Maureen Reagan Pushes Life With Father Saga

During her father’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and ‘84, Maureen Reagan’s days were a whirlwind of speeches, interviews, hotel rooms, fast food and airplanes.

This month Maureen Reagan is once again barnstorming the country. This time, however, it’s book buyers rather than voters she’s trying to woo.

The eldest daughter of Ronald Reagan is winding up a 4-week, 18-city publicity tour to promote her memoir, “First Father, First Daughter” (Little, Brown), an affectionate chronicle of her life with her father--from Hollywood in the ‘40s through Washington in the ‘80s.

On Wednesday Reagan will swing through Orange County to speak at a book-and-author luncheon sponsored by The Times’ Orange County Edition at the Red Lion Inn in Costa Mesa. Also speaking at the sold-out luncheon will be biographer A. Scott Berg (“Goldwyn: A Biography”) and novelist Amy Tan (“The Joy Luck Club”).

Speaking by phone from her Cleveland hotel room--a brief interview sandwiched between a talk show and a flight to Chicago--Reagan said she purposely held off having her book come out while her father was still in office.

“I insisted it not be published because I didn’t want to be one of Sam’s questions at the helicopter,” she said, referring to ABC’s ubiquitous White House correspondent Sam Donaldson.

“I had been asked for years to write a book. It just seemed to me we had come to the end of a unique experience and it seemed a perfect time to reflect. It’s not an autobiography. I’m too young to write an autobiography. But a political memoir of the time seemed fair.”

Digging into her past came easy to Reagan, 48, who lives in Los Angeles with her third husband, Dennis Revell, owner of a Sacramento and Washington public relations company. “I’ve always been the historian in the family,” she said.

Reagan speaks glowingly of her father. (“He’s the warmest person I’ve ever come across,” she writes, “and it’s a warmth that runs so deep inside him, it just kind of pulls you along like a magnet.”)

Yet her childhood growing up in Hollywood was far from ideal. When her father and mother, actress Jane Wyman, divorced when she was 7, “Mermie,” as she was called, was sent off to boarding school. Adopted brother Michael joined her when he was 5.

They’d return home every other weekend and, she said, because the motion picture industry was a 6-day-a-week business at the time, “it depended on who was working who we’d see.”

In the book, young Maureen comes across as a rather lonely child.

“I was,” she acknowledged. But rather than feeling abandoned after her parents’ divorce, she said, it was more a matter of “you don’t have anyone to go home to with your problems anymore. So you’ll take care of them yourself.”

That turned out to be the case during her brief marriage in 1961 to a Washington policeman when she was 20 and working as a Washington secretary.

It was, she writes, “the single worst mistake I’ve ever made in my entire life. 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 said she did not attempt to seek help during this period. (“Very few do.”) She simply lived through it.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this chapter in her life, she said, it is “that in this society we tend to blame the victim for almost anything that happens to them. A lot of women today are still in that situation. Every once in a while something needs to be said so another generation of women will realize it’s OK, it’s not your fault and you can get out and go on--and there are places now you can go and help that you can get.”

Despite such personal revelations, Reagan is adamant that “First Father, First Daughter” is not an autobiography. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s the story of my father and me . . .. The book addresses three areas: politics, Ronald Reagan and Maureen.”

Politics has always held a fascination for Maureen Reagan, who unsuccessfully ran for the 1982 Republican Senate nomination in California. “Politics was a way of getting things done and making things different and I liked that,” she said.

Reagan’s visit to Orange County next week will be a homecoming of sorts.

In the mid-’60s, as Ronald Reagan’s political star began its ascent, Maureen and her second husband, David Sills, a Marine Corps lieutenant stationed at Camp Pendleton, lived in San Clemente. Later, when Sills became an associate in a law firm, they lived in Anaheim.

It was here, Reagan acknowledged with a chuckle, that she “cut her teeth” on politics.

During this period, she served as a full-time political volunteer, doing precinct work and recruiting other volunteers. She also became first president of the Walter Knott Republican Women’s Club.

Reagan, who is well-known for her efforts on behalf of women’s issues, completed a 2-year term as co-chairman of the Republican National Committee in January. She said she has no current political ambitions of her own.

“I have other things I’d like to do,” she said.

Such as?

“For the moment,” she said with a laugh, “I’d just like to live through this book tour.”