-Caveat Lector-
Maureen Reagan, 60, Activist and President's Daughter, Dies
By ENID NEMY
Maureen Reagan, the outspoken daughter of former President Ronald
Reagan who was often at odds with her father's policies, died
yesterday at her home in Sacramento. She was 60, and had suffered a
recurrence of melanoma, a skin cancer with which she was first
diagnosed in 1996 and that, after some years in remission, recurred
last fall.
Ms. Reagan was a politically active feminist who worked to support
the proposed equal rights amendment, lobbied for abortion rights
and helped elect women to public office.
She had a distant relationship with her father for decades after he
and her mother, the actress Jane Wyman, divorced in 1948.
Although Ms. Reagan volunteered her services in 1966 when her
father ran for governor of California, his consultants rejected her
offer on the ground that her participation would again bring Mr.
Reagan's divorce to the attention of the public. She recalled a
news release at the time that said Mr. Reagan and his wife Nancy,
whom he married in 1952, had had two children, Patti and Ronnie,
and did not mention her or her brother Michael.
A thaw between father and daughter began when Mr. Reagan ran for
president in 1980.
''When he was elected president, she had more communication and
involvement with her father than she had had for the rest of her
life,'' her friend Judy Carter, the daughter-in-law of former
President Jimmy Carter, said in 1989.
Ms. Reagan, too, tried her hand at politics. She was twice
defeated in Republican primary races in California, for the United
States Senate in 1982 and for a Southern California Congressional
seat in 1992. Her first campaign was undermined by reports that her
father, then president, did not want her involved in the race, but
a decade later he endorsed her Congressional run.
To accusations that she was trading on the Reagan name, she said,
``I don't run because of my name but I don't run from it.'' She
noted that people who accused her of exploiting family ties
``forget I was a Republican before the president was.''
``I licked my first envelope in 1960,'' Ms. Reagan said, ``and I've
never stopped working.''
She said that as an 11-year-old watching television coverage of the
1952 presidential conventions, she preferred the Republicans
``because they were better organized.''
At an even younger age, she exhibited the traits for which she was
known throughout her life: strong will and impatience. As one of
her critics once said, she was ``simply not schooled in the ways of
holding her tongue.''
In 1987, after the Iran-contra affair, when Ms. Reagan asserted
that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter,
President Reagan's national security aides, should be
court-martialed for their actions, Mr. Reagan told Republican
leaders, ''I gave up arguing with my daughter long ago.''
Maureen Elizabeth Reagan was born on Jan. 4, 1941, and in her early
school years attended the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes Estates,
Calif., as a boarder. She went to Emerson Junior High School in Los
Angeles and to high school at Immaculate Heart in Hollywood. After
a year at Marymount College of Virginia in Arlington she dropped
out because, she said, ''I wanted to do something, be somewhere, I
wanted to be an actress, and to be one, you had to know something
of the world.''
When she left school, her father told her, ''Well, write if you get
work.''
The work she got was as a secretary in Washington, where she also
took part in local theater. She soon returned to the West, to Las
Vegas and California, where she sang in nightclubs, did a few
commercials (Duncan Hines and Crisco) and had bit parts in
television shows (''The Partridge Family'' and ``Marcus Welby,
M.D.'') and in the 1964 Elvis Presley movie ``Kissin' Cousins.'' In
her 1989 book, ``First Father, First Daughter,'' (Little, Brown &
Company), Ms. Reagan recalled, ``I went out on so many auditions I
began to think of changing my middle name to Rejection.''
Her brief television and movie career was followed by a stint as a
talk show host on KABC Radio in Los Angeles, and in 1969 she joined
a U.S.O. tour of Vietnam.
By 1980, Ms. Reagan was director of an organization called Sell
Overseas America, which promoted American products abroad, a
position she resigned two years later to pursue her Senate
campaign.
Ms. Reagan's book revealed that she had been the victim of domestic
violence in her first marriage, in 1960, to John Filippone, a
Washington policeman. The marriage lasted barely a year. A 1964
marriage to David Sills, a Marine lieutenant, ended in divorce in
1968.
Her husband of 20 years, Dennis Revell, a public relations
executive in Sacramento, survives her as does a daughter, Rita,
whom the couple adopted from Uganda in 1994. In addition to her
father, stepmother and siblings, she is also survived by her
mother.
Although she was an ardent Republican, Ms. Reagan angered many
members of the party by her refusal to compromise and for stepping
on toes. In 1983, she was given the title of special consultant to
the Republican National Committee and moved to the family quarters
in the White House.
When asked if she had been happy with her father's record on
women's issues , she said: ''No, I haven't. I think there could be
a much better record and I would certainly place the blame, I
think, where it belongs. That's in the hands of certain people on
the senior staff, who have never really accepted that there is a
political power of women and that has to be addressed.''
Larry Speakes, a White House spokesman in the Reagan
administration, noted in his book ``Speaking Out,'' that the
president's aides, including Secretary of State George P. Shultz,
were afraid of Ms. Reagan, known to many as Big Mo.
''You would avoid her if possible and agree with her if you had to
deal with her,'' Mr. Speakes wrote.
Ms. Reagan's most active political years were in the 1980's, when
she was a member of the California World Trade Commission,
chairwoman of the United States delegation to the United Nations
Decade for Women Conference in Kenya, in 1985; co-chairwoman of the
Republican National Committee, and chairwoman of the Republican
Women's Political Action League.
As Ms. Reagan became more influential, she worked to increase
Republican fund-raising for women running for office.
Ms. Reagan said she first recognized the symptoms of Alzheimer's in
her father in 1994 when he was unable to recall the part he had
played in a movie. ``Actors always remember the roles they
played,'' she said. She joined the Alzheimer's Association board
and began traveling the country to raise research money.
Her personal and political creed was perhaps best summed up in a
1982 interview. ''People who hurt my friends I have a lot of
trouble forgiving,'' she said. ''People who hurt me I tend to
forgive but I never forget.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/09/obituaries/09REAG.html?ex=998356165&ei=1&en=968ca738a5c36f35
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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