Found

by Tatum O'neal

  I had grown up in L.A., and I thought I was returning to a place where I had old, loyal friends. But years had passed. I had struggled and grown, and maybe the simple truth of the matter is that, during my years in New York, I had grown away from my old friends.

  As I spent time with old and new friends, it was hard to know whom to trust. Did people like me, Tatum, or did they like “Tatum O’Neal”? I knew to watch out for people who were interested in me for fame’s sake. This became all too apparent when I started working on the docudrama. Some friends were overexcited, to say the least. Nobody blatantly came up to me and said, “Hey, I want to be on TV! Can I be on TV with you? Huh? Can I?” Actually, I wouldn’t have minded that. Especially if it might help their careers. I respect ambition. Instead, they insinuated themselves into my life, not-so-subtly reminding me how very close we’d always been.

  IN AA THERE were other complications that arose among my friendships. One of the hardest was when I noticed that I hadn’t been hearing from my friend Tony. I was concerned. Tony struggled with his sobriety, but he’d been doing really well. He was very involved in AA, and he was feeling good about it. He had been sober for almost ninety days. But I had lent him some money, and when I didn’t hear from him, I worried that he was spending the loan on drugs.

  I started calling and texting him, telling him how worried I was and asking him to just let me know that he was all right.

  When I didn’t hear back, I finally called his boyfriend. He said, “Tony’s fine. He’s just sleeping.” But somehow I knew he was lying.

  I said, “Put him on the phone,” but his boyfriend refused.

  THE NEXT DAY, I continued my campaign, texting our mutual friends to find out if they’d heard from Tony. Nobody had heard a single word. Finally, Tony shot me a short text: “I’m fine. Leave me alone. Stop bugging me Tatum.” Then I knew for certain something was wrong.

  I texted Tony, saying, “Here’s the thing, Tony. If you didn’t use, which is what you’re saying, then where are you? Usually we speak at least once a day. What’s going on? Why did you just disappear? Something must have happened. As a friend, I’m curious.” No response.

  I was devastated. Knowing that he was in danger and not hearing back from him was scary. Not only was I worried about Tony, but I also wondered about the friendship. It was hard enough for me to make friends. Why did I pick people who were unavailable? When I called Patty to talk about it, she wondered if God put Tony in my life to show me what it feels like when your loved ones use. Maybe it was a lesson for me: See this? This is something you never want to make your children endure again.

  Finally, Tony e-mailed to say, “I didn’t tell you the truth—I did get high.” After this confession, Tony, caught up in the chaos and drama of his relapse, started texting me like crazy, asking what people were saying about him at meetings. I didn’t want to gossip with him. I just said, “Whatever you’re doing to stay sober isn’t working. Is it your self-esteem? Your boyfriend? Your therapist? I don’t know what you’re planning to do differently, but something big has to change.” Unless he had an epiphany, he wouldn’t be able to stay sober for any length of time.

  My emotions surrounding Tony’s relapse were split. While having a friend in jeopardy upset me, of course, the opportunity to support him made me feel proud and capable. That feeling inspired me to keep fighting in order to be strong for him—and any other friends who decided to come back to sobriety and wanted help doing so. If they wanted to jump on my lifeboat, I was right there, but I was not going down with them.

  When I told Patty what was going on, she suggested that I take a thirty-day break from Tony until he got himself better. I needed to have clearly defined relationships. I didn’t want to be sucked into the world of relapse, which is full of lies and deceit. But Patty’s recommendation wasn’t just for the sake of protecting me. It was important to show Tony that if he couldn’t stay sober, he couldn’t be part of my life. Tony was a successful businessman and a compelling guy. It was easy for him to convince me and everyone else around him that he was dedicated to his sobriety, but, as we all knew, he’d been relapsing every three to six months for the last five years. In a 12-step program, where there are people who have been sober for twenty to thirty years, there isn’t much tolerance for people who continually take from the program without ever giving back to it. Someone who relapses chronically starts to feel like a burden. Maybe it would help Tony to see that if he continued to do this, he would eventually exhaust our support. He would lose all his friends. Tough love actually works sometimes. Much as we wanted to help him, at some point he had to commit. If he stayed with the program, he would have the love and safety of a group that was doing exactly what he was doing. Much as I wanted to be there for my friend, I listened to Patty, kept my distance, and prayed for Tony.

  Boundaries aren’t hard for me with friends—intimacy is. Even when it came to people I trusted, I wasn’t used to having them in my life. I didn’t have the ordinary habits of friendship that most people have. Much as I love Patty, I even struggle with calling and engaging with her as much as I could. I have trouble answering the simplest questions. If she asks how I am (and Patty isn’t just being polite—she really means it when she asks), I’m not sure of the answer. It’s difficult for me to know exactly how I feel. How am I? Am I good? I think I’m good. In the past, when I didn’t feel good, my father insisted that I was fine. Maybe I should have been fine. But I know that life and friendships can grow and thrive in spite of such self-doubt and hesitation. I feel grateful to have Patty in my life and to know that I can turn to her, and most of the time, I do.

  I wanted to connect with people who challenged themselves and always tried to move forward. I’d found wonderful support from friends at my meetings, but I still imagined myself surrounded by a pack of strong, awesome women, preferably women who had had children, women who wanted to work, women who were ambitious and funny, women who didn’t feel sorry for themselves. I finally felt ready, and it was getting easier to connect, but I was busy with the show, and it was hard to make time. I had Emily, Patty, and a few other trusted and fun confidantes. For now, that was enough.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The New Generation

  WITH HIS FIRST job behind him, Sean turned all his energy back to his true goal: acting. When Sean was in high school, I took him to plays like Doubt, Pillow Man, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Seeing those plays, Sean connected to the actors. He started reading about Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, William Holden, and James Dean, as well as the director Elia Kazan; he watched every one of their films more than once. These were his heroes, and he wanted to follow in their footsteps. Sean had been bitten by the acting bug.

  Sean’s dedication is really quite extraordinary—more focused and serious than mine ever was. For me, acting was a way to escape school. Beyond that, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn’t know that every director wouldn’t be like Peter Bogdanovich, saying, “Hey, Tatesky, when you look at that guy, look at him like this.” I came to grips with that on my second movie, Bad News Bears, when the director didn’t act out the scenes for me. As I matured, it dawned on me that acting was a vocation, not just a get-out-of-school-free card. Could I do it? Did I want to? Eventually, I went to New York to figure out if I wanted to be an actor as an adult. But Sean made an informed decision after completing high school and college. He chose acting as a young man. He would have a very different experience, and I looked forward to that for him.

  Being a twenty-three-year-old would-be actor in Los Angeles is not the most straightforward career choice in the world. So, at the same time as I tried to support Sean’s efforts, I urged him to get a job in order to support himself. I tried to let him know that the day might come when I would stop helping him pay the bills.

  I heard about all the details of Sean’s efforts to break into the industry, but so far no work had materialized. I myself had never broken into the industry th
e hard way, so all I could do was place my hope alongside Sean’s and try to come up with ideas where I could.

  One day I came home after a day of writing, working on the show, and going to the gym. I was in desperate need of a nap. Just as I was drifting off, I heard Sean’s key in the door. He sat down on my bed and said, “Mom, I had a fender bender.” I sat up. He looked fine and quickly reassured me that nobody was hurt.

  The woman had taken a picture of the license plate with her cell phone. The car was registered to me. I envisioned the cops coming to the door at any moment. As I sat there trying to wrap my head around that, Sean’s phone rang. It was his manager. He had an audition for Law & Order.

  This was good news, but Sean was dumbfounded by the combination of good and bad events. When he hung up the phone, his face turned bright red. He was heading for what he calls a Level Ten Tantrum. It’s not easy to be John McEnroe’s son and Ryan O’Neal’s grandson. Sean inherited some of his father’s perfectionist tendencies and his inability to lose at anything. He has a tendency to blow up before thinking a situation through. And then there’s what Sean gets from me. I am no shrinking violet, and I have a temper. So Sean, from the get-go, had TNT in his DNA. If undirected and undisciplined, that can lead to total disaster. But, in our family at least, success has gone hand in hand with force of personality. If channeled correctly, it can lead to total greatness.

  The first part I ever auditioned for was in Urban Cowboy. I was auditioning for the part Debra Winger would play, and at fifteen I was young for it. At the time, I was living in a house on Beverly Grove, up above Beverly Hills, with Ryan and Griffin. I wasn’t going to high school. I had asked my father if I could drop out, because everyone else was doing drugs. He said, “Okay.” Instead, I stayed home, reading the books that my father and Peter Bogdanovich gave me: Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, The Catcher in the Rye, From Here to Eternity.

  Sue Mengers had been my agent ever since Paper Moon, but she had married Jean-Claude Tramont and was moving to Paris, so nobody was paying much attention to my career. The night before the audition, somebody (probably my father) said, “Tatum, tomorrow you’re going to an audition.” A messenger delivered the pages from the script, but I had no idea what to do with them, so they just sat in their envelope in the front hall, like any old piece of mail. The next morning, I put on high heels that I’d gotten at Theodore’s and a cotton skirt. John Travolta had just done Saturday Night Fever. Because I knew Travolta was going to be in the movie, and I wanted to get the part, I abstained from smoking pot that morning. At the time, I thought that counted as an effort at professionalism. I drove myself to the audition, tried to do what they asked of me, and drove myself back home. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part.

  As Sean’s stage mother I tried not to get overly involved, but I wanted to be there for him. I might give him a hint here or there, but I didn’t usually give him line readings. I trusted his instincts as they were and his ability to develop them further. Really, if I thought he’d be disappointed in what acting had to offer, that it might not make him happy, or that he wasn’t cut out for it, I would tell him. For better or worse, I’m relentlessly honest. Kevin thinks a white lie is appropriate if you don’t like someone’s haircut, but I can’t do it. I don’t know how else to be.

  I ran lines with him, made us dinner, and then ran lines with him some more until he knew his part by heart. The next morning, I sent him a text saying, “You did great last night. I’m really proud of you.” Later I sent another: “Good luck today. Let me know how it goes.” I meant what I said sincerely, and at the same time I was aware that these were simple phrases, the obvious words of support that a parent feeds a child. It crossed my mind that I would have loved to hear words like that growing up. I would have loved to have someone I could go to with my fears. Someone who would support me and give me encouragement.

  Sean would pay for the fender bender with money he had saved from his modeling days, but, sadly, he wouldn’t get the Law & Order part. Regardless, it felt good to correct the course with my son. Sean’s self-esteem and confidence were intact. That would serve him well as an actor. I was glad he wouldn’t go into his auditions with the doubt I knew so well.

  That night, when he finally felt good about the lines he’d practiced, Sean went home; I walked Pickle and went to sleep. Although he went home to his own apartment, it was like Sean and I were back in another phase of life, with me taking care of him, helping him with his homework, and seeing him through the mistakes a kid makes as he’s figuring it all out. I minded, because my own life was tiring enough, and yet I didn’t mind one little bit.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ryan’s Eyes

  WITH DECEMBER CAME a rare rainy winter, casting an unfamiliar shadow across Los Angeles. The show was still on a holiday break, and it was a good thing, because I wasn’t feeling well. After a week of what I thought was the flu, I took a turn for the worse and was diagnosed with strep and pneumonia.

  Then my father called and invited me to the beach house. I didn’t want to be sick and alone in my apartment for Christmas. Who needs that? So I took Pickle and Wallis and went to the beach house to convalesce—still, in some way, that little girl who wanted a parent to take care of her when she was sick. My father was happy to see me and—to my amazement—was a dedicated and enthusiastic nurse. He got food from the market and brought it up to me on a tray. He rubbed my neck to relieve my nausea. He managed the remote control but ceded movie selection to me.

  When I wasn’t hungry for dinner, Ryan came in with a steaming bowl and said, “You need two bites of turkey soup.” He spoon-fed me, just because he wanted me to have something in my stomach. I really wasn’t hungry, but I let him feed me anyway. I had endured so many years of wanting to be taken care of, of longing to be nurtured by my father, that this was a dream come true. After all that, it was the best soup I’d ever tasted.

  Most of all, Ryan made me laugh. As always, he talked to my cat, Wallis, as if she understood the entire English language. He’d say, “Wally, come and eat. No, don’t go that way, come this way. No, Wally, the food isn’t in the bathroom. Come and get on my lap. Good, Wally, good.” And, like a little kid, he was clearly dying to tell me what he’d gotten me for Christmas but trying as hard as he could not to spill the beans.

  Although I could tell Ryan liked having my company at the beach house, he hadn’t changed overnight. One time my father was out getting lunch for us when I texted him, asking where something was. He wrote back, ALL CAPS, “I’M ON MY WAY BACK SO WHAT DO YOU WANT TATUM?”

  He sounded so angry. As a joke, I wrote, “Are you coming to kill me?” But when he came home, he said he was trying to type as fast as he could at a red light. At least we were making light of our problems—wasn’t that a good sign?

  IN SOME WAYS my father’s house is a shrine to the best of times we had together. On every wall, there are pictures of us and the rest of the family in our golden days. The original poster from Paper Moon, Andy Warhol’s portrait of Farrah. My father making a funny face at me, a toddler, as he does chin-ups in a park somewhere. Ryan and me going to a party, his shirt unbuttoned to show off his chest. In the seventies, my father took me everywhere with him.

  As we got ready to fly to Kansas and be costars on Paper Moon, my father had his first taste of being a full-time single father. I was eight years old. Now that I had him, I wasn’t going to let him out of my sight. I insisted on going everywhere he went.

  “Where’re you going?” I’d ask.

  “I’ll be back. I’ve hired a babysitter,” he’d say.

  “No, I have to go with you. Or I’ll run away. Come on, I have to go with you.” And so, not knowing anything else, he brought me along. I went to parties, to premieres, to concerts. I saw Rod Stewart and the Faces and fell in love with the guitarist Ron Wood. I got to see the Who and meet Mick Jagger.

  No doubt I cramped Ryan’s style. On the beach one day, we ran into Nancy Reagan, who wa
s at the time the first lady of California. As he was chatting politely with her, I kept saying, “Let’s go, let’s go! I want to play ball.” On Sunday nights, we went to the Playboy Mansion to watch the new movie releases. Ryan says I made absolutely sure that there were no Bunnies in his life.

  Before we started making Paper Moon, we went to a Christmas party at Alana Stewart’s house. (We had no idea at the time that Alana would one day be Farrah Fawcett’s best friend and a close friend of Ryan’s.) There was a Nicaraguan actress at the party who took an interest in Ryan. He thought she was stunningly beautiful. Ryan says I watched their interaction, then insisted that he take me home alone. Immediately. He asked why I wouldn’t let him have a girlfriend. I said, “I can’t help it, Dad.”

  He said, “You want me to be alone?”

  I said, “You’re not alone. You’re with me.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, AS we took a walk on the beach, Ryan himself was the one to bring up the one time we ever tried to go to therapy together. Therapy was the topic that had last thrown us off-balance, but now we approached it calmly. I went to a psychiatrist, Dr. Foster, for the first time in my teen years. At her request I brought my father to a session, but it ended with him declaring himself my savior and walking out in the middle of the hour. Ryan asked if that therapy had been helpful to me. He knew that Dr. Foster had told me to get away from him. I said yes.

  Thinking about therapy, and what it does for people, I asked Ryan why he had so much anger. I wondered if there was something about his childhood, or the way he saw the world, that I didn’t know. Ryan didn’t answer my question directly, but he said, “I’m not just angry at you. I’m angry at everybody. I’m a fighter. I fight with everybody.” I tried to imagine what it was like going through life with that feeling. He was a boxer in body and spirit. He was so different from my ex-husband, who restrained himself as long as he could until he exploded. Ryan just let out smoke as he barreled forward.