazine. “By the time I finally discovered the strength to leave him, I had been brutally beaten, abused, battered and kicked about the face and head by this man on more occasions than I care to count.” Reagan, 48, who is now married to her third husband, declines to identify her first husband, except to say he was a Washington police officer and that she divorced him in 1962. The first her parents knew of the beatings was when she sent them manuscripts of her book last year.

--A record company that pulled out moldering stacks of Leonid I. Brezhnev’s recorded speeches, dusted them off and put them up for sale was surprised to find it had a sellout on its hands, a Soviet newspaper reported. A stack of 500 Brezhnev records recently pulled from the storage room of the state record company Melodiya in Moscow sold out immediately, Komsomolskaya Pravda said. And in Stavropol, hometown of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, copies of Brezhnev’s record, “Topical Questions of Ideological Work of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” were snatched up as soon as they reappeared on store shelves. A Melodiya director said the store had received no instructions from the government on what to do with the old records and had decided to sell them “to let people hear the way we lived” under Brezhnev. Brezhnev was Soviet president from 1964 until his death in 1982.

--Time in prison is paying off for convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard. Israel deposits $5,000 a month into an Israeli bank account for the former U.S. intelligence analyst who is serving a life sentence in federal prison in Illinois for stealing U.S. secrets for Israel, according to the April 10 issue of Newsweek. The magazine attributed the information to “Territory of Lies,” a book by Jerusalem Post correspondent Wolf Blitzer.