As not seen on tv: The rest of the Reagan story.

The way CBS chickened out of telecasting their miniseries, The Reagans, you would've thought the screenplay had referred to a claim in the wife of Peter Lawford's biography of her husband that Nancy Reagan gave the best blowjobs in Hollywood. You would've figured that it must have revealed the details of her alleged affair with Frank Sinatra?he did it her way?or maybe, who knows, her apocryphal fling with former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates. You would've been certain there was footage from that gay orgy in which, according to Larry Flynt, Reagan had participated before he was president.

When I was eight years old, I saw the movie, Knute Rockne?All American, starring Ronald Reagan as The Gipper. Reagan immediately became my first role model?he was handsome and dynamic, with a twinkle in his eye?and I even started combing my hair just like his, using water to maintain a fancy pompadour.

Eventually, I grew disillusioned, and when I grew up to be a stand-up comic, Reagan became a favorite target. I didn't have to make stuff up, just report it. During his campaign for the presidency, he actually agreed to take a senility test if the proper authorities concluded that he had become senile. Then, as if to prove his senility, he promised, "If I am elected, I will end the inheritance tax, for rich and poor alike."

My career as a tv writer was bracketed by the Reagan family.

In 1980, I was hired as head writer for an HBO special, satirizing the election campaign. The show was titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House and took place in a modern newsroom, with Steve Allen as anchor. This was the first time in American history that three major presidential candidates?Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson?had all publicly declared themselves to be born-again Christians. So the election was no longer a choice between the lesser of two evils; it had become a matter of choosing between the least of three sinners.

Near the end of March 1981, I delivered a keynote address at the Youth International Party convention in New York. (These were latterday Yippies, originally launched as Zippies during the 1972 Republican convention.) I asked the audience a rhetorical question, "How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?" On March 30, the new president was shot by John Hinckley in order to make a favorable impression on actress Jodie Foster. And if that seemed crazy, Hinckley later came out for gun control, and Reagan came out against it.

Although it took more than a decade after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy for there to be a band called the Dead Kennedys, it took only a few months after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan for there to be a group called Jodie Foster's Army. (Other bands were named Sharon Tate's Baby, Jim Jones and the Suicides and Lennonburger.)

"In the 60s we knew that the CIA was smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia," I'd say at a campus gig. "In the 80s we know that they're smuggling cocaine from Central America. The same planes that fly weapons for the Contras to airports in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica come back to Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas with their cargos filled to the brim with cocaine, even though the administration is carrying on its anti-drug campaign. The pilots only have to be careful to evade the radar screen. So while Nancy Reagan is saying, 'Just say no,' the CIA is saying, 'Just fly low.'"

In 1991, I was hired as a writer on The Ron Reagan Show, an ironic association in view of the kind of material I had written and performed about his father. But young Ron was a fellow cultural mutation, and he understood that I treated his parents as political symbols. I had met Ron's sister, Patti Davis, 10 years previously, when their father was still president. I told her, "I really respected your decision to appear at that antinuke rally."

"I was doing that before my father was president," she said. "I have to do it. I'm serious about that. It's the planet." (This was a logical extension of the time musician Graham Nash told Patti that she had a cute ass for a president's daughter, and she said, "I had a cute ass before I was the president's daughter.") Patti's Secret Service guards had been at that antinuke rally. "I wanted to take a stand," she told me, "by having all female Secret Service guards, but there's very few of them."

One time I noticed a bumper sticker that said "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm," which I mentioned to Ron, and he adopted it as the syndicated talk show's unspoken credo. We decided to defuse the fact that he was the son of the former president in a promo which included a recent clip of Ron as host of Evening at the Improv, saying, "I am the love child of Frank Sinatra"?immediately followed by an old black-and-white film clip of Ronald Reagan saying, "Can you imagine what the Commies will do with this!" But Fox head Barry Diller happened to be watching tv at home. He felt that the promo was exploitative and yanked it off the air.

In the original CBS script of The Reagans, when Ron told his parents he was getting married, the reaction was, "Thank God he's not gay." In real life, Ron had been falsely outed by militant gays in New York. We knew this issue was likely to enter the dialogue on an upcoming program about gay rights, so he was prepared. In fact, my fellow New York Press columnist Michelangelo Signorile was one of the guests, and he mentioned those rumors on the show.

"I was a ballet dancer," Ron responded, "and any straight ballet dancer gets a rather thick skin about this sort of thing. But it occurred to me that it's insulting to my wife of 11 years, because it says she's living a lie, and I don't like that."

Ron had a charming sense of irreverence. In the conference room, we were watching a clip from the film Rapture, which was to be included on a program about religion. "I met a guy," Mimi Rogers is telling her husband.

"You should meet him. You could love him too."

"You fell for some rich homosexual," the husband says, laughing.

"He's the Lord Jesus Christ."

"And," Ron added, "he's hung like a stallion."

A producer, another writer and I were the pot-smokers on this show. We would smoke a joint while walking around the block. The producer bought his stash from an actress on a popular series, and one time we drove to her house to make a purchase. Ron came along for the ride. He told us how, when he had been a toker as a youth, his dad once found a marijuana-filled baggie in his bureau and confiscated it.

Another time, the four of us went for lunch at a nearby restaurant, and the hostess shook hands with Ron, saying, "I thought it was really cool for your sister to talk about masturbating in Vanity Fair."

Somehow that scene, like too much else to mention, didn't make it into The Reagans on Showtime.

Paul Krassner can be reached at [paulkrassner.com]