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Patricia (Patti) Reagan, Reagan's first child by Nancy, is tall, slender, graceful and very shy. When an interview was scheduled, a Reagan campaign publicity aide insisted on sitting in (apparently Nancy Reagan wanted it that way). Her boarding school, the Orme School near Phoenix, was a place where students rode horses and tended cattle, but Patti also wrote poetry. "Serious poetry," she says. "I was a very serious person." Out of school, she devoted a lot of effort to writing rock songs. One of them, I Wish You Peace, was recorded by the Eagles. For the past year or so, she has been looking for work as an actress. She has found a few small parts in TV comedies (Love Boat, Fantasy Island). Her father's old pictures fascinate her. "I always had this fantasy," she says, "that I could do a film with him some day."
During the 1976 campaign, Patti was seriously estranged from her parents, but now she is living at their home in Pacific Palisades, and the differences that centered on the unmarried Patti's freewheeling life-style seem to have been settled.
"I don't know any family where the children's life-styles are the same as the parents'," she says. "I mean, generations are different, and times change." Patti remains totally uninterested in politics. When asked which party she has registered in, she pauses, gives a nervous laugh, glances at the nearby Reagan aide. "Uh—independent," she says. "That means I can vote either way, right?"
Ronald Prescott Reagan (not Junior, since his father's middle name is Wilson) was "Skipper" as a boy and grew up in more settled circumstances than the other children. "I was sort of an only child," he recalls. "Patti was away at school, and I had the place to myself. Dad was home for dinner almost every night, and the three of us were together." Ron joined his father's 1976 campaign and performed routine chores for a few months, but quit when he found the work "tiring and boring." At Harvard High School in North Hollywood, he played basketball, took up writing and did well enough academically to get into Yale. "I got into Yale through no fault of my own," he says. "What I was doing was wandering. I thought it would be a good place to go for four years while I figured out what I really wanted."
Patti took him to see The Nutcracker ballet, which "made a deep impression on him, though he says he had been fascinated by ballet ever since he was a child and saw Rudolf Nureyev in a filmed version of Romeo and Juliet. "His grace impressed me so much that I came to think of that as a sort of physical ideal." After just a few weeks at Yale, Ron began to take dance classes, then decided he wanted to make dancing his career. He called his father to tell him the news. "I was a little frightened," he recalls. "What was he going to say? Here I was proposing to leave this prestigious school. But he took the news pretty well. He said I should finish the semester and then get some advice about training from his friend Gene Kelly." Kelly recommended the Stanley Holden School in Los Angeles, so Ron went there, then won a scholarship to the Joffrey school in New York.