Both of Us (17 page)

Yours truly in glorious youth.

I credit my mother for my father’s good health and longevity. She lived another ten years after my dad passed in 1996. She was his most ardent admirer and supporter. She proofread all of his work, and I
can still hear their exchanges, her offering her critique on a particular scene and his spirited response to her usually apt assessments. They were the consummate team, maybe because they adored each other. And what a couple they made, my mom with her petite frame, auburn hair, and blue eyes, and my dad, tall and broad shouldered, with his masculine good looks. He was one of those men who believed a woman should be treated like a lady. He would always open the car door for my mother, pull out her chair, wait patiently for her to “put on her face” for the evening, and then beam when he’d see her coming down the stairs.

Every family has its legends, and we have ours. I’ve researched it and can’t find any references, but this is the story my mother told me: My mom’s maiden name was O’Callaghan. Her mother was born in Russia; her father, my maternal grandfather, was from Ireland. He was a tinker and supposedly invented the electric heater alleged to have started the Seattle fire of 1910. Apparently, my grandfather needed to make a hasty retreat from Seattle to avoid authorities who wanted to arrest him for toasting the town, and so he packed up my grandmother and my mom and they decamped to Toronto, where my mom lived most of her early years. I don’t know if any of this is true, but isn’t it a grand story?

Though my mom would take on bit parts occasionally, she was a self-selected wife and mother, though she had a small but memorable role in
Rosemary’s Baby
. She was our
anchor and our nurturer. I also have a younger brother, Kevin. He’s struggled with health issues most of his life. He suffered two terrible brain aneurysms when he was young, which have limited his activity. He was an amateur boxer like me, not the best exercise for someone who has a fragile brain.

When I look back on my youth, I can’t help but wonder how someone raised in a stable and loving environment could have ended up making such a mess of his own family life. I suspect my parents must have had moments when they asked themselves, “Did we go wrong somewhere?” My mistakes as a husband and father are mine and I take responsibility for the painful parts of my life as well as the joyful ones. Our parents may set the stage, but we’re the ones who determine what our characters will do as our lives are
played out. It’s what Tatum struggles with daily. My parents instilled in me a sense of hope and optimism, the instinct to see the best in others, and it’s on me, not them, that my expectations were unrealistic. At first I was too young. By the time I began to figure it out, I’d been married and divorced twice, was still in my late twenties, and had three children. The trail I was on got twisted and I couldn’t straighten it out. The sad irony is that there’s a fallout from growing up in a happy home. To this day I carry with me some of the belief that all will end well just because it should. It was my coping mechanism when I found out Tatum had become addicted to heroin and was entering her third stint in rehab. Maybe not the best response I could have had, but when a daughter has banished you, what choice is left? Being a Pollyanna was better than losing all hope.

My brother Kevin and I in our prime.

This feckless sense of human nature also colored my time with Farrah. I kept praying everything would be all right between us, but by the end of 1996, our problems had escalated. Farrah and I were also guilty of a mistake many couples make: we both expected our mutual love for Redmond would be enough to get us through anything. We were relying on him to be our savior, and no child should ever have to carry that burden. We weren’t unlike the couple who get pregnant thinking a baby will fix whatever is broken in their marriage. It never works, and it didn’t for us either. Redmond’s grades started slipping again, his attitude worsened, and he turned to—you guessed it—Griffin. I loved all three
of my sons and desperately wanted to believe that Griffin’s efforts to change his ways were genuine despite masses of evidence to the contrary. I thought that if I believed in him hard enough, eventually he’d believe in himself. Farrah knew better. I wish I’d listened to her, but at the time I had on glasses with a rose tint. I don’t anymore. A fireplace poker shattered them, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We were discussing the end of 1996. Our little family was imploding and Farrah and I sensed it, but we had grown so accustomed to evading the obvious that only shock or tragedy could jolt us out of our foolishness. We would be hit with both. A series of seemingly innocuous events would precipitate their arrival.

We’re nearing Christmas. I’m in production for a new comedy,
Burn Hollywood Burn
. The screenwriter is Joe Eszterhas, whose list of box office successes includes
Basic Instinct
and
The Jagged Edge
, and Arthur Hiller is directing it. He was the director on
Love Story
, and to be back on the Paramount lot, working with him after twenty-five years, is a homecoming. Every morning I wake up full of energy, eager to begin the day. I haven’t felt this good about a role in a long time. The excitement on set is terrific and everyone from cast to crew is spot on their game. I want to stand on the hood of my car and shout, “I’m back!” There would be some serious chemistry off set too, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Making this job even sweeter is that I don’t have to be on location. The entire film is being shot down the street from my beach house, where, sadly, I’ve been spending most
nights alone. At this point, Farrah and I are barely living together. Our relationship has reached its nadir.

When I read these journal entries, I cringe. We had so much together, and we let it sour over everything and nothing. Who cares about a video camera? If she was having a bad day and had it in her head that I left the camera at the beach house, why did I have to contradict her? Why not just say okay, I’ll look for it, and if we can’t find it, I’ll buy a new one? I know what you’ve concluded and you’re right. If it wasn’t the video camera, it would have been something else. The two of us together had become a steaming volcano. There was so much hostility bubbling beneath the surface of our relationship that these small eruptions were our only means of releasing the pressure. Our only safe place was sex. But soon even that, the one aspect of our love for each other
that was never used to hurt or humiliate, would be poisoned. And in order to breathe, we’d both seek a fresh source of air. Ironically, I’d find mine on the set of
Burn Hollywood Burn
, but it would be several months before I’d inhale. Her name was Leslie, an actress twenty-five years my junior who was costarring in the film. A graduate of Barnard, she was a smart girl, attractive and sweet, a decent, God-fearing Episcopalian from a small town in Minnesota who didn’t have the complexities and complications that Farrah did. Her life was much simpler. I didn’t pursue Leslie nor she me. It unfolded gradually. At first I thought of her as refreshing youth, innocent without being naive, kind without being fawning. Then one morning I realized that the first two things I’d look for on the set were my cup of coffee and her smiling face.

When I wasn’t filming, I was helping Farrah with a video project for
Playboy
. The editors were so impressed by the sales numbers from her cover spread that they asked if she’d do a second one. When she agreed, they suggested an accompanying video to commemorate her fiftieth birthday. She came up with the concept and it was brilliant. By this time she was serious about developing her talents as a sculptor and painter. While audiences may remember Farrah as an actress, she was also an artist. She had always wanted to try body art, in which she would cover herself with paint and use her torso as the brush painting the canvas. Playboy loved the concept so I began working with her on the production of the video. It was an arduous but exhilarating process. Despite
the personal tension, she still relied upon my judgment when it came to her career. As disenchanted as we had become with each other, I couldn’t bear not to play that role in her life, and after
Good Sports
, I didn’t have confidence that she’d want or need me, so I was grateful to be asked.

Over Christmas, Farrah finds another cyst on her breast. Over the years, she’d had several removed, all of which were benign, but this one is in a more troublesome spot and causing acute pain. Though it turns out to be benign like the others, I was uneasy during her surgery, never imagining that it was fate’s version of a dress rehearsal. As we toasted the new year in 1997, I believed Farrah was fine and so resented the medical intrusion on our holidays because during the two weeks she was home recuperating, she was ornerier than ever. What with menopause, which had now been going on far longer than dear old mother had promised me, Farrah’s swiftly approaching dreaded birthday, and Griffin and Redmond’s growing attachment to each other, I should have smelled the sulfur. Krakatoa à la Fawcett-O’Neal was getting ready to erupt.

I want to stop here for a moment and say something. Yes, it’s true. Farrah and I did occasionally get physical with each other when we fought. Neither of us possessed the emotional discipline to say wait a minute, this isn’t normal, we need help. But it wasn’t the way the journalists depicted it. You have to remember that I’m a trained boxer. I sparred with the world champion Joe Frazier, and if someone is coming at me with fists flailing or feet pointed at my family jewels, my instinct is to block the blows, which is what I did with Farrah. Back then there was no YouTube, but if there had been and someone had shot footage of our skirmishes, it would have generated millions of hits not because of the violence but for the slapstick dance. I’m not trying to make light of Farrah’s and my tussles with each other; still, most of the time, I found her outbursts oddly endearing because they were so ludicrous, so childlike. They were also courting serious injury. I should have paid more attention to the signs that something was amiss, that something was building, growing, and might one day explode. It had been percolating for years. But I was bedazzled. I loved everything about her, even her infantile display of temper, which I associated with her being fiery and passionate. By 1997, her conduct
unbecoming was more likely to ignite anger than bemusement, and in defending myself I didn’t see my behavior as aberrant. Most men of my generation would have reacted the same way. That doesn’t make it right.

But there was so much not right during this period that how we fought was simply one more obstacle to finding our way back to each other. Another, which I’m only beginning to recognize now, is that Farrah and I took most everything too personally. We may have seemed as confident as Ken and Barbie, but underneath, we were unsure of ourselves. If she was in a bad mood because of a tense moment on set or a dispiriting article, and she snapped at me, I didn’t have the wit to stand back and say, “She’s not really angry with me, it’s that cretin of a reporter from the
National Enquirer
.” Farrah was the same way. She interpreted a lot of my bad behavior personally too, when in reality, most of the time, it wasn’t her I was lashing out at, it was my kids, the world, Hollywood, my agent, you name it. I’m a moody guy, as are many actors. I’ve walked out of the middle of my own dinner parties. It doesn’t even require a trigger.