Travel tips:

1. For an oral history of the place, look for an archaeologist sweating in the sun and buy him a drink.
2. To find out about nuances in the local political situation, look for Jewish names on shops and say hello in Yiddish.
3. Immediately after boarding an airplane, go to the bathroom. There is plenty of time, it’s clean, and there is no line.

My father was good at travel because of a lesson he taught by example: Instead of clinging to a safe job in a politically stifling climate, and even though he had only modest savings and looming college tuition for two adolescent children, he picked us all up, set out for the unknown, and made such a success of it that when he eventually returned home, he got a job that he loved.

Looking back, I think the most amazing thing about my father as a parent was how he included his children in his work. Most men of that era left their home and kids and went off to their jobs. Not my father. He would often take us to work at the studio with him. He let us sit in when the writers gathered for meetings in our home. He shared his passion for his work with us, and we knew he genuinely enjoyed our company.

I can still remember sitting on the floor, watching story conferences, as he and his comedy writers shaped his nightclub act or knocked around ideas for an episode for his series. Sometimes I’d laugh out loud at a joke and he’d say, “You like that?” He’d get such a kick out of my getting the joke.

My father was truly interested in his children. He wasn’t at all a “kids-are-supposed-to-be-seen-and-not-heard” kind of guy. Unusual for a powerful man.

Growing up around all of this made my entry into the business so much easier. By the time I started working, it wasn’t a foreign land to me. I knew the lingo; I had learned how to shape a good story. And I understood the most important thing about comedy: As my father would say, “The audience will go down any yellow brick road with you, as long as you don’t lie to them. Don’t veer off that road of truth to get a laugh. Have respect for the audience, and they’ll stay with you.”

There’s a story I’ve told before about my relationship with my father that dramatizes how he influenced me and helped to shape my life:

When I was a little girl, around seven or eight, my father made a movie with Margaret O’Brien. It was summertime and he often took me to the set with him. I would cue him on his lines as we drove to MGM, with the car windows open and the heady mix of Old Spice and a Cuban cigar swirling about us. On the set I would play jacks with Margaret between takes, and when the bell rang I would join the crew in their silence as the cameras rolled and the boom mic moved into position to record the dialogue I knew by heart.

I was in awe of my father and sinfully envious of Margaret O’Brien. I wore pigtails. I wanted freckles. I wanted to be Margaret O’Brien. Ten years later, at age seventeen, I got my chance.

I played the lead in Gigi in a summer stock production at the Laguna Playhouse south of Los Angeles. The excitement of finally being a real actress was painfully short lived. All the interviews and all the reviews focused on my father. Would I be as good as Danny Thomas? Was I as gifted, as funny … would I be as popular? I was devastated.

I loved my Dad, my problem was Danny Thomas. So I went to him and said, "Daddy, please don’t be hurt when I tell you this. I want to change my name. I love you but I don’t want to be a Thomas anymore."
I tried not to cry during the long silence that followed. Then he said, "I raised you to be a thoroughbred. When thoroughbreds run they wear blinders to keep their eyes focused straight ahead with no distractions, no other horses. They hear the crowd but they don’t listen. They just run their own race. That’s what you have to do. Don’t listen to anyone comparing you to me or to anyone else. You just run your own race."

The next night as the crowd filed into the theater, the stage manager knocked on my dressing room door and handed me a white box with a red ribbon. I opened it up and inside was a pair of old horse blinders with a little note that read, "Run your own race, Baby."

Run your own race. He could have said it a dozen other ways. “Be independent.” “Don’t be influenced by others.” But it wouldn’t have been the same. The words he chose touched my heart and have remained with me all through my life. Whenever I’m at a crossroads, I ask myself, “Am I running my race or somebody else’s?” What a gift he gave me. I give it to you: Run your own race and … Happy Father’s Day.

When I was growing up, my father’s most frequent mantra was, “We’re going to build a two-party system in the South.” It may not sound so exciting now, but it was a big deal then.

Click here to see some of my favorite photos of my dad.

Daddy was the chairman of the Republican Party in Mississippi (when he took over in the mid-’60s, that old thing about the entire membership being able to fit into a phone booth was true), and, over the years, a driving force in the party’s rise in the South. When I was born, there hadn’t been a two-party system in the South for almost 100 years. We were the “Solid South” and the bad guys were the one-party Dems. Its leaders included such racist demagogues as our governor Ross Barnett and our senator, Jim Eastland, who reassured the folks back home that the Civil Rights Act would never get past his suit pocket, which he then thumped loudly for effect. This kind of stuff had left the region isolated and ostracized and essentially another country economically and politically for my father’s entire life — most of the Democrats did not even attend their own convention since their values were so out of sync with the National Party. (Daddy’s friend Hodding Carter, then a newspaper publisher in our hometown, Greenville, was his counterpart on the Democratic side, leading a group called the Loyalist Democrats.)

Hodding once wrote that Daddy had managed to build the Republican party in the South with “smoke and mirrors,” making it seem more important than it really was for just long enough that the reality came to match the perception. When Nixon became president, he played a key role in desegregating the schools. (My main memory of that time is of a bunch of guys from the Justice Department holed up for months on end in an apartment Daddy kept downtown above his office for such purposes.) After Hurricane Camille ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, Nixon planned a fly-over of the destruction. Daddy told Nixon aide Bryce Harlow that if the president did not stop and get off the plane, he shouldn’t bother to come at all — a lesson our current president would have done well to heed almost three decades later. Nixon did stop and became the first sitting president to do so since Teddy Roosevelt came on a hunting trip and famously refused to shoot a bear — that’s how long it had been since we mattered.

He took me to see Nixon that day — he took me, thank God, pretty much everywhere. It seems like half my childhood was spent in the bar at the Hay-Adams listening to guys from the OEO and HEW and the RNC and other such initials talk. (I also had a reading list — I’m pretty sure I was the only girl in the fourth grade to have written an essay on Whittaker Chambers, whose Witness Daddy had read to me aloud.) In 1976, he took me to my first convention, the one at which he was blamed for singlehandedly denying the nomination to Ronald Reagan in favor of Gerald Ford. To this day, he shuns notion that he had that much power (and I tell the ridiculous number of people who still harbor bad blood over his decision that they ought to thank him — Reagan would surely have lost to Carter and there might well have never been a subsequent Reagan Revolution.) It was a painful time for him, but he made his decision on principle — Reagan had personally assured him that he would never go for an ideologically split ticket and afterwards chose Sen. Schweiker from Pennsylvania, who boasted a higher ADA rating even than Mondale as his running mate. It was an entirely cynical — and miscalculated — choice on Reagan’s part, as Mississippi and Pennsylvania were the two remaining uncommitted delegations he was after.
As you can see from the above paragraph, I soaked up an awful lot of minutiae and I learned a lot — about principle, about political instinct, about showmanship. He was not a real showman like the fathers of Marlo or Candice, but he could put on what he called his “act,” a mixture of great charm, understated erudition and a big dose self-effacing humor, whenever it was called for. He was a “true believer” who believed in the West over Communism and Right over Left, but he enjoyed himself, always, and never took himself too seriously and that’s why he was so effective. In the early days, when they often joined forces to end our long stretch as national joke, he and Hodding would stage dramatic mock debates for the benefit of the increasingly curious national press. Usually this involved standing on a table in our living room and passing a bottle of scotch between them, and it was so entertaining that Daddy’s friend Bill Buckley saw it and put them on Firing Line.

Also, unlike Danny Thomas or Edgar Bergen, he wasn’t THAT famous, so it was always a plus for me and never a minus. I was known as “Clarke Reed’s daughter” in a world where that still remains helpful in my career. (It is also helpful at dinner parties. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner at the Botanical Garden that included such current notables as John Thain, and my dinner partner looked at my place card, heard my accent and promptly asked me if I were Clarke Reed’s daughter. Turns out he’d been in the Ford administration and had known him well, and the two of us spent the rest of the evening discussing our shared opinion that Dick Cheney had a stroke and the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is an asshole. Talk about an icebreaker.)

Though Daddy no longer spends all his time “saving the free world” (his stock answer when I was a kid and I asked him where he’d been), he still maintains the act and it is a mighty thing to behold. At his 60th birthday party, my friends and I were the Satin Dolls and serenaded him to the tune of that song. The first line was, “Silver-haired cool cat, he slays me.” Twenty years later he still does. The Dolls plan to reunite at his 80th in August.

My father was very feisty and temperamental. He was little, 5’6”, so he had to scrap his way through life, especially since he had a girl’s name, Sloan. He often said to us: “If anyone messes with you, don’t try to fight fair. Just grab a wrench or a pipe or a rock and knock their brains out. Survive!”

My mother would cry when he said this because she believed in turning the other cheek. She was Mrs. Non-Violence. Hung between Scylla and Charybdis. I have never been able to do the correct thing when it comes to taking advice.

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