"The Unknown First Family"

None of Reagan's four children is dedicated to politics

No law ever decreed that a presidential candidate must be accompanied on the campaign trail by a smiling wife and a bevy of pink-cheeked children. But a long tradition claims that the voters want a close look at every prospective First Family, and that they want any such family to be very familial indeed. No divorced man has ever been elected President, and except for Warren Harding, there has not been a childless President since James Buchanan (1857-61), who was also the only President to remain a lifelong bachelor.

Ronald Reagan lists family along with neighborhood, work, peace and freedom as the core of Americans' "shared values," so it seems somewhat odd that his own children were so rarely seen during the primary campaign. It also seems somewhat odd that Reagan barely mentioned his children in his official biography. "We would be," jokes Reagan's oldest son, Mike, 35, "the unknown First Family."

There have occasionally been stories about the younger Reagans, and occasionally embarrassments. Oldest Daughter Maureen, 39, sometimes gets headlines for her ardent support of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Reagan just as ardently opposes. Second Daughter Patti, 27, attracted attention by going around with Bernie Leadon, former banjo player with the Eagles. And when Younger Son Ronald, 22, became a dancer with Manhattan's Jeffrey II Company, the training troupe for the Jeffrey Ballet, gossip columnists began raising eyebrows and talking of family hostilities. "How embarrassed is Ronald Reagan [really] about his ballet-dancing son?" leered the New York Post. "Answer: plenty."

TIME Senior Correspondent Laurence I. Barrett interviewed all four of the younger Reagans and found them engagingly different from what the gossip suggested. His report:

The Reagan children are hardly recluses, but neither are they as funky as sometimes portrayed. They have lives of their own. None is dedicated to politics.

Reagan's public reticence about them comes partly from his strong sense of privacy. It also comes, say his aides, from Nancy Reagan's extreme sensitivity to Reagan's marriage to Jane Wyman. Nancy, the mother of the two younger children, would like to pretend that the first marriage never happened. Reagan caters to this sensitivity, and that is why there was so little mention of the marriage and the children in his autobiography. In fact, some friends think that the extreme closeness of Reagan and Nancy has created a barrier for all the children.

Maureen, now a tall, sturdy, handsome woman, ebullient but more than a touch wary, was seven when her parents were divorced. She lived with her mother, but remembers going riding on her fa ther's ranch and hearing him recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew. She jocularly refers to him as "Dear Old Dad." Like all the other Reagan children, she spent much of her youth in private boarding schools; like all of them, she dropped out of college (Marymount College of Virginia). She went to work as a Republican volunteer in Nixon's Washington campaign headquarters in 1960, while Dear Old Dad was an active Democrat for Nixon. "Once in a while," she says, "I remind him that I have time on him as a Republican."

Returning to California, she married twice, to a policeman and a lawyer, and divorced twice. She tried going into the family business, acting, but without great success. She drifted into what she calls "the talk business," serving as hostess on TV talk shows in San Francisco, then Los Angeles. For the past 18 months she has been editor of Showcase U.S.A., a slick bimonthly designed to promote sales abroad.

On weekends she frequently campaigns for her father, praising his record as Governor and then taking questions. There are usually several involving ERA or abortion, about which she and Dad have agreed to disagree. "I am a feminist, and I say so," she reports.

Mike Reagan was adopted when he was just a few days old, because, according to family legend, Maureen wanted a brother (Jane Wyman had been advised by her doctor to have no more children). Mike too has pleasant memories of his father's ranch. "He sure can talk," says Mike. "You ask him what time it is, and he tells you how to make a watch." But, he adds, "we always felt that we were sharing him with a lot of others. We were basically raised by nannies and maids."

In three prep schools, Mike became a good enough football player to be offered an athletic scholarship at Arizona State, but he turned it down ("I played the game for fun"), tried a few courses at the University of Southern California, then took up speedboat racing. A crack-up a few years later tore his back muscles, dislocated both hips and persuaded him to try another vocation. His father, newly elected Governor, was concerned. "Dad kept asking me, 'What's your future going to be?' " he recalls. "I'd tell him, 'I'm a late bloomer, just like you, Dad.' I was a loner, having fun. It was a while before I found a direction."

Having acquired Reagan's gift for amiable banter, Mike became a salesman, and quite a successful one. He started by selling boats, but early this year he set up his own business, grandly titled Agricultural Energy Resources, which he runs out of his suburban home in the San Fernando Valley. His main activity is to sell gasohol equipment to farmers.

Mike's first marriage lasted less than a year ("A round-tripper," he calls it. "In and out fast"). He and his second wife, Colleen Sterns, have a son, Cameron, 2, the only Reagan grandson. Mike also campaigns for his father on weekends, mostly in California. "Sometimes," he says, "I argue with him about his style. I tell him he should come across strong more often. It takes a lot to make Dad angry, but when he's mad, he's mad."

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.

There has been some uneasiness on the Reagan staff about how the press would treat these developments, and this uneasiness can itself complicate the situation. When a number of reporters wanted to interview Ron about his dance career, the Joffrey company scheduled a press conference, but Reagan headquarters got the session postponed, making it sound as though there were some reason to avoid publicity.

"In any family there's going to be a little friction over something as the kids go through adolescence," says the youngest Reagan. "Nothing is nirvana. But the recent stories have been exaggerated. Being close-knit has become almost a physical impossibility, since we're so spread out. We haven't had big sit-downs over meat and potatoes. It hasn't been the Waltons or anything. But we're fairly close, emotionally. There is a bond."

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