Both of Us (20 page)

It’s as if they were writing about Redmond. At eighteen, just a few years after Casa by the Sea, under another court order and on the heels of having been remanded to several other facilities in between, Redmond will enter the Betty Ford Center. Farrah and I were optimistic. This was the Betty Ford Center, for God’s sake. We knew its record of success. In our case, our child would go in a pot smoker and occasional pill popper, and come out a heroin addict. He met a girl there who got him hooked on the stuff. The point I’m trying to make is that Farrah and I, like so many other parents in the same impossible situation, wanted desperately to believe in the merits of the system. It’s contradictory that what starts out as your greatest fear, the sentencing of your
child, ends up being your last hope. When you have failed, you pray the experts have some magic to work. That doesn’t mean we as parents are absolved of culpability. It’s our job to protect our children and prepare them for the difficulties of adulthood. Redmond always knew that his mom and dad would never deliberately hurt him. But the system would, over and over again. Eventually the
New York Times
would do an exposé on Casa by the Sea, and the Mexican government would shut it down along with three other similar facilities. “See, our son was telling the truth,” I wrote Farrah in a note one day that I attached to the article and mailed to her. We never spoke of it again.

For years I blamed Farrah and would quietly seethe every time I thought about how my boy had been trapped in that god-awful place. I was so angry at her, thought she was just being stubborn. At the time, her sculptures were beginning to attract attention in the art world, and part of me thought she had convinced herself it was best for Redmond to stay there because it gave her more time to work in her studio. Now I realize that wasn’t why she was so determined not to bring him home. Neither one of us was sure we could handle him, and she knew he’d want to stay at the beach with me. She was afraid for him, of that entire scene, a lifestyle that, in retrospect, I realize may not have been good for any of us. She knew that the permissive teen environment in Malibu was exactly what Redmond didn’t need.
He’d run amok with kids his age whose parents were overly indulgent. I think it’s why Farrah, as much as she always loved the beach itself, resisted the culture of Malibu.

It took me a long time to understand that a world in which most adults don’t work is an odd place for children to grow up in. Most of the time we didn’t have the discipline of a regular job, that is, having to get up early in the morning, go to a place of business, answer to other people.

And living aimlessly ain’t cheap. Usually, when someone becomes a full-time resident in this oasis by the sea, they don’t have to worry about making a living anymore. That was the case for me. Though
Love Story
was a modest payday, I received three million dollars for the sequel,
Oliver’s Story
, a handsome sum in the early 1970s. This was before the Julia Robertses and Jim Carreys of the world were paid twenty million a picture. I also made decent money on other films:
The Main Event
and
What’s Up Doc
, both of which I starred in with Streisand;
Barry Lyndon
, which Stanley Kubrick directed; and, of course, there was
Paper Moon
. I got thoughtful, conservative advice and invested my earnings wisely. The returns have been handsome.

Though I’m pleased by my financial security, sometimes I wish I’d worked harder for it, taken risks on ventures I believed in, as have many other self-made millionaires. As John Houseman used to say in his famous commercial for Smith Barney, “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” When that commercial first came out thirtysome
years ago, I thought,
Why would anyone want to do that if they don’t have to?
Now I realize that growing something over time provides the satisfaction of good work well done.

Living in Malibu’s casual opulence has been a multiple-decades-long holiday for me. But it came with a price: it eroded my ambition, clouded my introspection, provided such a seductive distraction from the rude competition of Hollywood life, that instead of its being my escape, my haven, it became my confinement.

I remember the afternoon I bought the beach house. This was not long before
Paper Moon
was filmed and Tatum and I had both fallen in love with it. The house, which at the time was a modest cottage on the ocean, was owned by director Blake Edwards, who sold it to me for $130,000. At the time, I thought the price was exorbitant. I renovated the house in stages till it became my idea of home. It’s not like one of those huge mansions in East Hampton. It’s an open, airy, three-bedroom, two-story contemporary structure with large windows overlooking nothing but blue ocean and sky. In Malibu, most of the beach homes are built close to the shore, so no matter which room you’re looking out from, all you see is ocean. It’s like being on a houseboat. My favorite part of the house is the master bedroom. Off-white walls, chocolate-colored doors and woodwork, a large bath and dressing rooms, walk-in closets, the Andy Warhol portrait of Farrah over the expansive bed. I love to lie there reading, listening to music. And you can hear the crashing of the
surf. Sometimes, while I’m having my morning coffee, I’ll see a whale surface out of the mist, a school of dolphins, or maybe a seal bobbing past. There’s a large terrace and a sauna next to the bedroom. Farrah sure loved that sauna.

I have wonderful memories of this beach. Yet sitting here now, I feel haunted by it. I talk about home and family, but look at what became of my only daughter and me. While I’m not naive enough to believe all our problems were caused by where we lived, it wasn’t a healthy environment for an impressionable young girl, any more than it was for Redmond or Griffin, all three of them limited by their lack of a decent education. Tatum only had two options: marry a rich and famous man—and we know how that worked out—or continue as an actress, but Tatum was never able to make the transition from the appealing child to the accomplished adult.

British singer Amy Winehouse died this week. She was twenty-seven years old and a heroin junkie. I can imagine what her parents must be going through. And there’s still no guarantee with three of my own four kids. As of the writing of this book, they’re all still here on this earth, thank God. But addiction, like the devil, is always waiting for that moment when you’re at you’re weakest, and then he slithers inside and awakens that deadly craving. Patrick is immune to those temptations. I’ve never been addicted to anything either, except maybe Farrah. What is this hollow ache that has so possessed three of my four children? Is it genetic, a consequence
of how they were raised, the result of their parents’ failure? Sometimes I wish I’d never started this book. Who wants to face these types of questions, when deep down you suspect you already know the answers.

Looking back, I think that’s why Farrah became engrossed in her art. Everything in her life had become tentative except her art, which she could physically grasp and hold on to. It gave her comfort and relief because she had charge of it. I now realize it’s how she survived our ordeal with Redmond. She poured all her pain into her sculpting the way Judy Garland channeled every hurt through her songs. It was their release, their strength. And Farrah’s art was beginning to generate serious attention. A talented young sculptor who was a fan of hers invited Farrah to collaborate with him on an exhibition. Their joint venture examined the relationship between celebrity and fan, and also between projection and reality. Together they created a pair of sculptures: a reclining marble sculpture of her, done mostly by him; and a standing bronze sculpture of him, done mostly by her. They began working on the pieces in the spring of 2000. I’ve never had a passion for something the way Farrah did for her art. I both envy and admire it. The exhibit premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to rave reviews in 2002; Rizzoli published a coffee table book about it titled
Recasting Pygmalion;
and a year later the exhibit moved to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, once again garnering critical applause.

I’ve been rereading
Speak, Memory
, Vladimir Nabokov’s remarkable memoir. The author of
Lolita
both inspires me and makes me feel inadequate as I sit here wandering through my own lost time trying to recover images of people and places I adored.

Where were we in our story? Oh yes, the end of year one of the new millennium, when Redmond had just been released from Casa by the Sea. Farrah and I were in a fallow period, having exhausted our emotional and psychological nutrients. It was even taking a toll on my relatively bucolic life with Leslie. Truth be told, I don’t remember how I spent the Christmas holidays in 2000. The year before, I spent them with Leslie and her family in Minnesota. I went there with her a couple of Christmases, which were always delightful. I only know that Farrah and I didn’t celebrate the 2000 yuletide together because I found a long letter I wrote to her dated December 25, detailing my suggestions on how best we might help Redmond acclimate to being home and suggesting how we might make shared custody more manageable for everyone. I talked about possible schools, getting him excited about music again, a dozen and one ideas. It’s not an angry letter. It’s full of hope about the future, though once again, Farrah and I were back to communicating via letters and voice mails. I suppose it was to be expected after what we’d just been through with our child. This is how I ended the letter:

Four months later I won’t even be sure if I’ll see another new year.

I
t’s April 20, 2001, my sixtieth birthday, and I’m numb. I’ve just been told I have leukemia when Farrah calls. “You can’t die,” she says. “We’ll fight this together; we’ll beat this.” We’ve barely been on speaking terms. I’d actually started to believe her disappointment in me had turned to loathing. But Farrah is weeping and she’s never been a crier. That’s when I realize, this is lethally serious.

I can envision the headline, “Death Sentence for Ryan O’Neal; Life Imitates Art as Star of
Love Story
Diagnosed with Leukemia.” I’m scared and though Farrah and I are estranged, I’m not surprised by her call.

Nothing makes you question your life more than reading about your own mortality, knowing that for once, the newspapers got their facts straight. While my leukemia would eventually go into remission, thanks to a new drug called Gleevec, which was approved for treatment around the time I was diagnosed, in that moment on the phone with her, I could have listed a dozen reasons why she shouldn’t be there for me, and only one reason why she should: we were still in love with each other.

I’ve never been a New Age kind of a guy. Karma,
chakra, abracadabra, it’s all the same to me. But lately I’ve been starting to rethink my perspective. Maybe the New Agers are on to something. Look at my old chum George Hamilton. He’s been enlightened since Jimmy Carter was president. He’s also a genuinely nice guy comfortable with himself and the world. I envy him that. And then there’s Shirley MacLaine, who seemed to grow younger after she discovered her past lives, a concept I must admit I do find romantic. I wonder if Farrah and I were lovers in a past life. Those who espouse the theory believe that in each lifetime you’re given the chance to work out unresolved issues from a previous life. If that’s the case, Farrah and I must have shared dozens together, and they all began to align that spring at the dawn of my sixth decade.

It was four years almost to the day that we broke up, and while admittedly there were good reasons, there were even more bad excuses. Though I didn’t understand it in 1997, it became abundantly clear to me as I began ruminating about our love affair in the days and weeks following my diagnosis. Farrah and I each chose the excuses we thought we needed to flee from each other. We were cowardly, and now we had no choice but to be brave. My first valiant act would be accepting the inevitable with Leslie, whom I had grown to love. Ours wasn’t the soul mate version. Farrah always occupied that part of me. But Leslie was kind and her generosity boundless. As much as I wanted to be back with Farrah, it was still hard letting go of this appealing young
woman who embodied qualities I wished that my daughter exhibited. Leslie was with me when the oncologist broke the news. She was in the room when the doctors inserted this enormous needle into my spine to extract a bone marrow sample. They needed cells to confirm the type of leukemia. The pain was excruciating. I almost came off the table twice and had to be held down. They pumped me with pain meds until finally they got what they needed. I couldn’t walk afterward. I went in there a strapping guy and I came out in a wheelchair. Leslie witnessed all of this, and I think it got to her, not that she wouldn’t have been there for me through the long haul. She would have because she was caring and unselfish, but by then she’d met actor James Spader on location for a film. They’d eventually marry and have children. Leslie thought it best to exit gracefully, and I’ve always admired her for that.