by Tatum O'neal
It was midday, but the December sun was pale and forgiving. We seemed to be in a safe zone, probing tender issues without exploding, so I brought up my teenage years.
When you get to my age, the best and worst moments of your life become a little like a greatest hits album. You’ve heard them too many times. You don’t want them to define you. You long to play something, anything else. But still, in a way, they shape who you are and how you are perceived. With Ryan, I kept circling that period of my life, hoping to get some kind of acknowledgment. I felt like he had to recognize how painful that time had been for me if I were to ever move past it into forgiveness.
For now, I asked Ryan why he had left me alone at sixteen.
His explanation was, “That’s what you wanted, sweetie. You were begging me to have your own place. I was just doing what you told me to do.”
I said, “Dad, I was sixteen.”
He said, “You were the most mature sixteen-year-old I’d ever met. You’d been to Paris, to London. You were an Academy Award winner. You knew what to do.”
He still believed that a sixteen-year-old was perfectly capable of parenting herself, or that was his best argument and he was sticking to it. Then he said, “God, I just loved Farrah so much.” He declared his love for her frequently, often spontaneously, but in this moment it was part of his explanation. Ryan went on to say that when he met Farrah, I made him choose between us. “How do you choose to be away from Farrah? I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You and I had been side by side for six years. I was hungry like a wolf for a love story.”
He stopped walking and turned to look at me with sad eyes. “It was a terrible time in my life, to be pulled in both directions like that. After all those years of taking care of you by myself, I felt like it was my turn.”
I disagreed. Just because a sixteen-year-old says “choose” doesn’t mean a parent has to accept that choice. It was hurtful to hear that his love for Farrah was what motivated him. It was like he was saying, I’m sorry I deserted you, but I was busy playing with Barbie.
But in his mind it had come from me. I had forced the choice on him. Hard as it was, I tried to accept that as his true experience.
Then he added, “You were sixteen, then seventeen, and you were going through all kinds of changes that I wasn’t comfortable with. I didn’t quite understand all this growth-hormone stuff. The boyfriends. Michael Jackson adored you. That was all right with me. But nobody else.”
This was my father, not the all-powerful god I worshipped as a child but a young man saddled with an adolescent daughter he didn’t understand. In his own way, he was admitting that he was simply overwhelmed, and he had bowed out. If he had to choose between parenting a tough teenager and enjoying happiness with Farrah, and he thought he did, then the choice was clear to him.
Looking out at the quiet ocean, Ryan said, “I was infuriated when you complained about me being with Farrah. We were a lopsided family. We were winging it. Just like you do in the movies. None of it was by the book. There were no easy answers. Suddenly, something came up that we couldn’t handle. You know how people always ask if you’d do anything differently in your life? The usual answer is no. But I would have liked to do that time over. Maybe I could have gotten it right. I knew at the time that I wasn’t at my best.”
This was huge. In my entire life, this was the first time Ryan had expressed regret. At last, he was admitting that he had made a choice, and that it affected me. It was the closest he’d ever come to taking responsibility for some of the trauma of my youth. A morsel!
Yet, as he took responsibility, he cast blame. Ryan said, “You were against my relationship with Farrah. You didn’t see it as the great love story that I did. To prove it, you left town, and when you came back, you didn’t contact any of us. Not even my mother, your grandmother. That hurt me the most. You walked away from people who cared for you to marry someone who didn’t love you the way a woman should be loved.
“And your hatred for me grew. With no contact, it just grew. I didn’t even get invited to your wedding. I never imagined that. When you had your first baby, I thought you’d see how hard it was and give me a pass on my mistakes, and then we could reunite. Farrah was all for it. She saw how hurt I was and knew it was about my daughter.
“When I made Paper Moon with you, I knew that would bond us forever. It was hell, and we came out the other side, heroes. We saw the worst and best of each other, every day, day after day. But I was wrong. You moved on and took no prisoners. I had to erase you from my mind, my heart.
“Where were you for twenty-five years? I try not to think about that. It’s too late. But I’m still healthy. Maybe we’ll have another twenty-five and make the best of it.”
I looked at my father and just said, “I hope so, Dad. Twenty-five years would be nice.” We had been walking for a while, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a recommended treatment for pneumonia. I was tired, and we were back at the house, but I went up the stairs with some reluctance. These were conversations that had never happened before. Never. I tried to recognize that as progress even though I didn’t like all of what I was hearing. I held my tongue, listened, and kept my emotions in check. He was only human. This was how he felt, and the only way to understand him, us, and myself, was to absorb his point of view, the side that I had never understood. I let his words crowd into my brain, where I would sort them out later. What I heard most clearly was that he loved me, he had missed me, he wanted me in his life, and he was glad to have me back. We shared those feelings. They were a foundation, and I hoped we could build on them.
Part III
Grace
Chapter Twenty-Three
Everything’s Perfect
MY FATHER HAD expressed regret for one of the pivotal moments of my childhood. The conversation hadn’t happened on-camera, but we had made it through tough terrain without disaster, and I had survived it without the security of witnesses. It was the sort of moment I’d hoped for when I began this process.
I wanted a happy ending, and I wish I could end with that. I wish I could end by saying: I stayed at my father’s house. He took me to the doctor. He took care of me. We ate together. We watched movies. We talked. I wish I could add: Now my dad and I are doing great. Our whole family spent Christmas together. Everything’s perfect. La-di-da.
This is not that story. This is a story of imperfection and strife. It is a story of struggle and redemption. It is not perfect, but it is real and true.
THE BEACH HOUSE was supposed to be a place for me to recover. All was promising at first. Along the way, that plan went amiss. The more time I spent there, the harder it got. I love the beach, but I stopped enjoying it. I thought it was because I was ill, but the truth was that it was not a good place for me. It was quiet and clean. The peaceful ocean rolled away in the backyard. But behind the big glass windows, we were all in our own worlds. Redmond was in his room. My father was in his room. And I was in my room, caught up in old memories.
THE DAY BEFORE Christmas, I came into the kitchen to talk to Ryan’s friend Marketa, who was helping him out with some office work. Ryan was unloading his popsicles and other items into the freezer. As I innocently asked Marketa a question, my father’s voice boomed over us, “Hey, what are you doing in here? This is my kitchen time!”
Kitchen time? I had no idea what he was talking about. I said, “Whoa, whoa. I’m just talking to Marketa.”
He came right up to me and yelled, “Get out of the kitchen. I’m working, can’t you see that?”
“Yes, Dad, I see that,” I said. “I’m out of here.” I went up to my room.
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES later, Ryan came into my room and sat down on my bed. He said, “I love you. I don’t mean to yell like that.” I believed him. My father has man rituals. It turned out that he really didn’t like anybody to go into the kitchen during the four minutes it took for him to put away his popsicles. He had a very particular way he liked to store his popsicles in the freezer. Th
ose four minutes were sacred to him. I should have known. But I didn’t.
Ryan said, “Tatum, you are too white. I think a spray tan would help.”
Ha! I said, “You know, Dad, I don’t like the spray tans. I think they look orange and unnatural.”
What I really knew was that the problem wasn’t on the surface. It was deeper than that. Then Ryan pointed at my leg. He said, “Ooh, is that the scar from the car accident?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “It’s not that bad.” This was far from the truth. The scars I had from the car accident to which he was referring may not have been visible, but they were very deep and lasting.
When I was fifteen, after a night of partying with Mackenzie Phillips, my friend Carrie and I set out to join my father on vacation in Big Sur. Carrie was driving the Jeep that I had leased for my mother. We were on the highway for a while, maybe I had drifted off, maybe I blacked out, but the next thing I knew I was lying on the highway. Carrie had lost control of the car and hit a guardrail. The Jeep tipped, the doors flew open, and the two of us were thrown out into the middle of the road.
The car accident and its aftermath were a dark, dark time for me. All the self-doubt I had inside—about becoming a woman, being worthy, being lovable, having a purpose—rose to the surface.
Soon afterward, Ryan moved in with Farrah, and the line connecting those two events formed a wall between me and my self-esteem, me and my happiness, me and my father, a massive wall of trauma over which I never seemed to be able to climb.
It was not too late to turn this train wreck of a life around, but the car accident had the opposite effect. My self-esteem was forever affected. From the moment of the accident, I saw myself as damaged goods, and I became the despondent daughter of Ryan O’Neal, who walked with her head hung down with the weight of loss and despair. I got stuck in the low until I met cocaine . . . and then John McEnroe.
Now, sitting on the bed, Ryan brought up my scars. I didn’t say, Do you remember that you weren’t there for me? I didn’t say that, or anything remotely like it. The way I see it is that if he admitted to being sorry about one thing, he’d have to apologize for everything.
Or this: he didn’t see any of it the same way I did. He said he had never read my book, we never talked about it, and for all I knew, he had no idea how hard it had been.
By mentioning the scars, was he tentatively opening a door? Maybe this was it—the opportunity I’d been waiting for. I could articulate my experience. We could begin to merge our different memories of the past. The cameras had been following me and my father. We’d taken some local trips. We’d had plenty of time to talk. But I had been holding back. I let him talk about the past in his rose-tinted way, without reminding him of the dark truths that came up for me at every turn. I was afraid of scaring my father away. But repressing the truth was taking its toll on me. My health was starting to deteriorate. I felt emotionally exhausted. Above all, I was tired of the endless denial. I couldn’t listen to his incomplete version of the past any longer.
A few days earlier our talk on the beach had gone well. Now I drew him back to my childhood. During the seventies, starting when I was twelve, our household was chaotic. To some extent, it was a broader problem during that era in Hollywood. Children were left alone. Their parents were out partying, or they were partying around their children and with them. There were no boundaries.
There were many issues to address, but this time I started with Gavin. The one with whom my father blithely still maintained a friendship. “Why didn’t you protect me? I was twelve.”
He said, “What was I supposed to do, Tatum?”
Only days before he had alluded to his regret, but that sentiment had seemingly passed. Not for the first time, I wanted to write out the words I wanted to hear and hand them to him. A script was what we needed—the script for the third act of the father-daughter play with a happy ending. Tatum, if I could go back in time and change my behavior, I would. I’d do backbends to create a new life for us so I could have your company and spirit around.
I wasn’t getting anywhere, but I was feeling brave and he, at least, was participating, so I kept trying. I brought us back to how he left me and Griffin to live on our own as teenagers. I’d listened on the beach when he told me that I forced him to choose between me and Farrah. Now it was time for him to hear my side.
I reminded him that during that time he had neglected some basic parenting obligations. “Dad, what school were we going to?”
He said, “You went to Hollywood Professional School.”
I said, “Dad, I didn’t attend. I never finished school.”
He said, “You didn’t need school.”
I said, “But, Dad, I had Griffin. He was getting into trouble.” The police had brought Griffin home repeatedly for car accidents, drugs, and other destructive behavior that showed the toll our lives was taking on him.
He said, “Farrah was intriguing.”
Exasperated, I said, “I didn’t live with her. She didn’t know me. How do you think I felt, Dad? Sensitive? Confused? Abandoned? It was a nightmare.” I tried to force him to consider my side. “You say that I made you choose between us, but it’s not like you brought us to Farrah’s house and showed us our rooms. You never asked us to come live there.”
I had been his favorite, his girl, his constant companion. Then I wasn’t anymore.
What I was asking for was beyond what he could face. He said, “I was saddled with you children. Sorry, Tate.”
A silence fell over the room. As we sat there I looked at his face, still handsome and strong. He worked hard to preserve that movie-star exterior. For all he loved the stories of us as sidekicks—me the scampish kid and him the ladies’ man—he had left because we’d outgrown that phase. I was becoming a woman, and he couldn’t handle my puberty. As an adolescent, I was a burden to him. That is what I had believed all these years and would believe until I heard different.
Whenever we reached this point, our needle got stuck in its groove, damning us to hear the same warped theme over and over. I wanted Ryan to understand how I had felt as a fifteen-year-old. But that was the heart of the problem. He hadn’t known what to do with me when I was fifteen, so what was the point of conversation, now or then?
Having this conversation with my dad got me nowhere. What I was beginning to learn was that I was better off not having it at all.
THAT NIGHT I spoke to Patty. In my 12-step program, the first step is admitting that you are powerless over alcohol and your life is unmanageable. Patty always said to me, “You are powerless over Ryan and your life is unmanageable. You can’t do anything about his behavior. Stop trying to change it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself about it. Get over it.” In the program, we talk about people, places, and things. You stay away from the people, places, and things that lurk at the heart of your addiction. On the exterior, like my father, the beach house looked warm and welcoming, like the right place to go when I was ill, but in it lurked every danger I knew I should avoid. Why was I still here?
My father had taken care of me while I was sick, but we hadn’t gone to therapy yet. Given our dynamic, I had overstayed my welcome. We simply needed to do some work before we could spend too much time in close quarters. I needed to let go of the past—if I stayed in the present, these small encounters wouldn’t feel so loaded. Besides, I was an adult. Sick or well, I belonged in my own home.
MARLEY, A HOUSEKEEPER who has worked for my father for more than twenty years, was down in the kitchen. I went in and made myself a cup of tea. I said to her, “I love my dad, and I love my brother, but I have to go home and face the music, whatever the music is.”
I wrote my father a note. Dad, I love you, and I'll keep trying, but I am too old to be living at home.
MY FATHER’S HOUSE is beautiful. It is clean and sunny. There are orchids everywhere. Most rooms have a stunning view of the ocean. In my room, there is a pseudo-weathered sign leaning against the wall. It
says: the beach fixes everything. Ha. I wish!
I gathered all my stuff, got in the car, and drove back to West Hollywood. It was Christmas Eve and I was back at home, sweet home.
Chapter Twenty-Four
My Own
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Oprah’s new network, OWN, threw a launch party. Peter Morgan’s boyfriend, Andrew, came over to do my hair. I was wearing a black (there’s a shock), long-sleeved dress that showed a little cleavage, a leather jacket, and shoes that my father had given me for Christmas. My hair was curly and parted in the middle. I had on drop gold earrings and an Irish Claddagh ring that I had been looking to for strength. I looked as good as I could on my best day. Andrew and I talked and laughed about what it had been like at the beach house. I felt lucky to have known him and Peter for so long. Andrew and I decided that 2011 had to be a good year for all of us. Enough was enough.
It was a freezing night. I got a call from Redmond saying that he, Ryan, and Ryan’s friend Marketa were downstairs, waiting in Ryan’s Porsche. I didn’t panic, although I know how Ryan hates to wait for anybody. Redmond sounded calm, and I felt confident and good.
I climbed into the backseat next to Marketa. Off we went.
The party was at Soho House, on Sunset Boulevard, not far from my apartment. Ryan told us that he wanted to get there right at dinnertime so he wouldn’t have to mingle during cocktails. He pulled up across the street, on Doheny, and stopped the car. He wanted to wait until it was late enough so that we could go straight to dinner.
