Ryan O’Neal says he has been so estranged from his daughter Tatum that he hit on her at Farrah Fawcett’s June funeral because he didn’t recognize her.
“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,” Ryan tells the September issue of Vanity Fair. “I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me–Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”
Tatum says she wasn’t creeped out, either. “That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” says the actress, who won an Oscar at age 10 for starring with her father in Paper Moon. “You make of it what you will. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.” Tatum had struggled with addiction growing up and hadn’t spoken to her father in years. Penning her 2004 memoir A Paper Life didn’t help their relationship, either.
“She wrote a book–b***!” Ryan recalls thinking. “How dare she throw our laundry in the street for money!…
Tatum says her father “has every right to be angry about the book; no parent wants to hear their kid saying s**** things about them… But what I wrote in the book was true. I’ve got a battle with drugs, but I’m a strong, independent person, and I fight for myself, and my father and I butt heads.” “When I was 16 years old, he and Farrah moved in together, and after that I saw my dad periodically, and that took a long time for me to get over,” she says. “Would I do that to my kids? No, but I don’t think Farrah was responsible for that. I truly thought Farrah was inspirational and beautiful and kind. Anyway, it’s past; I’ve moved on. I’m older now, and I forgive him.”
