Ryan O'Neal Quotes: The Sheik of Malibu

He’s stopped dead on the sand, he appears to be trembling. “Weird! If my dad was working, we’d move out of the San Fernando Valley up to Pacific Palisades; things got rocky, we’re back in the Valley. You moved with the money, by age twelve I could pack all my possessions neatly in half an hour! This was not a normal childhood, we did not turn out to be ordinary people, which is why we’re all actors. Who wants to watch ordinariness? You came down here to the beach from Beverly Hills and Bel Air, this was the action, too much action, we actually believed in following the sun, the next wave, this was the Southern California existence, except we didn’t have marijuana then to level us, we did it on beer and cheap wine"

Patrick, who’s four, hurries across the sand, a long stumbling run that ends against Ryan’s leg. He says, “Hey, Dad!” Ryan boxes with him joyfully. “Patrick, would you like to walk along with us awhile?”

The running girl has overtaken and passed us again. Ryan says, “Leigh does that too, runs a couple of miles every day, so healthy. I love four-wall handball, used to box, but now, with this back. . . . All of a sudden, three discs in my spine went krupeghff! Did you know that Jeff Chandler died from the operation I had? This was my first surgery, you had any yet? Well, man, half hour out of it and I was screaming for morphine!

Then I lay there for days and thought: all my life, go, go, push, punch the clock and pick the cotton, and now, I am finally in this strategically perfect position, and I know what I want: juice, power, bread!” Pause. “And to act well, I have got good serious performances in me, I. . . .” The statement seems to have embarrassed him, and he grabs the child to his chest. “Right, Patrick?

Yesterday he saw Leigh and me kissing in the bathroom and he got excited. Yeh!” This had been stage-whispered. “He wouldn’t let me see. I said, ‘What you got there, Patrick?’ and he ran away, he knew what it was! Isn’t that great, it’s such a great feeling, sexuality! Arousement! So healthy, and God gave it to us and we’ve suppressed it for so long, our parents put it down, man, Lenny Bruce used to put me uptight, man, talking about jacking off to a mixed audience. Now, wow, kids are getting it on and women are loosening up, getting gay, ’cause that’s what they always wanted but it was so ugly for them, they had to wear combat boots and tattoos and break their noses. Kids are getting sex education in schools, we’ll end venereal disease this way, I see great things happening. . . .Patrick’s pounding his father’s shoulder, laughing at the words."

“Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, she was very uptight because in the picture we had a little fun at the end with the line, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Said I was dumping on Love Story. Big deal. Look, Love Story isn’t a very good picture, I have no special loyalty to it. I think I was a whole lot better in What’s Up, Doc? I like Peter’s work, why shouldn’t I do comedy?” Pause. “And after Love Story, man, I was not sent a whole lot of serious scripts. I wasn’t sent a whole lot of scripts, period.”

I love active roles, doing my own stunts, know who I’d love to play? Douglas Fairbanks! Now, he married, what was her name?” Jaffe, the press agent, who’s wandered out to sit on the sand with us, replies, “Huh?”

“She was queen of the movies.”

“Barrymore?” Jaffe says.

“That’s a he. Queen of the movies?” Large laugh.

“Ethel Barrymore?” Jaffe suggests, exhaling, passing.

“No, man, she was America’s sweetheart!”

“Man, I’m not into that. America’s. . . .”

“Well, it was Mary Pickford, dummy.” Jaffe gets up and wanders inside. “. . .

Hollywood then was very sexy, were very sensuous and promiscuous, they took care of their bodies! Fairbanks and Pickford, man, they were the perfect couple: both stars of equal magnitude, both totally—beautiful. When they went to get on trains, thousands came to the station, there were riots to see these two unique people. That’s how they made contact with their fans.” Pause; sadly, “I’ll never make contact like that.

Why, those people were kings! Jack Warner? Listen, Leigh had costume fittings at his old studio. I went with her, there was a box of his memorabilia stored in wardrobe! There were these pictures of him taken with his son. Warner always looked the same while the kid grew bigger and increasingly terrified! I asked the wardrobe lady what happened to him, she said, ‘Jack made him a producer but one day he drove on the lot and the guard said, “Sorry, can’t let you in, orders from your dad.”’ Banned from his own father’s lot! Yeh, Warner gave the cruncher to his own son, man!”

Patrick, who’s been dozing, wakes. “You are going to be a heavyweight champion,” Ryan explains to him. “Or maybe President.” Patrick says, “No, Dad, you are!”

He’s at the bar, pouring. “I get tired, my back, and I’ve got to go out to dinner tonight, friend of Leigh’s. I dunno: I have trouble getting it together to go out anymore, I don’t mean to people’s houses so much, but they print I go to the Whisky, which is bull, I go maybe once a year. I do not like going into public, and it’s an ego trip, but I can’t help it. Barbra said, I have this great fear of being killed! That somebody out there really hates my guts and wants me dead.’ Hell, if they shoot at the Pope, an actor hasn’t got a chance.

Abruptly, Ryan looks white and haggard. “Come on, come on,” he says hoarsely, and we’re into the master bedroom, and he’s in the bathroom adjoining it. “Look at this, I still gotta use it.” It’s a special toilet seat, raised above normal height by about two feet of metal base. “This is because it hurts to sit down.” He closes the door, after a while comes out wearing a cerulean terry robe: he folds himself onto the big bed.

Jesus, I was in London for this Love Story command performance, and this writer from Life followed me everywhere, I could not even get laid. The story then appears, titled A Very Brash Young Man, about fifty words in which it’s starlet time, I look like an asshole, and look, I am not an asshole, I have worked very hard not to be an asshole!”

“Man, the world is mad, spinning! Did you know Sharon Tate? That is a story of today’s Hollywood! She was an angel, so gentle, so . . . healthy. Did you know that her father, this square Army colonel, retired after the murder, grew a beard, dressed as a hippie, went out and mingled in the hip scene, to get information? Jay Sebring used to cut my hair. Roman’s a friend of mine, so is Bill Tennant, who was his agent and who identified the bodies, and his wife Sandy was Sharon’s best friend, she still visits the grave twice a week. And communicates with Sharon. Roman said to her, ‘You take the car,’ this 1954 white Rolls he had had shipped here for Sharon’s birthday. But the car’s in probate, because Sharon’s estate isn’t settled yet. And the house owners sued Roman Polanski for diminishing the resale value of the house! That’s the Hollywood tag to that story!

And in Washington we have these very uptight people who are just, as crazy. And powerful, that is real juice up there!” He pounds the bed. “And very old. The head of the F.B.I. was nearly eighty when he died. Once this man was after Dillinger and Mad Dog Coll and at the end the best he could do was a couple of priests and a nun! And Nixon, this man with the shaking jowls representing us in China? Man, couldn’t they have sent John Lindsay and said he was Nixon? Right?” A very high laugh, like an arpeggio. “And this great-looking guy gets off the plane in Peking, looking stoned! Know where I met John? At Michael Butler’s house! What a funky place to meet the Mayor! I dunno, though, maybe it’s not yet time for the first turned-on President. . ..”

From the bathroom, Patrick is calling, “Dad, please wipe me.” Ryan shouts genially, “Patrick, you’re old enough to do that yourself, I hate that job,” but he goes to his son and comes back holding him.

“Listen, I try to do something about the country,” Ryan says, as if continuing an interrupted sentence, “I send checks to things, but I don’t go to rallies much, actors have this edge because they’re famous and I don’t approve of that. Jane Fonda, though, I admire her, she means it.” He’s settled on the bed again. He shakes his head twice, as if inserting quotation marks. “I think the black people, man, are really gonna take it, take it all, and I hope, when they do, they don’t kill us, that they let us hang around, teach us to dance, let us drive for ’em. They could use us as long-distance runners. . . .”

His wife enters, smiling whimsically; she has changed into a fine black dress and boots. “Yeh, I know, I have to drag ass,” he says to her gently.

When he comes out to the bar, where everybody else is waiting, he’s wearing his U.S. flag shirt, and he’s frowning. “Five years of marriage,” he says abruptly, quietly, to no one in particular. “Know what that means? Fifteen f----ing gifts, between us: one anniversary, two birthdays every f---ing year.”

His wife smiles uncertainly. Ryan starts another sentence, but his brother is bounding around in front of him, chattering, and we all move outside through the dim garden to the garage.

On the set of What’s Up, Doc?, inside stage seventeen, Warner’s, Burbank, a flattened Hilton Hotel, corridors with no rooms beyond the doors, rooms without corridors, he is standing around slue-foot waiting for a take “Know what happened to me recently?” he begins “I was driving rather high and highway patrol stops me for speeding, and I said, ‘Hey, fellas,’ facing them, ‘hey, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry!” Right, fellas?’ Forget it, they were not amused.

I once spent fifty-two days in the Lincoln Heights jail, a pesthole, downtown L.A., for simple battery, in jail all we talked about was balling, and my cell mate, this Spanish fellow, he said, quietly, ‘Man, I balled Barbara Graham.’ What, what? ‘Yeh, the chick they gassed for murder, I was working in the San Quentin morgue when they brought her in from the gas chamber, and I was alone with her.’ You dig that? Barbara Graham was dead at the time!”

Here, Barbra Streisand slides her thin arm into his. She is wearing a white bathrobe. They cuff one another a bit. Ryan explains that they have been studying It Pays to Increase Your Word Power. “Well, I have something in my, this whatdoyoucallit,” Barbra asserts elegantly, pointing to the corner of her left eye.

“Tear duct, dummy, tear duct.” She belts him matter-of-factly.

"Ryan is distracted by the faulty-blender sound of something overhead, an advancing helicopter which contains, incredibly, a man leaning out its side, as in old film chases, holding an Arriflex aimed at the group on the beach. “Look at that!” Ryan makes harsh gestures skyward. “It’s Ron Galella, hi Ron, hiya mother--!

Look, the f---ing photographers are here already, hanging from the pilings, last Sunday he was actually here lunging at me, Ron Galella! Leigh and I were out tossing the Frisbee and three of them materialize with their cameras, and under those pictures will be printed, ‘Ryan and Leigh look happy but there’s terror under the smiles.’

Or they’ll take a shot of me with Barbra and it’s ‘Has Ryan left his faith for Judaism?’ What faith? So totally asshole inaccurate, and I have had to put up with this for seven f---ing years, since the start of Peyton Place. They suppose, truly, that there’s some sort of perpetual orgy occurring down here.”

“There’s something in Ryan that challenges males,” asserts Lee Grant, the actress who played Stella Chernak to his Rodney Harrington in Peyton Place. “He was always jockeying for position with the crew, the director, half-kidding, but under the shiny surface terribly anxious and troubled about it. They were, let’s face it, jealous of him, and they would pick on him in subtle ways, especially in front of women. Who, unanimously, loved him. Watch him on a movie set sometime.”

“Hey, man, gladaseeya, hey!” It is a month later, and the day of the jogging, the ambience has changed, mellowed. Greg is still answering the gate bell, he has apparently not changed clothes since the fall; inside, the same pool game is going on, but Leigh Taylor-Young has joined the ensemble, and there is something in her manner that is kind and reliable.

Ryan’s various business representatives have warned well in advance that he doesn’t talk about Leigh, or about his first wife, or about his children by this first wife, either publicly or privately. Neither will his wives talk about him, and the kids aren’t old enough. When he was twenty-one, he married an actress named Joanna Moore. They had a son and a daughter named, oddly, Griffin and Tatum.

The divorce was bristlingly reported by sob sisters: in court, Ryan asserted that the mother of his children wasn’t prepared to function as such, but Joanna Moore won the custody suit (with the understanding that custody could go to Ryan sometime in the future) and Ryan married Leigh Taylor-Young, whom he’d met at work—she replaced Mia Farrow in Peyton Place.

They separated about the time that Ryan began working with Barbra Streisand on What’s Up, Doc? (“But you know it’s just how those people all operate,” says a California writer, “they just sort of date around. And Leigh always had her outside interests.” Lee Grant remarks, wistfully, “Ryan and Leigh, well, they’re both too beautiful to be mated. They look alike. I see him with Barbra, or her with maybe Omar Sharif, but together they’re looking into a mirror, it’s incredibly narcissistic.”

No matter what the nature of his marriage, the recent one, Ryan has not denied himself friends: Streisand was reported displeased when actress Peggy Lipton arrived at the What’s Up, Doc? location shooting in San Francisco. Leigh, meanwhile, had supposedly become quite friendly with Tom Stern, who used to be married to Samantha Eggar. Finger snap! Peggy goes home, Barbra goes out with Milos Forman, Ryan goes out with Barbara Parkins, Leigh goes out with a New Mexican.

When one first arrives at Ryan O’Neal’s beach house—months before the day of the jogging— the entrance appears portentous like the gate that Margaret O’Brien had to open in The Secret Garden, behind which everything changed from black-and-white to Technicolor. Beyond Ryan’s gate there is also a garden, but grey and desultory, like the Pacific. The young man who answers the bell—it turns out that he also answers the phones when they ring—is Technicolored in a sense, vividly freckled. He too wears hacked-off Levi’s, and explains that his name is Greg, smiling, with California teeth. The house one follows him into suggests the interior of a redwood tree; a wall of glass seems to enlarge the ocean.

Another boy, resembling Ryan or Greg, is bouncing around the pool table, under the green work light, with the master of the house; they are saying loudly to one another, “Hey, hey,” and “Thatawaytogo,” as if playing a larger outdoor game. A girl, slim, cinnamon-colored, wanders through the opened glass doors from the beach.

The air is now somewhat blue, James Taylor is singing through the speakers; the waves look higher, about to break through the glass and across the rustic floor. Greg, it has been explained, is an aspiring artist, sponsored currently by Ryan; he assembles collages from magazine cutouts, quite painstaking concepts, such as a jet airliner flying through the dim upper reaches of a cathedral.

In one of Greg’s works, greatly enlarged and hung beyond the pool table, a giant king cobra stands erect above a calm seascape, and now the snake seems to extend itself into the room. Ryan moves, slow and stately, out onto the deck, to recline precariously on its narrow rail. The cinnamon girl stands over him, stroking his chest hair, whispering; the boys drift outside, attentive, though not appearing to be.

These people do not wear dark glasses in the sun, nor do they squint; no one here has ever had pimples on his back. It is an atmosphere in which blondness is important: if one comes here shielded by smoked glasses, wrapped in unnecessary clothes, not beautiful, then one is an emissary from a grey, anxious, motivated world, an enemy of symmetry, radiance, physicality, opponent of hedonism, and is gently, circumspectly mocked.

One’s needs are seen to with great elaborateness; certain dubious smiles are exchanged. It is like being in a house with a reputation for ghosts, in which things move insultingly just as one turns away from them.