by Tatum O'neal
My dad ran up the stairs and got his gun. My father had always owned a gun. I’d played with it when I was a kid, and once Griffin, at five years old, got into Dad’s bullets, throwing them into the fireplace and watching them ricochet around the room. But I’d never seen Ryan himself take it out or known him to use it.
Ryan fired a warning shot. Ryan says that he intentionally missed Griffin, that he fired the shot to scare Griffin off, but Griffin ran to the phone, called 911 (the best decision anyone made that night), and told the dispatcher that Ryan O’Neal was shooting at him and that he needed help. Moments later, the cops showed up and took my dad away. Griffin didn’t get arrested, just my dad. Maybe Griffin’s used police car bought him credibility. What a sad, ugly night!
The wire now coiled at my feet represented all the misplaced love and violence that clashed that night. It was the sad symbol of an unmanageable life. Gunfights and drugs and chains. Why was my family doing this to one another? A lot of pain and misery, and for what? Why was there violence and anger where there should have been nurturing and love? We just wanted to survive, me and my brothers. What had we done that was so bad? Why did we have to be born, really? Why was I here? For everything to be destroyed around me? Where was the love that people are supposed to have for one another?
As Ryan was being taken away, he says he saw Griffin standing in the doorway of the house. In Ryan’s memory, which seemed to find the cinematic resonance in any story, Griffin, like a big-screen villain, hurled the poker into the bushes and stood on the threshold to watch Ryan go, arms crossed, victorious.
As far as I know, after Ryan was taken away, Griffin drove Jojo to the hospital. She had almost lost an eye. Later, Griffin would try to press charges on Ryan for her injury, but it was unclear who exactly hit her, so the case was dropped. As for Redmond, he was left in the house, no longer bound but all alone at the grim scene of the crime.
Soon after the fight Griffin called me. He said, “Dude, something bad happened. Dad just got taken away in a police car. He was trying to kill me with his gun.”
I said, “Oh my God.” After he told me the rest of the story, I said, “I told you not to do that,” and it felt like a meager, ordinary response given the extraordinary circumstances, as if I were saying, “I told you not to let the dog out of the house.” What else could I say? There were no words for the shame and devastation. And yet, in a way, I was used to this kind of bad surprise. My mother had constantly threatened to kill herself. I was somewhat numb to such news. And I didn’t quite realize how bad the situation had been until I saw it on the news. Ryan had been arrested. It was a big, ugly scene. I had to call my children and tell them, and as I did, I knew my ex-husband was sitting there, shaking his head, saying, I could have told you this would happen.
Griffin and I had been through a lot in our lives. I love him unconditionally, and I’ll love him forever. Our lives—mine, Griffin’s, Patrick’s, and Redmond’s—were a minefield, so full of anger and fighting. Although Griffin’s good intentions are hard to pull out of that screwed-up scenario, what I will always understand is that our lives were not exactly fair. And now here I was, filming this relatively peppy sizzle reel with my father for a docuseries. How real was it going to get?
FIVE WEEKS LATER, Endemol e-mailed me a finished edit of the sizzle reel. The narrator’s calm, resonant voice intoned, “Meet the O’Neals . . . Like all families, they have issues.” I had to admit that it looked interesting. Wouldn’t want to live it (though I had and was), and it was a little hokey, but it made for good TV and I was going with it.
Now we had to pitch it.
Chapter Nine
Cold Feet
THE PERCEPTION MAY have been that I was a child star who stopped working when I got married, but the truth was that lately I’d been working steadily. I had no doubt that more dramatic roles would come my way, but visibility was definitely a factor in my decision to do the TV show with Ryan. I wanted the acting work to keep coming.
In my life, I’d known the greatest possible range of fortune. I started off dirt-poor in my mother’s house, which was in a constant state of disrepair and where I was haphazardly clothed and fed. Then, at six, I moved into the fancy Malibu house with my movie-star dad. By eight, I was earning my own money (which I wouldn’t control until I was eighteen). At eleven, I was the highest-paid child actor ever, earning $350,000 for Bad News Bears. By fifteen, I had my own credit cards. Nobody oversaw what I bought. Whatever I charged, the accountant just took out of my savings. Cher was my idol, and I developed an obsession with shoes and clothes. I had three of everything I owned, just like Cher. When I was a teenager, Ryan arranged for me to be financially responsible for my mother. I became my mother’s parent.
Then, at twenty-two, I was engaged, and in the next several years I had three kids with John, who had more money than I had ever had. There were private planes and homes everywhere. I was constantly remodeling houses. That became my hobby. That’s what rich people do. I guess my understanding of money went a bit haywire, because all of a sudden there was just so much of it. It kind of lost its meaning to me. As I transformed into the wife of a very wealthy person, my identity was corrupted by the assumption that with great wealth comes happiness, which, as it turns out, it does not. Money can keep you distracted from looking at the big picture but not forever.
When I left my marriage in 1993, I left John’s fortune behind. What money there was in the divorce settlement I spent almost carelessly, as if I wanted to use it up quickly because it was tied to the past, to a relationship gone sour. It wasn’t given willingly, and I never felt like it was truly mine. In the years that followed, I was not nearly as financially comfortable as I had been at various times in my life or might be again, but what mattered most was that I was free.
After September 11, I had lost custody of my children, and I left for Los Angeles because I thought I needed to give up, that I was a true failure as a mom, an actress, and a woman. Around that time a significant amount of money went missing from my account. My accountant at the time kept telling me it was my fault, that I was spending too much. I knew that wasn’t the case, but when I pressed for answers, he scolded me for accusing the company of mishandling my money. Isn’t there always one of these accountants in a story like mine? I allowed myself to feel ashamed. If I’d been sober, I definitely would have figured out that something was seriously wrong and that it wasn’t me. I left that accounting firm because I knew in my gut that the whole company was a crooked mess. It was an instinct, and my instincts have often served me well. Soon afterward, I read in the paper that the head of my former accounting company, Ken Starr, had been arrested for stealing $30 million of his clients’ money in a Ponzi scheme over the last few years. Had I been more aware, had I not been using and dealing with the emotional wreckage of my past, I would have caught on to what that firm was doing far earlier.
Time passed. I spent ten years litigating over my divorce and my kids, and have since gone through many periods of feeling poor and worrying about money, working hard to make ends meet and to take care of my children.
I’m not opposed to a fancy life. I had one, and it wasn’t bad at all. My ex-husband and I lived in one of the biggest apartments in New York. We had serious houses in Malibu and Long Island. When we went to Paris, we stayed at the Bristol. He bought me expensive jewelry that I have locked in a safe-deposit box to some day give to Emily. A girl can get used to that kind of life.
Having been there, however, I can now say without reservation that I don’t need to be rich and I don’t need a rich man. I’ve loved being humbled the way I have, because I’m happier now than I was when I had money and whatever I wanted. Being rich makes many things look easy, but, as I said, it just doesn’t guarantee happiness. In the beautiful Upper West Side apartment I shared with John, I watched the world passing me by. I felt like Rapunzel, trapped in my tower. I just wasn’t happy. I wanted and needed out.
Now, sixteen years after my d
ivorce settlement, I earned my own keep, and for the past ten years I had lived on what I earned. I helped my children financially. But there were plenty of middle-age actresses without drug histories. It was too easy for Hollywood to write me off. That reality motivated me to do everything I could to make the most of career opportunities.
I had thought long and hard about doing the TV show. Now it was rolling forward, and I was optimistic. Endemol set up meetings for us with several cable networks. Ryan started off willing and chipper. He’d switched from introducing himself as “Ryan O’Neal: Love Story” to “Reality Ryan.”
I did all of the talking in the meetings. I’d say, “This is the story of a reunion. A father and daughter who had a great relationship that was torn apart by their careers, their dynamic, and their personal struggles. It’s about a woman’s struggle to find what’s left of her family.” I explained that we didn’t know what might come out on-camera—we weren’t perfect, by any means, but we had a lot of ideas and were willing to explore our relationship in different ways.
Those meetings made me proud of how far I’d come. After all, I hadn’t picked acting as a career. It had picked me when I was too young to know myself. I was just a ranch kid, a wild child, and I didn’t arrive in Hollywood with enough confidence or fortitude to carry me through a whole career. I could barely speak in public. Then, when I was nineteen, just before I met John, I decided that I wanted to be an adult actor, but I wanted to do it right. I didn’t have any formal training, and I couldn’t rely on my childhood aptitude growing with me, so I went to New York and enrolled in acting classes. From then on, for the entire time I was in New York, I took acting classes off and on, whenever I could. Even when I was primarily focused on being John’s wife, I always knew I wanted to better myself, to perfect my craft.
Ultimately, I took the same approach with life: I hadn’t been given the basic life tools to develop into a strong, self-confident woman, so I worked hard to become the person I wanted to be. I spent years in AA and years in therapy. I searched inside myself. It was hard, but it was worth it.
At last, I was in a position to show off the results of my years of hard work. I was finally capable of making eye contact without feeling the urge to bow my head like a naughty schoolboy awaiting punishment. Finding grace and dignity in those meetings was a real achievement for me.
As we went to the first few meetings, Ryan was enthusiastic, but soon, when we had our postmortem chats, he started to voice some doubts. Would this ruin his film career? His chances at an Oscar? I was pretty sure he was joking about the Oscar but not entirely. The upshot was that my father was hesitant about what this kind of exposure might mean for his career. And, truth to tell, so was I. I believed in the show, felt that it could bring about much positive change for me, my dad, and perhaps even for viewers. Nonetheless, if not done well, our good intentions could backfire. Long story short: we didn’t want to be turned into laughingstocks. My old friend and former agent Sue Mengers is a Hollywood legend. I’d met Jon Hamm at one of her parties and, out of the blue, he said, “Don’t you ever dare do a reality show. You can’t.” Ha! Easy for him to say. I do like to think of myself as a legitimate actress and I thought our show was different, but I didn’t know how it would be perceived. What about my career? My pedigree? But I wanted to make my decision based on the work before me, not on the fear of industry perception. I believed in this show.
For all the potential pitfalls of exposing one’s real self on television, I thought we had a rare chance to make something quirky and different and dark and funny. Ours was a story people might relate to: a parent and a child reconnecting after many years of estrangement. And I couldn’t help hoping that if our reunion played out on the screen, where Ryan was so comfortable and proud, maybe it would buttress our relationship. Maybe it would be the mirror he needed to face his own past, present, and future. Maybe it would help our newfound fledgling family dynamic endure.
From the beginning Ryan’s mood was unpredictable. At one of the production meetings—before we found Endemol—there was a glass of water waiting on the table in front of his chair. Ryan arrived a little late and everyone else—producers and some executives from a cable network—was already in their seats. When Ryan sat down in his chair, somehow he was hunched over in such a way that he smashed his forehead into the glass. Blood poured down his face. That’s right—head hit glass. It was a dramatic and seemingly impossible feat of coordination. Before I could reach to help him, he turned toward me and said, “Did you put that glass there?” He later would joke that, in his mind, I shifted the glass just before he made his entrance, that it was all a plot.
I made light of it: “Dad, stop sitting down headfirst.”
The table of executives chuckled, and Ryan joined in: “Do I have to do this in every meeting?” We never did manage to reenact how his head was so low and yet so . . . forceful. I was scared that he would be too embarrassed to show up at another meeting.
We had first started thinking about doing a show in July. Now it was September and Ryan’s attitude toward the show darkened. After three months of being on board, Ryan started threatening to quit. I was pretty frustrated—I’d made this commitment and I was ready to go through with it. Every time Ryan threatened to quit the project, he had his reasons, though they weren’t the reasons one might imagine. For instance, if I missed one of his phone calls, he threatened to quit. Missing Ryan’s calls was different from missing Emily’s calls. Emily and I had an arrangement: if I missed one of her calls, I would call her back as soon as I was able. I understood and respected her concern for my well-being. Ryan and I were two adults, yet he expected me to answer my phone—at all times—not because he worried but because he wanted me to be immediately available whenever he wanted to talk to me. Could I be in a relationship with someone who expected me to answer the phone whenever he called—even when I was asleep or in the shower? Answer your phone! I had no idea how to react. Answer your phone! How could I have a normal conversation after that? Finally, I stood up for myself. “I can’t always answer the phone, Dad. Sometimes I’m busy. People don’t always answer their phones.”
Then, for fear Ryan would quit, I called and texted, apologizing, and trying to woo him back. Wasn’t I a fool, to put myself in a position where Ryan had the power to disappoint me over and over again?
Then we met with OWN, Oprah’s new cable network. The morning of the meeting, I put on gray jeans, high-heeled black booties, a black silk shirt, and a leather jacket. I wore my usual makeup, but punched it up a little with some bright red lipstick. I got my hair done, so it was sleek and flowy. I was trying to be glamorous. From the minute we walked in, it was clear that this was a network that wouldn’t sensationalize, manipulate, or exploit us. At OWN, we’d found our home. We sold the show. Now came the tricky part—making it.
Chapter Ten
How Can You Do This to Me?
WE DIDN’T EXACTLY celebrate making the deal with Endemol to produce the show for OWN. The process of bringing the show from concept to reality had taken far longer than Ryan and I had expected. In my dad’s life, everything needs to happen fast, and he still seemed frustrated at the pace. And, as I found myself jumping through more and different hoops, I realized I had to fire my agent. Ryan and I were trying to iron out our separate agreements with the various players, and it became clear that sharing a representative created a conflict of interest. There was quite enough conflict in the equation already, and I bowed out. That also meant that Ryan couldn’t instruct me to contact our once-mutual agent with his questions or ideas; if he had something to say to his agent, it was now up to him to do it.
Putting our negotiations aside, for Sean’s twenty-third birthday in September I planned a family celebration at Matsuhisa, our favorite sushi restaurant in West Hollywood. My father and Sean came together, arriving a little late. They joined Sean’s stepsister Ruby (John’s wife Patty’s daughter) and her friend; Sean’s best friend, Doug; Ryan’s friend Mark
eta; and me at the table.
I was expecting a nice evening, but as soon as Sean came in, I thought he looked agitated. My father, too. I was worried. What was going on? Was Sean okay? I must have given Sean some kind of questioning look, because suddenly he said, “Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like that.”
He went outside and sat on a bench. I had no idea what he was talking about. It wasn’t ordinary for a glance of mine to freak Sean out. I followed him outside and sat beside him. He said, “You can’t look at me like that—you’re condemning me. How can you do this to me on my birthday?”
Those words, coming from Sean, were familiar, though the last time he’d said them had been in much worse circumstances—five years earlier, on one of my worst days as an alcoholic. Right before A Paper Life was published in 2004, I was living at the Mercer Hotel in the heart of SoHo. I wasn’t using drugs but I was still angry and willful. I was complying with the judge’s orders for regular drug testing, motivated by my desire to be with my children. But simply complying with the court system isn’t an indication of the highest level of sobriety. The system doesn’t necessarily lead to true sobriety. I hadn’t yet made the spiritual shift.
Although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, I was still trying to get away with whatever I could get away with. I was more interested in fighting John and the system than looking at my problems and dealing with them directly. I knew that alcohol wouldn’t show up in the court-mandated tests for drugs in my urine, and so I decided that it was fine for me to drink occasionally. I’d never been anything but a social drinker. That soon changed. Quick riddle: What do you call a junkie who takes up social drinking? Answer: An alcoholic. There followed a three-month drinking period that was anything but social. I remember drinking sixteen mini-bottles of vodka, throwing them into the trash one after another. Bing, each went as it landed in the can. Bing. Bing. Bing. At some point during my stay at the Mercer, the housekeeper stopped refilling the mini-fridge with mini-bottles. She said, “Oh no, Miss O’Neal, we can’t put more in your room.” Yep, as it turned out, I couldn’t drink, either. Alcohol: not good.
