Joanna Moore : Tatum O'Neal's Crazy Mother

And Reagan emptied the insane asylums.

She was sweet to Opie.

From Ryan O'Neal book: Both of Us

I did love Leigh and I tried to convince myself I loved Joanna. Griffin and Tatum’s mother, actress Joanna Moore, has battled addiction and depression all her life and it damaged the children....... My daughter inherited her mother’s predilection for addiction but not her wisdom or compassion.

Joanna had been cheating death since I’d known her. When we were first married, I came home one night to find her passed out in a bathtub with an open bottle of barbiturates and a tumbler of wine on the side of the tub. It took me more than an hour to wake her.

Joanna was the worst decision I ever made, but I bear her no ill will. I was a kid when we got hitched because she got pregnant and back then no one understood much about addiction.

I went after Joanna for custody of Tatum and Griffin, twice, for the same reason John had to duke it out with Tatum. I had no choice. At the time, my ex-wife was washing down half a bottle of barbiturates a day with vodka.

And this was back in the early seventies when the courts favored the mother even if she was unfit. “Let’s give her another chance,” the judge said. To Joanna’s credit, when she realized she was hopelessly addicted, she showed up on my doorstep in Malibu and handed me our kids, then checked into a hospital. Tatum was seven years old and Griffin was six.

I can only imagine how hard that was for Joanna, and to this day, I don’t know whether either of my children appreciates the courage that decision took. The rest of the story gets more complicated, with fundamental disagreement between my children and me over the specifics of how it unfolded.

I can only say this: Joanna and I made some dreadful mistakes as parents, and I hope that one day my children will be able to forgive us, as they would want their own children to forgive them.

From Tatum O'Neal book : A Paper Life

My mother's instability and confusion grew unmanageable, ours did too. She had adopted two huge German shepherds, Sarge and Tiara, which were ferocious former LAPD dogs. One of them bit me in the face. My mother would shut us up in our rooms for hours,leaving us no choice hut to defecate on the floor.

Jon Peters recalls a weekend when my mother went out, forgetting that she'd locked me and Griffin in a bathroom. When she remembered, she called Jon, who rushed over to rescue us.

Still, my mom wanted custody and imagined, in her paranoia, that my dad was scheming to take us away. She once dragged Griffin out by the pool to show him what looked like a little plastic bag, poking out from under the tile roof. 'You see that?" she said. "That's where your father has been planting marijuana, so the cops will find it and arrest me."

We seemed to see so little of her that I have only one vivid memory of my mom during this time. Griffin and I woke up one morning, unsupervised as usual, and started poking around in the garage, then found that we were locked in. We cried and hammered on the door, but my mother slept on,oblivious, for the next four or five hours.

When we got hungry,there was nothing to eat but dog food, and when we got bored,there was nothing to do but raise hell. We'd discovered a cache of lightbulbs and were gleefully smashing them to bits when suddenly the door flew open.

There was my mother, in a white-hot fury. "Why, why, you little . . . ," she stammered. Slapping and grabbing at Griffin and me, she flung us into the house. There, luckily, she found an inanimate object to vent her rage on—my brother's bunk bed, which she tore apart like a woman possessed.Frightening as my mother's temper could be—and she was freewheeling with her fists, coming from a generation that was big on beatings—beneath it, even then, we could sense her impotence. We continued to act out, unmoved by her anger.

We became neighborhood terrors by stealing whatever we could get our hands on. Griffin managed to swipe an electric garage opener and would hide in the ivy, raising and lowering the door, to torment the man who lived next to us. When Griffin discovered sharp objects, his mischief making turned serious. He slashed one of our nannies with a knife, almost severing her hand.

My mother made little effort to stop us that I recall. She seemed powerless—barely accepting responsibility for her own life, never mind for her children. She would take us with her to bars—shades of Addie's mother in Payer Moon—start drinking, and disappear.

We'd be left clutching a slip of paper with my grandparents' phone number. The bartender would call and have them come and pick us up.

"There were such emergencies for so many years," my grandmother would say." The experience would have destroyed some children."But it was my mother who seemed destroyed, like a passive victim waiting for rescue.

There were times when she could pull herself together, and I remember loving her then, so much. She used to tell me a bedtime story, I would fall asleep to the sound of her soft southern voice, THOSE MOMENTS OF ENGAGEMENT were rare.

My dad's visits were infrequent, but he somehow seemed more present and involved than the parent we lived with. My happiest times were the weekends when he took me to the pony rides at LaCienega Park.

Once when we were there, he promised me a dollar if I would stop sucking my thumb. So, by sheer force of will, I did stop. In the daytime I kept my thumb clutched tightly in my fist, and at night I imprisoned it under my pillow, rubbing it on the satin trim of my blanket to fight the overpowering urge to stick it in my mouth.

I didn't do it for the dollar, though.I did it because even at three or four years old I knew my mother was too ill to care for me and because I was miserable and frightened and lonely and longing for the comfort of a parent.

I did it because I loved my big, handsome daddy and thought if I stopped sucking my thumb, that would prove it.Then, like the angel horse, he would carry me away, taking me home to live with him.It would be another year or two before that happened.

WHEN I WAS FIVE my mother decided that we should change our lives by leaving the L.A. suburbs for "the country."She found a small, four-acre ranch in Reseda, then one of the poorer sections of the northern San Fernando Valley, which reminded her of her own rustic beginnings.The ranch lay at the end of a rough dirt road and was screened by a thicket of untamed brush. My grandmother, fittingly, called the place Tobacco Road.

How my mother planned to make the ranch livable, I can't imagine. She couldn't afford to fix it up. Her career was foundering, thanks to her addictions, and my father had been vindictively stingy in the divorce.

Still, for my mother the ranch seemed to hold some promise of redemption, which she never explained. Maybe she just needed to leave L.A., to get a fresh start. Maybe she wanted a clean break.

"I thought the ranch would be a beautiful existence," my mother later said. "But it turned into a nightmare."

My MOM HAD a fifteen-year-old boyfriend—I'll call him"Seth"—with long, stringy hair and tattoos on the biceps bulging out of his T-shirts. Early on, Griffin and I discovered his cruel streak. We'd adopted a family of rats we'd seen running around the ranch as our pets—setting out little dishes of food and water and giving them names.

But Seth insisted that they had rabies. Rather than get rid of them quietly, with poison or traps, he threw them in pond and made us watch them drown. Since they can't swim, it took a very long time, and it completely freaked US out.

Most of the time, my mother was either closed up in her room—sitting up for days, writing to Jesus—or else drinking and partying with Seth and his relatives or an older couple (I'll call them the "Jonnsons') sort of adopted my mom.

My mother wasn't just boozing, however. Griffin recalls finding white-flecked syringes around the house, evidence that her addiction was escalating.So were her bouts of paranoia.

Our meals were erratic, basically consisting of fast food, along with whatever we could scrounge. I was so hungry that I ate raw bacon and, once, a whole tub of Cool Whip, which made me sick. Worst of all was the can of olives I started in on before I realized it was crawling with maggots. I didn't even know what they were. Griffin and I grew scrawny, and my teeth ached with cavities and from an abscess that I tried to ease by jabbing it with a fork. But my first dental appointment was still a few years off.

One night my mother, Seth, and his sister took us to a cheap restaurant, where I started drinking someone's beer. I continued to sneak sips from people's glasses as my mother and the runaways got progressively drunker. Evidently I passed out on the bathroom floor, for I awoke sometime later, alone and covered with vomit. Nobody took much notice of my little bender or even of such basics as whether we went to school.

Griffin and I attended only intermittently, walking there alone. Even at school we were isolated, seen as odd and unkempt. My one good outfit was an orange paisley midriff top with matching hip-hugging bell-bottoms, which my father had sent from Rome. I may have looked freakish next to my classmates, but I was proud.

I cherished that gift from my father and, even more, his attention on weekends when he was in town. However, his visits only highlighted the bleakness of the ranch and the vast difference between his life and ours. My father had become and was living like a movie Star.

He loved nice cars, so he would pull up in a maroon Maserati Citroen, which rose up and down, to whisk us from the dilapidated ranch to his Malibu beach house. I remember huddling with Griffin under the dashboard of the Citroen,naked, cold, sandy, and wet after one of those golden week-ends, feeling sick with misery at the thought of returning to the ranch.

My father was our knight in shining armor back then.

Sometimes we tried to escape the ranch literally, by running away. Stuffing our ragged clothes and whatever food we could find into a pillowcase, Griffin and I would make our way down the rugged dirt road, barefoot as always. Then the police would drive up and escort us back to the ranch—often as not, for a beating. My mother could be a harsh disciplinarian, but it was Seth who really scared me.

When Griffin and I misbehaved—or when Seth felt like it—he'd whip us with switches cut from the fig tree. Often we were beaten for stealing from the Jolly Jug, our local general store. We would take candy, because we were so hungry.

Much as I feared Seth s rage, his switches and his fists, I had enough fight in me to try to stand up to him. But my resistance only seemed to heighten his wrath, so my legs were always black and blue from his beatings, and my back was scabbed over. Once when he came after me, I ran to my mother, clutching at her, begging her to not let him beat me—if need be, to punish me herself. She did it, with her belt.

Seth was bad, but I utterly despised one of his cronies for other reasons. One night, when I was hiding out in my mothers bed during one of her drunken parties, he crawled in with me and started groping, pushing his fingers inside me."Doesn't that feel good?" he demanded, I was only six. The memory of his prod-ding sickened me for years, and it is only in adulthood, after years of therapy, that my sense of violation has begun to ebb.

It's a measure of how out of control our lives had gotten that my mother would continually leave us alone with strange men. One of them forced me to examine his genitals, then actually tried to penetrate me—a tiny child. Mercifully, he couldn't stay hard.

I hated her for her weakness, for making us live in squalor, and for exposing us to cruelty.

There were periods when I felt completely overwhelmed—even worried about my-self. Watching a TV show on which an animal died, I burst into tears, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably, consumed with grief. I adored animals but was so freaked out at one point that I actually tried to kill a cat—knowing, even in my child's mind, I was committing a terrible act as some kind of cry for help. (Luckily the cat escaped without harm.)

Griffin claims that I once climbed a tree and dropped a knife down on him, slicing his face. As I recall, it was an accident, but it's anyone's guess why I had a knife in a tree. Griffin still has the scar.

Even at five and six years old, I knew that my mother's view of our lives was distorted. She was so out of touch that despite the sexual abuse, we continued to socialize with Seth's pals and his extended family.

As IF OUR LIVES weren't bad enough already, early in 1971,a massive earthquake struck the northern San Fernando Valley......

After the earthquake, my grandparents and my father began to monitor conditions at the ranch more closely. Appalled at the goings-on in what my father condemned as "a poisoned environment," they began working behind the scenes to get us out.

By the time I was seven my mother had begun to acknowledge her amphetamine addiction. She checked into Camarillo State Hospital, a well-known mental institution out in "canyon country," to try to beat it.

When my mom was released from the hospital, I spat in her face. She called my reaction "the most painful experience of my life . . . like having a child die."I deeply regret my behavior, but at the time she seemed so cruel to me.

AFTER THE ISOLATION and chaos of the ranch, I felt out of step with the more civilized world—unsure how to navigate,how to talk to people, how to react. Even simple daily hygiene was confusing, for I'd rarely been bathed and had never brushed my teeth, which were full of cavities. Taken to the dentist for the first time, I went wild when he tried to give me novocaine—I'd been promised "no shots"—and kicked him in the head and the balls, trying to escape. My father had to wrestle me back into the chair.

Academically I lagged far behind my classmates, and socially I was totally lost, with really no idea how to communicate with the other kids. I tried to attract friends , by reminding people repeatedly, "My father is famous. My father is a movie star."Needless to say, that strategy didn't work.

Soon I fell back on an old feel-better habit—stealing—and got caught snatching some earrings from a classmate's drawer. Finally, in utter misery, I chopped off all my hair. I mailed the cuttings to my grandma, along with a letter—a full page on which I'd scrawled over and over, with childlike spelling, I hate it heer, I hate it heer.

Griffin remembers my rescue better than I do. He was watching from the window when a big black limousine kicked up dust on the school's dirt road then circled around the fountain at the entrance. My father got out with a woman, but no one summoned Griffin.

I clung to my father, terrified of abandonment, Emotionally I was pretty rocky—tantrum-prone, dauntingly headstrong and outspoken—and I still stole, though less often.

There was some worry among the adults that I might set fires. The worst thing I did was take a collage Greg had labored over for days and cut it to shreds. What prompted that destructive impulse I couldn't have guessed. Later my father would say in print, to my chagrin, that Paper Moon 'answered the question of what to do with this strange little girl I was living with."

I visited my mother occasionally on Bolas Street in West L.A.—not a very good neighborhood—and observed what she'd do and wear and even eat, weird country combinations like apples with salt and cheese or salted grapefruit and watermelon.

She and Gary, her husband, who was a roofing contractor, were members of an evangelistic religious sect. Griffin had to go to Bible study classes at Pat Boone's house.

Once, around the time of Paper Moon, I got a serious blast of her religion when she started speaking in tongues and beating the hell out of me.So my mother was nothing like the fashionable, worldly,and independent women I found so inspiring. Today I respect and deeply love her, though I'm saddened by what she made of her life. I was also a little afraid of her.

I heard about her mainly when there was some new crisis involving her or Griffin—and there were plenty. One day Griffin fell off his bike on Gary's job site, landing in the hospital because a stake went straight up his rectum.

That was terrible. However, the main problem was my mother s alcoholism. She was constantly drunk—Gary left her because of it—and poor Griffin was losing his mind.

From Confessions of a Hollywood P.I. by Hollywood Private investigator, Don Crutchfield:

There are times when a parent is clearly responsible for a child’s problems, like when a mother foists her drug habit upon her kids. What chances does any child have to grow up whole under such circumstances? I got to see some of the tragic results of this situation when I worked on a case involving the actress Joanna Moore and her children, Tatum and Griffin O’Neal.

When I entered the scene, Tatum O’Neal and her then-husband, tennis star John McEnroe, had returned from Wimbledon to LAX and were met at the airport by Joanna Moore. Tatum loaded most of the luggage into her limousine, but inadvertently put a couple of bags containing valuables into her mother’s Mazda, a car that had been purchased by Tatum. The next morning, Tatum realized her mistake and phoned her mother, who had a very unusual story to tell.

Joanna Moore claimed that the car had been stolen overnight and that she didn’t know anything about her daughter’s valuables. Tatum knew this story was a fabrication, so she called me into investigate. Tatum told me right off that her mother had a serious drug problem, and expressed no doubt that Joanna had stolen the bags Tatum was missing a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage that held a smaller Cartier bag containing passports, $160,000 worth of jewelry and $15,000 in cash.

Tatum’s skepticism about her mother’s story turned out to be well founded. Joanna Moore lived in a Sherman Oaks apartment building with a security garage. She claimed to have parked the Mazda on the street that night because the garage gate wasn’t working. I contacted several of Joanna’s neighbors, all of whom stated that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that garage gate. “How do you want this handled?” I asked Tatum.

“I want my mother to admit she did it,” my client instructed. “I want her to go into rehab and get some help for her drug problem. If she doesn’t go for that, then I don’t give a damn if you put her in jail. I’ve just about had it with her taking advantage of me.” I immediately placed surveillance on Joanna Moore and applied myself to retrieving Tatum’s belongings. I wanted to meet with Joanna, but knew that would have to wait.

Joanna had already reported the Mazda stolen to the police. She was going to be hard to nail, but I had an idea. Maybe I could get to Joanna through her son, Griffin O’Neal. In 1986, I had worked on the defense team for Griffin when he’d been accused of manslaughter in a Maryland boating accident that took the life of Gio Coppola, the twenty-three-year-old son of director Francis Ford Coppola. Griffin, who was twenty-one at the time, was indicted on six counts, including boat manslaughter.

Griffin told police the Gio was piloting the fourteen-foot boat when it ran into a tow line connecting two power boats. But eyewitnesses swore under oath that Griffin was at the helm when the collision occurred. To make matters worse, Griffin’s blood-alcohol count was far beyond the legal limit. Apparently, the two-year drug rehab program he completed in 1985 didn’t work.

Before the trial, we took Griffin to Hawaii to get him cleaned up. He was supposed to spend two weeks at one of those rehab places where they shave your head and put you through a kind of boot camp. We hoped the judge would be favorably impressed that Griffin was trying to turn his life around. Naturally, Griffin wouldn’t cooperate. I had assigned a PI named Cliff Stewart to put Griffin on a plane to Hawaii, accompanied by an attending psychiatrist. When Griffin tried to bolt, I had Cliff fly to Hawaii with him and deliver Griffin to the rehab center personally. Shortly after he returned from rehab, Griffin faced a court trial with no jury. Fortunately, the judge threw out the manslaughter charges. Griffin was found guilty of negligent boating and sentenced to thirty days of community service.

Griffin was lucky. The Maryland judge even consented to allow him to do his community service in Los Angeles. Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was let off easy, Griffin ignored the sentence. That was his pattern. Griffin had been busted numerous times for driving under the influence. Eventually his license was taken away, but he kept right on driving. However, this was a far more serious matter. A young man was dead because of his negligence. The Los Angeles authorities grabbed Griffin and extradited him to Maryland, where he did thirty days of hard time. That should have taught him a lesson-but it didn’t.

Griffin is the kind of guy who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. Furthermore, he can’t be trusted. Tatum confided that she once invited Griffin over for dinner. John McEnroe and the kids were there, and they were all having a nice meal. Suddenly Griffin excused himself to go to the bathroom. When her brother didn’t return, Tatum went to look for him-only to find Griffin in the bedroom rifling through her dresser.

Griffin is a kid who has never answered to anyone. Whenever the chips are down, Griffin’s dad always bails him out. After Griffin sold a tell-all story about his father to the National Enquirer, Ryan cut off his funds. But he eventually allowed the boy to get back on the gravy train. Maybe if this kid had been forced to sink or swim just once, he’d grow up. Meanwhile, I needed this flake to help me retrieve my client’s valuables.

When I found Griffin, he assured me had had cleaned up his act, was off drugs, and was about to marry his girlfriend, Rima. He also informed me that he didn’t want to have anything to do with his mother and therefore couldn’t help me.

“I can’t be around her,” he said, because she turns me on to cocaine. She’s always been a bad influence on me.”

When I first started dealing with Hollywood celebrities, a mother’s pushing drugs to her son would have seemed as heinous a crime as incest. But in this modern-day Babylon, there aren’t many taboos left. I still thought it important to enlist Griffin’s cooperation-even though I had a feeling he would repeat my every word to his mother.

“Tatum and I are convinced that your mom stole those bags,” I told the son. “On top of that, she has filed a false police report, which means that she’s in pretty deep. But I’m on the case now, and I’m pulling all the strings. I can make the police go away, but I need to have those bags back, with everything that was in them.

“The worst thing that can happen is if I leave this case, because then the insurance company will get involved, and they’ll hound your mother forever before they pay out all that insurance money. Or I can call the dogs off now. Then everyone will write the whole incident off as a big mistake. Tatum just wants her stuff back. And she wants her mother to deal with her drug problem.”

As I spoke, Griffin O’Neal just nodded his head in agreement. I didn’t trust him-not for a second. In fact, I strongly suspected that Griffin might have been in on the heist. I left Griffin’s house without anything solid. But hopefully I’d given him enough motivation to try to convince his mother to talk to me. In the meantime, I continued my surveillance.

At one point I spotted Joanna trying to ride a bicycle while walking her dog. Unfortunately the dog pulled so hard that Joanna fell off the bicycle. She proceeded to get back up and ride a few more feet. Then the dog pulled on the leash again, and Joanna came crashing down off her bike. I felt as if I were watching a Charlie Chaplin film, observing this crazed subject continue her bizarre cycle of riding, getting up, and falling down again. I was getting some good laughs on the job.

Unfortunately the situation was no closer to being resolved. I grew more nervous with each passing day. As time slipped by, the probability increased that Tatum’s jewelry was being fenced for pennies on the dollar. My best hope was to keep pressuring Griffin to set up a meeting with his mother. Eventually that’s what happened.

A meeting was finally arranged to take place in his apartment on a steamy Tuesday afternoon. Griffin and his girlfriend, Rima, lived in a dive in a decrepit North Hollywood neighborhood. The instant I walked through the doorway, the overpowering odor of dog crap nearly knocked me off my feet. The couple had a Doberman pinscher and a pit bull. It was painfully obvious that those dogs went to the bathroom whenever and wherever they pleased. I thought I was going to pass out.

Rima was embarrassed and started to mop up some of the excrement. But it was going to take more than a mop to get that place in shape for anyone other than a couple of whacked-out drug freaks. Joanna arrived a few minutes later, and I asked her to sit in a low, straight-back chair. I then proceeded to drop onto the sofa. I mean that literally, because the sofa didn’t have any springs. All of a sudden, my butt hit the floor, just what I needed, a Griffin O’Neal trick couch. Now Joanna was sitting about two feet higher than I was. Not the greatest configuration for interrogating a subject.

I finally managed to hoist myself up, when I noticed Griffin fidgeting in the kitchen. I observed him as he walked over to a tape recorder and casually flipped it on. I raced into the kitchen, turned the recorder off, grabbed Griffin by the shirt, and threw him onto his springless couch.

“Sit down, stop fidgeting, and don’t move until I tell you,” I said. Griffin seemed shocked that I had laid hands on him. But for once he obeyed. I was finally ready to begin my interrogation. I hammered Joanna with questions for nearly an hour, warning her of dire consequences if she continued her deceit. Joanna was nervous, but she held fast to her story, as I had expected. “I wish I could help,” she said again and again. “You will help,” I told her. “I’m not here to hurt or embarrass you. But I’ve been hired to get your daughter’s things back, and I intend to do just that. Lady, you’ve got a real foe and your hands now.”

I didn’t expect Joanna to confess, but I could tell I had gotten to her. When she walked out of Griffin’s house that day, Joanna knew I wasn’t bluffing and hounding her until I got what I was after. The only remaining question was what she would do about it. I didn’t have to wait long for my answer.

The day after my meeting with Joanna, a mysterious call came into the Screen Actors Guild. A woman claimed that her son had stolen Tatum O’Neal’s car. She wasn’t willing to give her name, but wanted to help Tatum get back the car. SAG called Tatum’s business manager, and someone from his office contacted me. It wasn’t hard to figure that Joanna was behind this little scheme.

The mystery caller referred to the missing vehicles as Tatum O’Neal’s car-even though the car was registered in Joanna Moore’s name. I found the Mazda unlocked, exactly where they mystery caller had said it would be. The rear seat was folded down, providing access to the trunk. There I found the Cartier bag, full of jewelry. A few hundred-dollar bills were scattered around the trunk. The Louis Vuitton bag wasn’t there. Neither were the $15 thousand or the passports.

As I drove away from the scene, a dark thought crossed my mind. Joanna had left the car unlocked. Anybody could have come along and stolen those jewels. If that happened, I would have been the prime suspect. Now I was fuming. This drug-crazed thief had tried to set me up, and she nearly succeeded. I‘d worked too long and hard to have my reputation ruined by a stunt like that. It took me almost half an hour to cool off.

Finally I felt composed enough to call Tatum on the car phone. “Any progress?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I answered. “I’ll be at your place in about ten minutes with some of your goods.” Tatum was glad to recover the jewelry, even though most of the cash was still missing. I stepped out of the room for a minute. When I returned, Tatum was sniffing one of the crumpled hundred-dollar bills I’d found in the Mazda.

“That’s my mother’s scent,” she announced.

Tatum’s investigative technique was a little weird, but she was convinced. “These bills have been in my mother’s possession,” she repeated. I couldn’t very well dispute my client’s conclusion, especially since I believed she was right.

At this point Tatum seemed satisfied. She was ready to let the matter go, but I wasn’t. After all, she was still missing her Louis Vuiton bag, the passports, and most of the cash. “Just tell your mother I want to talk to her again,” I advised, “though I seriously doubt that she’ll be willing to go through another encounter with me.”

Tatum heeded my advice, and Joanna made it clear that the last thing she was wanted was to face me again. Eventually, Joanna confessed to Tatum and returned $12,000, of the money plus the missing passports. She also agreed to get help with her drug problem. At that point, my involvement in the case was officially over-although the family’s problems have apparently not abated.

Griffin O’Neal’s continuing propensity for violence was evidenced by a 1992 arrest for assaulting his ex-girlfriend and firing a .44 magnum in her parked car. He also violated my commitment to Tatum to keep the story of her mother’s thievery out of the tabloids. Although the headline story in the Enquirer did not specify Griffin as the source, my investigation proved that he was indeed the “source close to the family” who had sold the story, probably to obtain money to support his ongoing drug habit.

Griffin’s treachery came as no surprise. I’ve been around too many druggies and dopers to expect anything else. A guy like Griffin cares only about getting the next fix-even if it means dropping a dime on his own mother.

Still, if that mother is the person who turned you on to drugs, doesn’t have a right to expect better. Shortly after Griffin sold his family out to the tabloids, Tatum and John McEnroe ended their six-year marriage. Although Tatum had won an Oscar for Paper Moon as a youngster, her movie career had been stalled for years.

With her marriage on the rocks, she fell into a deep depression. Before long, Tatum was spotted partying in New York, and rumors of cocaine use abounded. Tatum had always impressed me as a stable person, so those rumors were troubling.

Still, I was hardly surprised. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that drugs are part and parcel to the Babylon lifestyle. If you add to the mix a child growing up with an addicted parent, it’s hard to avert disaster. In September 1995, Tatum checked into an exclusive drug rehab center in Connecticut for a twenty-eight day cleanout.

Shortly after her release, she was again spotted hanging out with a high-rolling, coke-snorting crowd. A few weeks later, reports had her checking into New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center for another round of drug treatment.

By now John McEnroe had seen enough to convince him that his ex-wife was an unfit mother with a drug problem that wasn’t likely to go away. When they first split, the couple shared custody of the kids. It eventually became clear that Tatum was unable or unwilling to perform her parental duties.

“Mac has been assuming almost all the parental responsibilities for the past several months,” a close friend of his told a reporter. “He takes the kids for haircuts, to the doctor, to school, and out for fun. He’s maintaining a family life for them.” “I’m fighting to protect my children from a sick woman,” McEnroe told the friend.

“Kids need a full-time mom they can count on twenty-four hours a day. A nanny can only do so much. Tatum can’t be trusted to take care of the kids. When they’re with her, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about them.” At this writing, John McEnroe has filed for sole custody of this and Tatum’s three children. He seems serious about doing whatever is necessary to realize that goal. “Get me all the evidence you can,” the tennis star told the private detectives he hired to follow his wife. “I’m taking those kids away from her-even if I have to spend years in court.”

Given Tatum’s behavior and family history, one can hardly argue with the man’s concerns. If I were in John McEnroe’s position, I would probably do the same thing. Like many other unstable parents, Tatum seems determined to hang onto her children, however much it might hurt them.

At one point, Tatum enlisted her father, Ryan O’Neal, to intercede on her behalf. “What do you want to do, kill her?”

Ryan reportedly screamed at his former son-in-law during a heated phone conversation. “Those kids are all she’s got to keep her sane. You take them away, and nobody’s going to be able to put back the pieces again.”

Excuse me, but I always thought that parents were supposed to be there to support their young children, not the other way around. Once a parent is under the sway of drugs, she may desperately want and need her kids. Unfortunately, she is probably the last person who should be given the responsibility for raising them.

John McEnroe had seen enough to convince him that his ex-wife was an unfit mother with a drug problem that wasn’t likely to go away. When they first split, the couple shared custody of the kids. It eventually became clear that Tatum was unable or unwilling to perform her parental duties. Given Tatum’s behavior and family history, one can hardly argue with the man’s concerns.

If I were in John McEnroe’s position, I would probably do the same thing. Like many other unstable parents, Tatum seems determined to hang onto her children, however much it might hurt them.

Given Tatum and Griffin's horror early life with their unstable negligent mother, Those kids were already far damaged when they came to live with their father (who didn't know how to be a parent himself), Tatum also displayed sociopathic behavior such as lying, stealing and setting fires.

They needed to be put in a rehabilitation school. The last thing they needed was a a Hollywood fast life style and a playboy actor. But he was the more responsible parent compared to the mother.

Still, the mother was a cluster fuck and Tatum/people are assigning all the blame to Ryan, which is ridiculous and unfair.

Tatum O'Neal "Cloudy memory": Can't recognize her mother

tatum__oneal Mama #joannamoore with #elvisfollowthatdream

More blatant lies from Tatum? The woman in the picture is Debra Paget from Love me Tender movie, Not Joanna Moore.

Makes one wonder, how many lies/cloudy memories, Tatum kept spewing through the years.

some people called her out and corrected her lies:

"cribinpupdi198360652 It's not Tatum's mother. It's Debra Paget who was in Love Me Tender with Elvis - 4 movies before Follow That dream"

helenbega Debra Paget is in this photo with Elvis. She was his costar in Love Me Tender. There's a whole series taken at this photo shoot. ;)

"It's Debra Paget from Love Me Tender movie!"

Griffin finally admitted that his early drug introduction came from his mother and that the root of their problem is much bigger than Ryan

2015

Last year, 52-year-old Griffin - whose sister is Tatum O'Neal - admitted he had to "walk away" from his famous family.

He said: "My whole family has been absolutely destroyed to smithereens from drug addiction and alcoholism. The common denominator is drugs and alcohol and depression and it's a never-ending cycle. I had to walk away from all of it. I'm done."

“My mother was an alcoholic and she took weight-loss pills, speed and other drugs,” says Griffin. “The combination of the two, along with her not being emotional stable because she was orphaned at age 6 and lived a rough life – was heart-wrenching.”

Griffin’s long battle with addiction began when he was just 9, while he was still living with his mother. “I was the family joint roller,” he says. “My life has been a reign of drug and alcohol degradation. There were drugs everywhere in my family all day, every day. It was the ’60s and ’70s.

Found this old story about Tatum and mentioning Joanna Moore's absolute craziness:

IT'S TATUM! 6/6/1976

Academy Award Winner TATUM O'NEAL in her very first TV special! America's favorite young star will sing and dance her way into your heart along with her special guests... CHER - and Tatum sing "Love Rollercoaster" at Magic Mountain (taped for broadcast) THE BAD NEWS BEARS - the young co-stars of hit film "The Bad News Bears" join Tatum for a rendition of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game".

RYAN O'NEAL - Tatum's Dad and co-star in their hit film "Paper Moon" and forthcoming "Nickelodeon" show us talent runs in the family when they sing "Me and My Shadow". DIANA ROSS - sings her hit song "Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know) into the gazing eyes of her #1 fan - Tatum. and Special Guest Star WALTER MATTHAU - as Coach Buttermaker from the hit film "The Bad News Bears" joins Tatum for a game of catch. Brought to you by CREST - WITH RETSINxAE

(editor's note: production was halted for two days after actress Joanna Moore - Tatum's mother - crashed her Buick LeSabre onto the sound stage. It was later discovered that her 12 year old son Griffin was actually driving the car and that Joanna was intoxicated and sleeping in the back seat.)

Some online comments about Joanna Moore:

"Joanna was a pill popping drunk right up to her death from cancer. She was so messed up, she would regularly wet herself. She once crashed & rolled her SUV, killing her dog and losing a finger. Her friend and next door neighbor in Palm Springs cared for her during her cancer but Tatum did show up during the end. The whole family is messed up royally."

"Tatum's mother Joanna Moore was on her third husband (O'Neal) before she was 30. Even Andy Griffin couldn't stand her and had her written out after four episodes of playing Peg, his love interest. The woman was a cluster fuck and you are assigning all the blame to Ryan?"

"Ryan married older actress Joanna Moore in the early 1960s because she was pregnant. Joanna was a pill popping alcoholic and nymphomanic. Tatum and her brother were neglected by their mother. There were stories that Tatum was regularly sexually molested by Joanna Moore's male friends as a child. Very horrible childhood. Those kids were damaged from very early on, long before Ryan took custody"

"Tatum and Griffin were raised by their drug addicted-alcoholic-bipolar mother, Joanne Moore who was not equipt to handle parenting. Later, when Ryan took custody, he attempted to "straighten" Griffin out in his own way".

"If any of Ryan's children other that Patrick had a decent nanny, they wouldn't be such fuck-ups. Besides Ryan, the kids were neglected by incapacitated mothers - Tatum and Griffin by a bipolar alcoholic (Joanna Moore), and Redmond from a vacant drug abuser (Farrah)."

'Tatum and Griffin's mother was much WORSE than Ryan as a parent, and still Tatum likes to downplay her mother's non existing parenting and faults (like for instance being a pedophile and having 15 years old boyfriend who beat up Tatum and molested her) but still it's all her father's fault."

"I still wonder about Tatum's ability to forgive her mother so easily and have such a difficult time accepting her father. Turns out she has proven that the incident with the gun and her brother Griffin was not a crazy Ryan."

"It's a little odd how the mother's responsibility in all of this is minimized. She was a serious addict and it was at her house the kids got into drugs and were left alone. I give Ryan credit for fighting to get the kids back and having his parents help raise when he wasn't there."

"Ironically, however, the single worst villain in Tatum's gallery is not the mother who chose addiction over her children and exposed Tatum and her younger brother to genuinely horrific forms of deprivation before finally abandoning them completely. To the contrary, Tatum manages to center what little forgiveness she can muster on her mother, perhaps because this is whom Tatum actually identifies with, while her father Ryan, who was comparatively the more responsible parent, merits virtually no kind word from his daughter."

From John McEnroe's book "You can't be serious" :

"She didn't have the strongest of foundations on which to build a sense of motherhood. Her own mother had had such problems with alcohol and pills that she'd barely been present when Tatum was little; for a time, Ryan had carried most of the burden, to the best of his limited ability, while pursuing a full-time acting career."

"In fairness to Ryan - temperament aside, imagine being a gorgeous actor in your 20s, your career about to take off like crazy, and you've got to deal with a seriously impaired ex-wife and two neglected little children. Plus, it's the 60s, not exactly an enlightened era. Surely that's part of what McEnroe meant by Ryan's limited ability. He should have hired a really good governess and paid her lots of money, I guess."

" I think that many Hollywood actors are narcissists and very bad parents as well, the difference is that Ryan's kids didn't have good mothers to live with (except for Patrick, that's why he turned out okay), Tatum and griffin's mother was totally crazy/unfit and Farrah was nuts and an addict. I really think if other Hollywood actors were given the responsibility to solely raise their children, the outcome probably would be similar to Ryan's kids. Tony Curtis comes to mind, he was self absorbed and wasn't meant to be a father, and gave some of his kids drugs but the difference is that his kids were raised by their mothers who were Not crazy."

"Tatum said in the book that when her father was going to be staying in Ireland to shoot the Kubrick film she was going to have to go back to boarding school and didn't understand why her grandparents wouldn't keep her. I'll tell you why - she was a borderline sociopath - attempted to kill a cat, stole things, made up lies, set fires. Not sure how much of that is in her DNA or was triggered by the neglect and abuse in her very early childhood development with her mother."

Troll

R29 = Griffin or Tatum

It's all so very sad.

I believe one of Tatum's kids wrote a book about her which I couldn't get into.

Tatum talks about her mother's abuse on Instagram :

"tatum__oneal

This is where I was teaching my friend how much i loved being spanked , and how to do it !! Later I would really learn what spanking was with switches , paddles , belts and whips . I am a firm believer that corporal punishment does NOT work. If you follow me and that’s what you do to your children please unfollow!! It has done irreparable harm to me. Photo my mom . Irreparable means that I have not been able to overcome it. I have. But I think it was the worst way to try to teach me. We’re not animals we can speak words to each other. Circa 65

Oh god oh god, this is all so awfully horrible and sad. Thanks for posting. Having been abused and neglected as a child, I really feel a lot of pain for Tatum and Griffin. They were never given a chance. Destroying your child should be the gravest offense in the book, with the harshest punishment. Unfortunately, nobody cares for the little ones.

R33 I agree, but what bothers me, that Tatum and Griffin are mainly putting all the blame for their fucked up upbringing/life on their father. Even though their mother had a MAIN contribution to their damage. Their mother was far Worse than their father. Maybe because she's dead, that's why they forgave her.

R33 yeah, that's a bit strange. Sometimes abused people side with their abuser, the Stockholm Syndrome. But perhaps we don't know the full story. From experience I know that sometimes the people who present a saner front are far more cruel and deranged than the obvious fuckups. It's nearly always the case in abusive households.

From Tatum's second book "Found":

""My mother had a 16-year-old boyfriend, who beat us with switches cut from the fig tree," remembers Tatum. "We were locked in the garage for so long that we ate dog food to quell our hunger. We were unsupervised and wild."

Tatum first got drunk at the age of six when she passed out in her mother's bathroom. By then, she had already been sexually molested twice.

A year later, in 1971, her father spirited her away and put her in boarding school where she developed a severe stealing habit. On a visit to the school Ryan found her living in a room with infants, "because there was nothing I could steal from babies".

DO NOT FEED THE BIPOLAR ASPIE TROLL

He’s taking advantage of Muriel’s days off.

F & F

R31 Tatum's son Kevin, wrote a fictional book based on his grandmother Joanna Moore called "Our Town"

After Kevin's arrest in 2014 for cocaine possession, he claimed that his grandmother's spirit visited him and saved him, so he decided to write book about her!!

I simply can't wait for the NEXT Ryan/Tatum O'Neal thread! They're just like the Barrymores!

R39 Be careful of what you wish for!

Gosh. Everything but the hounds snapping at her rear end. Yet Tatum now speaks warmly of her mother and took care of her in the end. (And Meghan Markle won’t have anything to do with her father because...why again?)

R41 Yes, Tatum is now rewriting history and portraying her mother as hero and wounded victim. Can you imagine how bad her mother was if Ryan was the more responsible parent of the two?!

Not everything can be fixed and people have no choice but to live with the pain until they die. Writing books and appearing on Larry King are not happy endings.

R43 100% True, Tatum wrote 2 books, did the media rounds of countless TV shows/magazine interviews and a reality show (to humiliate her father in public). All of this and she's still miserable and unhappy.

I still wonder why Tatum and Griffin had their mother disinterred from the cemetery in California and moved to Georgia. It's not like Joanna had any relatives left in Georgia who would have been keen on that happening. This is the sad stone they provided for her.

R45 Maybe they felt their mother belonged more to Georgia because it's her birth place.

Somehow I have a hard time thinking Tatum or Griffin would have cared where Janna was buried.

R47 Because of Tatum and Griffin's bad relationship with their father, They somehow put their dead mother in some kind of holy shrine.

Tatum's son Sean McEnroe about his grandmother's craziness:

"sean__el: My mother won an Academy Award at the age of ten, before she could even read. My grandmother was also an amazing actress and just as amazing of a singer (YouTube: Joanna Moore, Down in the Valley). However, in the 60s, actresses were fed pills like they were candy. Even though she had built a fantastic career for herself, my grandma had an extremely addictive personality and by the late 60s, she had become a full-blown addict/alcoholic. Her career was never to be the same again. My grandfather divorced her and he soon became one of the biggest movie stars of his time. Even though he was known for his beauty and seductive charm, he had one of the most violent tempers of anyone I’ve ever known.

So by the time my mom was a little girl, she was living in a trailer in the San Fernando Valley with my grandma. Her childhood was extremely traumatic. She would be locked in a bathroom and left for days on end, when my grandma would leave for Las Vegas and eventually come back to let her out. My grandma was also only interested in dating extremely young men, some of whom molested my mom and often beat her with tree branches.

My grandpa eventually became aware of the dire conditions my mom was living in, and took full custody of her.

Honestly, I give Tatum credit for being up, dressed, and able to hold a conversation. She has had to overcome quite a bit.

R51 Agree, but Tatum should stop blaming all her problems/failures on her daddy. It seems that she likes to forget about her mother's faults and her major early contribution in fucking up her life.

The expiration date on Tatum blaming her father for her problems has long since passed. She needs to take responsibility for her actions and mistakes instead of blaming her daddy. Would Tatum want her kids to constantly remind her of her poor parenting and drug addiction all the time and blame her for their failures in life?!

Tatum is now rewriting history on her Instagram's posts and portraying her mother as a hero. It's totally ridiculous.

Tatum's son Kevin is totally obsessed with his dead grandmother, and credits her for saving his life!!! He also wrote a book about her life in 2015. The book flopped because people/reviewers said they found the main character of the book (Joanna Moore) to be so unlikable with no redeeming qualities and they didn't know what the point of his book.

Kevin McEnroe with an ugly tattoo of his grandmother.

I think Tatum's 2 sons are unstable as well.

Joanna only lasted 4 episodes on The Andy Griffith Show because of her instability, and because Andy Griffith hated her.

I remember when Tatum was on Howard Stern show and literally ripping and humiliating her father there (even though she was supposedly reconciling with her dad on the reality show!!!!). Howard trashed Ryan with Tatum throughout the whole interview, but when he started to bash her mother calling her crazy and a worse parent than Ryan, Tatum interrupted him saying "but she was beautiful, let's forgive her!).

Tatum and Ryan appeared on TODAY show and then Piers Morgan the very next day to promote the reality show, Tatum said that her father is in a bad mood because of the Howard Stern interview, she lied and claimed it was Howard who tried to break them up. WTF. If she really wants to have peace with her father, why deliberately go to Howard Stern show and trash/humiliate her father there? and then complains in other interview and says she don't know why her dad was mad at her?!

Tatum is toxic and thrives on the negativity and drama. I hope Ryan continues to put her at arm length. He doesn't need more grief and drama at this time of his life.

Joanna Moore encouraged her teenage daughter (16 years old) to date Warren Beatty:

From Tatum's book:

"I was staying with my mother when I ran into Warren Beatty, who asked for my phone number. He was one of the most notorious lady killers in Hollywood, but my mother gave me some surprising advice. She said, "Go for it. You might get hurt, but if you're willing to take that chance, you could probably learn a lot from him."

Pretty interesting, huh? I confided to my diary. Sometimes she's the coolest person I know. Luckily for me, nothing ever happened with Warren Beatty—much as I wished it would."

If the roles were reversed and it wasn't her mother who were encouraging her to date the much older Warren Beatty when she was only 16 yo ,and it was Ryan. She wouldn't have called him a cool parent, she would have accused him of being a negligent abusive father.

Ryan has had a pretty spectacular life. And he's caused a lot of people misery being such a narcistic pain in the ass arrogant actor of limited talent though incredible good looks.

And the fact now that he's a rich old man who gives a shit if two of his children hated him? All of us eldergays should have had a such a life of constant great lays and California real estate.

'narcissistic'

R58 "All of us eldergays should have had a such a life of constant great lays and California real estate."

LMAO

I remember Joanna was on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW around 1962-63 playing his potential love interest. I don't know what happened but I noticed that suddenly Joanna was gone after a half dozen episodes and then next season there was a new gal. Then again, Griffith was known to have been difficult so who knows ? Keep in mind that before Joanna, sweet Elinor Donahue from FATHER KNOWS BEST was the first actress on ANDY GRIFFITH to play his love interest. Her name was Ellie as I recall and she was a pharmacist assistant. Like with Joanna Moore, one day after a season on the show she was gone. After that they got that dull boring actress who played Helen Crump or whatever. Joanna was good on the show but obviously had a lot of demons. She'd been damaged since she was a little girl when her family was in a car accident which killed her mother and sister instantly & left her a father an invalid who died less than a year later. Horrible thing.

Funny, when she was with O'Neal although she was less than 10 yrs older than him she looked like a generation older. He was a major pussy hound. She got pregnant and that was that. Back then you married unless you could find an abortionist.

R61 Yeah Joanna (born in 1934) was 7 years older than Ryan. But she looked rough and older than her age, Alcohol, pills and her ridiculous wigs didn't help.

Tatum said that her mother had a habit of wearing wigs, and that ultimately destroyed her hair. She also had a favorite large wig in the 1980s which she called "Farrah" after Farrah Fawcett's hair. This was mentioned in Kevin McEnroe book about his grandmother Joanna.

Wow, it's hard to reconcile the stories about Joanna Moore told here with the woman who appears on so many MeTV reruns. She appeared on many old Perry Mason shows and was very good and (in one episode) very funny. She was by far the best of "Sheriff Taylor's" girlfriends on the Griffith show, more mature and sexy than "Ellie Walker" and warmer than "Helen Crump" (who wouldn't be?). It just goes to show, you never know what goes on behind the scenes.

How does John feel about his children picking up their mother's mantle and making a career out of the O'Neill family history of public emotional exhibitionism? Could you imagine the Barrymore's family autobiographies on what the previous generation did to them? I bet it would be a lot more interesting.

Though I guess it would be rich if John himself reproached anyone else for public emotional displays.

R64 Be ready for future books by Tatum's sons about the O'Neal family dysfunction. Kevin had already written one, but might write another one. Since his first book in 2015, he hadn't written anything, most probably he has no material so he will just write book volume 2 about the his mother's life.

Sean is already writing an essay about his mother's life and struggle on Instagram and some people are encouraging him to write a book!!!

It's interesting that Griffin and Patrick's kids don't participate in whoring their family business in public. It's only Tatum's sons, they inherited their mother's attention whoring and whining traits.

Here's Kevin McEnroe promoting his book in 2015. It's obvious that there's something wrong with him.

Tatum also passed her hatred and bitterness for her father to her sons.

In one interview, Kevin said that his grandfather wrote him a letter wanting to connect with him (Tatum admitted she rejected her dad's several requests to meet her children through the years), but Kevin said he just wanted to throw tarts at the letter!

If Joanna were the parent still alive, she'd be getting the blame most likely.

"Kevin said he just wanted to throw tarts at the letter!"

- I like that visual.

R69 I'm sorry I meant "throw darts"

Kevin McEnroe wrote about what his grandfather/Ryan taught Tatum as if it was some kind of abuse or something negative. It's funny because those same traits were what attracted his father John to his mother in the first place.

From Our Town book (Ryan is Dale, Tatum is Clover and Dylan is Griffin in the book):

"Dylan’d signed up for judo, he’d skip school then just do that—Dale wanted to teach his daughter something. He wanted her to be beautiful, like her mom. But not weak like her. Not pathetic. He wanted her to be wry, and self-aware. Clever, and sure of herself. He wanted her to be brave. A girl that could play pool with men could do anything Like the heroine in a screwball comedy, whom all the men pine after but no one has the courage to court."

From You Cannot Be Serious book by John McEnroe : 2002

"Maybe my fiery spirit reminded her of her father's own famous temper. For my part, I liked her confidence, She wasn't even twenty-one yet, but she had the poise of an experienced woman. I was more attracted to her all the time. she did certain things unexpectedly well—she was an excellent pool player, a great Frisbee thrower, a good skier. Her father taught her well. She was very easy to spend time with: In some ways, it was like being with one of the guys."

Ryan and Tatum interview - 1990

Ryan a 21-year-old high school dropout and aspiring actor when he met starlet Joanna Moore, a B-movie starlet from Americus. She became pregnant with Tatum soon after she met Ryan, and they were married within a few months. Griffin was born 11 months after Tatum.

The two separated when Tatum was 2 and were divorced 18 months later. Then began a nightmare for Tatum and her brother.

'It was a poisoned lifestyle,' Ryan O`Neal says. He spews forth a stream of invectives about Moore, but asks quickly that they not be printed.

'They weren`t getting proper food and care,' says Tatum`s grandmother, former stage actress Pat O`Neal, 82. 'It was dreadful. Tatum was a little girl with a certain vanity, and here she was dressed in rags, her hair a tangled mess and no shoes.'

Pat and Charles 'Blackie' O`Neal, a Hollywood screenwriter, were constantly rescuing Tatum and Griffin during that time.

'Joanna would take them to a bar and drink and then disappear, and the bartender would call us,' she says. 'Tatum always knew our telephone number. Then my husband would go find them, and I`d bathe them and put clean clothes on them.'

Tatum recalls cooking meals for herself and Griffin and 'being a little mother hen.' But her father, whom she rarely saw, was never far from her mind.

'I went around telling people my dad was Ryan O`Neal. I remember seeing him in `Love Story.` '

So when Ryan offered to let Tatum come live with him when she was 7, she jumped at the chance. Tatum says she always gravitated more to her father and Griffin was more loyal to their mother, which was why 'I didn`t give too much thought to Griffin.'

Tatum joined Ryan at his houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills. Griffin later moved in with them when he was 12, but it was the ragged little girl from the ranch who was tapped for movie stardom.

Peter Bogdanovich`s ex-wife Polly Platt met her and suggested she`d be perfect for the part of the little con artist in the movie Bogdanovich planned to direct, 'Paper Moon.'

'She saw this little waify thing with tangles in her hair,' Tatum says. 'I was tough. Rough around the edges.'

Ryan sent her to boarding school after the movie, but she didn`t get along with the other children and decided she wanted to work again.

Shortly thereafter she got the role in 'Bad News Bears.'

Tatum , who used to tell the press she grew up too fast, now says she enjoyed being a child star. 'I just had a great time,' she says. 'I was playing dressup.'

Tatum calls her father the greatest influence on her life, despite frequent estrangements.

'It was very nice of him to take time out to raise a little girl,' she says. 'He gave me a lot of rope and said, `Don`t embarrass me, and don`t embarrass yourself.'`

By all accounts Tatum and Ryan were extremely close from the time she came to live with him until she was 16. Women such as Bianca Jagger and Anjelica Huston 'came and went, but I was his greatest friend. I told him everything.'

She calls her father 'a very intense person. That`s why women fell in love with him all over the world.' But that intensity had another side. 'Some women survive their breakups with him better than others,' she says.

Perhaps the worst moment for the young O`Neals came when Farrah Fawcett arrived on the scene. Tatum was 16, and she and Griffin were living with their father in Malibu. A second nightmare began for Tatum. In effect, her father left her for Fawcett.

There have been long periods of not talking, mixed in with reconciliations. Ryan says plaintively that Tatum 'has to be accepting of my relationships. She must deal with both her caring and jealousy.' Lately they have both been 'working on it. We`re treading lightly.'

Tatum feels some regret about how she dealt with her mother`s problems at the time, particularly the day years ago when Moore was released from a clinic for amphetamine addiction, and Tatum, age 6, spit in her face out of pure resentment for having been abandoned.

Now, Tatum says, she supports her mother financially.

I can think of someone else much crazier.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Sean McEnroe whining on Instagram :

sean__el: I spent my college years doing one reckless, dangerous thing after another. Daredevil accidents, DUI's, nearly drowning in the Pacific... it's always been a miracle to me that I didn’t die during this time. And yet, it wasn’t until I was 22 that I experienced the worst accident of my life. I was swinging on a tree branch in Ireland when it snapped and I fell 10 feet onto my back. The force of the fall was so strong that I fractured my sternum and broke my clavicle.

It was such a strange and unique accident that I didn’t even know I had broken my chest. I had excruciating pain in my right neck and shoulder, because, unbeknownst to me at the time, my sternum was actually twisting my rib cage and pulling my shoulder down. I ended up living with severe chronic pain every day for 5 years. At 27, I finally found the only surgeon in California willing to perform the specific surgery I needed. He had to open my chest up, break my sternum to put it back into place, drill a hole in the bone and then wrap it with a synthetic tendon to keep it in place. I was warned before I signed the contract that I had a 20% of dying because the operation would be so close to my heart and major arteries. I signed immediately.

Every morning, I would wake up in agonizing pain, filled with despair and regret, berating myself for swinging on that branch, not understanding why I had to suffer more than I already had. At a time when I desperately needed anything to give me hope, I discovered photography. And I'm so glad I did because it was through this lens that I first began to see life through the eye of my heart. Somehow, within this first year, and through many synchronicities, I found myself accompanying a charity to Nepal 2 months after the catastrophic earthquakes in 2015. Even though I was only there for 6 days, it was probably the most eventful week of my life.

As momentous and life-changing as my experiences were, my body was not adapted to the food I was eating in all of the remote villages and as soon as I returned home, I had to go straight to the ER for an extreme stomach virus. This sickness, combined with my chronic pain, sent me spiraling into the darkest week of my life.

Do you have any more stories about Tatum and Ryan and Joanna and Griffin O'Neal OP? These are fascinating. Your devotion is admirable. Tatum sounds very disturbed. What do you attribute that to? Does Ryan have Farrah's Warhol - do you think he deserves that?

Sean McEnroe visits DL!!!

He changed his Instagram post at R50 and his other Instagram posts about his mother which I posted in the other thread yesterday. If you open the link, the posts are changed!!!

Tatum interview 2004:

Joanna Moore she moved their two children, 5-year-old Tatum, and her younger brother, Griffin, to a rundown ranch outside of Los Angeles. Tatum writes, "My own young life had eerily echoed Addie's, [her character in ‘Paper Moon'] even though my mother was still alive. In the grip of addiction, she had virtually abandoned me and Griffin, leaving us in squalor -- starving, shoeless, and ragged, as well as beaten and abused by the men in her life."

Phillips: "How bad was the neglect?"

O'Neal: "It was terrible. My mother stayed drunk for years and years and years. It just went on and on and on. So, even from when we were little up until when we grew up and, you know, it just didn't end."

Tatum says as a young girl, left unprotected, she was molested on the ranch.

Phillips: "You were six years old?"

O'Neal: "Yeah. When the mother is off getting drunk or getting high or taking pills in another room, and leaving little children with, you know, people who don't watch their kids, this is what happens."

Phillips: "You write that your mother would continually leave you alone with strange men. So, this wasn't just a one-time thing?"

O'Neal: "No."

Tatum says as a child she held her feelings in, that she was more apt to steal or set a fire for the attention she craved. Defiance and delinquency were her defense against the pain.

By the time Tatum was eight years old, her mother was so incapacitated by her addictions that she could no longer care for her children. They were sent off to boarding school, but Tatum wouldn't stay there for long.

Phillips: "You went to live with your father at his Malibu Beach house. The good life, you called it."

O'Neal: "Yeah. It was pretty good then.

I believe Tatum like to overlook her mother's poor mothering and faults because Tatum identifies with her as a drug addict mother.

Tatum's dateline interview:

O'Neal: John was off playing tennis and I was alone in his New York City apartment. John had a safe.There were drugs in it - some pills and at least an ounce of cocaine. Like many people in the 80's, when coke was a staple at parties, John kept drugs around for hospitality, I guess, like having a wine cellar. And that's sort of when I realized that I would do drugs alone. I didn't need anyone to do them with me. That I was a drug addict."

Phillips: "You went back to the safe and back to the safe—"

O'Neal: "Well, yeah. I did them all by myself. I did all these drugs by myself."

Tatum says when John got back and found out what she had done, his famous temper flared. She says John thought he could fix her problem. If she got pregnant, he believed she would stop using drugs.

Phillips: "The cure—"

O'Neal: "Yeah. I wouldn't try that for everybody."

Phillips: "But for you it worked?"

O'Neal: "Well, yeah. I didn't want to be like my mother. You know I didn't want to be this crazy mother, which I sort of later ended up later on being."

Phillips: "His temper, his outbursts, are pretty well known."

O'Neal: "Yeah."

Phillips: "What about you?"

O'Neal: "I have a temper, but I wouldn't call me abusive."

Phillips: "He says that while you accuse him of being a bully, that you gave as good as you got."

O'Neal: "That makes sense, yeah. Although, I think he's the bigger bully. Being away from John and away from the kids, that's when all my demons came right back."

Phillips: "How painful was that for you?"

O'Neal: "Horrendous. The most horrendous thing. And I'm so terribly sad that my daughter Emily walked into that room and that, you know, things get so sloppy when you're under the influence. And it's tragic and awful"

Phillips: "Do you blame John McEnroe for taking the precautions that he did?"

O'Neal: "Well, no."

Phillips: "I mean wanting supervised visits, wanting drug tests? So where's the beef with him?"

O'Neal: "I don't have a beef with him on the testing and stuff. I have a beef with him on the way he's treated me. John was a volatile person and said to me, ‘You suck. You're a has-been. You're nothing. You mean nothing, Tatum. You'll never make it. Without me, you're nothing, and if you think you're ever, you know, forget the abusive drugs, if you think you're ever going to get these kids, you know, you can never get them. You'll never see them.' What do I have to live for in my life? I'm worthless."

Is Tatum blaming others unfairly for her own addiction?

Phillips: "At what point do you have to take personal responsibility for it?"

O'Neal: "I do. I do take responsibility for it. I admit to having a problem. I have been to numerous treatment centers. But chemical dependency is not a right to be punishing me for the rest of my life."

Online comment from someone who knew Joanna Moore:

"I knew Joanna Moore, Perhaps Ryan's life would have been different ,if his first wife was a healthy human being. Her dysfunctions adversely affected her children. Ryan was young and impressionable & she just was not a mentally healthy human being. "

"Joanna was a pill popping drunk right up to her death from cancer. She was so messed up, she would regularly wet herself. She once crashed & rolled her SUV, killing her dog and losing a finger. She never got over Ryan and was jealous of Farrah. She even tried to look like her by wearing a Farrah hair wig, even though she was old. Her friend and next door neighbor in Palm Springs cared for her during her cancer but Tatum did show up during the end. The whole family is messed up royally."

Ryan fought for custody twice. But the court preferred the addict unfit mother.

Ryan in court with Leigh Taylor-Young

Tatum recent IG post about her life in squalor with her mother.

tatum__oneal: We all come from some where and this was me and my bro Griffin pre - Hollywood ! Northridge ,Ca 1970

R83 R84 Ryan in court fighting his crazy unfit ex wife for the custody of Tatum and Griffin in 1968

I blame all this mess on Ryan. If could have kept it is his pants none of this craziness would have come to pass. Don't stick your dick if the chick is sick!

R87 = Tatum with her Ryan's blame syndrome

Tatum O'Neal admitting the truth/her sick love to her father - 1992

Tatum O’Neal credits her father with giving her “a long period of unconditional love” at the height of his own career.

“I really thought he was my mother and my father—which he really was,” she said. “And that was so hurtful, for me to be that attached to him, because every woman in his life to me was somebody that would take him away—she was taking my spot.”