The Way I See It
Book excerpt by Patti Davis

Patti Davis, daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, spent some time living with Bernie Leadon. Parts of that relationship are detailed in Patti's book The Way I See It. According to the acknowledgments in the book, she is still friends with Bernie. Here are some excerpts from that book that would be of interest to Eagles' fans.

"In 1974, the Eagles were one of the most popular groups in the country. Their third album, On The Border, had just been released and it was the only thing playing on my stereo, hour after hour. I was looking at the album insert one night, at the photograph of Bernie Leadon, and I had a feeling, somehow, that I was going to meet him.

Two days later, I drove over to a store called Westwood Music to get some guitar strings. The store was frequented by a lot of well-known musicians, including Jackson Browne and some of the Eagles. As I pulled up to a parking meter outside the store, Bernie's song "My Man," from the new album, came on the radio. Then, a minute after I walked into the store, I turned around and Bernie was coming through the door.

He walked right over to where I was standing, and I felt like I had to say something. "I like your music," I said, and thought "Oh God, that sounded really lame."

"Thanks," he said. "What's your name?"

"Patti." I deliberately left of my last name because at that time it was still Reagan.

"What are you doing right now? Do you want to go to the beach?" Bernie asked.

"Okay." I think I forgot all about the guitar strings I'd come in there to buy.

Today, I probably would never have gone off with a stranger, but this was the early Seventies. We still had some of the innocence of the Sixties. We still passed joints down the row at rock concerts and took rides from people we'd just met.

Bernie followed me home; I left my car there, and we spent the day on a small section of private beach where Bernie knew one of the homeowners. At one point when we were out in the ocean, we ended up with our arms around each other, trading water, with sunlight and white sea-foam around us. It didn't feel as if we'd just met; there was the easiness of not feeling the need to keep talking, which usually comes after knowing someone a long time.

He drove me up to Topanga Canyon, to his tiny house balanced on a hillside; from the backyard there was a view of the canyon. We made love outside, with an acacia tree spilling yellow blossoms around us and the sun falling behind the green hills.

It was dark when Bernie took me home, and he told me he'd just gotten off the road--he'd need about four days to recover and catch up on sleep. He'd call me then. And the odd thing was, I never doubted he would.

"This is a change for you," my roommate said, after I told her every detail of the day. "A guy says he'll call you in four days and you believe him?"

"I've known from the beginning with him," I told her. " And there's something else I know. We're going to be together a long time."

Bernie did call in four days, and we were together for a whole day before I told him who my parents were. The way he remembers it, I had mentioned my father a few times, and Bernie had gotten the impression that he was someone powerful, but assumed he was the head of a corporation or something like that.

We were driving along the Coast Highway when he asked, "So what does your father do, anyway?"

"He's the governor," I told him.

"Of what?"

"California."

"Your last name's Reagan?"

"Uh-huh."

"When were you going to tell me this?"

"Whenever I decided it might o make any difference. Maybe never. I don't know."

"What do you mean you're going to Europe?" my mother said over the phone.

The Eagles were going to play some concert dates in Europe and I was going to be with Bernie. For a couple of months, we'd been together constantly, staying either at his house or my apartment. I had considered just going, not announcing the trip beforehand, or getting there and sending a postcard. But I didn't dare.

"I'm going with Bernie," I told my mother, in a stubbornly cheerful tone, as though that could defuse her displeasure.

She had met Bernie once. We had going to my parents' house for a few minutes to pick something up, I think. It was a brief, agonizing interlude spent standing in the living room introducing a rock musician to the governor's wife, who still played Frank Sinatra on 78's.

"Well, you're going to have a separate hotel room, aren't you?" she said.

"Uh, no. Why would I do that?"

"Have you any idea how this is going to look--traipsing off to Europe with some rock star? The press will just love this."

I knew part of my mother's concern had to do with my father's unannounced candidacy for the presidency in 1976.

"I'm going to let your father handle this," she answered, and hung up. Which meant that she would continue to handle it as soon as she thought of something else to say.

But I was doing more than just going to Europe with Bernie. We were going to live together, which Bernie remembers being more my decision than is, and it probably was. But I figured we were getting to that point anyway, so why not speed things up? Besides, my roommate was moving out to live with her girlfriend. I'd been laid off form work and I was on unemployment. I couldn't afford the rent by myself, and Bernie and I were in love. So it seemed perfectly logical to just push things along and move in together.

Bernie kept his tiny house on the hill, rented it to his brother, and bought a large A-frame on Old Topping Canyon Road where Charles Manson used to park his bus. We planned on moving in after  we got back..........

I hadn't spoken to my mother since she'd hung up on me, and I was leaving the country in a few days. I took a deep breath, dialed the number, and made an appointment to go talk to my parents that evening.

"Why don't you come up around seven-thirty, after dinner?" my mother said.

I was about ten minutes late, which was noted; then we at in the den, choosing chairs spaced well apart.

"I wanted to tell you that when I come back from Europe, I'm going to be moving to Topanga with Bernie. He bought a new house." I felt the words rush out.

My parents sat stunned, staring at me. Finally my father spoke.

"Well now, Patti, we weren't prepared for this. We'd expected to talk to you about this trip you're planning, but this is a real shock."

"How can you do this to your father?" my mother asked.

I didn't answer her; I've never figured out a suitable response to that question.

"This is just immoral, what you're doing," my father continued. "Living together without the benefit of marriage is a sin in the eyes of God. He tells us this in the Bible."

"He does? It's in the Bible that you shouldn't live together?" I figured I must have missed that.

"Yes," my father said emphatically. "God wrote that men and women should get married."

"But God didn't write the Bible. The disciples wrote the bible," I pointed out.

"No they didn't. God wrote it."

This is the most aggravating aspect of discussing anything with my father. He has this ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless. you sit there with your mouth open, thinking, "This is ridiculous. There's a perfectly sane rebuttal to his statement." Only you can't think of what it could be.

"The point is, you are committing a sin," my father said. "This is a fact. It is a sin in the eyes of God. And if you do this, this young man will not be welcome in our house."

"Well, if he's not welcome, then neither am I," I answered. "But you and Mom will always be welcome in our home." 

The day we left for Europe, Bernie and I got to the top of the escalator at the Los Angeles airport with a couple of the guys who worked with the Eagles. Suddenly, two photographers jumped in front of us and started snapping pictures. I trued to get away from them, but the escalator was behind me, and then I heard Bernie say, "We'd better do something." Two guys who were with us shoved the photographers back and herded them into a corner. "Open the camera, " I heard one of them say. "Give me the film." the photographers were young and looked scared; the opened the cameras, handed over the film, and watched as it was ruined by the light. A week later, an item appeared in People magazine stating that I was traveling to Europe with Bernie Leadon of the Eagles; there was no accompanying picture.

Everything seemed to move quickly during this period, and everything was infused with drama and excitement. Our world was rock and roll, crowds, screaming at concerts, limousines speeding away from backstage doors. I didn't really notice at first that Bernie's relationship with the group was starting to fracture, but it would soon become apparent, and it would result in his being the first one to leave the group. I didn't know when I sat on my bed one night writing a song, that it would increase the tensions that already existed.

The Eagles were getting ready to go back into the studio and record another album, which would become One of These Nights. Glenn Frey and Don Henley were the writers in the group, and the majority of the songs were theirs; but Bernie and Randy Meisner always had songs featured on the albums. Bernie hadn't come up with anything he liked, and when I played him a song I was writing called "I Wish You Peace," he wanted to help finish it and record it as his cut on the next album. I knew that the group had made a decision not to use any outside writers anymore (they had, in the past, co-written with Jackson Browne and JD Souther, among others).

I supposed It would have shown a strength of character for me to say, "Oh no, you guys made this pact. I'll just keep this song and play it in the living room when no one's around." I did not have the strength of character, and I don't even know if I would now. Bernie's insistence that they make and exception to their new rule didn't help his relationship with the rest of the group, and I felt guilty about it. But I was also ecstatic that I was going to have a song on an Eagles album.

I think there are houses that bring good luck and houses that harbor bad luck. The house that Bernie and I had moved into had something very dark and ominous about it. There were strange things that happened there, some of them just feelings that would sneak up on me. I would wake up at night and for some reason be drawn to the top of the stairs, even though there was nothing I needed from downstairs. But I knew that if I went down, I would meet whoever it was who was sharing the house with us--some strange presence that frequently made me turn around sharply, certain I was being watched. One night, while Bernie was away on the road, I'd gone out and left on the outside lights and the inside living-room light. When I came home, the house was dark. I went in and the light switches had been turned off. The doors were locked; no one had broken in, no fuse had blown. I had no concrete explanation for this.

You can't blame a house for splintering a relationship, but I've wondered about its effect on Bernie and me and on Bernie's with the rest of the Eagles. Both relationships seemed to disintegrate while were were in that house. We began arguing more often, and I didn't know how to resolve arguments, or even how to have them. I'd never seen my parents argue with each other; I'd never learned from them how tow people work things out in a relationship. My experience with arguing came from my mother, and it had only to do with rage and fear, not with working things out.

The Eagles were four different personalities and from what I saw, their relationship was affected by their success. The more famous a group becomes, the smaller three world gets, and the more personality differences are magnified.

One night in our topanga house, I decided to try peyote for the first time, by myself. Bernie didn't come back until I was well on my way to another galaxy.

He found me sitting in our upstairs bedroom, staring out the glass doors that opened onto a deck. The house backed up to a ravine and through tall trees, stars were dancing in the sky. I was sitting there watching the stars and thinking about death. This had to do with something Bernie and I hadn't talked about , but had both been thinking about.

A couple of weeks earlier, we'd flown into LA in a thunderstorm that rocked the plane and made everyone aboard turn religious. I In that same storm, while were were landing, another plane was crashing and hundreds of people were killed--just like that. We learned about it when we walked into the terminal. Since that day, I'd been afraid for Bernie,afraid because he took so many planes. While I was tripping on peyote, these fears because enormous.

I told Bernie about this and he said he'd been worried, too. In fact, he'd had a will drawn up a few days earlier. And the most frightening thing was, he was leaving on tour the next morning. He was supposed to be packing because he had an early flight, and were were sitting there Tallinn about death-by-airplane and these premonitions that we both had, that if he got on a plane, he'd die.

Sometime after midnight we got into bed, but I don't know if we slept at all that night. The conversation had turned to Bernie leaving the Eagles, which he'd been talking about doing anyway. Since we both thought that if he got on the plane the next day he'd die, it seemed as if right then was a good time to leave. There is no way to describe this and make it sound rational, because it wasn't.

The next morning, Bernie called Irving Azoff, who was managing the group, and said that he wasn't going on tour. Panic erupted; one of the lawyers for the group wanted to drive up to Topanga right then and discuss it, but within a few hours, logic returned. Finally, it was agreed that if Bernie thought that particular plane was going to crash, then he could come the next day without missing a show; surely twenty-four hours would be enough time that whatever hex had been put on him would be gone.

This is what he did, except that I decided to go with him because I didn't have that much confidence that this hex was really so fickle, and if Bernie was going to die, then I would tool. Obviously, neither plane crashed; but just to play it safe, we rented a motor home and rove between concert dates along the East Coast. We stuck with that for nearly a week, and then Bernie started taking planes again. that was, however, his last tour with the Eagles.

There's a bit more....a pregnancy scare, Patti being unfaithful to Bernie, her telling him that she's going to sterilize herself...but I'm tired of typing for now : )

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