"I'M Trying to Have Fun"

By John S. DeMott

To the 6 million viewers of NBC's Saturday Night Live, it looked like just another boffo send-up of the President. Playing off the hit movie Risky Business, in which a high school senior throws a wild party when his parents are away, the skit had the Reagans at Camp David, leaving their son to look after the White House. Sure enough, a gyrating lad in undershorts dashes into the Oval Office wildly plucking a guitar and dancing like a man possessed. Wait a minute. That was no Tom Cruise playing the President's son. That was the President's son. "I thought it would stir things up," explained Ronald Prescott Reagan.

It did. After sweating without stardom in the ranks of the Joffrey Ballet and trying to carve a career as a free-lance journalist, Ron Reagan, 27, has unabashedly decided to seize the advantages his surname affords. "People told me I'd be a fool not to," he says. "If people insist it's an unfair advantage, at some point you have to say, 'Who cares?' " His risky and risque performance as guest host of S.N.L. displayed the stage polish that runs in his family, aiming him toward a new career as a television personality.

Since he dropped out of Yale as a freshman in 1977, Ron has pursued a meandering private path that has not always delighted his parents. Commenting in 1981 on his son's decision to become a dancer, Reagan awkwardly told reporters, "It's O.K. We've made sure he's all man." More recently, Ron has been turning out pieces for Playboy magazine on such subjects as the 1984 Democratic National Convention and the summit between his father and Mikhail Gorbachev. Wearing blue jeans and red Reeboks, Ron had the unprecedented advantage of living at the President's chateau while on assignment, causing no small consternation among the rest of the press corps. Some officials were dismayed by the flippant article he produced. Titled While Lenin Slept, it tosses out cheeky descriptions. Three KGB types are slurred as the "kind of lugs who crush walnuts on their heads because it feels good." Said one top U.S diplomat: "It was one of the most damaging things to U.S.-Soviet relations I've seen." But Playboy was pleased. Ron has, says his editor Barry Golson, a "very deft, light style."

Causing commotion runs in the Reagan family. More than a year ago, First Son Michael made headlines by hinting at differences with his stepmother Nancy and disclosing that the President very rarely sees his grandchildren. Maureen Reagan is, like her father, a conservative, but also has been an outspoken feminist. Her free-spirited half sister Patti Davis, who uses her mother's maiden name, has had tumultuous but unsuccessful careers in acting and music. She has come out with a novel, Home Front, a thinly disguised autobiography about growing up as the daughter of an actor who becomes Governor of California and then President. The revealing book focuses on the love-hate emotions of a girl toward her detached father and cold mother. The heroine writes a poem to her father, who never has time to read it because "there are so many other things on my desk."

The Reagans actually seemed rather proud of their son's acting debut. "Like father, like son," the President said after his press conference last week. Ron told his parents that he was going to appear on the show, but he did not ask for their permission nor tell them what he would be doing. Upon seeing a tape Sunday morning (the Reagans did not stay up for the near-midnight broadcast), Mrs. Reagan had to be filled in on the story line of Risky Business to understand why her son danced in his underpants. Ron, with his unaffected way of carrying his celebrity lightly, insists that he had few qualms about taking on the S.N.L. assignment. Says he: "People think that any member of the First Family is necessarily stupid and incompetent. They automatically assume you must be an idiot." His S.N.L. mentors were more apprehensive. "All week I kept thinking, 'He's not actually going to do this,' " recalls Head Writer Jim Downey.

Ron specified only one ground rule. "I told them I didn't want them trashing my folks in a mean way," he says. The one skit he rejected: portraying a gay hairstylist. There was, however, much skirting of the bounds of propriety, including a catty reference to Reagan's first wife, Jane Wyman, and a portrayal of Nancy as a chain-smoking lush by an actor in Adolfo-like drag. One White House aide thought the whole thing tasteless. Said he: "Some birthday present to his father."

Ron has been able to carve out an identity of his own--hip, low-key, poised yet slightly irreverent--that came through in the relaxed way he juggled both his family connections and his talent on S.N.L. "I want to see a show of hands," he began his monologue. "How many people here think I was asked to host Saturday Night Live because I'm a contributing editor of Playboy magazine? (Some applause.) How many people here think I was asked to host the show because my father is President of the United States? (Much louder applause and laughter.) That's what I thought. That's what I thought." Said Writer Downey: "It made me like Ronald Reagan more, knowing he has raised such a likable kid."

The next step? Ron has signed a year's contract with ABC Entertainment and has been producing promotional spots for ABC affiliates. His first assignment as an entertainment correspondent--a segment on a cowgirl training camp in Exeter, Calif.--has been scheduled for ABC's Good Morning, America. If the right movie offer came along, he'd accept wholeheartedly. Says he: "I take it one step at a time. I'm trying to have fun."

With reporting by Alessandra Stanley/Washington