Joe Rodota Jr. releases audio play about celebrity psychic Jeane Dixon

While his father was a legendary Sonoma County parks director, Joe Rodota Jr. followed a different professional “trail.”

A graduate of Montgomery High School and Stanford University, the younger Rodota forged a highly successful career in politics. Following a stint in the 1980s as deputy director of public affairs for President Ronald Reagan, Rodota spent seven years as cabinet secretary, then deputy chief of staff, for California Gov. Pete Wilson.

Renowned as a pioneer in the dark arts of opposition research, Rodota has long been drawn to other arts, as well.

The 60-year-old recently released his play, “The Jeane Dixon Effect,” in an audio format. This hourlong, one-woman show, recorded in Santa Rosa and available on Apple Podcasts, is based on the life of psychic Jeane Dixon, who lodged herself in Rodota’s consciousness while he worked on his 2018 book, “The Watergate: Washington’s Most Infamous Address.”

In the course of that research, Rodota learned that President Richard Nixon’s longtime assistant, Rosemary Woods, had lived in that iconic building. At the height of the Watergate scandal, he also found out, Woods was a client of Dixon’s, and went so far as to arrange a meeting between the celebrity seer and then-President Nixon — a juxtaposition no less surreal, Rodota said, then the day Nixon met Elvis Presley in the Oval Office.

“I made a mental note,” Rodota recalled, “that I was going to return to that.”

After completing his book, he did a deep dive on Dixon, who in her heyday made appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” and whose paperbacks could be found in the bookshelves of Rodota household when Joe Jr. was growing up. He visited the presidential libraries of Franklin Roosevelt, Nixon and John F. Kennedy. He found, after considerable effort, Dixon’s FBI file.

The resulting play seeks to answer the question: Was Dixon a genuine psychic? Or was she simply delusional? Rodota’s production conveys healthy skepticism, even as it never mocks Dixon.

The balance they tried to strike, said Rob Olmsted, who directed the production, was to bring the humor forward “without condescending or making fun of Dixon.”

Whether Dixon was a true soothsayer or just highly perceptive and persuasive, “I think she believed that what she did was for the benefit and good of people,” said Valerie Leonard, the veteran stage actress who voiced Dixon. “So that’s what I took into the performance.”

The play was a reunion of Santa Rosa theater geeks. Olmsted, a video producer who runs an advertising agency, graduated from Montgomery a year ahead of Rodota, who was in the same class with Leonard at Rincon Valley Junior High School. While the two attended different high schools — Leonard graduated from Ursuline, which closed in 2011 — she remembers that he created promotional posters for the shows she was in.

Leonard went on to a long, successful theater career. “Valerie is brilliant, a real-deal Broadway actress,” Olmsted said.

Rodota developed the play with the help of Sacramento’s B Street Theatre, which hosted a staged reading of it in 2018. Similar readings followed in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

The point of staged readings, Rodota said, is that they give him a chance to get feedback, and improve the play. The idea is to keep getting it better “as it moves up the food chain, from smaller theaters to bigger ones.”

With the pandemic closing so many theaters, he decided to release “The Jeane Dixon Effect” as an audio play.

His goal is to see this produced in Washington, D.C., “where I think people would eat it up,” Rodota said.

This is not the first time Rodota has featured astrology in his work. In 1988, as young aide in the Reagan White House, one of his duties was to prepare a response “when the Gipper was portrayed in an unflattering light.”

In early May of that year, the White House learned that a tell-all memoir by former Reagan Chief of Staff Don Regan would be released the next day. The book would reveal Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, for advice on the timing of presidential announcements.

Poring through microfilms of old newspapers early the next morning, Rodota found Don Regan’s horoscope from Feb. 27, 1987, the day he resigned as chief of staff. He printed it out and handed it to press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, who opened the press conference with a recitation of that horoscope:

“A burden will be lifted from your shoulders. Events occur which place you on more solid emotional, financial ground.”

The assembled press corps burst into laughter, then applause.

Rodota hopes his play has the same effect on audiences.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.