Ryan O'Neal Exposing Tatum O'Neal

"Farrah visits me on location for Fever Pitch in Las Vegas. Tatum slides in for a visit. I get the feeling that my daughter will never trust men. One moment she’s sitting with Farrah discussing baby names; the next she’s telling Farrah that I’m going to throw her away when I grow tired of her. Farrah considers the source and isn’t worried, but I am. With Farrah pregnant, the last thing I want is a confrontation between these two. "

"I thought Tatum’s first serious relationship would change all that. I know now her wounds were much deeper and more complex than any of us understood. Little did I know that John McEnroe would aggravate those wounds.

As I was going through my journals for this book, I found an entry from that New Year’s morning that gave me pause. Tatum and John had come to LA to attend a party. They brought Patrick to the party with them. They all stayed at the beach house with Farrah and me.

JOURNAL ENTRY, JANUARY 1, 1985

"John and Tate have left for the airport to fly to Las Vegas so he can play tomorrow against Conners. Tatum’s first match. After they left, Patrick told me something unusual. When they got home last night at four a.m., Tatum wanted to continue to party, which included tequila shots and pool until sunrise.Patrick finally put her to bed after she started to see the pool balls two at a time."

I was so relieved to see Tatum and Farrah getting along for a change that I didn’t worry that my daughter, who’d never been a drinker, who would confiscate my glass when she was a little girl, had gotten wasted the night before.

Farrah had admitted to me two months earlier, when she was seven months pregnant, that Tatum and John had offered her cocaine. I was surprised because at the time Tatum was still proclaiming her objections to drugs and alcohol. I assumed John was the instigator and Tatum just went along.

Tatum continues to be unpredictable. One day she’s effusive and warm, coming over to visit Farrah and me, offering to babysit her little brother; and two days later she’ll be distant and stormy, refusing to return our phone calls.

Tatum and John make an effort to include Patrick in their life, and gradually he begins pulling away from me. Not anything overt, just a subtle, quiet shift in his affection. I can’t blame him.

Patrick has always loved sports, and John, whom Patrick idolizes, is generous with him, I pass John and Tatum’s house on my daily beach run. If Patrick’s there, he’ll join me for a mile or two, but I can sense he’s uncomfortable, as if he’s being disloyal to Tatum.

He shouldn’t have to choose between his dad and sister any more than I should have to choose between the woman I love and my only daughter.

Sometimes when I’m passing the house, the curtains are drawn, but I see Tatum’s silhouette in the window, watching. She doesn’t invite me in or even wave hello.

Our plans are deterred at the last minute. Tatum and John insist that on the way back to California, we stop over in New York for a visit at his parents’ Long Island estate.

I’d met his mother only briefly, at the hospital when Tatum was in labor, and I’d never met his father, so with Patrick and little Redmond in tow, the four of us take a car from JFK to Oyster Bay.

When we arrive, Tatum and John aren’t there and his parents greet us with perplexed expressions. Soon I’m waiting for Alan Funt to pop out from a bush and say, “Surprise! You’re on Candid Camera”

To this day, I remain convinced that John’s parents were not expecting guests that afternoon.

Two decades later, in her first book, Tatum will accuse Farrah and me of deliberately insulting John and his family with our abrupt departure. But that afternoon, as we’re exchanging goodbyes with the McEnroes, we think everything is hunky-dory.

Three months later an old boxing friend of mine calls and asks if Farrah and I would like to ride with them to the wedding.

"What wedding?” I ask. “Tatum’s” he replies. Now I know how John’s parents must have felt when they saw us standing on their doorstep.

Tatum had mentioned the possibility of marrying John. She and Farrah had even discussed wedding dresses. Sometimes they would sit on the stairs that led to the beach and talk and laugh.

“John’s parents want a big church wedding, but I’d rather do it on a surfboard on the beach,” Tatum says.

“It’s usually the other way around; it’s the girl who wants the traditional celebration and the guy who wants to get it over with as fast as possible,” Farrah replies.

“Maybe that’s because he’s a New Yorker and I’m a California beach girl,” she answers.

Over the past year, Farrah and Tatum have had talks like these, and never once did my daughter say anything about an actual wedding date.

I tell myself it isn’t true, that there has to be some mistake, that my daughter would never get married without her dad walking her down the aisle, without her grandparents sitting in the front row

I tell myself that, yes, Tatum and I have had our struggles, but she’d never be that callous, she’d never hurt her family that way. And I can think of nothing to precipitate such hateful behavior. There haven’t been any blowups, no huge arguments, unless there was something smoldering beneath the surface, festering in that willful head of hers.

I try to think of something I might have said or done, berating myself, then alternating to denial, convinced this is not so. I call my daughter and the machine picks up. I leave several messages. No response.

And then, The Telegram. It’s dated August 1, 1986, 9:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. And it reads: I’M GETTING MARRIED

TATUM 1132 EST (HTE BEVERLY HILLS CA)

Farrah will ask what’s wrong. Too often I’ll snap at her, not wanting to explain because I’m embarrassed.

What still bothers me most was Tatum not inviting her grandparents. It’s one thing for my daughter to want to punish Farrah and me, but it’s another to do that to her grandparents.

My mom and dad adored Tatum, were a loving, supportive presence in her life, and for them to be treated that way severed a bond between my daughter and me that has never been repaired.

Over the years, I often expressed my anger and frustration with Tatum to Farrah. She was never cold or unsympathetic. Early on she would listen to my woes about my children and offer reassurance, but eventually she would grow aloof. She had to in the interest of her own survival as well as our relationship. One day she sat me down and said:

“Ryan, I can’t be your whole world. It’s not healthy. It’s also not possible. We’re both too dependent on each other, but I have a few close friends I can confide in. We shop, we gossip, we do lunch. You don’t have anyone like that. The only grown-up men in your life are Freddie Fields and your father, and you can go to them for practical advice and they’re helpful, but you don’t talk to them about feelings, hopes, dreams. I love it that you trust me enough to tell me everything, but I’m not a sage and at times I feel overwhelmed, inadequate, and I resent the fact that you ask too much and I’m only able to give too little.”

She was right and just as I didn’t know what to say to Freddie or my dad when I was hurting, I didn’t know what to say to Farrah then.

By the new year, she and John have divorced, leaving a trail of tabloid scat in their wake. It had been coming for a while. But I don’t need to get into all those details. My daughter has written two books on the subject.

Speaking as her dad, the failure of her marriage was deeply disappointing. Though you know how I feel about John, I really did believe he’d be the anchor my daughter needed. Instead, she went overboard and soon found herself dragged under in a sea of drugs and alcohol. Next, Tatum would be embroiled in a bitter custody battle. John would eventually triumph.

If Tatum’s listening, she won’t like hearing this, but I don’t blame my former son-in-law for fighting for his kids the way he did. In fact, I respect him for it. No father wants to yank his children away from their mom. I ought to know. I went after Joanna for custody of Tatum and Griffin, twice, for the same reason John had to duke it out with Tatum. I had no choice.

At the time, my ex-wife was washing down half a bottle of barbiturates a day with vodka. And this was back in the early seventies when the courts favored the mother even if she was unfit. “Let’s give her another chance,” the judge said.

To Joanna’s credit, when she realized she was hopelessly addicted, she showed up on my doorstep in Malibu and handed me our kids, then checked into a hospital. Tatum was seven years old and Griffin was six. I can only imagine how hard that was for Joanna, and to this day, I don’t know whether either of my children appreciates the courage that decision took.

The rest of the story gets more complicated, with fundamental disagreement between my children and me over the specifics of how it unfolded. I can only say this: Joanna and I made some dreadful mistakes as parents, and I hope that one day my children will be able to forgive us, as they would want their own children to forgive them.

That was about forty years ago. My daughter inherited her mother’s predilection for addiction but not her wisdom or compassion. And it was always either/or with Tatum. She was unfamiliar with subtlety. Innocent of nuance. Tatum is still tearing holes in her world and unfortunately her world at the moment is also mine.

I promised to tell you what happened in New York. I’ll set the scene for you.

It’s midafternoon exactly one week ago today. I’m sitting in the greenroom at CNN watching my daughter tape her interview with Piers Morgan. The “greenroom” is where talk show guests are parked until they go on camera. I can’t believe what’s coming out of my daughter’s mouth. She’s telling Piers that she first started experimenting with drugs at eleven years old.

She knows that’s not true He’s now inquiring if I supplied her with the drugs. “You’ll have to ask him,” she replies. Ask him? He doesn’t need to ask me! Tatum, you and I both know the answer to that question is no! At this point, I’m hollering at the TV screen. A network page comes running in to ask if everything is all right. “Are you listening to this?” I say. “She’s rewriting history! She hated drugs when she was little!”

I turn my attention back to the show, trying to ignore the nagging question now hovering at the back of my mind: Could she actually have been doing drugs that young? Could I have been so clueless that I missed it?

I remember after I got full custody, I put both Tatum and Griffin into a private school and she hated it there, started stealing and getting into trouble. I took her out of that school, and soon after we went into production on Paper Moon, where she had a tutor.

I may not have been the best father, certainly not a perfect one, but I would have known it if she was chewing Quaaludes at eleven. She probably thinks it looks better if her drug problem was a lifelong struggle rather than something that happened to her as an adult. I’m guessing, grasping, trying to come up with a reason why my daughter would misrepresent about something like this.

Now my child is telling Piers to remember to speak up when he interviews me because I’m old and don’t hear too well anymore. Well, young lady, I certainly heard that! Then, tossing back her hair, Tatum looks into the camera, smiles coquettishly, and adds, “I don’t think my father can see too well anymore either.” So I’m not only going deaf, I’m also going blind?

When I look back on my youth, I can’t help but wonder how someone raised in a stable and loving environment could have ended up making such a mess of his own family life. I suspect my parents must have had moments when they asked themselves, “Did we go wrong somewhere?”

I’d been married and divorced twice, was still in my late twenties, and had three children. The trail I was on got twisted and I couldn’t straighten it out.

My mistakes as a husband and father are mine and I take responsibility for the painful parts of my life as well as the joyful ones.

Our parents may set the stage, but we’re the ones who determine what our characters will do as our lives are played out. It’s what Tatum struggles with daily.

The sad irony is that there’s a fallout from growing up in a happy home. To this day I carry with me some of the belief that all will end well just because it should.

My first valiant act would be accepting the inevitable with Leslie, whom I had grown to love. Ours wasn’t the soul mate version. Farrah always occupied that part of me. But Leslie was kind and her generosity boundless. As much as I wanted to be back with Farrah, it was still hard letting go of this appealing young woman who embodied qualities I wished that my daughter exhibited.

Leslie was with me when the oncologist broke the news. She was in the room when the doctors inserted this enormous needle into my spine to extract a bone marrow sample. They needed cells to confirm the type of leukemia. The pain was excruciating. I almost came off the table twice and had to be held down. I couldn’t walk afterward. I went in there a strapping guy and I came out in a wheelchair. Leslie witnessed all of this, and I think it got to her, not that she wouldn’t have been

My second act of bravery was to occur when I got home from the doctor’s office. Tatum showed up because she’d heard the death knell. I wasn’t expecting much by way of sympathy, but I sure wasn’t ready for what I got.

She verbally stripped me bare, recounting the highlights of my failed life and then, before slamming the door on her way out, she said, “Well, at least my mother died with dignity.” I worry that if that episode in our lives comes up on the reality show, I won’t be able to manage it.

Living in Malibu’s casual opulence has been a multiple-decades-long holiday for me. But it came with a price: it eroded my ambition, clouded my introspection, provided such a seductive distraction from the rude competition of Hollywood life, that instead of its being my escape, my haven, it became my confinement.

I remember the afternoon I bought the beach house. This was not long before Paper Moon was filmed and Tatum and I had both fallen in love with it. The house, which at the time was a modest cottage on the ocean, was owned by director Blake Edwards, who sold it to me for $130,000. At the time, I thought the price was exorbitant. I renovated the house in stages till it became my idea of home.

I have wonderful memories of this beach. Yet sitting here now, I feel haunted by it. I talk about home and family, but look at what became of my only daughter and me. While I’m not naive enough to believe all our problems were caused by where we lived, it wasn’t a healthy environment for a young girl, any more than it was for Redmond or Griffin, all three of them limited by their lack of a decent education.

Tatum only had two options: marry a rich and famous man—and we know how that worked out—or continue as an actress, but Tatum was never able to make the transition from the appealing child to the accomplished adult.

1979:

By now, Tatum is on her way home from Canada and all I’ve been hearing on the phone from her is how delighted she is that Farrah and I have found each other. Lee has never mentioned anything to her. She even hints that we should marry if Farrah divorces Lee. So I decide to surprise my daughter and take Farrah with me to the airport to pick her up, thinking she’ll be thrilled. I’m wrong.

After our telephone conversation, I’m surprised that Tatum seems uncomfortable, defensive. All of a sudden, it’s almost as if she’s the jealous other woman. I begin not to trust Tatum with Farrah. Tatum is too talkative around her. I had known a few women. Tatum had been around them. Some she liked, some she didn’t.

It’s out of respect for them as well as for Farrah, who knew about my past, that I don’t feel comfortable discussing my previous relationships. For somebody who’s been the center of an avalanche of publicity for fifty years, I live an unusually private life, always s have, and I’d be a traitor to one of my few guiding principles if I changed now.

And so the next day I plead with Tatum, “Please, let’s not remind Farrah. Let me be this virgin that she’s found, let me keep the illusion alive just for a little while.”

Tatum will have none of it.

One day, several months after Tatum’s return, Farrah and I are in the car, and she points to a street corner we’re passing and says, “That’s where your daughter told me about you.”

“Oh, really, what did she say,” I reply, slightly sick to my stomach.

“How hard you are on women, that you’re not always a nice man, that I should be wary of you.”

These were the ways that Tatum, who was living with me, tried to undermine my love affair with Farrah. She couldn’t help it, she was angry and confused.

I just felt powerless to stop it. I was spending more time with Farrah than with her, and she saw it as a betrayal, that I was abandoning her. I adored Farrah, and felt I deserved this chance at happiness.

In my defense, when Farrah came on the scene, Tatum was pretty independent, had her friends and her life, and didn’t need me like she did when she was a little girl.

And so, to me, it didn’t seem that I was spoiling the situation. I was just happy with Farrah. Alas, the happier I was with Farrah, the less Tatum appreciated it. She believed I was withholding something from her and giving it to Farrah.

Tatum and I still retained our daily routine. We’d run or take long walks on the beach. If either of us was up for a part, we’d read each other’s scripts.

It was the evenings that were different. Tatum was no longer my regular dinner companion nor did she accompany me to parties. The evenings belonged to Farrah now. That was tricky for me, and I can’t say that I handled it particularly well.

I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know what to do to get over this hump. I had a habit of making molehills out of mountains. I had allowed my daughter to become too close to me and now I had somebody I wanted closer.

Farrah reacted in all the right ways, which moved me deeply because I suspected, even though she never said anything, that Tatum unnerved her, that she was afraid of her.

Farrah was so loving and supportive, continually reassuring me, “It’s okay, we’ll see more of her.” She’d encourage me to bring Tatum with us to the movies, to dinner, anything to try to break through.

Tatum turned sixteen on November 5, and we had her birthday party at Farrah’s, at the big house in the hills, and invited all her friends, including Michael Jackson, Melanie Griffith, and Andy Gibb, who was one of Tatum’s great crushes.

I give my daughter not one but two cars—a brand-new BMW and a classic MG sports car. I had them brought to the front of the house. Each had an enormous ribbon with a bow tied around it.

The entire party escorts Tatum outside. I expect an ordinary teen response from her, a squeal, a big hug for her old man. Instead there’s nothing. She just looks at the cars and then at me. I can’t tell whether she’s confused or disappointed. “Thanks, Dad,” she says as she turns and walks back into the house.

By this point it’s clear I’m not going to able to console my daughter with fancy presents. The stronger Farrah believed in me, the less Tatum did.

My mother saw what was happening and understood I would have to leave Farrah to get Tatum back. My mother didn’t want to say that. She also knew I wouldn’t do it. Both my parents did.

I’ve won Farrah. I’ve lost my daughter. It’s as if Tatum has moved to a very strict boarding school that doesn’t allow telephone calls or visits from parents. A letter a month at most. This girl was a chatterbox as a child. We’d exchange 1,000 words an hour; 950 came from her.

It might have been different had I enforced healthier boundaries beginning with the filming of Paper Moon, where father and daughter were equal partners, but we acted like adult friends, and it would prove our undoing.

It’s one of my life’s greatest regrets that I didn’t establish stricter boundaries with my children. I was one of those fathers who placed too much value on being a friend to his kids and not enough on being a parent.

I have to give my second wife Leigh Taylor-Young credit. Though I may not understand her New Age philosophies and bohemian sensibilities, she’s always been one hell of a mother, and it shows because of all my kids, Patrick is the one who was able to sidestep the temptations.