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Chapter Thirteen
On Again

I CHANNELED MY
anxiety about my career through my lawyer, Jodi. I was calling and e-mailing her about the situation with the man formerly known as “Reality Ryan.” If he didn't do the show, what was our backup plan? Could I carry the show without him? What would it be about? How would we structure it? Jodi counseled me to let go and stand back. She didn't think I should try to woo Ryan back to the show. Very wisely, she noted that if I did that, then when the show began, he could put it all on me.
Tatum, why are the cameras in the house? Tatum, why are there people in the garage?
He could quit an infinite number of times, knowing I would keep running back to him and begging him to reconsider. He needed to return on his own terms, to acknowledge to both of us that he was doing the show of his own will.

Jodi, who is a great advocate for me and other strong women, advised me to establish a new pattern of behavior with Ryan. She said, “Don't sweet-talk this person into something he's already going to do.” If I let him take responsibility, she was ready to bet money that he would reappear. But I couldn't see it. In my world, things fall apart. I try to fix them. That's what I do. But I took Jodi's advice. I sat on my hands and tried to distract myself.

Then, after waiting what felt like forever, but which was actually just three weeks, I heard that Ryan was in. Ryan, of his own accord, had called Greg, our producer at Endemol. When I spoke to Greg, he said, in his slow, methodical way, “Your dad said that he's going to do the show.” There was no announcement, no apology, no drama, no resolution. Ryan just quietly reappeared. Maybe this was how Ryan apologized. Maybe the act of swallowing his pride, showing up, and moving forward was his way of expressing regret over the quarrel with Sean. Even if he wasn't accepting culpability or apologizing, he was at least indicating that he wanted to let it go. At long last, I was coming to accept this as a kind of resolution.

The show was back on. Great! Or was it great? I had to shift gears. I'd been spiraling around the collapse of the show, and suddenly we were planning the first day of filming. Now that I had the show back, did I still want it? At the end of the day, I still believed that the camera would be our best mediator. As actors, the one thing we cared about most in the world was how we were perceived. If somehow my father gained perspective on our relationship, it would all be worth it. Or would it? It was a gamble.

I was hoping that Ryan's participation meant I was back in his good graces, even though I was the one who had reason to be angry with him for how he'd treated Sean. The last I'd heard from him was our brief exchange after his
Oprah
appearance. There were so many unresolved conflicts. I texted him to say that Endemol wanted to start filming on my birthday, November 5.

Silence.

My father had become an active texter. From the moment he'd started, he never stopped. When there was no response from him, that meant something, but I wasn't sure what exactly. Did it mean that he was annoyed that the start date was centered on me? Or that he didn't like me being the one to give him the information? Or that he just didn't like my birthday? Maybe, it occurred to me, it had been so long since we'd celebrated each other's birthday that he had forgotten when mine was and felt embarrassed.

It was mid-October. When I told Greg that in November I'd be celebrating my forty-seventh birthday at the home of a friend, he said he wanted to start filming that night. A birthday party—a celebratory occasion on neutral turf—that was a perfect way for me and Ryan to try again, this time in front of the cameras. It made sense for who we were and where we were. I was relieved, even excited. The torture of being in limbo was over.

WITH THE START
date set, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. I had a job lined up—what better time to see how my daughter was doing at college? I wanted to catch up with her and to meet her new friends, so we planned a girls' weekend. I booked rooms at a nice hotel in San Francisco for Emily, her friends Christina and Claire, and me. Over the weekend I took them for manicures, facials, and massages. We walked around the city. We went out to fancy dinners. It was a very nice time for us.

I was happy to get to know Emily's new college friends and to hear what their lives were like. Even though I was still “the mom,” to some extent they included me in the girl talk. It struck me that this was one of the benefits of being a single parent. If I were visiting Emily with John, or another man, would she and her friends still open up and tell me about boys and all the
stuff
that girls talk about? I doubted it.

It was also nice for me to have a window into what it might have been like for me if I'd gone to college. Of course, I'd visited my sons. In fact, I'd seen a little too much of Kevin's dorm room. It was such a mess that, once, he lost his cell phone in it for weeks. Tired of being unable to reach him, I drove up to Skidmore to find it. A sticky layer of peppermint schnapps covered every available surface of Kevin's room, punctuated by coins and cigarette butts. It was disgusting. I sent Kevin away, pulled on rubber gloves, and cleaned the whole room from top to bottom. When I gathered up a pile of clothes that was shoved onto a shelf in his closet, I unearthed his cell phone.

So I knew my way around a dorm room. But experiencing college through my daughter was different. I had a constant feeling of living vicariously. I myself had missed out on school, camp, college, all the youthful experiences where girls build so many interpersonal relationships that it becomes an effortless part of their adult lives. So, like an anthropologist, I observed Emily closely through her high school and college years as she easily and naturally developed strong friendships. To me, college was a wonderful period of growth. How cool to be a young person, learning and playing, with no greater obligations. Without putting pressure on Emily to achieve anything in particular, I felt the glow of the experience she was having.

A couple of days later, I returned from San Francisco to the real world, where I wasn't a carefree eighteen-year-old. I was about to have another birthday, and, if all went well, a nation of viewers (or at least a respectable fraction of them) would tune in to see it.

Chapter Fourteen
Beautiful Creatures

MY BIRTHDAY WAS
approaching. I had grown up surrounded by actresses who fought their age with every weapon available to them—plastic surgery, makeup, primping. Where did I stand? Would I—could I—be happy in my own skin at forty-seven?

The first woman I watched deal with aging was my mother, Joanna Moore. My mother was a woman who couldn't have been more beautiful, inside and out, but she had an unimaginably hard life, which I will come to. Though she was always striking, with green eyes and a heart-shaped face, she didn't want to age gracefully. In a desperate effort to stay young and beautiful, she changed a lot about herself, even her name. She wore a wig, fake nails, and false eyelashes. She taped the skin of her face up to her head in a makeshift facelift before she had a real facelift. She wore caftans, heels, multiple necklace strands, and always had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. With the smoke and perfume, the overall effect wasn't glamorous but quite dramatic. My dad likes to say, “You got your acting talent from your mother. Boy could she act!”

I rarely saw my mother without her wig on, but once Griffin, who liked to make her chase him around, bolted through a first-floor window. As she followed him out, her wig caught on the windowsill and got pulled off. Suddenly my mother was standing on the sidewalk, screaming after Griffin, her wispy real hair enjoying a rare glimpse of sunshine. She could and did laugh at this vision. She could always laugh at herself.

My mother struggled with her inner and outer selves. I always saw her beauty and wish she could have forgiven herself for her substance abuse. I have long forgiven her.

My mom fought aging by transforming herself. Even while she lay in the hospital, dying of lung cancer, she still managed to put on those individual eyelashes every morning. I loved her for doing that.

Farrah became my de facto stepmother when I was fifteen. Her walls were lined with the magazine covers she had graced, forever young, forever perfect. She was an icon until the day she died. I can't imagine what it was like to have been the most famous poster girl on the planet and then to age, surrounded by images of your “perfect” self. But through all of it, including a ravaging early death to cancer, her bravery and beauty shone through.

I was left to find my own way as I tried to age gracefully, and I am still forging my own path as the years pass.

I laughed when my father referred to me as a “chick” in the meeting when we discussed our show with OWN. He said, “I had no idea this chick was so together.” I'd been making my own money since I was nine. In reaction to my mother, and in part because she couldn't or wouldn't mother me, I was pretty much a woman by the time I was fifteen. So I thought it was pretty funny when Ryan called me a chick in the meeting.

I see certain actresses at my gym in West Hollywood. They're in their late sixties, and they have long, curly hair and huge fish lips. They are bizarre caricatures of their former selves. I mean, what is the sense in that? What message are we sending our daughters? That getting older means we're no longer beautiful? Too many women in Hollywood are messing with their faces and losing track of what normal looks like. A horrible, expensive, warped new standard of beauty is emerging: The Fishface. I'm not against all the techniques women use to stay young, but I do think a little goes a long way. I have no desire to look like I'm in my thirties as I hit fifty. I've
earned
my age; I'm lucky to be here and I want to celebrate it.

I want to age. I want my daughter to be proud of me, and I use that notion as a guide. My daughter is proud of me if I eat healthy food and live well. In this land of artificial everything, I want to stay real and authentic, true to my heart. I enjoy being a grown woman, and I plan to embrace it as life passes. I don't wear short skirts. I don't keep my hair really long anymore. I don't want my life and work to be dependent on my looking like a twenty-year-old. This doesn't mean I'm prudish or that I don't want to be a sexy woman, but I want to be ladylike . . . or at least to try. So the furthest I go is skinny jeans and high-heeled boots. I don't want to wear the same clothes as my daughter would wear. It's her turn to be the young, sexy one. I don't want my sons to have unrealistic expectations for the women in their lives. True beauty evolves.

AGING AS GRACEFULLY
as I could meant sailing through my forty-seventh birthday and the party that was now upon me. Easier said than done.

My birthday fell on a Friday. When I woke up that morning, my father and I still hadn't had a real conversation since the night of Sean's birthday. Yes, he had signed on to doing the show, and yes, we'd exchanged a few texts about his appearance on
Oprah
and about Sean, but there hadn't been enough of a conversation to let me know where I stood with him. A couple of weeks before my party, a friend of his had called to tell me that Ryan was going to attend but warned me that he was going to ask, “Why did you do this to me?” or “What did I do to deserve this?” Wow, well, jeez. I didn't want a blowup, and I was hurt, but mostly this forewarning just made me sad.

Then I had a bit of an epiphany. My father and I had achieved a loving, balanced relationship when we reunited after Farrah's death. Why would he risk that? Maybe he had his own doubts and fears. I wanted to sustain the balance that we'd found. I wanted it to serve as a foundation on which to build a solid relationship with Ryan. But if I wanted real change, maybe the best thing to do was to let go of all my preconceptions about how it should be and just wait and see the reality unfold, on-camera and in our lives.

It occurred to me that Ryan might not show up at my birthday celebration that evening. But it almost didn't matter. I love birthday parties. My friends would be there. The show was launching. There was plenty to celebrate.

MY BIRTHDAY MORNING
still did not get off to a great start. The phone rang soon after I woke. It was my brother Griffin. I had called Griff a week earlier to say happy birthday to him. (We're Irish twins—every year we are the same age for a week.) It had been great to talk to my brother—it always is. But, without thinking it through, I had told him about the TV show that Ryan and I were doing.

Now Griffin was calling me. He wished me happy birthday, but then he started asking difficult questions about the show. He sounded anxious, and I realized I had made a mistake by telling him about it without preparing him. It appeared as though I'd triggered all sorts of bad memories for him. I'd provoked his desire for some kind of resolution without being in a decent position to support him. I felt terrible.

I struggled to explain as best I could how I saw it. “Griffin, Dad isn't likely to address and apologize for everything you remember. We aren't making
that
show. If you want to make a show about retribution, you go ahead and pitch it. But that's not my goal. I'm not going to force Dad to come to terms with anything. This is a journey. I'm trying to find peace with Dad. He's moved on, and you need to do so, too.”

Griffin said, “Yeah, he has no remorse, no remorse.”

That was the substance of my birthday conversation with Griffin. It was painful.

Griffin is a ruggedly handsome mixture of my mother and father. He has green eyes and freckles and plays the piano and guitar so beautifully, all by ear. He's never had a single music lesson. I love, love, love my brother. When I feel sad and alone, I always know I can turn to Griffin. He can always clarify the truth of our lives, because he was there alongside me.

But Griffin and I have had a tumultuous relationship. We survived together, and for each of us, surviving meant losing pieces of ourselves and living with the scars. Griffin seems trapped in the unpleasant memories of his youth. At the slightest provocation, he tends to rant about what happened to us and how horrible it all was. I can't blame him. I'm not suggesting that he forget any of it, but sometimes it feels like he might be reliving the original trauma with the same depth and agony every time he speaks of it. I wish he didn't have to go through all of that. Griff needs to move on a little, for the sake of all of our kids. But that's easy for me to say. Griffin is charming, sweet, and keeps me in stitches. But he is Ryan's son, and a bit of a loose cannon at times.

BY THE TIME
I got off the phone, I was already exhausted. I wanted a different, calmer voice in my ear, and I summoned my own, relatively new inner voice.
Griffin is an adult. He can find his own way. He will be all right, Tatum.

Then I discovered that while I was on the phone with Griffin, Sean had left me a message. His neighbors in the apartment building were complaining about noise. Sean's apartment had a bare wooden floor and he likes to sing—loudly. Sean has many great qualities, but I guess he got a little carried away with his singing.

I called Sean back to ask, “Why today, Sean? It's my birthday!”

Sean said, “Look, Mom, I spoke to the building manager. I'm allowed to sing during the day. I'm not singing at night. But I'll try to be quieter.”

It seemed like a lot was happening in one day. Added to the phone calls of the morning, I was nervous to see my father that night.

THE PARTY WENT
off without a hitch. I was wary of seeing Ryan, but when he arrived, it was perfect—or as perfect as we O'Neals can get. He just came up to me and said, “Hello, Tatum.” I said, “Hello, Dad.” We stood there a bit awkwardly. Then he tried to make a joke: “Is there a way to get a drink here?”
Because it was a sober party, get it?
I laughed, and in that moment I could see that there was no cause for worry. Before me was a warm, congenial man who was, to all appearances, happy and proud, if a little uncomfortable about the omnipresent cameras.

At times like these, my fear of my father feels unwarranted. Why did my anticipation of his anger eclipse the real scope of it? Was it because I had been so terrified of losing him when I was a child that I still catered to his whims? Or was it because he had been a different, scarier guy when he was younger? I believed it was both but more the latter. My father has always had a big, booming voice. Much as my father had mellowed, I still saw him as the looming, volatile father I had when I was eleven, and I still reacted to him with the same deferential fear.

The party had been my first real attempt to assemble my L.A. friends. Since leaving New York, I had been making friends at meetings and reconnecting with old friends. It was never easy for me to make friends, and the jury was still out on some of the people I had assembled, but I liked looking around the party and seeing old friends and new. Patty was there, representing the sober, strong women I wanted in my life. Ryan had been a gentleman all night. It had been a long time since I'd spent a birthday with my father, and having him there made my L.A. family complete. I felt healthy and pretty. The food was delicious. Everyone had a good time. The night was wonderful. I felt awkward but okay. I was optimistic. L.A. might work out after all. What's more, I was really happy with the way our first night of shooting footage for the show had gone. I felt so comfortable, I barely noticed the cameras. My father and I were tentative but trying. It felt real. For the first time in my on-camera life, I wasn't playing a character. I was just being me, Tatum.

Being Tatum meant acknowledging that I felt a tangle of thoughts and emotions: worrying about what we were shooting and whether it would feel right; second-guessing what I said and how I looked; wondering what I might be doing to my career; trying to shove pride and ego out of the way and be grateful that I was working at all. There's no question: it was more exhausting to be Tatum than any character I had ever played. But I was happy.

Tonight peace had been made. Tomorrow I would visit my father at the beach house.