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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.

My dad ran up the stairs and got his gun. My father had always owned a gun. I'd played with it when I was a kid, and once Griffin, at five years old, got into Dad's bullets, throwing them into the fireplace and watching them ricochet around the room. But I'd never seen Ryan himself take it out or known him to use it.

Ryan fired a warning shot. Ryan says that he intentionally missed Griffin, that he fired the shot to scare Griffin off, but Griffin ran to the phone, called 911 (the best decision anyone made that night), and told the dispatcher that Ryan O'Neal was shooting at him and that he needed help. Moments later, the cops showed up and took my dad away. Griffin didn't get arrested, just my dad. Maybe Griffin's used police car bought him credibility. What a sad, ugly night!

The wire now coiled at my feet represented all the misplaced love and violence that clashed that night. It was the sad symbol of an unmanageable life. Gunfights and drugs and chains.
Why was my family doing this to one another? A lot of pain and misery, and for what? Why was there violence and anger where there should have been nurturing and love? We just wanted to survive, me and my brothers. What had we done that was so bad? Why did we have to be born, really? Why was I here? For everything to be destroyed around me? Where was the love that people are supposed to have for one another?

As Ryan was being taken away, he says he saw Griffin standing in the doorway of the house. In Ryan's memory, which seemed to find the cinematic resonance in any story, Griffin, like a big-screen villain, hurled the poker into the bushes and stood on the threshold to watch Ryan go, arms crossed, victorious.

As far as I know, after Ryan was taken away, Griffin drove Jojo to the hospital. She had almost lost an eye. Later, Griffin would try to press charges on Ryan for her injury, but it was unclear who exactly hit her, so the case was dropped. As for Redmond, he was left in the house, no longer bound but all alone at the grim scene of the crime.

Soon after the fight Griffin called me. He said, “Dude, something bad happened. Dad just got taken away in a police car. He was trying to kill me with his gun.”

I said, “Oh my God.” After he told me the rest of the story, I said, “I told you not to do that,” and it felt like a meager, ordinary response given the extraordinary circumstances, as if I were saying, “I told you not to let the dog out of the house.” What else could I say? There were no words for the shame and devastation. And yet, in a way, I was used to this kind of bad surprise. My mother had constantly threatened to kill herself. I was somewhat numb to such news. And I didn't quite realize how bad the situation had been until I saw it on the news. Ryan had been arrested. It was a big, ugly scene. I had to call my children and tell them, and as I did, I knew my ex-husband was sitting there, shaking his head, saying,
I could have told you this would happen
.

Griffin and I had been through a lot in our lives. I love him unconditionally, and I'll love him forever. Our lives—mine, Griffin's, Patrick's, and Redmond's—were a minefield, so full of anger and fighting. Although Griffin's good intentions are hard to pull out of that screwed-up scenario, what I will always understand is that our lives were not exactly fair. And now here I was, filming this relatively peppy sizzle reel with my father for a docuseries. How real was it going to get?

FIVE WEEKS LATER,
Endemol e-mailed me a finished edit of the sizzle reel. The narrator's calm, resonant voice intoned, “Meet the O'Neals . . . Like all families, they have issues.” I had to admit that it looked interesting. Wouldn't want to live it (though I had and was), and it was a little hokey, but it made for good TV and I was going with it.

Now we had to pitch it.