Found

by Tatum O'neal

  THERE’S A REASON I didn’t end up where Sue envisions me, and it is a combination of my own will and the 12-step program that saved me and continues to help me survive. The morning after Sue’s party, I got up at six thirty a.m., walked Pickle, then went to the seven thirty a.m. AA meeting that I usually attend. Sometimes, when I want to feel glamorous, I put on makeup before I go, but that morning, I just pulled my hair back, stuck a baseball cap on my head, and slipped into the room, which was slowly filling with people. As much as I care about my appearance, meetings are not about being seen. I know it is important to be able to go into those meetings, as tired and needy as I might be, without caring what people think. The point is to be there, however you are, to strip oneself of ego and vanity, and to get better. As they say, you cannot save your ass and your face at the same time.

  In contrast to Hollywood parties, like the one at Sue’s, my meetings are a social world in which I am instantly comfortable. When I entered the room that morning, I was met by the familiar smell of coffee—the stale breath of the abstinent alcoholic that makes me feel like I am home. I recognized most of the attendees, as I always do, even as the faces rotate throughout the week. I picked a chair near the front to make sure I could hear the speaker without being distracted by the stragglers.

  As I started concentrating on the prayers and readings, a warm feeling flooded over me. When the speaker began, I was fully transported into another alcoholic’s life. It helped me forget myself and the self-doubts I was carrying from Sue Mengers’s party the night before into the day ahead. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you have some peace of mind.

  Almost every day I go to a meeting to sit, listen, and share. I love hearing the intense story of what each person’s life was like before he started using, what happened when he met drugs and/or alcohol, and what his life is like now.

  Some of the speakers had loving parents and stable families. Some, like me, did not. All of us experimented with alcohol and/or drugs and, for some reason, spun out of control. There are all sorts of stories from all walks of life, but after hearing many of them, day after day, I now see the common threads of damage, pain, survival, and hope that weave through them all. Every one of us has found a way to live without the dread and self-loathing that are the biggest challenge to recovery. It can be very hard to drag yourself to meetings, make friends, and believe there is a reason to go on. It is a tremendous gift to hear how other people fought their way back, and how they found a way to live happy, healthy lives. As I listen, I feel love for the speaker—even if I don’t foresee wanting to forge a friendship. I love him for making it to that podium.

  Above all else in that room is the love that helps people survive. The support group promises to love you until you can love yourself. That amazing, unconditional love is palpable in the room.

  Individually, the stories are deeply inspirational. There’s a man who goes to one of my meetings—let’s call him Bob—who is a true success story. After getting sober at the age of thirty-eight and starting with nothing, he created his own real-estate business and is now worth millions. His story inspires me, because when you’re addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, you’re so broken and bruised that the idea of getting sober is hard enough to imagine, let alone going on to launch a hugely successful business or career. It all seems so out of reach when you’re using. I felt very differently about Bob’s hard-won fortune than I had about the shallow talk of TV-star salaries the previous night.

  Then there is Mark, a thirty-year-old friend of mine who often sits with me at meetings. One of the achievements of his sober life is that he has become a person who is always there to help someone who’s not doing well and needs extra support. One morning, I noticed that Pat, a man whom I usually saw at my seven thirty a.m. meetings, hadn’t shown up for the third day in a row. Though he had stayed clean and sober for almost two years, I suspected that Pat was using. After the meeting, Mark and I drove to Pat’s house—there’s a rule that you’re never to go alone on a “sober call,” so your own sobriety is not compromised—and we coaxed Pat out to breakfast. We convinced him that he needed to go into treatment, and that day, he checked into a residential treatment center.

  Carrie W., who was my original sponsor in L.A., is still one of my good friends. She is smart, funny, and beautiful, and she has been sober for twenty-five years. Every time I hear her story, I am newly inspired.

  When it is my turn to talk, I give a relatively unemotional, straightforward account of my history of substance abuse. It goes something like this:

  The first time I got drunk was when I was six years old and living at the ranch. At one of my mother’s parties, I got into the grown-ups’ beer. All I remember is sleeping on the floor in the bathroom (instead of in my bed, which was also in the bathroom). By that age, I had already been sexually molested twice.

  I started smoking pot when I was twelve and living with my dad. I was a habitual pot user for three years or so, at which point I started adding other substances, like quaaludes, coke, and alcohol. Before I turned sixteen, I had been molested by two men and two women.

  At fifteen, I had the first of my many spiritual awakenings when, under the influence, I was in a car accident in which I was thrown from a Jeep out onto the highway. My leg required two major surgeries. I was so grateful to have survived that in the hospital I swore off all drugs.

  When I was eighteen, I started using coke in an effort to lose weight. I continued to use coke until I got pregnant in 1983 at the age of nineteen. I was determined to be a mother who never touched drugs or alcohol.

  I stopped everything until 1995, when, in the midst of a horrendous custody battle, someone introduced me to heroin. I used heroin, on and off, through many detoxes and rehabs, until I finally stopped in 1998. I was clean until September 11, 2001, when I fled New York and my custody battle for a freefall back into addiction in Los Angeles.

  A year later, I went back to treatment and stayed clean but for my close call with crack in 2008. Luckily, the relapse that I was headed toward was averted by my arrest—so you could say God protected me from that one—or from myself!

  My neck started to deteriorate in 2004. Since then, I have had three surgeries. Each time I had minor slips with pain pills, but otherwise, I have been close to 100 percent clean and sober for seven years.

  I have been sober since June 29, 2010, because that is the day after I took a pill I didn’t need for the arthritis I now have in my neck. It was a single prescription pill, and when I took it I hadn’t used illegal drugs for five years, but I count from that pill, because that’s how we do it in my 12-step program. Some people treat that date as a critical fact in one’s sobriety. I don’t see it that way. That small slip, the fact of that date—I see it as a very personal, private matter. But they say you are only as sick as your secrets. So I want to give that date, not because it is so meaningful to me but because I hope that in being open and honest about that moment, that single pill, maybe I will help another person to be honest about the small but significant bumps along the way. There is shame in mistakes, but there is greater pride in honesty. So I have been sober since June 29, 2010. For that, I am proud and grateful.

  I spent years poisoning my body to avoid the pain, physical and emotional. What have I learned from it? At first, I had to accept that I lived with a cistern of pain. It was no use to pretend it didn’t exist or to cover it up. No quantity of any drug in the world was powerful enough to dull the pain for good. Heck, when I’m in pain there isn’t a drug that will abate it for an hour, much less forever. Once I accepted that, I began the ongoing process of dealing with my pain in a healthy way, through words, prayer, exercise, friends, and, of course, my support group.

  I LIKE TO start the day by plugging into the bigger purpose of life at a meeting. When you see others fighting for their lives, it puts all your own small daily struggles in perspective.

  Sometimes I go to meetings at night, when I’m feeling more soci
al. At nighttime meetings, sometimes I dress up as if I were going out to dinner, to see Patty and other friends, and to find the social exchange that other people might have in a bar or somewhere else where people are drinking. It’s nice to be surrounded by nondrinkers. People who have been sober for thirty years are amazingly bright-eyed. They have good color in their faces. It’s a look you only find on sober faces.

  Going to a meeting was the perfect way to clear my head after Sue’s party. My purpose was plain to me. And I was reminded that there was a reason Sue’s words about my life on a street corner never came true. Because I was fighting it every step of the way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Again

  I CHANNELED MY anxiety about my career through my lawyer, Jodi. I was calling and e-mailing her about the situation with the man formerly known as “Reality Ryan.” If he didn’t do the show, what was our backup plan? Could I carry the show without him? What would it be about? How would we structure it? Jodi counseled me to let go and stand back. She didn’t think I should try to woo Ryan back to the show. Very wisely, she noted that if I did that, then when the show began, he could put it all on me. Tatum, why are the cameras in the house? Tatum, why are there people in the garage? He could quit an infinite number of times, knowing I would keep running back to him and begging him to reconsider. He needed to return on his own terms, to acknowledge to both of us that he was doing the show of his own will.

  Jodi, who is a great advocate for me and other strong women, advised me to establish a new pattern of behavior with Ryan. She said, “Don’t sweet-talk this person into something he’s already going to do.” If I let him take responsibility, she was ready to bet money that he would reappear. But I couldn’t see it. In my world, things fall apart. I try to fix them. That’s what I do. But I took Jodi’s advice. I sat on my hands and tried to distract myself.

  Then, after waiting what felt like forever, but which was actually just three weeks, I heard that Ryan was in. Ryan, of his own accord, had called Greg, our producer at Endemol. When I spoke to Greg, he said, in his slow, methodical way, “Your dad said that he’s going to do the show.” There was no announcement, no apology, no drama, no resolution. Ryan just quietly reappeared. Maybe this was how Ryan apologized. Maybe the act of swallowing his pride, showing up, and moving forward was his way of expressing regret over the quarrel with Sean. Even if he wasn’t accepting culpability or apologizing, he was at least indicating that he wanted to let it go. At long last, I was coming to accept this as a kind of resolution.

  The show was back on. Great! Or was it great? I had to shift gears. I’d been spiraling around the collapse of the show, and suddenly we were planning the first day of filming. Now that I had the show back, did I still want it? At the end of the day, I still believed that the camera would be our best mediator. As actors, the one thing we cared about most in the world was how we were perceived. If somehow my father gained perspective on our relationship, it would all be worth it. Or would it? It was a gamble.

  I was hoping that Ryan’s participation meant I was back in his good graces, even though I was the one who had reason to be angry with him for how he’d treated Sean. The last I’d heard from him was our brief exchange after his Oprah appearance. There were so many unresolved conflicts. I texted him to say that Endemol wanted to start filming on my birthday, November 5.

  Silence.

  My father had become an active texter. From the moment he’d started, he never stopped. When there was no response from him, that meant something, but I wasn’t sure what exactly. Did it mean that he was annoyed that the start date was centered on me? Or that he didn’t like me being the one to give him the information? Or that he just didn’t like my birthday? Maybe, it occurred to me, it had been so long since we’d celebrated each other’s birthday that he had forgotten when mine was and felt embarrassed.

  It was mid-October. When I told Greg that in November I’d be celebrating my forty-seventh birthday at the home of a friend, he said he wanted to start filming that night. A birthday party—a celebratory occasion on neutral turf—that was a perfect way for me and Ryan to try again, this time in front of the cameras. It made sense for who we were and where we were. I was relieved, even excited. The torture of being in limbo was over.

  WITH THE START date set, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. I had a job lined up—what better time to see how my daughter was doing at college? I wanted to catch up with her and to meet her new friends, so we planned a girls’ weekend. I booked rooms at a nice hotel in San Francisco for Emily, her friends Christina and Claire, and me. Over the weekend I took them for manicures, facials, and massages. We walked around the city. We went out to fancy dinners. It was a very nice time for us.

  I was happy to get to know Emily’s new college friends and to hear what their lives were like. Even though I was still “the mom,” to some extent they included me in the girl talk. It struck me that this was one of the benefits of being a single parent. If I were visiting Emily with John, or another man, would she and her friends still open up and tell me about boys and all the stuff that girls talk about? I doubted it.

  It was also nice for me to have a window into what it might have been like for me if I’d gone to college. Of course, I’d visited my sons. In fact, I’d seen a little too much of Kevin’s dorm room. It was such a mess that, once, he lost his cell phone in it for weeks. Tired of being unable to reach him, I drove up to Skidmore to find it. A sticky layer of peppermint schnapps covered every available surface of Kevin’s room, punctuated by coins and cigarette butts. It was disgusting. I sent Kevin away, pulled on rubber gloves, and cleaned the whole room from top to bottom. When I gathered up a pile of clothes that was shoved onto a shelf in his closet, I unearthed his cell phone.

  So I knew my way around a dorm room. But experiencing college through my daughter was different. I had a constant feeling of living vicariously. I myself had missed out on school, camp, college, all the youthful experiences where girls build so many interpersonal relationships that it becomes an effortless part of their adult lives. So, like an anthropologist, I observed Emily closely through her high school and college years as she easily and naturally developed strong friendships. To me, college was a wonderful period of growth. How cool to be a young person, learning and playing, with no greater obligations. Without putting pressure on Emily to achieve anything in particular, I felt the glow of the experience she was having.

  A couple of days later, I returned from San Francisco to the real world, where I wasn’t a carefree eighteen-year-old. I was about to have another birthday, and, if all went well, a nation of viewers (or at least a respectable fraction of them) would tune in to see it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Beautiful Creatures

  MY BIRTHDAY WAS approaching. I had grown up surrounded by actresses who fought their age with every weapon available to them—plastic surgery, makeup, primping. Where did I stand? Would I—could I—be happy in my own skin at forty-seven?

  The first woman I watched deal with aging was my mother, Joanna Moore. My mother was a woman who couldn’t have been more beautiful, inside and out, but she had an unimaginably hard life, which I will come to. Though she was always striking, with green eyes and a heart-shaped face, she didn’t want to age gracefully. In a desperate effort to stay young and beautiful, she changed a lot about herself, even her name. She wore a wig, fake nails, and false eyelashes. She taped the skin of her face up to her head in a makeshift facelift before she had a real facelift. She wore caftans, heels, multiple necklace strands, and always had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. With the smoke and perfume, the overall effect wasn’t glamorous but quite dramatic. My dad likes to say, “You got your acting talent from your mother. Boy could she act!”

  I rarely saw my mother without her wig on, but once Griffin, who liked to make her chase him around, bolted through a first-floor window. As she followed him out, her wig caught on the windowsill and got pulled off. Suddenly my mo
ther was standing on the sidewalk, screaming after Griffin, her wispy real hair enjoying a rare glimpse of sunshine. She could and did laugh at this vision. She could always laugh at herself.

  My mother struggled with her inner and outer selves. I always saw her beauty and wish she could have forgiven herself for her substance abuse. I have long forgiven her.

  My mom fought aging by transforming herself. Even while she lay in the hospital, dying of lung cancer, she still managed to put on those individual eyelashes every morning. I loved her for doing that.

  Farrah became my de facto stepmother when I was fifteen. Her walls were lined with the magazine covers she had graced, forever young, forever perfect. She was an icon until the day she died. I can’t imagine what it was like to have been the most famous poster girl on the planet and then to age, surrounded by images of your “perfect” self. But through all of it, including a ravaging early death to cancer, her bravery and beauty shone through.

  I was left to find my own way as I tried to age gracefully, and I am still forging my own path as the years pass.

  I laughed when my father referred to me as a “chick” in the meeting when we discussed our show with OWN. He said, “I had no idea this chick was so together.” I’d been making my own money since I was nine. In reaction to my mother, and in part because she couldn’t or wouldn’t mother me, I was pretty much a woman by the time I was fifteen. So I thought it was pretty funny when Ryan called me a chick in the meeting.

  I see certain actresses at my gym in West Hollywood. They’re in their late sixties, and they have long, curly hair and huge fish lips. They are bizarre caricatures of their former selves. I mean, what is the sense in that? What message are we sending our daughters? That getting older means we’re no longer beautiful? Too many women in Hollywood are messing with their faces and losing track of what normal looks like. A horrible, expensive, warped new standard of beauty is emerging: The Fishface. I’m not against all the techniques women use to stay young, but I do think a little goes a long way. I have no desire to look like I’m in my thirties as I hit fifty. I’ve earned my age; I’m lucky to be here and I want to celebrate it.