A Second Crack at ‘Daddy Dearest’ : With New Novel ‘Deadfall’, Patti Davis Is Again at Odds With the Reagan Household

Patti (Reagan) Davis is at it again.

A month before publication of her mother’s memoirs, Davis’ second novel, “Deadfall,” hits bookstores next week. And like her first, it will probably raise some hackles back home on the Reagan ranch. A kind of political “Daddy Dearest,” the spy thriller takes aim at the war in Nicaragua, which she described in an interview this week as “my father’s war.”

Asked whether she went to Nicaragua to research the book, Davis said it would have been too dangerous: “The CIA created, armed and financed the Contras. My father backed them with everything he had. It was my father’s war, and almost everyone in Nicaragua has lost somebody as a result of it. I couldn’t go down there, being his daughter, and expect not to feel those people’s wrath.”

Strong Opinions

Enough said? Not really. Davis, 36, has strong opinions. And they all seem opposite to the ones her parents hold. They also all seem to be showing up in print, which leads some to suspect that Davis’ writing career is some kind of vendetta against her parents.

Not so, Davis said in an interview at her modest Santa Monica home.

She only chose writing as a career after stints at acting and songwriting. “I was frustrated, creatively. I wasn’t getting work as an actress, or selling any songs. I’d always written poetry, and I liked doing it.”

She says she wrote her first book, “Home Front,” about a President’s family like her own because “most authors write first novels about what they know best.” It just so happened that the family she knew best wasn’t exactly a warm, folksy tribe like the Waltons. And Davis doesn’t mind admitting it, because “anyone who hasn’t been living in a coma for the last eight years knows that we’re not a close-knit family.”

Written with a co-author, because Davis “needed to learn certain things about writing dialogue and structuring scenes,” her first book had a heroine who was a child smothered by adult political conversation from the time she could talk, a child so emotionally isolated that she took to falling off chairs at the dinner table to get the attention she craved. She cried when her father was elected governor, perceiving politics to be the enemy. Her mother, always perfectly coiffed and dressed in Chanel, had the single goal of helping propel her father’s career.

People magazine called “Home Front” a “literary striptease” in which her father came off “like Ozzie Nelson in the White House.” The Los Angeles Times reviewer said, “If I were Nancy Reagan I’d never speak to Patti again.” The New York Times called it “an earnest and well-intentioned souvenir.”

“Deadfall,” (Crown Publishers Inc., $17.95) written by Davis alone, is a notch up on the literary scale and more than a souvenir.

It is about a young Pacific Palisades couple who try to make a documentary film about the ravages of the Nicaraguan war. CIA spies, stolen film, evidence of America’s illegal involvement in the war and the husband’s murder in a San Fernando Valley church follow in quick order. The widow determines to find her husband’s killers, though she is risking her unborn child’s life in the attempt.

It’s a page-turner in parts and shows that Davis has worked on her writing skills. There are no controversial descriptions of parents, because the heroine’s mother and father are dead before the book starts.

Have her parents seen the book? “I won’t discuss that. Those details are nobody else’s business.”

Did she deliberately bring this book out a month before publication of her mother’s memoirs, scheduled for Oct. 27? “When I started writing this, I don’t think my mother knew she’d do a book. I certainly didn’t know about it.”

But why not choose a setting other than Nicaragua, so that her father’s feelings would not be hurt?

Davis relaxes on a puffy sofa in her comfortable living room, which looks out on the street. “I could have picked Guatemala or Allende’s Chile. We’ve gone into a number of countries and participated in an overthrow. I chose Nicaragua because it was current and because the situation bothered me tremendously.

“There are (Guatemalan) children walking along on one leg, who are blind and maimed because of this,” she says. “Nicaragua will never be the same. When I started writing this book, I thought we might be in a full-fledged war by the time it came out. And when such things disturb me on such a large scale, (speaking out) on them has to be more important than what my parents think.”

Neither parent was available to discuss Davis’ book, said Reagan spokesman Mark Weinberg.

Davis, married to yoga instructor Paul Grilley for the last five years, says she has been speaking out “practically since I was born. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had ideas that were different” from those of her family.

In earlier years, during Reagan dinner-table conversations, “the response that would make me give up was that my parents thought I had gotten my (controversial) ideas from someone else. I wasn’t credited for having developed my own viewpoint.”

Later, during her father’s Administration, Davis was concerned about the nuclear arms build-up. She brought Dr. Helen Caldecott, the noted anti-nuclear activist, to meet her father at the White House. “I realized at that point that there would never be any way to communicate on these issues and that I had to give up the illusion and stop trying. It was a cordial meeting, but we were so far apart and there was no point at which we could connect. Helen or I would bring up documented facts, and my father would say, ‘That’s not true.’ There was no room for discussion.”

Davis now seems perfectly at ease with the writer’s role. She is already working on a new book, which will be “smaller in scope, more intimate and not political at all. It is just one woman’s story.”

She wants to have children, although she worries about the world they’ll inherit: “I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what’s happening environmentally. I can’t even consider the prospect of grandchildren because I don’t know if there will be anything left for them on Earth. That’s how serious the problem is. We can’t drink the water or breathe the air, and we’re all dying from some sort of cancer. How many generations can sustain that? It frightens me terribly.”

She says she does what she can to help. “Even if I fail, I would rather know that I joined with those who are trying to make this a better, healthier place to live.”