william flew and film stars

Tatum O’Neal is like no Hollywood actress I have ever met. Instead of balking at questions of a personal nature, she needs no prompting at all: she arrives at our lunch in New York so wound up that with one tap she is off, not drawing breath for more than an hour. It is like being plugged into a highvoltage energy source. Her main beef, after all these years, is her tempestuous relationship with her father, the actor Ryan O’Neal. “He just can’t stop being cruel to me,” she says, tears springing to her eyes. She talks as openly about the difficulties of being the youngest actress to win an Oscar (for Paper Moon, at the age of 10), her broken marriage to John McEnroe, with whom she has three children, and her long battle with drug addiction, including her arrest three years ago for buying crack cocaine in New York.


Now 47, she has just written her second autobiography in seven years, which seems more than a little excessive – until you meet her and realise she probably has another six autobiographies to go. “My family was fractured,” she writes, “a stew of drama, drugs, violence and tragedy.” Her latest book is called Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home, but she admits that the title is wishful thinking and her relationship with her father is worse, not better.
“He’s still just as mean,” she says in a smoky, throaty voice as she launches into a conversation occasionally tinged with tears and often studded with swearwords. “He’s 70 now and is probably not going to change. I just feel that at a certain point it’s time to be there for your parent who is getting old and to forget the jerk that he was and the bad parent.”
Wearing a gold and silver dress, her waist cinched in with a black belt, Tatum comes straight from the set of a chat show – both she and her father have flown in from their homes in Los Angeles to promote their new television docuseries, Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals, a somewhat bizarre attempt to rake over the coals of their difficult relationship. “It is not a reality show,” stresses Tatum, although she says her father has taken to introducing himself to people as Reality Ryan.