Ronald Reagan’s Daughter Really Despises James Woods

Patti Davis. Photo: Araya Diaz/WireImage/Getty

James Woods portrays the head of the Secret Service in the new movie White House Down, so at the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre earlier this week, we asked him whether he’d ever had any real-life run-ins with the Secret Service. 

I used to hang out with Ronald Reagan’s daughter,” Woods told us. “We were friends, and they used to follow us all the time. She’d always say, ‘Run the red lights, they have to run the red lights.’ So I’d always run red lights.”

We thought it was a funny story, so we reached out to Patti Davis, the Reagan daughter we presumed Woods was referring to, to see if she was nostalgic about the carefree days of messing with the Secret Service with James Woods. She was not. 

James Woods is not a stable person,” Davis, the actress turned author, told us over e-mail. “I’m not even interested in whatever he said.” She also claimed she “never drove anywhere with him.”

We thought maybe we had the wrong Reagan daughter. Maureen Reagan, who died in 2001, was an actress, too. Was she friends with Woods, we asked?

Absolutely not,” she said, adding, “I really don’t want to think about him.”

It is not clear why, exactly, Davis appears to loathe James Woods. Davis won’t tell us, Woods hasn’t gotten back to us, and a search of media reports failed to find even a single mention of the two so much as ever speaking to or being in the same room as each other, much less evidence of some kind of falling out. Davis did imply, however, that her hatred for Woods is hardly unique.

I’m in good company on that one,” she said

Reagan’s Daughter Hates James Woods