American political family, the first child and daughter of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. A minor singer and actress on radio, she also has played in TV and films.
Ever since domestic violence became a national issue in the ’70s, Maureen has been an advocate for its victims. It was not until she published her book “First Father, First Daughter,” 1989, that her own story came out. An affectionate family and political memoir, the book contains a chapter about her traumatic early marriage to a Washington DC police officer.
In 1961, while working as a secretary, Maureen married a man whom she prefers not to name, about ten years older than she. The marriage was a hazard course of brutal beatings, kicks, abuse and battery, a life of anguish and fear. Their courtship had been romantic and tender. It was not until later that she found out he was married to a woman who was in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. When his divorce came through, they were married in a simple ceremony.
Her new husband immediately began to show himself as an emotionally unstable man, given to violent fits of anger. The first time that he turned his fury on her was when she came home an hour late from work, due to a snowstorm that delayed the busses. He accused her of having an affair and slapped and punched her in the face. Maureen tried to rationalize their marriage after that; maybe he was under great stress, maybe she had done something to provoke him. After an outburst, he was so loving, so sorry. By summer, it was worse. At work, she explained her bruises by admitted that she was a klutz who banged into doors a lot. When she refused him sex, he forced her. Ashamed, she told no one, until the day came when she just walked out.
In the next six months, Maureen moved five times, and each time her husband found her. He stalked her until she got a restraining order. In early 1962, they were divorced, putting a legal end to her living hell, but she was haunted forever by the memory of that year.
Reagan was Co-chair of the Republican National Committee from January 1987 to January 1989. She was living at that time with her third husband, 36-year-old Dennis Revell, the owner of a public relations company whom she married in 1981. With her involvement in women’s issues, she and her husband adopted a ten-year-old daughter from Uganda.
From the experience of watching her dad deal with Alzheimer’s, Maureen took the active position of working with the Alzheimer’s Association as national spokeswoman.
In the first week of January 2001, the family announced that she was in the hospital with melanoma. Doctors found a “metastatic malignant” tumor the size of a ping-pong ball inside Reagan, said the statement, which added that the lymph nodes between her right knee and groin have been surgically removed. This is Reagan’s second fight with this form of cancer. On 12/12/1996 she was treated for melanoma and this occurrence resurfaced last October, 2000. On 7/14/2001, news media reported that she was hospitalized in Carmichael, near the family’s northern California home. The melanoma has spread to her brain and she is undergoing radiation. When she had mild seizures on 7/04/2001, an MRI confirmed two brain tumors. She returned home on 7/23/2001, from where she will continue to receive weekly chemotherapy treatments.
After a five-year battle, Maureen died on 8/08/2001 at her Sacramento home, attended by her husband, Dennis C. Revell, a public relations executive and their 16-year-old daughter, Rita, a Ugandan girl they adopted in 1995. Friends had long said that of Reagan’s four children, Maureen remained closest to her 90-year-old father, working for Alzheimer’s groups and, until her illness, traveling from her home in northern California to visit him two or three times a month. She also showed flashes of the elder Reagan’s disarming wit, as she did last October when one of her doctors interrupted a formal dinner to come to her bedside garbed in a tux. “I don’t know much about this hospital,” she joked, “but I sure like the dress code.”
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