His father gasped.
That is one of his few memories of his father; a 64-year-old man who couldn’t get out of bed, struggling with emphysema.
Patrick Reynolds was 15 at the time, and his father, R.J. Reynolds Jr. was heir to the world’s biggest cigarette fortune. When his lungs gave out, the elder Reynolds had a yacht, an island home, powerful connections, a penchant for Camels or Winstons (the bestsellers of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company) and no relationship with his son.
Ask Patrick today why he gets so excited around Christmas, and he’ll tell you about his absentee father and what tobacco took – despite all the riches – from his family.
He’ll tell you about his appearance at a Post Office in Los Angeles on Dec. 5 to encourage people to donate to needy children through a program called “Operation Santa.” He’ll tell you about a letter he read that still makes him cry. It was written by a little girl who asked Santa for a pair of shoes for her older brother.
He’ll tell you about the year he became an elf.
Tobacco, turmoil
Patrick Reynolds, now 69, lived such a glamorous life.
His mother was actress Marianne O’Brien, who appeared in four Hollywood films in the 1940s. She had a scandal-filled marriage to R.J. Reynolds Jr. from 1948 to 1952. She was the second of his four wives. She admitted having an affair, and didn’t have much of a relationship with R.J. once the marriage ended.
Patrick was born in Miami and remembers “I would shuttle back and forth” to homes in New York City, Miami Beach and Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia. When he was 9, he wrote his father a letter to introduce himself … “I am your son, Patrick.” He saw his father a couple of times as a teenager, but that was it.
“I didn’t know him,” Patrick said. “I remember my mom sobbing when she realized how sad that was.”
Patrick attended Hotchkiss, a boarding school in Connecticut. He was classmates with Ted Morton, heir to the Morton Salt fortune, and a year behind Edsel Ford, heir to the car manufacturer.
On his 21st birthday, Patrick inherited $2.5 million of his father’s fortune.
He said most of the family money went to his father’s ex-wives. He got a sliver, he said.
Hollywood life
Patrick started at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, known as the summer of love. A millionaire student, he didn’t agree with the politics of the hippies. But he found their antics fascinating. He wanted to make movies, so he shot footage of protests and riots. His student-film documentary, “Berkeley,” was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
He studied film at both UCLA and USC, moving to Southern California in the early 1970s. He paid cash for a home in the Holmby Hills, and he was proud to show off its ballroom ceiling that had been extracted from a chapel in Spain.
In the mid-1970s, he lived with Shelley Duvall, the actress. She had not yet starred in “The Shining,” but her career was taking off. She helped introduce Patrick to influential people and, suddenly, for a time, he was an actor.
He took acting classes with Michelle Pfieffer and Patrick Swayzee.
Patrick Reynolds appeared in “Nashville” with Duvall, several television shows, “Pumping Iron” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the music video “Physical” with Olivia Newton John. His biggest role was as a human/robot called “Mandroid” in the 1986 sci-fi film, “Eliminators.”
Soon after, Patrick got into psychotherapy and, soon after that, decided he’d had enough with Hollywood.
“It was all about vanity.”
Activist
In therapy, he began to explore his feelings. As part of that process, he came to grips with the devastating effects that tobacco had on America and on his family. Smoking, he said, had destroyed his father and other relatives. “Cigarettes took my father away from me. That led to so much crap in my life.”
Of course, a lot of families could say the same.
“Big tobacco killed millions of people,” he said, recounting his testimony, in 1986, before a congressional committee in Washington D.C. that was investigating the industry’s role in covering up the health effects of tobacco.
Patrick — who smoked for two decades before quitting in 1985 — discovered another reason to fight the family business. Tobacco money, he noticed, was influencing politics.
“The more money politicians got from big tobacco, the more likely politicians were to vote the way big tobacco wanted them to vote,” Patrick said.
For years, he devoted much of his energy to raising taxes on cigarettes, limiting cigarette advertising, and keeping them away from children.
Elf
In 2004, a friend asked Patrick to help deliver some Christmas presents.
It turned out he was taking part in the U.S. Postal Service’s annual holiday charity, Operation Santa.
Each year, thousands of children write letters to Santa, and some of those letters are adopted by donors who buy gifts for those children. The letters come from cities throughout the United States and local Operation Santa groups fulfill as many of those requests as possible.
The kids’ reaction, Patrick said, was his initial payoff.
“The children… were so surprised. They would say, ‘This is for me?'”
One of the early letters Patrick read was written by a girl who was more concerned about her brother than she was about herself.
“Dear Santa, I don’t need anything for Christmas, but my brother Mike needs a new pair of shoes real bad, size four please. Love, Amy”
As he recalled that sentiment, Patrick began to cry.
“I feel inspired,” he said. “I’m filled with love and Christmas spirit. I get choked up reading the letters.”
To support the postal program, Patrick started BeAnElf.org, to coordinate volunteers and donation money and gifts for Operation Santa groups around the country.
The group changed a bit over the years. In 2008, a registered sex offender volunteered with the organization to buy and bring presents to a child. The man was identified before anything happened, but, today, donors don’t visit children personally to deliver the presents. The big “thank you” moment is gone.
Patrick is undaunted. Every year, he fills several envelopes with gift cards and gives them to postal employees, who take them to the proper families.
“It’s now part of my soul,” he said.
