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Book Review

TWICE ADOPTED:  HARD-LEARNED LESSONS FROM REAGAN’S SON

By Diane Levero

What was it like, growing up as the son of a famous Hollywood movie star/governor of California/President of the United States?

According to Michael Reagan, in his autobiography, Twice Adopted, it was pretty rough.

Three days after his birth to an unwed mother in 1945, Michael was adopted by Ronald Reagan and his equally famous movie star wife, Jane Wyman.

Three years later, they were divorced, leaving a bewildered little boy wondering why his daddy didn’t come home any more.

With her burgeoning movie career demanding almost all of her time, Jane Wyman sent little Michael off to boarding school when he was only 5.

Chadwick was a great school, says Mike, but he and the other kids felt that their parents had abandoned them.

“Most of us were lonely and cried ourselves to sleep at night,” he recalls.  “At lights out, you could literally hear kids sobbing in their pillows all around the dorm.”

Mike had found out by accident, when he was 4, that he was adopted.  His mom hastily told him that he was “chosen” and that made him “special.”

But in the second grade at Chadwick, a classmate informed him that being adopted meant his real mother hadn’t wanted him and gave him away – that he was a “bastard.”

Afraid to ask his mother any questions, he looked up “bastard” in the concordance of the family Bible.  The verses that the confused 7-year-old found seemed to him to say that all bastards were destined for hell.

“When I read these words, I though my eternal fate was sealed,” he remembers; “I began the process of hating myself and hating God.”

When Michael entered the third grade, his mom enrolled him in a day school in Beverly Hills.  Mike was elated!  Now he could come home every day for dinner with Mom, just like in the normal families he saw on TV.

She also enrolled him in an after school day camp program run by a charming and charismatic 30-year-old man named Don Havlik.

People like Don could spot lonely, vulnerable kids like him a mile away, Mike remarks dryly.

In the chapter entitled “The End of Innocence,” he describes how the slimy Havlik gradually ingratiated himself and became a father figure to him, then sexually molested him again and again.

The 8-year-old boy knew instinctively that he had been trapped into doing something that was wrong, but felt too frightened and guilty to know how to free himself.

Havlik got Mike to pose for pornographic pictures, then showed one to him with the remark, “Wouldn’t your mom like to have a copy of that photo?”

Mike felt the trap slam shut on him forever.

A year later, influenced by her best friend, actress Loretta Young, Jane Wyman converted to Catholicism.  To please his mother, Michael was baptized a Catholic along with her and his older sister, Maureen.

They went to Mass every Sunday, and Wyman sent him to a series of Catholic boarding schools.

His mother and sister became sincere Catholics.  But Catholicism never “took” for Mike; he was only playing a role.

He still was secretly convinced that as an illegitimate child, he could never go to heaven.  And the Church’s teaching on men having sex with other males only reinforced his worst fears.

His guilt over his molestation ate away at him, and his rage and bitterness grew.  He threw tantrums and instigated nasty fights with his mother, acted up in school, and refused to do his schoolwork.

His bewildered mother had no idea why he was so angry.

She finally gave in to his badgering and let Michael go and live with his father.  But Ronald Reagan had a second family now, his wife Nancy and their two children.  Mike, bitter and resentful, picked fights with Nancy and stirred up trouble between her and his mother.

After purposely flunking out of college, he became hooked on boat racing, and traveled around the country, living the life of a playboy.

When he was 28, however, he met Colleen Sterns, one of 12 children raised on a farm in Nebraska and a committed Christian.

“She was God’s gift to me,” says Mike; “she was the beginning of my redemption.”

Michael’s “redemption” took many years and much love and patience on the part of his wife Colleen.

But in 1985, at Faith Church in San Fernando Valley, he says, “I received Christ as Lord of my life.”

More years passed before he was able to stop taking his anger and self-hatred out on his family.

He finally broke down and told Colleen, and then his dad, mother and Nancy, about his molestation.

Freed at last from his secret burden, he was able to stop blaming others for his failures, and to see the good and the love in his parents.

And he was able to turn his burden over to God, who, in redeeming him, had adopted him as His son.  Thus, says Mike, “I was twice adopted.”

Now a talk show host, with a show syndicated in almost 200 radio stations coast to coast, Mike feels God wants him to use his own experiences with child molestation, child pornography, illegitimacy, adoption, divorce, and broken homes as a springboard to help others.

He does this also throughout Twice Adopted, moving from his personal experiences to present the bigger picture, and then offering constructive, Christian-based steps to remedy each societal ill.

This is not a “Mommy Dearest” book; Reagan depicts his parents through the eyes of his Christian faith.  

And along with the tragedies and sadness of his childhood and later life are many heartwarming incidents.  

There is an especially poignant scene with his dad after Ronald Reagan contracted Alzheimer’s.

And yes, life is very different when your dad is President!  How many of us have a Secret Service agent in the delivery room with us, reporting crisply over his walkie-talkie that our new baby girl (code-named “Raindrop”) has arrived?

I’ve heard Mike’s show.  I don’t agree with him on every single issue, but he has a positive, upbeat attitude, and he’s worth listening to.

He can be heard 9 p.m.-1 a.m. Eastern on Sirius Satellite Radio, Sirius Patriot Channel 145, and on the net at RadioAmerica.org live 6-9 p.m. Eastern.