Tatum O’Neal covers the latest issue of Variety. I didn’t realize that Tatum is in such poor health these days. She overdosed in 2020 and suffered a stroke, and five years later, she’s still walking with a cane and she has noticeable memory lapses. She’s 61 years old, and she has three adult children – all with her ex-husband John McEnroe – and she’s surprisingly close to all of them, even though she had major substance abuse issues throughout their childhoods. This Variety piece is, at times, a real downer. Tatum is clean, she’s been drug-free since 2020, but she admits to drinking alcohol several times since her stroke, like on Election Night last year (I feel her on that). Some highlights from this Variety piece, including her conversation about being cut out of her abusive father’s will:
Her parents: Her parents were both actors, and addicts — they were careless with her, abusive and neglectful. She was given alcohol at age 6 at her mother’s house, then endured years of physical and verbal abuse from Ryan O’Neal after he gained full custody of her in 1970. He punched her, for instance, after learning she was nominated for “Paper Moon” and he wasn’t. O’Neal, who died in 2023, openly did drugs in front of her when she was a child. “Pills and painkillers, cocaine,” she says, ticking them off on her fingers. “And then, of course,” she says of the procession of women who came and went from their home, “girls, girls, girls.”
Her 2020 overdose: Pills nearly ended her life in May 2020, when she overdosed in her Century City apartment, causing a severe stroke. During the lockdown period of COVID, while suffering from chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, O’Neal had been prescribed morphine by a doctor who either didn’t know or didn’t care about her addictions. Isolated, she remembers not wanting to be here anymore, even for her kids. “I love them so much, but I’d already given so much,” she says. “Part of me just didn’t want to make it, you know?”
The stroke changed her: “Now I don’t want to hurt myself. Now I don’t want to f–king take drugs again — I really don’t.”
Ryan O’Neal cut her out of his will: She never did get an apology from her father — in fact, his coup de grâce was when she learned after his death that he’d cut her out of his will. But he has given her something after all, something priceless: She’s now free from the malignant shadow he cast over her life.
Starring alongside Richard Burton when she was in her early teens. “He was brilliant — and the movie we did was terrible,” O’Neal says. Through today’s lens, the whole enterprise was utterly repellent — just wrong on every level. She had to appear topless in it (“I was horrified”), and says that Burton, a famous drinker, offered her booze and then propositioned her with the salvo, “Would you like to have a kiss?” O’Neal was always treated like a little adult. “‘Yikes’ is the right word,” she says. “I loved Richard Burton, but I was like, nah, I ain’t going to do that.”
She visited her father three times after her stroke: After years of bitter fighting and estrangement, Tatum had actually seen him three times after her health crisis, including a visit to the Malibu house right before his death. He had been in poor health for years, and she didn’t know that he was dying, though “he didn’t look well at all.” During her final visit, he offered her drugs. “I know he was drinking, smoking a lot of pot, and he was like, ‘Here, take a pill,’” she says. “I was like, ‘No, thank you.’” [Her son] McEnroe, who is also sober and intent on accountability, says: “She drank that day though. Every single time she’s seen her dad my entire life, something happens.”
She thinks Ryan cut her out of his will after she wrote her first memoir: “The first book that I wrote was just a f–king honest book. And that’s what got him.” Naturally, O’Neal was devastated to find out she wasn’t in her father’s will. Yet she soon felt a steely resolve emerging out of Ryan O’Neal’s final fuck-you from beyond the grave: “Keep it, motherf–ker.”
Sobriety remains a struggle: Her birthday, Nov. 5, was election night, and when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win, she began drinking. “I was with my gay friends, and was like, ‘I’m going to have a glass of wine — maybe two,’” she says. “And then I was like, ‘OK, damn: I have one day of sobriety.’”
The concern, I’m sure, is that it’s a slippery slope for so many addicts who have issues with multiple substances. While I believe Tatum when she says she’s done with drugs, if she continues to drink a couple of times a year, you never know what else she might feel like doing or taking when she’s one bottle of wine into the night. I wish her peace though, and I’m glad that she’s finally done with the drugs and that she’s managed to salvage her relationships with her kids. The sh-t with Ryan O’Neal though… he was such a piece of sh-t to all women throughout his life. What a completely slimy thing to do, cutting the daughter he abused out of his will.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Backgrid, cover courtesy of Variety.
