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There was not a cruel bone in Farrah’s body. She just had no notion of what she could or should do about these rogue children who were, to all appearances, an incidental, remote component of her relationship with Ryan. Soon after my phone call asking my dad to come home, he and my brother had an infamous fight in which my brother lost a tooth.

  Much as I had looked at Farrah with admiration and wonder, she had also suddenly and permanently come between me and my father. Innocent bystander though she may have been, I could never separate Farrah from that experience.

  IN 2006, WHEN my brother Griffin first told me that Farrah had been diagnosed with cancer, I felt somewhat distanced from the news. I knew it was terribly sad for my father, but I was still figuring out what Farrah meant to me: a mother, an icon, my father’s girlfriend. No matter what, I still felt terrible grief that she was so ill. I had really loved her.

  A year after Farrah’s diagnosis, during a break from Rescue Me, I was in San Diego working on a miniseries. Griffin, who was always the bad-news-bearer of the family (not to be confused with the Bad News Bear of the family), called to let me know that Farrah’s cancer was getting worse. It was serious. If I wanted to say good-bye, I had better go see her soon. It would be as much of a hello as a good-bye.

  I called Farrah to see how she was and to ask if I could visit. She said, “Sure, come see me.” I thought that was sweet, so I drove my rented Kia to her grand apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard, bringing food and flowers and all of my good thoughts.

  When I entered Farrah’s bedroom, what struck me first was how gorgeous she still was. I hadn’t seen her for many years, and, sick as she was, she looked more glamorous than ever. She lived and died a true beauty. I sat down on her bed and talked with her, saying nothing about our complicated history, just general, quiet talk about her illness and how she was fighting it. I held her hands and gave her love. We shared a mutual respect, and it was monumental that we were seeing each other, alone, something that had never really happened before. Being at Farrah’s bedside meant that I wasn’t afraid of my father anymore. I needed to show her I was no longer the scared and envious girl she’d first met; I wanted to show her the woman I’d become. And so we sat together, accepting the bond that could have been but never was. It was my last and only moment with Farrah before she died, peaceful and sad.

  In June 2009, two years after that visit, I found out that Farrah had died, from her best friend, Alana Stewart. Griffin, my news-bearer, had been ostracized after he and our dad had had that epic gun fight. Alana let me know that there was going to be a private funeral. I was on my way to L.A. anyway—the lease on my new apartment started the day before the funeral. But more to the point, I thought that the occasion would offer some kind of an opening for me to reconnect with my dad. It would be the first time in years that I’d see him without Farrah. I wanted to be there for him, and I thought we might find our long-lost connection. It was worth a shot.

  I called my father and left a message to ask if I could attend the funeral. Through Alana and Sean, I got Ryan’s okay to come.

  I WALKED INTO Farrah’s funeral awash in a mix of emotions: deeply sad for the loss, nervous to see my father. I knew that Redmond had been released from jail to attend, but that he would be in shackles. There would be a lot of people attending who were strangers to me, people from the last twenty-five years of my father and Farrah’s life. I had to be brave. I brought Ron Castellano, my ex-boyfriend. He and I were still dear friends, having dated intermittently over the past three and a half years. He had come with me from New York to help me get settled in my new place, and I felt very safe around him.

  As I walked into the church, I heard someone say that Griffin was outside, trying to come in. It pained me to hear that. What I didn’t know at the time was that my dad had forbidden Griffin from attending the funeral. It was just like Griffin to show up regardless. He has never cared about how he’s perceived. I don’t judge him, or any of my brothers, for whatever ways they’ve found to survive. In some way maybe I was the luckiest, because I had A Paper Moon and an Oscar to buoy me along; Patrick, Griffin, and Redmond didn’t have those tangibles.

  Gathered in the pews, I saw many faces I hadn’t seen in a long time. My uncle Kevin and his wife were there, with their son Garrett. I saw my half-brother Patrick. Dillan, Griffin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, had come in alone, while Griffin, his wife, Jojo, and their baby waited outside. There was Zetta, my former accountant who had worked for our family since the seventies; Ron Meyer, my old friend from Hollywood; Mela, a family friend who was Farrah’s hairdresser. Marianne Williamson, the famous life coach, was one of the speakers at the service. It was quite the emotional onslaught.

  During the ceremony I sat there, crying quietly. I thought about all that might have been. What I’d never been able to achieve with Farrah as a stepdaughter or even as a friend. All we had was that one short but poignant meeting on her deathbed. And, apparently, a long-ago trip to the dermatologist.

  Immediately after the ceremony people lined up outside to give their condolences to Ryan. I saw him up ahead. There he was, my father. He had his sunglasses on, but I could see that he was crying. He seemed distraught. Tears sprang to my eyes. Much had happened to me in recent years—a marriage, three children, a painful divorce, years of struggling with addiction and achieving sobriety—all major life milestones. I was finally seeing my estranged father, watching him mourn the death of the woman who had unwittingly come between us so long ago. It was a strange, intense moment.

  I joined the line to give my father a hug. I wished we’d stayed a family. I wanted to start anew, to build the relationship I always wanted us to have. I hoped to be a shoulder he could lean on.

  There was a breeze in the air that day. My hair was long and blond, and as I reached my father, it kind of got caught flowing across my face. With my face partially hidden, my father grabbed me and pulled me in. It seemed slightly intimate. I had no idea what to expect, but he said, “Hey, baby, got a drink on you? Want to get out of here?” Was it possible that my own father didn’t recognize me? It had been a pretty long time.

  I said, “Dad, Dad. It’s Tatum. It’s me, Tatum. Your daughter.”

  My father took a step backward and I saw the light enter his eyes. “Tatum. Oh my God, hi, baby. I didn’t recognize you.” Through it all, his tears were flowing. What a mess. How surreal.

  Nonetheless, we hugged and were able to talk, slightly awkwardly. It was a sad occasion for sure, but a reunion nonetheless. Circumstances aside, I was happy to see him.

  When I was a kid, I couldn’t have loved a person more than I’d loved my father—Ryan, Daddy, Papa, Dad. He was my everything—my world. When my father and I stopped being close, I felt like I’d lost a limb, like I wasn’t a whole person anymore.

  Now my dad was heartbroken. The love of his life was gone. Although he looked the same to me, he seemed more vulnerable. Meanwhile, I was healthy, happy, and living in L.A. I was enjoying the sunlight and the mountains and the sea and the space, the meetings, my old friends—and the absence of foot traffic! And jackhammering! To be fair to Manhattan, the L.A. car traffic was a bitch. Nonetheless, my outlook had changed. We had been estranged for roughly twenty years, but it was really thirty if you started counting from when he met Farrah in 1979. I had been through more than my share of hardships, and I was ready to harness them into something positive for my father and me. Would that be possible, given all that had passed between us? I wanted to give it a try.

  Evolving in the heart of this moment of reunion was the belief that I was finally strong enough, spiritually and emotionally, to find the beauty and humanity in the man, to keep the light, and to overlook the difficult past in order to have a precious future with him. I wanted my dad to feel like he had a family again. At this stage in his life, he deserved that, despite the problems of the past. He had an enormous heart. And I needed my father. I needed to throw down the gauntlet, to wave a peace flag. I wanted his love even if i
t came with limitations and risks. As we talked, that first tentative exchange, I started to believe that I possessed the strength of will and spirit to redeem us.

  We hugged, somewhat awkwardly, as we said good-bye, but I resolved to see him again. A month after the funeral I was shopping at Whole Foods, picking out organic fruits and veggies. As I poked at the pears, I thought about how we had lost Farrah, and I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if Ryan got sick. How would I feel? Would I cope? Would I question myself and my actions? Or lack thereof? When my mother had died in my arms, of advanced lung cancer in 1997, a lot of our issues were left unresolved. If Ryan were to pass away soon, I would be in the same place, wondering what we might have had, what I might have come to understand. Would I feel like I had given it my best effort? I did not want to live with that regret.

  I’d been to loads of 12-step meetings and umpteen hours of therapy, enough to follow through on the germinating idea of reconciling with Ryan. What did I want our relationship to look like as we both grew older? To ignore the opportunity was not fair to my kids. I owed them a chance to know their grandfather. Sean, who was still in college, had been spending weekends out at the beach with his grandpa (as he called my father, to Ryan’s chagrin). All reports from Sean were good. Grandpa has been great. Grandpa is being really nice to me. We’re going to parties. We’re going to events. I was glad Sean was seeing the part of my father that I loved. At his best, I knew Ryan to be a compelling presence. Authentic. Deep. Wonderful. Kind. Gentle. There is a charm about him that no one else has.

  I ran the idea of reconciling with Ryan past Kevin and Emily. Sean, who knew Ryan now, wanted us to get together with an eye toward patching things up. Unlike Sean, Kevin and Emily were mostly apprehensive, and with reason. They knew that when all three of them had been little, I had taken them to the beach house on an experimental visit to see their grandfather. There had been an incident while I was out on the beach—a fight that the children witnessed between Griffin and Ryan, during which a hammer was thrown. Alarmed, John had sought some kind of legal order that mandated that the kids could not be left with my father unless there was another adult present. After that the children had little contact with their grandfather, but all of my children had witnessed, from the periphery, the publication of A Paper Life. Though they hadn’t read it—wisely recognizing that it might be too much information—they knew that I’d made a damning representation of what my life was like. Kevin and Emily worried that the outcome I hoped for with Ryan now might be impossible.

  Nonetheless, I wanted my children to know their legacy: where I came from, and that they were O’Neals as much as McEnroes. My kids needed to know both sides of their family to be well-rounded people. If they saw me pursue a relationship with Ryan, they would always know that I did it for a reason: love. And if, at any point down the road, they found reason to stop talking to John or me, they would learn from my example that there was always a way to come back, to be brave enough to forgive.

  When I got to the parking lot of Whole Foods—an odd location for revelations, but so it goes—I stopped at the door to my car and thought, It’s now or never. I felt somehow that I’d healed enough. I was no longer bitter about how Ryan had raised—and failed to raise—me. I could forgive him for the choices he’d made. I was now a woman in charge of my own life, and I wasn’t going to let the past haunt me anymore. I was ready to make my move. I got in my car and called my father.

  Chapter Five

  Reconciliation

  FOR ALL THE strife between me and my father, there was a powerful bond between us. The happiest years of my life were the first ones that I spent living with him.

  As little kids, Griffin and I only saw Ryan when he’d come and take us to the pony rides in West Hollywood. When we were little, there was a fair on the site of what is now a mall—the monolithic Beverly Center. When my parents first separated, my father, having no better ideas, brought us to the pony rides every weekend. I rode Goldie, the same pony that my father had ridden when he was a kid.

  My dad tells a story of how one day, on our way to the fair, I was in the passenger seat and Griffin was in the backseat. I was three or four years old, and I was sucking my thumb. I asked my father why he had left us and our mother, where he had gone. To change the subject, he said, “You have to stop sucking your thumb.”

  I said, “How much will you give me?” Just like Addie, the character I would play four or five years later in Paper Moon.

  Ryan said, “I’ll give you a dollar when you’ve stopped.”

  I said, “How about half now, half after I stop?” My father gave me fifty cents, and I never sucked my thumb again.

  As my father tells it, he thought being a parent was that easy. Even though there’s something sad and sweet about Ryan trying to replicate happy moments from his childhood by introducing me and Griffin to Goldie, he had no clue that it takes more than pony rides and a bribe to raise a kid.

  My mother was a warm, loving person and a talented actress—who knows what she might have been if she hadn’t suffered the tragic loss of her immediate family at a very young age? There were major reasons for her addictions. But, as it was, she wasn’t able to raise us properly. We were struggling, scrawny weeds, with barely enough water to grow. My father was funny and warm, handsome and rich. I set my sights on him. Who wouldn’t? When he showed up for his weekend visits, I would start begging him to come back before he’d even left. The rest of the time, I’d wish and wait for him. I prayed for him to come save me, to bring me to live with him in his beach house.

  In 1971, when I was seven years old, my dream finally came true. My father rescued me and Griffin, and for several years he provided the water we needed to survive.

  Salvation wasn’t immediate. When my father first wrested custody from my mother, part of his agreement with her was that he would send us to boarding school. The place they picked was the ironically named Tree Haven in Tucson, Arizona, a school for troubled kids. Dennis Ketcham, the inspiration for the cartoon strip Dennis the Menace, had been a student. I took up stealing there, a habit I wouldn’t drop for a number of years.

  Ryan says that once, when he was on location in Houston, he took some time off to visit me at school and found me living with the infants—they’d put me there because there was nothing I could steal from the babies. (Infants at a school for troubled kids? I’ll have to ask my dad where he came up with that one.) When his limo pulled away from the school, I chased after the car barefoot, with a bunch of kids, like a pack of starving dogs hoping for a bone.

  My father had hated his own boarding school experience, but he assumed it would work out for me and Griffin as it eventually had for him. Still, the image of us chasing the car stayed with him, and when Peter Bogdanovich, who had already directed my father in What’s Up, Doc?, called Ryan to tell him he had a script with a role for a little girl, he saw a way to get me out of that school.

  As Ryan tells it, he arranged for me to fly to L.A. to meet with Peter. Peter didn’t want him to tell me what the meeting was about, but Ryan says that in the car ride on the way to the meeting, which took place on the beach, he said to me, “If you behave yourself, you can get a part in this movie with your dad. Keep your voice low and don’t tell him you know about the movie. If you get the part, you don’t have to go back to that school.”

  I wanted clarification. I said, “If I get the part, can I stay with you at the beach?” Ryan said yes. So I followed his instructions, got the part, and moved in with him at his beach house in Malibu, never to return to Tree Haven. Poor Griffin—for a while, he was stuck either at Tree Haven or with my mother.

  During the filming of Paper Moon, my father and I stayed in side-by-side hotel rooms at the Holiday Inn in Wichita, Kansas. We worked together for fourteen-hour days, and I had the time of my life. It was Paper Moon that brought us together and, ultimately, ironically, it would be Paper Moon that drove us apart. During the movie Ryan treated me like an adult, althou
gh he tried to keep me off the coffee. When I complained that all the actors got to watch the dailies every night, to review what had been shot during the day, my father asked if I could join them. Peter Bogdanovich declined, saying they didn’t want me to get self-conscious, but I knew that Ryan was on my side.

  In Hays, Kansas, we were shooting a scene in which Addie is waiting for her father by the train tracks. I found a stray cat on the tracks. I brought it back to the hotel, named it Alio (like an alley cat), and semi-trained it to go to the bathroom in the hotel bathtub. Every day I brought Alio to the set. We always had a full car: my on-set guardian, Diane; my tutor, Betty, and her husband, Greg; and Joe, my father’s stunt double (who had once gone to prison for kidnapping Frank Sinatra Jr.). Invariably, the cat would defecate in the car. All the grown-ups would make a fuss, but my dad paid them no mind. He let me keep my ill-trained pet and bring it home with me to Malibu.

  Ryan recalls that at the start of filming I stumbled over my lines, but by the end, if I made a mistake, I’d say, “Don’t cut. Give me the cue. I’ll do it again.” He remembers that time with pride—watching the actor in me emerge.

  Ryan explains my ongoing movie career as the result of purely mercenary motives on my part. He remembers my saying, “You know what I’m going to do with my sixty thousand dollars from Paper Moon? I’m going to raise Thoroughbred horses.”

  Ryan said, “No, honey, not sixty thousand dollars. You were paid sixteen thousand dollars. You won’t get a horse for that.”

  I said, “But I won an Academy Award.”

  He explained, “You don’t have any money. Really. I do. I got 10 percent. But you don’t make money on the first movie. For your first movie you get paid the minimum, scale wages. It’s the second movie that makes you money.”

  There was a silence. Then I said, “Well, maybe I’d better do a second.”

  In those days, there weren’t many movies with parts for children. But an opportunity emerged around Christmas of 1974, right after Paper Moon was released. Ryan and I were at a party together, because we went everywhere together. There Ryan ran into some producer from Paramount with whom he had a beef. The producer had called him a prick over the phone. Now, in front of me, they sort of pushed each other. The producer spilled his drink on me, and I kicked him in the shin. Ryan says he and I were like two Gestapo agents shoving the poor guy around.