She married the president’s son in a judge’s chambers wearing cowboy boots. She died 33 years later in Seattle. In between, Doria Palmieri built a career in clinical psychology and kept almost everything else to herself.
Before she was a Reagan, Doria Palmieri was the daughter of an Italian scenic designer who built sets for Twentieth Century-Fox. She grew up in Los Angeles, studied philosophy at California State University, and trained as a clinical psychologist. When she married Ron Reagan in November 1980, she was 29, working as a literary researcher in New York, and sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village with the president-elect’s 22-year-old son. The marriage surprised the incoming first family, drew sustained scrutiny from the press, and lasted 33 years.
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From a Hollywood Household to Clinical Practice
Doria Felice Palmieri was born on September 13, 1951, in Los Angeles. Her father, Faustino Bruno Renzo Palmieri, known as Tito, was Italian-born and worked as a scenic designer for Twentieth Century-Fox. Her mother was Margaret Liguori Palmieri. The family surname, Palmieri, traces to southern Italy, historically common in Campania and Sicily.
She studied philosophy at California State University, a background that fed into the analytical, patient-facing work she would later do as a clinical psychologist. Philosophy-to-psychology is not an unusual academic route, but it signals a particular kind of intellectual seriousness, one that showed up in how she conducted herself throughout her public life: deliberately, and with as little noise as possible.
By the late 1970s, she was in New York, working as a literary researcher, and moving through the arts circles that came with that work.
Meeting Ron Reagan
In 1977, Doria was 25 or 26 years old and attending Stanley Holden’s dance studio in Los Angeles. Ron Reagan was 18 or 19, a Yale dropout who had left university after a single semester to pursue ballet. He would go on to join the Joffrey II Ballet Company.
A friend who knew the couple described the meeting to People magazine: “It wasn’t the kind of thing where he had to chase her. They just saw each other and had to be together.”
Three years later, they were living together in Greenwich Village.
The Wedding
On November 24, 1980, twenty days after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election, Ron and Doria walked into a judge’s office in Manhattan to pick up a marriage licence. The judge, recognizing the name and anticipating the press attention, offered to marry them on the spot.
They said yes.
The ceremony took place in the chambers of State Supreme Court Justice Lester Evans. The witnesses were Secret Service Agent Lane McNitt, assigned to guard Ron, and Ron’s friend Calvin Williford of Pinol, California. The standard 24-hour waiting period between licence and ceremony was waived by the judge.
Neither President-elect Ronald Reagan nor Nancy Reagan was present. Neither had been told in advance.
The details, reported the same day by UPI and the Washington Post, became the most widely reproduced facts about the wedding:
- Doria wore red cowboy boots, a black sweater, and black slacks
- Ron wore a red sweatshirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes
- The couple’s next destination after the ceremony was not disclosed
When reporters reached the president-elect, he said only that it was “kind of…” and the quote ended there. Nancy Reagan, stopped outside her Pacific Palisades home, said she was not bothered by the age difference between her son and his new wife.
Behind closed doors, the reception was considerably less relaxed.
What the Reagan Family Actually Thought
Ron Reagan confirmed in a 2011 interview with The Seattle Times that his parents “were not fans of Doria” at the time and “were suspicious of her motives.” The seven-year age gap, the unannounced civil ceremony, and Doria’s distance from the Reagan circle all fed into an early and undisguised coolness.
President Reagan himself wrote about Doria in his White House diary, published by HarperCollins in 2007. One entry describes a visit from Ron and Doria during the presidency:
“Late afternoon Doria and Ron arrived for a family pow-wow… It wasn’t the greatest meeting but still I think it opened the door to a closer relationship.”
It did open. Through the 1980s, Doria appeared at Reagan family events without incident. She was photographed with Nancy Reagan at the Joffrey Ballet’s Silver Anniversary Gala at City Center in October 1981. Ron and Doria were photographed together at the Perry Ellis Spring 1984 fashion show and at pianist Vladimir Feltsman’s Carnegie Hall performance in November 1987. In June 2004, Doria stood with the full Reagan family at President Reagan’s funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Their Life in Seattle
A 1981 Newsweek report described Ron and Doria as “very much a stay-at-home couple.” At the time, Ron was earning $90 a week at the Joffrey II Ballet Company, rising to $270 when the company was on tour. The Newsweek piece noted that funding cuts by the Reagan administration threatened arts organisations like Joffrey II directly, putting Ron’s own income at risk.
They eventually settled in Seattle, Washington. They had no children. The Washington Post reported they shared their home with three cats. Doria worked as a clinical psychologist. Ron left ballet in January 1983, and built a career in broadcast journalism over the following decades, working as a co-host on MSNBC, a contributor to ABC’s 20/20 and Good Morning America, and hosting his own programme on Air America.
The persistent public speculation about Ron’s sexuality, driven in part by his years as a ballet dancer, ran alongside the marriage for most of its duration. AIDS activist Larry Kramer had publicly stated that Ron was gay. Ron addressed it in that same 2011 Seattle Times interview, with visible amusement:
“I’m gay and I’m rich. Ron Reagan, rich gay man unaccountably married to the same woman for 30 years.”
Cause of Death
Around 2006 or 2007, Doria developed a progressive neuromuscular disease. Ron never named the condition publicly. Over seven and a half years, it gradually worsened.
Doria Palmieri died on March 24, 2014, at their home in Seattle. She was 62 years old. Ron announced her death publicly, confirming she had died of complications from the disease.
Ron Reagan’s Remarriage
Ron Reagan married again in July 2018. His second wife, Federica Basagni, is Italian, and had been one of Doria’s closest friends. The ceremony took place at Palazzo Cavallo in Italy.
Doria Palmieri gave no public interviews across 33 years as a member of one of America’s most scrutinised political families. There are no known quotes from her in any newspaper or broadcast record. What exists instead is a president’s diary entry calling their first meeting difficult, a few dozen press photographs, contemporaneous news reports from 1980 describing a woman in red cowboy boots who said yes in a judge’s chambers, and a marriage that ran from the opening of the Reagan presidency to a quiet house in Seattle in March 2014. She was a clinical psychologist who happened to marry a president’s son. That was never the order she chose, but it was the order history recorded her in.
