Found

by Tatum O'neal

  My children were out of the nest, and for now, at least, I was not trying to replicate that traditional family structure. But the moments Sean and I spent with Ryan, in the place that had once been my home, were happier than I had imagined possible. Life could not have been better. A brief golden age with the perpetual golden boy.

  THEN, ONE NIGHT in July, Ryan and I went to dinner with my then-agent, at an Italian restaurant. While we were chatting, my father abruptly turned to my agent and said, “You want to represent me?”

  My agent said, “Sure.” Suddenly, he was representing my father, too. Didn’t that muddy the waters a bit? I sat there, thinking, What about good old Tatum? Sitting right here at the table. Anybody want to run this by me? Boundaries, anyone?

  As we ate, my—our—agent said, “You guys have a good rapport.” He started asking if we’d want to work together, and if so, on what? In the past, I had had the idea of doing a reality show by myself, but by the time we were done with our entrées, we were all caught up in the notion of Ryan and I doing a reality show in tandem.

  I wanted to be in front of a camera again. Just before my marriage, I’d begun taking acting classes, wanting to reinvent my image and to be taken seriously. But then John came along. During the years of my marriage, the only role I played was that of a supportive wife and mother. Then there was the divorce, and the tough years that followed. With the exception of some indie movies, there had been a twenty-year gap in my career. I was particularly proud of the work I’d done in recent years. I had stayed with Rescue Me for six years. But I never stopped feeling like I had to prove myself extra-hard. Paper Moon had been a free ticket for me, an entrée into a career I was too young to know I wanted. Winning an Academy Award at nine years old had put me in an odd position—and I’d spent a lifetime living up to it. I was totally proud of the Oscar—but it was a little challenging to have begun my career at the pinnacle of success and then to realize that I would have to work my way up the ladder again. But I was willing to pay my dues.

  My arrest gave me the opposite sort of notoriety. It was a badge of dishonor that I wanted to overcome. I did the court-ordered rehab—two eight-hour class sessions about drugs and alcohol—which cleared the charges from my record. But as far as the press was concerned, I had been convicted.

  The notion of a reality show promised not only work but a chance to show who I really was—not the precocious child star, not the out-of-control tabloid headline, but a real, strong, independent woman.

  In the next few days, I talked to my kids about the possibility of doing a TV show—a documentary series that followed my life. I’d been offered a few such shows in the past, and they weren’t opposed to the genre. But when they heard my dad was involved, they didn’t know exactly how to respond. This was a gray area—it was unclear to all of us if it would be good or bad for me. So while they were generally apprehensive, they trusted me and believed in me. They knew I’d make the right choices along the way. They just wanted me to keep them informed. They wanted updates and downloads.

  It was talking to my friend Kyle that got me most excited about the prospect of doing a show with my father. He said, “Yay, Tatey! This will be good for you. It’s brave to take on something so personal and heart-driven as this.” Kyle’s enthusiasm was contagious. But as a die-hard fan of Dancing with the Stars and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Kyle cautioned me, too. He said, “Be careful. I know how sensitive you are. I want you to have a good outcome with your dad, but don’t do anything that might be damaging to your sobriety or yourself.” For the most part, Kyle was just plain enthusiastic, except that it broke his heart that if the show did go forward, it would take place in L.A. We wouldn’t be in the same city, and he wouldn’t be able to color my hair for it!

  Now that my father and I were a family again, would we really have a chance to work together again, too? I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Within days of that dinner with my agent, Ryan and I had meetings with several different production companies. It was on. It happened so fast I couldn’t help wondering if my agent had planned it all in advance and maneuvered things so we would believe it was merely a spontaneous inspiration. No matter. The Hollywood train had left the station and we were on board.

  Chapter Seven

  The Storm After the Calm

  DURING JUNE AND July, Ryan and I spent a lot of time together at the beach house and had meetings about the show. We were getting reacquainted. Spending so much time together, my father and I didn’t suddenly develop the ability to talk openly about our thoughts or feelings. We certainly didn’t talk about the past or attempt to resolve any of our issues. We were both much older than the last time we’d had any kind of relationship, and it felt as though, with Sean as a connector, we were slowly, carefully forging a new family dynamic.

  In August, Sean left the beach house to spend six weeks in Ireland as part of a theater group. One day, he was walking along a moor, and he climbed into a tree—presumably, to have a poetic moment, my whimsical child. Somehow, he fell out of the tree and tore a tendon. When he returned to Malibu, he was still recuperating and could no longer play Frisbee on the beach with Ryan. It should have been only a minor shift in the beach-house routine, but it seemed to throw my father off in a bigger way.

  It became hard to tell what exactly was going on with Ryan and Sean. They started teasing each other in a not-quite-friendly fashion. Ryan chided Sean for forgetting to close up the Jacuzzi. “Why can’t he shut the lid?” he would mutter. Then he’d complain that Sean stayed in the bath or Jacuzzi for too long. Sean imitated my dad saying “Goddammit” in a gruff, angry voice. And Ryan caricatured Sean’s long arms, dangling them from his shoulders as he walked. Then Ryan started being curt with Sean, yelling, “Don’t do that!” Or, when Sean was wearing his headphones, Ryan would say, “What’s he doing in there alone listening to music all day?”

  Then my father closed his door. His upstairs bedroom is the gathering place in that house, where we all hung out to watch TV and eat dinner off trays. Now Ryan shut the door. If Sean knocked, he shouted “yes” from behind the door in a tone that said, Don’t bother me. When they crossed paths, Ryan looked at Sean in a way that wasn’t exactly loving. I can’t really explain the shift. Was it frustration? Was it simply challenging for a man set in his ways to have a young man around? Was he irritated that his Frisbee partner couldn’t pal around with him like he used to? The sun was setting on our Malibu summer.

  Ryan probably wasn’t even aware that his behavior toward his grandson had changed. I only know that Sean and I felt it severely.

  Sean is a pure soul, a sensitive boy. I saw that even when he was little. Before Emily was born, when it was just the two boys, I decided that my second son needed a little one-on-one time with his parents. Kevin, the oldest, was an easy child, and always seemed settled and comfortable wherever he was. Sean was throwing tantrums, fighting to be heard and seen, as second children sometimes do.

  We usually took both, and later all the children, when we traveled for John’s tournaments, but when Sean was four, I decided it might help him if we took just him to Wimbledon in the summer of 1991. He would have alone time with both parents—well, mostly me while John practiced and played the tournament. So five-year-old Kevin stayed at our Malibu house with the nanny, attending a summer program, while Sean and I wandered around London, going to Hyde Park to feed the ducks, building sand castles, counting double-decker buses. I had been right—all Sean wanted was to be numero uno for a little while. In that environment, without his older brother, he was a perfect joy. There were no tantrums. He was a cheerful little engine of a kid, ready for any and every adventure. This was exactly what he needed.

  One day, when we were in a pharmacy, the bobbies came in chasing a burglar, nightsticks drawn. Sean screamed, “Mommy, Mommy! They’re going to hurt the guy.” I comforted him and tried to distract him as they carried the man out of the pharmacy, but he was deeply worried about the burglar. He was the
same way about homeless people in New York. He always wanted to stop and give them money. He couldn’t understand why their lives had to be that way. Sweet Sean.

  I thought about that sensitive boy in the hands of my dad. I couldn’t stop worrying that any one of the traumas I had suffered would befall him. My God. He was not a hardened, wild child like my brothers and I had been. I was only spending weekends at the beach house, and I grew anxious about leaving Sean there with Ryan for the remainder of the week. If anything happened to him, how could I live with myself? I started trying to convince Sean that he needed to move out.

  “I’m not liking this. I want you out of there” became my everyday mantra.

  It was naive, but when Ryan and I made amends, I really wanted to believe that we could never be angry at each other again. Our relationship seemed entirely different and better than when I was a little girl. So many years had gone by without my dad. How could I have been apart from him all this time? I had missed so much. Now that we had found our peace, I thought it could and would never end. The fairy-tale ending was within our reach and I assumed we both wanted it more than anything.

  I should have known. Why didn’t I know? If I hadn’t been swept up in the fantasy, I would have admitted to myself that underneath it all, things really hadn’t changed.

  Now Ryan was going after Sean. I was much better at seeing reality when it involved my children. I lifted up the proverbial rug to see what else Ryan and I had swept under there. Weren’t we sidestepping the past at every corner? At one point, he said, “I’m reading my journals. I really wasn’t that bad. I took you to the doctor.” My book A Paper Life, which damned his parenting, was the 900-pound gorilla in the room (or, to mix metaphors, the 900-pound metaphoric gorilla “hidden” under that metaphoric rug). From his telling me that he had taken me to the doctor, I inferred that Ryan was defending his behavior in the past and denying all I’d written about it in the book, but neither of us was really ready or willing to come straight out and talk about it. He had his own reasons; I was simply terrified to go there and jeopardize our new, fragile peace.

  Sean and I conferred about Ryan’s mood. The grumbling to himself. The closed door to his room. He seemed frustrated with Sean, or frustrated in general. We observed the change, but there was nothing concrete to address: no actual conflict, no argument to resolve. Besides, I didn’t exactly dive into confrontation with my father. So we did nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  Down to the Wire

  DESPITE THE SHADOWY backdrop of unresolved conflict, Ryan and I had now settled on a production company, Endemol, for our documentary-style series. If we sold the show to a network, Endemol would be the company to put it together, doing all the planning, shooting, editing, and production of the final product. We all agreed that it wasn’t going to be a reality show. I see reality TV as titillating drama that is created for an audience. With the infusion of plenty of alcohol, reality TV shows feature women fighting, women wearing couture and fighting, and women with money fighting. Our series would be different. It would show our real lives. It would be the authentic investigation of a father-daughter relationship. Instead of calling it a reality show, we referred to it as a docuseries. I liked the sound of that. The first step toward selling the show to a network was shooting a “sizzle reel”—a short sample video that gave a glimpse of who we were and what the show would be.

  We filmed the reel over two days in September at my dad’s house. In the days leading up to the shoot, my dad and I were both antsy. Two months had passed since we first had the idea. At first Ryan was raring to go and wanted to start shooting right away. As the days rolled by, I saw his initial enthusiasm waning. In the days leading up to shooting the sizzle reel, he hurt his back, and I worried that it would all fall apart, but the night before the shoot, Ryan was in a good mood, happy and laughing, and I had high hopes for the coming days.

  The next morning was overcast and cool. Around ten a.m., the crew, producers, and others started arriving at the Malibu house.Ryan emerged from his bedroom half an hour later. He made a grand, Norma Desmond–style entrance, which he timed carefully, making sure everyone was assembled downstairs and waiting before he descended the staircase. Later he would explain that he did this as a joke that nobody got. I asked him how his back was, and he said he didn’t feel great and hadn’t slept well. I was nervous because I could tell he was nervous.

  They taped the whole day, shooting footage of the two of us playing Frisbee, walking on the beach, sitting on a couch in my dad’s living room talking. My father kept saying that everything was great. To hear it, the past was but a distant memory. Our relationship was sunshine and roses. My dad kept saying, “I lost her once; I’m never going to lose her again.” But I felt like it wasn’t real. The sunshine and roses weren’t exactly the whole picture. Wasn’t the point of the show to reconcile? And didn’t reconciliation start with confrontation? At some point, we had to start talking about what had happened.

  The producers were trying to understand what had caused the rift between us. What, they kept asking, had made the fissure so longstanding and painful? Finally, Ryan said, “I left Tatum for Farrah. That’s the rub.” The producers then spent the next six hours asking us every question there was to ask. I tried to offer long, thorough answers to what were pretty tough questions. Then Ryan broke in and said, “Oh yeah, also the fact that I wasn’t invited to your wedding, and I was virtually abandoned by you.” I started explaining to Ryan that at the time I had no control—that John didn’t like him, that I was pregnant and felt mentally beaten down by John, and that I knew that no one tells John McEnroe what to do, especially his pregnant twenty-two-year-old fiancée.

  Ryan accused me of never inviting him and Farrah to John’s tennis matches. “When you did come,” I said, “you left in the second match of the second round.” I explained that, as far as John was concerned, if you were a family member and you were there to watch him play, you had better watch the first match all the way through to the end of the tournament. John felt that it brought him bad luck if a family member left during a match, which my dad did during the U.S. Open, the first time he went to see John play. Afterward, my dad offered some lame reason that he had to go do something in Los Angeles. Whether or not that was true, John was so angry with my dad that he never invited him back to another match, which I now tried to explain to Ryan.

  Plus, I reminded him, that was more than twenty-five years ago! I got very emotional and started crying. The last thing I expected was for him to lay into me about the past. Was this what he was holding on to after all these years? Inside, I was saying, What about me? Do you have any idea what it was like for me?

  For the shoot, the crew had arranged the cameras in the ground-floor entrance hall, outside my old room. To access an outlet, the production team moved a couch. There, behind the couch, looped around the banister, was an old, forgotten wire bike chain. Halfway through the day, when I noticed it, a chill ran through me. I knew exactly why that wire was in that odd place, although I couldn’t believe my incredibly neat father had never noticed and removed it. This hallway had once been a crime scene, and the wire was evidence of the damage done.

  In 2007, Griffin had called me in New York and given me alarming news. He said that Redmond had been shooting up. Our half-brother Redmond—we’d always loved him and worried about him—was flirting with death. Griffin was driving a used cop car at the time, and maybe the cop car was infused with a justice-enforcing pheromone or something, because Griffin said, “I have a great idea. I’m going to handcuff Redmond to the bed for twenty-four hours so he can kick heroin.”

  I knew this was not a good idea. In fact, it was by far the dumbest idea I’d ever heard. I’d been a hard-core junkie in the nineties, and I was pretty confident that handcuffing a person to a bed was not only a bad approach to most everyday situations, it was also not an effective way to detox anyone. I knew Red would become super-agitated, and then God only knows what he’d do
. I said to Griffin, “Dude, I really don’t think you should do that.”

  Griffin didn’t listen. Determined to carry out his preposterous plan, he went to the beach house with his wife, Jojo, who was eight months pregnant, to “keep an eye on Redmond” while Ryan went out for the evening to celebrate Farrah’s sixty-first birthday.

  Ryan says that when he arrived home from a beautiful night out, he was confronted with the scene of his oldest son, Griffin, sitting in a chair in the hall outside Redmond’s room—my old room. Griffin had taken the bedroom door off its hinges as part of a complex system he’d rigged to restrain Redmond. Now, standing at the bottom of the stairwell, I looked over at that door. It had long been rehung, looking like a normal door in a pretty house, but I still felt like it was hiding its haunted truth, the ghostly shadows of that not-so-long-ago night.

  That night, my father came in, saw Griffin and his contraption, and then saw his youngest son, Redmond, shackled on the floor of his room with a long wire attached to his neck on one end and the other end attached to the banister in the hall. True to his plan, Griffin had tied Redmond up to force him to detox. Using a bike lock.

  Ryan shouted, “What the fuck is going on? What are you doing? Unlock him immediately.” Griffin refused. Ryan lunged at Griffin. Griffin, convinced he was the only person who would and could save Redmond, grabbed a fire poker and started beating Ryan with it, hitting him over and over. As Ryan tells it, he shouted, “I’m going to be in Bones. Don’t hit my face,” which to me is the only remotely comical part of the otherwise grim story.

  Somehow poor Jojo got involved, probably trying to calm things down. But in the melee, she got hit in the face with the poker, and her eye started to swell and bleed.