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  My first eight years in New York were spent married, being a young mother, traveling internationally with John. New York had done some good work on me. It taught me how to be forthright, to look people straight in the eye, to be a strong woman of substance and intellect. But during my marriage and the fifteen years that followed, I’d really never found a core group of friends.

  Sure, there was Kyle. He’d been processing my hair at the Oscar Blandi Salon for two years before we finally decided to go to a screening together. I think one of the first screenings we went to was Frozen River with Melissa Leo. For some reason, the theater was freezing cold, which made the setting feel a little too real, but we liked the movie.

  Kyle is a beautiful young gay man from Long Island, though you’d never know the Long Island bit because he took voice lessons to lose his heavy accent. He is one of six children from an Irish-Italian family. We may not have had much in common on the surface, but the more time we spent with each other the closer we became. I knew instinctively that I could trust him. Kyle would never judge or condemn me for my addictions. He would never turn his back on me. Part of the healing process for me was feeling unconditionally loved, and Kyle and I found that kind of love in each other. And, less critical for the friendship, he is a true genius with hair color.

  Kyle was a blessing. Beyond him, I had my social group of friends, and, yes, I had friends from AA, but true intimacy was always a challenge for me. There were few people I would call in a pinch, even when, like Kyle and Hunter and Perry, I knew they would be there for me. (And by in a pinch I mean plagued by the soul-draining darkness that has been with me since I was born. Isn’t that what everyone means by in a pinch?) Isolation is something I bring on myself without realizing it. I grew up without a family structure or a proper support system. I had no formal schooling and no peer group. There is a difference between loneliness and being alone, but I’m so used to both that I can’t always tell them apart. When I’m lonely, I don’t exactly notice and do something about it. Even when people reach out to me, I can be apprehensive. In New York, there were always people who would have been my friends, true friends, but, particularly as the series Rescue Me came to a close, I felt the pull of L.A., where I had stronger connections than anyplace else. Or so I thought.

  My oldest son, Kevin, was still in New York, which made it an especially hard decision. It would be tough to leave him. But my other two children were on the West Coast now. They were all too old for me to keep them in the tight cluster I wanted. And so it was time to go home to the sea and the mountains and to explore the memories. Good or bad, they were my memories.

  I planned to leave New York within weeks of taking Emily to college, so before we both left, she and I had a farewell dinner with Kevin and his girlfriend, Caroline, at a restaurant on the Lower East Side.

  I looked at my two children across the table, my oldest and my youngest. Kevin is tall—six foot four—with blond hair and green eyes, and my coloring. He lives with his girlfriend, Caroline, and their terrier, Nate. Kevin is deeply dedicated to his independence and making a life outside the shadow of his famous parents. It’s exciting and fun to watch him.

  Emily has snow-white skin with freckles, long, dark, curly hair, a round Irish face, and the sweetest spirit a mother could wish for. She is always well-dressed in her own unique style she likes to call grunge-glam. Emily is a caregiver, the kind of girl people go to with their problems, but as her mother, I can’t help reminding her to take care of her own needs first.

  Kevin and I had never lived so far away from each other. For college, he went to Skidmore in upstate New York, where it was easy for me to visit him all the time. We were all used to me traveling a lot, and it didn’t occur to us that this move might feel any different. Much as I hoped L.A. would work out for me, Emily and I both kept saying, “We’ll be back!” I figured that as soon as I’d earned the money I needed to put myself back on stable financial footing, I’d come back to visit or fly Kevin out to see me. I still had my New York apartment and no plans to sell it. As for Kevin, if he had any reservations about my departure, he didn’t say so. In the McEnroe family, they sometimes say, “The boys aren’t so good with their words.” Kevin is one of those boys. But my guess is that the reality of my departure didn’t hit him that night. It hadn’t really hit me, either. None of us felt that the move was going to be permanent.

  IN SPITE OF all the allegations and alienation, in some way, going home meant returning to Ryan. It took me a few months to find an apartment and pack all my things. All the while, my father was on my mind. My role on Rescue Me was finished except for the finale, for which I would fly back to New York. I moved in the summer of 2009 and set about reestablishing a life in the city where my father had been the center of my world.

  One of my first orders of business in L.A. was attending an AA meeting. I went to a morning meeting in Beverly Hills that I had gone to on many previous visits to L.A. As I took my seat and watched people filter in, I noticed an attractive woman who seemed to know everyone at the meeting. After the meeting, I saw the same woman talking with a circle of women. She seemed very involved and invested in their lives. I could tell that she was their sponsor, and I imagined she was a good one if she was actively helping this many women stay sober. I was curious. I went up to her and introduced myself. Her name was Patty. She was dark-skinned, with long hair and a va-va-voom body, but tasteful style. It was a summer night, and she was wearing a pretty cotton dress with red flowers on it, which looked like a vintage dress from the forties. I told her I really liked the dress. She told me a bit about herself, and then I said, “I’m looking for a sponsor.” After a brief conversation, we exchanged phone numbers.

  The next morning I called Patty, and a few days after that we met at her place in Beverly Hills to talk. Patty’s apartment was comfortable and laid-back, with a comfy couch, cats that meowed a lot, and a Chihuahua named Pepito.

  Patty asked me what I was hoping for in a sponsor. I said I was looking for someone who could walk me through the steps. I wanted to find a woman who would be interested in my recovery and life, but who wouldn’t be distracted by who I’ve been, or seem like I am, or the life that I appeared to have lived.

  Patty was around my age, which I liked. She hadn’t had children, but I could instantly see that she would focus on our similarities, not our differences. I recognized a very good, strong spirit in Patty. I didn’t get the sense that she’d judge me, or compare us, or feel threatened by me. She was open and caring, maternal and protective. She was kind but also careful.

  We agreed to give it a go, and from then on Patty and I talked on the phone every day. Sometimes sponsors expect their sponsees to call them. It becomes something of a power play for them to have a protégé whose responsibility it is to report to them. That dynamic doesn’t work for me, especially since my inclination is not to reach out for help, even when I should. Patty doesn’t play that game. We call each other, and it doesn’t matter to either of us who dials the phone. We’re not there for a power play. I’m there for an alcohol and drug problem. Finding Patty was my first step toward building a stable, sober life in L.A.

  One of the other early phone calls I made when I was getting my footing in L.A. was to my old friend Tony. Tony and I had known each other since we were ten and went to the same school. In our teens, we’d go to the famous old-school Beverly Hills deli Nate and Al’s, and drive around doing all the silly things that fifteen-year-olds do, blowing off school and going to the beach together.

  Growing up, we all knew that Tony was gay, but he wasn’t ready to tell his parents. He finally came out of the closet in his mid-thirties. We’d stayed in touch over all the years. Tony has a big personality. He’s funny and has a lot of energy, so he brings a certain amount of excitement with him to even the most mundane lunch date. I’ve always been drawn to people like that, and I do best, it seems, with gay men.

  Once Tony and I reconnected, we took up where we’d left off. He was
also sober, although he was having trouble staying so, and we started going to a meeting together every day. We had lunch and dinner all the time. I thought, Okay, great. At least I have one person here whom I know and can talk to, who is sober. Or at least trying his best.

  Over the next six months, I settled into my new life, attending meetings every day, going to the gym, taking my dog for walks, spending time with my son Sean, reconnecting with old friends and trying to meet new ones, and auditioning.

  Chapter Three

  Father and Son

  A SERIES OF events led me back to Ryan, but most of all, it was my younger son, Sean. Ryan and I had been estranged for years and years. It began in 1979, when I was fifteen years old and he moved out of the house; continued through the rest of my teens; and kept on during my marriage to John, who didn’t trust Ryan as far as he could throw him. Given John’s strong personality, it was easier for me just to have little contact with Ryan for most of our eight-year marriage, which lasted from 1986 to 1994. Most recently, the scandal that came between us was my publication of A Paper Life, which exposed to the world for the first time how Ryan had treated me when I was growing up. Writing the book was torture, but being on the other end of it can’t have been pleasant. Needless to say, my father didn’t call to apologize and make amends. We didn’t speak directly about the content of A Paper Life—my father claimed not to have read it—but I knew full well what his reaction was to the book’s revelations. He was angry. How dare I talk about our personal lives that way? I had always been warned against that—warnings so powerful that they wove themselves permanently into my young brain. He was and is a private man. Even now, with my father’s tentative consent to write this book, I worry about hurting and upsetting him.

  I didn’t intend A Paper Life to be an attack on Ryan, but I wasn’t surprised that he sought to defend himself. Everything that I described in the book Ryan denied to the press, and we never spoke of it. Since the publication of A Paper Life until very recently, I harbored anger for all that had happened, and my best guess was that he was equally angry at my having exposed it.

  Those are the broad brushstrokes of Ryan’s and my estrangement, but my relationship with my father is a canvas layered with years of paint in myriad colors—some harsh and sharp lines, some gentle and curved, some light, some dark. As new strokes are added, the overall tone of the painting shifts. No single stroke tells the whole story, but maybe some of the smallest, most muted corners of the picture can best hint at the whole.

  In 1994, I entered Hazelden for my first trip to rehab. I’d been addicted to heroin for several months. It was a very rough time. I wanted to be off heroin. But heroin was also the only thing that made me feel like I was meant to be alive. Ever since my divorce earlier that year, my life had tumbled quickly and steeply downhill. Heroin was the only way I had found to feel inner peace. It was the sole antidote to my pain, and yet it was ruining everything: my career, my relationship with my kids, my life. I couldn’t wrap my head around that fucking contradiction. Anyone who had been through what I’d endured, and found a way to take away the pain, would have to understand that I couldn’t let go of it. I had tried suicide three times without success. Without killing myself, taking the drug was the only way to endure. It was the best I could do.

  I spent Christmas at Hazelden with snow up to the sky, shivering my ass off, not knowing how I’d ended up there. I was alone and needed my family. What family? I called Ryan. I don’t know exactly what kind of support I was hoping to get from him. But all he said was, “Don’t blame me for the fact that you’re smoking the dragon.” The phone went dead. My dad never did make a habit of saying good-bye. I stared at the disconnected phone, listening to the dull dial tone, having a conversation in my head. Hang in there, Tatey, your dad loves you.

  Love you too, Dad, I said to the empty phone. And P.S., while we’re on the subject, the proper terminology is “chasing the dragon.” He was right. This mess was my fault. But it was hard to hear him say it that way. For me, the alienation came from moments like that, seemingly inconsequential brushstrokes that further shadowed already dim corners of my being.

  As for my father, he saw things in more black-and-white terms. He was angry and hurt that I’d chosen to distance myself from him in the first place. He did not participate in my rehab process and, eventually, I emerged. The 2004 publication of A Paper Life was just another black mark against me, as far as he was concerned. But it was a necessary phase in the healing process for me. I needed the truth to be told. Since then, my father and I had had only small encounters, fraught events where we never addressed what had come between us, and it seemed like that was how we would go on in perpetuity. He later would say that he erased me.

  Until: “May I have Grandpa’s phone number?” It was Sean. My twenty-year-old son, Sean, had met Ryan only a couple of times in his young life. A decade earlier, around the time my mother passed away in 1997, we had taken a family trip to Hawaii together when the kids were really little—me, the three kids, Ryan, Farrah, and their son (my half-brother), Redmond—and around the same time, we’d spent a few weekends out at Ryan’s beach house in Malibu. But for the most part, Ryan was a stranger to Sean and his siblings, a larger-than-life figure he knew from Ryan’s movies, from magazines, and from family photos. Now Sean was studying theater at Occidental College, in L.A. He was a third-generation actor and had been yearning for a connection to his roots, to the family vocation, to the O’Neal family in general. He wanted to experience the connection with my side of the family.

  I thought long and hard about the decision to make the introduction. I asked God to guide me toward the right answer. Part of me had always thought the kids needed to have relationships with my family. But, as my ex-husband had put it more than once, “No, actually, they don’t.” Fair enough. My family was fractured, a stew of drama, drugs, violence, and tragedy. Only four years earlier my father and my brother Griffin had been in the news for an epic fight that ended in gunshots and my dad’s arrest. Nobody knew my father’s faults better than I. But he was older now. I hoped, the way a daughter does, with hope against hope, that Ryan had changed. Maybe he would surprise me. Maybe when his young grandson called—this handsome, worthy young man who was so ready to love his grandfather—Ryan would rise to the occasion.

  My heart wanted Sean to find a strong male role model in Ryan. And I missed my father. Our good years together in Los Angeles—when he took custody of me and Griffin, and Ryan and I made Paper Moon—had been some of my happiest. Even when we weren’t speaking, I always felt his presence. He was the most important man in my life, forever.

  I did it. For better or worse, I gave Sean his grandfather Ryan’s phone number, a number I myself hadn’t called in years.

  NOT LONG AFTER I gave him Ryan’s phone number, Sean reported that he and Ryan had gone out to dinner, and that it had gone well. As I rebuilt my life in L.A., Sean and Ryan started spending more time together, reading lines, walking on the beach, playing Frisbee, taking saunas at Ryan’s house in Malibu. Even though nothing was explicit, it was as if Ryan and I were communicating again, through Sean.

  I was glad to hear how well things were going between the two of them, but I tracked Sean’s experience carefully. He didn’t really know who he was dealing with when it came to my father. That charm might give way to anger at any moment. It was impossible for anyone who hadn’t experienced it firsthand to superimpose the behavior I could describe on a man who could be so soft, so caring, so sensitive, so charming. Nothing was as real as when it happened, that tsunami of utter transformation. I wanted to protect Sean, so I told him what I thought he needed to know, but I also wanted to give Ryan the benefit of the doubt. I imagined in my mind that Ryan had mellowed, that the sharp edges I remembered had eroded.

  Sean seemed happy, and that was what mattered. He was old enough to know what was good for him, and this was a connection that he needed in his life. Amazingly, after all these years, he appeared to be
building a healthy relationship with his grandfather. I was back in L.A. Sean and Ryan were spending time together. Ryan and I were circling closer and closer.

  And then, on June 25, 2009, Farrah died.

  Chapter Four

  Is That You?

  THE MEMORIES I have of Farrah are fragments—the sharp, scattered pieces of a broken childhood. Harmless, even childlike though she was, I could not help but secretly resent her presence in our lives. I hadn’t had anyone acting as a mother figure or female role model for years, and the job requirements were minimal. Throughout most of my young life, nobody had bothered to care what—or even if—I ate. But in 1979, when Farrah entered our lives, Griffin and I were involuntarily emancipated. When I phoned my father to complain about his absence from the beach house, Ryan said, “What? You’re fifteen. What’s the problem?”

  Farrah and my father assumed I was an adult (I’d acted like one since I was nine), and that Griffin, who was a year younger than me, and I had no need for supervision. There was probably a housekeeper who stocked the refrigerator, but she must have kept out of our way, because I don’t remember her. We smoked pot. Griffin surfed while I swam. One time, the two of us drove ourselves to Big Sur, contemplating a more permanent move. But that idea didn’t last. Mostly, there was a lot of watching TV, feeling lonely, wondering what purpose we had on earth.

  When we did see Ryan and Farrah, it seemed clear to my young eyes that my father would prefer that Farrah and I stay apart. He admits it—joking that he was afraid we would conspire against him. Even in later years, his focus never stopped being on Farrah, and he found the idea that I was sensitive about that weird, even sacrilegious. How dare I? Ryan tells me that they once took me to the dermatologist for a mole or something when I was sixteen, his “proof” that they fulfilled parental duties, but I don’t remember that.