Reagan to Be Absent From 85th Birthday Ceremonies

As former President Ronald Reagan’s 85th birthday approaches Tuesday, his presidential library has been revamping its galleries, planning a huge party and baking a big cake.

But Reagan will not show up today at the galleries’ unveiling.

Nor will he travel to Chasen’s restaurant in West Hollywood, which is being reopened Tuesday--for one night only--for a presidential birthday fund-raiser hosted by Merv Griffin with a galaxy of GOP dignitaries and crooning by Johnny Mathis.

“He doesn’t make public appearances,” said Joanne Drake, Reagan’s chief of staff.

Instead, Reagan will stop by his Century City office Tuesday, then retire to the Los Angeles Country Club for his customary birthday round of golf--this time with entertainer Bob Hope.

The 40th president has been in seclusion since his announcement to the American public 15 months ago that he is suffering from nerve-destroying Alzheimer’s disease.

But the party will go on in his honor, said Lynda Schuler, spokeswoman for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Center for Public Affairs.

At 2 p.m. Sunday, museum visitors will be invited to eat cake, sign a birthday card to the former president and make $85 donations to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

And Tuesday night, Republican VIPs including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Gov. Pete Wilson and former President Gerald Ford are to fete Reagan in his absence at the Chasen’s fund-raiser.

Yet the most lasting commemoration of Reagan’s 85 years--a presidential milestone achieved only by Truman, Hoover, Madison and Adams--is the multimedia face-lift of his library and museum in Simi Valley.

With 3-D sculpture, CD-ROM technology and life-size replicas of historic rooms, library director Richard Norton Smith and a cadre of designers have recast the core of the collection into a walk-through, please-touch, gee-whiz show on the Reagan presidency.

The library opens today at 10 a.m., complete with a full-size model of the granite-and-cedar Geneva boathouse where Reagan and then-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev hashed out details of a nuclear treaty in 1985.

There is also a mock-up of the White House Cabinet Room, where visitors can sit around the conference table using touch-sensitive computer monitors to vote on historic issues, then learn from video clips what Reagan actually decided.

“I thought the presidential gallery could do a much better job of conveying the events of Reagan’s presidency,” said Smith, who conceived of the $500,000 make-over just before he arrived in 1993 and will finish it just before leaving next week to run the Gerald R. Ford library and museum in Michigan.

“The gallery should tell you how he changed the country and the world, but it should allow the visitor to become part of the story and not stay just an observer,” he added.