The First Daughter

The Physical resemblance to her mom and dad is strong. She has the Great Communicator's good hairand Lincolnesque stature along with his happy Buddha peepers, eyes you might encounter in the late stages of a picnic, when the sun sinks and the beer's flat, but, ah, the memories. From her mother, Patti inherited the flowerpot shape of her jaw and her white teeth. She also has Nancy's edgy smile, which her mother--a.k.a. the Dragon Lady--uses to ward off the less cunning.

While the Reagans presided over their conservative Camelot, daughter Patti--born seven months afterher folks marrie--becamea personal veto of her parents' button down credo. Throughout the Reagan years, she openly criticized her father's foreign and domestic policies, remained active in the antinuclear movement, spoke at peace rallies and refused to live in the White House. And she married, then divorced, her yoga instructor.

At one point during Reagan's campaign for reelection in 1984, he was so exasperated with Patti's liberl stands on marijuana use and premarital cohabitation that he remarked, "I'm just sorry that spanking is out of fashion now."

Although Patti adamantly opposed her father's politics, she refused to vote in either of her father's elections. "I didn't have the balls to go against my father. Looking back on it, I should have done it differently. But back then I just chickened out." (text continued on page 157)The first daughter (continued from page 124)

Still, she didn't let her dad's job get in the way of her private life. She dated Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, actor Timothy Hutton and musician Kris Kristofferson. She was also on a two-term test drive through the Physicians' Desk Reference (cocaine, diet pills, Valium, Quaaludes). As if that weren't enough, Patti next took her insurrection to print. In the span of five years, she wrote a pair of romans à clef--Home Front and A House of Secrets--excoriating her father's politics and her dysfunctional family.

Then Patti took off the gloves. Abandoning fiction altogether, she wrote her autobiography in 1992. Compared with the malevolent worldview of The Way I See It, the novels were in a league with The Jungle Book. And while the former first daddy took a few shots, it was Nancy who was most often in Patti's cross-hairs, pinned down by accounts of drug abuse, corporal punishment and psychological torture. (Her mother has denied the allegations.)

Davis wrote that a tubal ligation she had at 24 was prompted by fear that she had inherited some of her mother's negative qualities. "My fear was that if I became a mother I would become her. I wasn't totally wrong in my thinking. That is how these patterns get continued. But I didn't have to be quite that dramaticin my way of dealing with it. I realized that to the degree we try not to be like our parents, we end up being like them. Trying not to be like them isn't where your work is supposed to be," she explains, her conversation sweetened with therapyspeak. "Once I learned to forgive my parents, I didn't have as much of an investment there. I didn't have the fear that I would be like them and, if I did find little moments where I had been imprinted or something was coming up, I was more forgiving of myself."

In her quest to avoid the parental pattern, she is seeking help from a salad bar of philosophies. Ask her where the joy is, for example, and she drifts into a long pause.

"Well, I don't know," she muses (perhaps needing her mother to whisper into her ear, "We're doing what we can"), "I guess doing good work as a writer makes me happy. I always felt that that was what I was meantto do."

Somewhere in the healing process, Patti traded her poison pen for a stab at literary eroticism. Her latest novel, Bondage, is the fictional account of "bondage on several levels," says Patti, scooping the froth from the surface of her cappuccino. "It's about sexual, psychological, emotional and spiritual bondage. It started as a short story where I was writing about trust and intimacy in relationships. Control and surrender--all that stuff. In a sadomasochistic relationship, people think that the turn-on is the danger, the fear. But I think it's the trust. You're playing with danger and yet you know that the other person won't hurt you."

She professes to having always wanted to write erotica (see her short story, Safe Sex, on page 134) and to having a great appreciation for people who do it well. The publication of Bondage, which tasted the lash from book reviewers, illustrates just how, er, bound Davis is to the abiding folklore of her parents. She recounts a radio interview she recently did in Washington while promoting Bondage.

"I was asked by the disc jockey if writing a book such as this, with these really hot, steamy scenes, got me excited. I said, 'Well, yeah. If I don't get turned on writing it, how would I expect anyone else to?' It seemed like a fairly silly question to ask, really. But then this went out on the national news wire: 'Former President Ronald Reagan's daughter admits that she got excited,' or something like that. People from Republican families aren't supposed to get turned on. Or they're not supposed to talk about it."Then Patti slips into her dead-on Nancy impersonation: "'You can do it, dear, just don't talk about it." '

Just how did her mother tell Patti about sex? "She gave me one of these little personal books and said, 'Now, you read this, then we'll talk.' The book started with the mating habits of salmon, then went up the evolutionary ladder. They showed you how salmon do it, swimming upstream, laying eggs. Then you got to rodents, then cows, then they eased you into the primates and finally human beings. That's when the pictures stopped and the book relied more on description. I remember the book said something like, 'Human beings do it different from primates. They do it by lying facing each other.' My first question to my mother was, 'Wouldn't that hurt?' She said, 'Oh, no, no. It's wonderful and you'll love each other." '

Patti has come a long way from that discussion to her uninhibited display in Playboy. Part of that comesfrom her continuing devotion to bodybuilding. Every day for the past seven years she's worked out with a trainer, sculpting abdominals and pectorals. With her toned-up, hardened limbs, she looks as if she could walk through a wall.

"I'm really proud of the work I've put into my body," Davis says, fondling a cross that dangles between her breasts. "I'm 41. When I was 21, I didn't look like this. In fact, when I was 21, I was warned by a doctor that if I didn't stop doing drugs and all the shit I'd been doing, I would be dead by the time I was30. I like the way I look and feel, but it also really helps my head. If I run five miles, it really clearsout my head."

Patti still finds time to remain politically active despite her busy schedule. She is presently involvedwith People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to whom she has donated half of her fee for her Playboy pictorial. The big question is whether or not Peta would give the money back if they saw her as she is now, wearing a leather watchband, a leather belt and leather tennis shoes--accessorized in moo material.

"Look, as soon as they come up with a suitable replacement for leather, I'll get it," she promises. "I just don't think plastic shoes are a decent alternative. I tried wearing those rubber sandals and they're awful--your feet can't breathe. How healthy is that?"

How about all the leather straps and violent posing in her novel?

"In Bondage the main character usually gets tied up with chiffon scarves, not leather."

Davis didn't tell her parents about the Playboy shoot. "Why stir up something? I mean, they're not going to like it. 'Hi. I'm calling you up to tell you something that I know you're going to hate. It's not coming out for a few months but I just wanted to give you these few months to get really pissed off.' That's stupid, you know? Besides, my parents are never going to approve of what I do anyway."

That doesn't keep her from explaining her father's recent assessment of President Clinton's State of the Union address (he called it "grand larceny" of ideas), which Patti insists was not in keeping with his character. "I think someone suggested that and he went with it. But that's not him. He's more gracious than that. I'm beginning to realize the good things that I got from my father."

Asked if she's seen him lately, Patti's face takes on a glow. The two met the night before when an acquaintance canceled dinner plans at the last minute and Davis found herself in Los Angeles with nothing to do.

"I thought, OK, I'm not going to get depressed. I went and got my nails done. I got something to eat, and then I thought, Well, I should call my parents to see if they're back from Washington. I had a birthday card for my dad and I really wanted to see him. I called and my father answered the phone, which meant my mother wasn't even there, since she always answers. I asked him if I could run over right then and he said sure.

"I gave him this New Age card and I wrote inside, 'Thank you for the gift of faith that you've given me.' I told him that the most valuable gift he ever gave me was teaching me how to talk to God when I was a little girl. I reminded him of things he told me when I was younger, about praying and talking to God and the miracles in his life. It was profound. He looked at me and he said, 'I always wondered what your faith was, what your relationship to God was.' We stood at the front door saying goodbye and he said, 'Well, you know, God is always listening and I think he's listening right now."'

Patti grows quiet, pausing in the enclosing arms of her father's reach, letting the memory of the previous night pass onits own accord. After gathering herself, she will have an early dinner, then turn in.

"I'm training at Gold's Gym at seven A.M. We're doing legs," Patti groans. Because tomorrow is a new morning in America.

Openness about sexuality was not part of Patti's upbringing: "We didn't walk around the house nude. My mother was less shy than my father, who was really shy. In fact, my parents were horrified by the free-love generation of the Sixties and early Seventies. My braless stage did not go over well."

Part of Patti's motivation to do this pictorial was provided by "the nasty little press reports that call me middle-aged. They're latching on to this middle-aged thing. I thought, You know what? Fuck you. This is what middle-aged looks like." (You've seen the photographs--now turn to page 134 to sample Davis' uproarious, incendiary literary style.)

"Davis didn't tell her parents about the Playboy shoot. 'Why stir up something? They're not going to like it."