Found

by Tatum O'neal

  I want to age. I want my daughter to be proud of me, and I use that notion as a guide. My daughter is proud of me if I eat healthy food and live well. In this land of artificial everything, I want to stay real and authentic, true to my heart. I enjoy being a grown woman, and I plan to embrace it as life passes. I don’t wear short skirts. I don’t keep my hair really long anymore. I don’t want my life and work to be dependent on my looking like a twenty-year-old. This doesn’t mean I’m prudish or that I don’t want to be a sexy woman, but I want to be ladylike . . . or at least to try. So the furthest I go is skinny jeans and high-heeled boots. I don’t want to wear the same clothes as my daughter would wear. It’s her turn to be the young, sexy one. I don’t want my sons to have unrealistic expectations for the women in their lives. True beauty evolves.

  AGING AS GRACEFULLY as I could meant sailing through my forty-seventh birthday and the party that was now upon me. Easier said than done.

  My birthday fell on a Friday. When I woke up that morning, my father and I still hadn’t had a real conversation since the night of Sean’s birthday. Yes, he had signed on to doing the show, and yes, we’d exchanged a few texts about his appearance on Oprah and about Sean, but there hadn’t been enough of a conversation to let me know where I stood with him. A couple of weeks before my party, a friend of his had called to tell me that Ryan was going to attend but warned me that he was going to ask, “Why did you do this to me?” or “What did I do to deserve this?” Wow, well, jeez. I didn’t want a blowup, and I was hurt, but mostly this forewarning just made me sad.

  Then I had a bit of an epiphany. My father and I had achieved a loving, balanced relationship when we reunited after Farrah’s death. Why would he risk that? Maybe he had his own doubts and fears. I wanted to sustain the balance that we’d found. I wanted it to serve as a foundation on which to build a solid relationship with Ryan. But if I wanted real change, maybe the best thing to do was to let go of all my preconceptions about how it should be and just wait and see the reality unfold, on-camera and in our lives.

  It occurred to me that Ryan might not show up at my birthday celebration that evening. But it almost didn’t matter. I love birthday parties. My friends would be there. The show was launching. There was plenty to celebrate.

  MY BIRTHDAY MORNING still did not get off to a great start. The phone rang soon after I woke. It was my brother Griffin. I had called Griff a week earlier to say happy birthday to him. (We’re Irish twins—every year we are the same age for a week.) It had been great to talk to my brother—it always is. But, without thinking it through, I had told him about the TV show that Ryan and I were doing.

  Now Griffin was calling me. He wished me happy birthday, but then he started asking difficult questions about the show. He sounded anxious, and I realized I had made a mistake by telling him about it without preparing him. It appeared as though I’d triggered all sorts of bad memories for him. I’d provoked his desire for some kind of resolution without being in a decent position to support him. I felt terrible.

  I struggled to explain as best I could how I saw it. “Griffin, Dad isn’t likely to address and apologize for everything you remember. We aren’t making that show. If you want to make a show about retribution, you go ahead and pitch it. But that’s not my goal. I’m not going to force Dad to come to terms with anything. This is a journey. I’m trying to find peace with Dad. He’s moved on, and you need to do so, too.”

  Griffin said, “Yeah, he has no remorse, no remorse.”

  That was the substance of my birthday conversation with Griffin. It was painful.

  Griffin is a ruggedly handsome mixture of my mother and father. He has green eyes and freckles and plays the piano and guitar so beautifully, all by ear. He’s never had a single music lesson. I love, love, love my brother. When I feel sad and alone, I always know I can turn to Griffin. He can always clarify the truth of our lives, because he was there alongside me.

  But Griffin and I have had a tumultuous relationship. We survived together, and for each of us, surviving meant losing pieces of ourselves and living with the scars. Griffin seems trapped in the unpleasant memories of his youth. At the slightest provocation, he tends to rant about what happened to us and how horrible it all was. I can’t blame him. I’m not suggesting that he forget any of it, but sometimes it feels like he might be reliving the original trauma with the same depth and agony every time he speaks of it. I wish he didn’t have to go through all of that. Griff needs to move on a little, for the sake of all of our kids. But that’s easy for me to say. Griffin is charming, sweet, and keeps me in stitches. But he is Ryan’s son, and a bit of a loose cannon at times.

  BY THE TIME I got off the phone, I was already exhausted. I wanted a different, calmer voice in my ear, and I summoned my own, relatively new inner voice. Griffin is an adult. He can find his own way. He will be all right, Tatum.

  Then I discovered that while I was on the phone with Griffin, Sean had left me a message. His neighbors in the apartment building were complaining about noise. Sean’s apartment had a bare wooden floor and he likes to sing—loudly. Sean has many great qualities, but I guess he got a little carried away with his singing.

  I called Sean back to ask, “Why today, Sean? It’s my birthday!”

  Sean said, “Look, Mom, I spoke to the building manager. I’m allowed to sing during the day. I’m not singing at night. But I’ll try to be quieter.”

  It seemed like a lot was happening in one day. Added to the phone calls of the morning, I was nervous to see my father that night.

  THE PARTY WENT off without a hitch. I was wary of seeing Ryan, but when he arrived, it was perfect—or as perfect as we O’Neals can get. He just came up to me and said, “Hello, Tatum.” I said, “Hello, Dad.” We stood there a bit awkwardly. Then he tried to make a joke: “Is there a way to get a drink here?” Because it was a sober party, get it? I laughed, and in that moment I could see that there was no cause for worry. Before me was a warm, congenial man who was, to all appearances, happy and proud, if a little uncomfortable about the omnipresent cameras.

  At times like these, my fear of my father feels unwarranted. Why did my anticipation of his anger eclipse the real scope of it? Was it because I had been so terrified of losing him when I was a child that I still catered to his whims? Or was it because he had been a different, scarier guy when he was younger? I believed it was both but more the latter. My father has always had a big, booming voice. Much as my father had mellowed, I still saw him as the looming, volatile father I had when I was eleven, and I still reacted to him with the same deferential fear.

  The party had been my first real attempt to assemble my L.A. friends. Since leaving New York, I had been making friends at meetings and reconnecting with old friends. It was never easy for me to make friends, and the jury was still out on some of the people I had assembled, but I liked looking around the party and seeing old friends and new. Patty was there, representing the sober, strong women I wanted in my life. Ryan had been a gentleman all night. It had been a long time since I’d spent a birthday with my father, and having him there made my L.A. family complete. I felt healthy and pretty. The food was delicious. Everyone had a good time. The night was wonderful. I felt awkward but okay. I was optimistic. L.A. might work out after all. What’s more, I was really happy with the way our first night of shooting footage for the show had gone. I felt so comfortable, I barely noticed the cameras. My father and I were tentative but trying. It felt real. For the first time in my on-camera life, I wasn’t playing a character. I was just being me, Tatum.

  Being Tatum meant acknowledging that I felt a tangle of thoughts and emotions: worrying about what we were shooting and whether it would feel right; second-guessing what I said and how I looked; wondering what I might be doing to my career; trying to shove pride and ego out of the way and be grateful that I was working at all. There’s no question: it was more exhausting to be Tatum than any character I had ever played. But I was happy.

  Tonight peac
e had been made. Tomorrow I would visit my father at the beach house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wild-goose Chase

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up full of doubt. As I thought about our history and the issues that stood between us, I felt proud of myself for continuing this relationship with my father. But the warm, fuzzy feelings of the night before seemed to have sharper edges in the harsh new light of day. Ryan had no real desire to revisit the past and face up to what kind of father he’d been. Hadn’t he made that abundantly clear? What could I possibly expect when I saw him at the beach today, and the next time, and the time after that? Why was I trying to pry thoughts, reactions, and emotions from him when they seemingly didn’t exist? Wasn’t this an exercise in frustration and futility? What was the point?

  When I had first called Ryan, after my revelation in the parking lot of Whole Foods, I was open to healing our wounds, but if it didn’t happen, I was willing to go on my merry way. Then we put the show together, and it introduced a new factor into the equation. We now had a shared commitment. I needed Ryan to fulfill that commitment. But I didn’t want to force us into a relationship just because of that. Nor did I want to force confrontation for the sake of dramatic TV. We were messy enough without cameras. I didn’t want to destroy the tentative peace we’d found.

  A darkness fell on me. I had lost faith in the reasons I wanted to reunite. I had lost hope in finding something deeper. I couldn’t see our future. In my head, we were back at zero, and this would happen again and again.

  BY THE TIME I arrived at the beach house, it was late afternoon. I made dinner for Ryan and me. At my birthday party the night before, Ryan had asked why Sean wasn’t there. He was shocked when I said it was because of him. During dinner, Ryan brought up Sean’s absence again. He was obviously trying to wrap his head around what had gone so terribly wrong between them.

  I said, “What did you do to Sean?”

  Ryan said, “I threw him out of the car.”

  “Yeah. It upset him,” I said. My father didn’t seem to realize his impact on people.

  Ryan paused, then he said, “That night, after we left the restaurant, Sean and I were on our way to do karaoke. I had never done karaoke before. But Sean told me he’d decided he wasn’t going to be in the show. I was stunned. He said, ‘Monty Clift, Brando—they wouldn’t have done this.’

  “I said, ‘True, but you’re not them and neither am I.’

  “I don’t really want my life on film—who does?—I did this to please you, Tatum. I’m a grandfather. The old guy. I thought Sean would be the strapping, handsome boy in the show. We could pass him the ball, and he could carry it.”

  Ryan continued, “Sean said, ‘I want people to see me playing parts. I don’t want them to see me as myself.’

  “I said, ‘We have another motive. To support your mother.’ But Sean was adamant. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Sean had been living in my house, in Redmond’s room. I’d made adjustments for him. Now he’d made this decision. I pulled over to the side of the road and said, ‘Out.’

  “Then you called and told me you hated me. I was the guy who was sticking with you, being there for you. If you tell me you hate me, I believe you. I didn’t want to work with someone who hates me. But we got past it, and I thought, maybe she doesn’t hate me. And here we are.”

  Ryan and I hadn’t done much of this in our lives—going back over a disagreement and explaining our perspectives. Though I still disagreed with what he had done, it was eye-opening. In his version, the behavior that had seemed so abrupt and cruel to me at the time now seemed to come from a place of love for me.

  I said, “I don’t hate you, Dad.” I smiled.

  LATER, DRIVING HOME, I thought about what Ryan had said. At last I knew both sides of the story, but my heart was heavy. I wanted Sean to be able to have a relationship with his grandfather.

  These two men, my father and my son, were so dear to me. The words, the explanations, were coming too late. All this conflict was for nothing. We were a family, but we had no idea how to make it work. Would we forever be breaking apart and piecing ourselves back together?

  Without a doubt, just as my father had his own version of the fight with Sean, he had his own version of my childhood. Surely it, too, was shaped in his memory by love and devotion. I knew that, at some Jurassic level of his conscience, he was aware that all I revealed in A Paper Life was true to my experience. If he didn’t have guilt and regret fossilizing somewhere deep beneath the surface, he wouldn’t have showed up at all those meetings for a TV show about our relationship, he wouldn’t be inviting me to spend time at the beach house, and we wouldn’t be in this awkward situation. If he was capable—on some level—of accepting that my experience was different from his, shouldn’t I try to do the same? The core of forgiveness is seeing both sides and, moreover, allowing both versions of an event to coexist. We had to make space for each other. How hard it was, to allow truth to be broad and shadowy and rife with contradictions.

  All at once, I saw that there was a reason I’d locked myself into a TV show. Just by nature of spending so much time together, my father and I were having actual, unscripted conflict and resolution. It was uncomfortable for me, but something I realized I needed to do if I wanted to break out of lifelong self-destructive behavioral patterns. When I was young, I was always on the defensive. I felt attacked by everyone. I wasn’t reared to challenge my father, as a child or as an adult. And now, I wasn’t supposed to bring up the past. I wasn’t supposed to tell the truth. On the other hand, to be fair, my father has story after story of how tough it was to raise me on his own. But I wasn’t that little girl anymore and he was no longer that man.

  My father was older. The loss of Farrah had a profound, life-changing effect on him. Death has a way of putting everything in perspective. He was tired of being angry all the time. He was the same Ryan in many ways, but a softer, kinder vintage. I was a little more brave, and he was more open. Added to those changes, the docuseries had a real purpose. When it came to facing the past, the show forced my hand. Through its lens, I would give him the second chance I believed we both wanted and deserved.

  When I got back to my apartment, I called my producer, Greg, and said, “Let’s go back.” I told him I wanted to return to the beach house to see my father as soon as possible. I felt it was important to keep the momentum going.

  Greg said, “Are you suggesting this as a producer or as a daughter? We want you to think like a daughter. How do you, as a daughter, feel about going back there? Are you inspired?”

  I thought for a long moment, and said yes. The simplest reason was that Ryan was happy to see me. But the bigger reason was that I had turned a corner. I was ready to dig deeper. If it was at all possible, I wanted to help my father take responsibility for his life. My father thought that life just happened to him. He never felt like he was calling the shots. His children happened to him. My mother fell apart; that happened to him. The ups and downs of his career happened to him. Our show was happening to him. In his mind, all of his behavior was a response to the bad things that happened to him. Consequently, he didn’t feel responsible for any of his actions. I understood his fear of exposure in the course of making the show, but I was determined to be gentle and respectful, while urging him to take ownership of his past, present, and future. I had come a long way in the month since Sean’s birthday, when I thought my attempt to find a new relationship with Ryan was over. I wanted to go back to the beach house. I wanted to talk. Complacency—acceptance of the status quo—wasn’t enough for me.

  I texted Ryan and made plans to come, with the cameras, and stay for the whole weekend.

  Part II

  Regret and Hope

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Man Behind the Curtain

  THE NEXT SATURDAY morning at the beach house, the film crew arrived at ten o’clock. I had been awake for a while, but there was no sign of Ryan. An hour passed. I left the cameras behind and went for
a walk on the beach, past the actor Stephen Dorff doing push-ups on his deck, all the way to an outcropping of rocks. The beach was as glorious as ever.

  It has always been hard for me to have a broad perspective on my life. I was trained to survive the moment. Now I was my own master. I made my own choices. But I still had to wait for my oversleeping father on this windy Malibu morning. When would my life truly be my own? I turned around and headed back to the house, thinking these thoughts.

  At the house, Ryan finally emerged from his bedroom. He gestured from the top landing of the stairs for me to come up. I did, and I changed into sweat clothes so I could ride the exercise bike while we talked and the cameras ran.

  Today, Ryan was in the mood to read to me from one of his journals. He has journals dating back to the seventies. The part that he read didn’t go deep and was his story, not mine. So I cycled in place, going nowhere, listening to Ryan read from his journal and its description of the rosy world that he chose to preserve. We sure remembered things differently—that was clear. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I got off the bike and went to get ready for an event that evening. It was a dinner for people who’d donated to Hollywood Arts, an arts academy for at-risk young people. I was scheduled to present an award to Howard Samuels, a friend who is a cofounder and director of the Wonderland Center—a rehab for the stars.

  PATTY WAS GOING to the event with me. She came over beforehand and we watched a beautiful sunset over the beach, then headed to Hollywood. The event was being held at Raleigh Studios.