Tatum O’Neal Is Still Here: The Oscar Winner on Surviving Addiction, a Stroke and Coming to Terms With Being Left Out of Her Father’s Will

Tatum O’Neal walked into Smashbox Studios using a cane, a vestige of the stroke she had in 2020 after an overdose. As she was getting a manicure, she struggled to remember the names of important people in her life. But now that she’s actually before the cameras, posing with her Oscar in hand, she’s come alive. There’s electricity in the air, and we’re all leaning in, cheering her on, rooting for her. “You look like a movie star!” shouts her 38-year-old son Kevin McEnroe, who has traveled from his home in New York to support her throughout the process of this story — and indeed she does. O’Neal beams. “Kevin, I love you!” she shouts back.

In April 1974, at age 10, a tuxedoed O’Neal — “I’m the original tomboy,” she tells me later — won a supporting actress Oscar for her role opposite her father, Ryan O’Neal, in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon.” She became the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award, a record she still holds. “Paper Moon” and her Oscar triumph were the start of O’Neal’s heavily scrutinized public life, then followed by teen movie stardom and a worrying wild-child presence in the pre-internet gossip press. At 21, when she began dating John McEnroe, at the time the No. 1 tennis player in the world, the tabloids went into a frenzy, stalking them wherever they went, and causing problems for their already tempestuous relationship. Later, during a less forgiving time about such matters, O’Neal became the face of addiction: to alcohol, to cocaine, to heroin — that last one causing her to, for a while, lose custody of her three children with McEnroe. She became a symbol, a cautionary tale, about child actors and the demons that can haunt them.

Yet throughout all this turmoil, O’Neal, now 61, has remained a touchstone for Generation X, because we grew up alongside her.

And that she’s standing here at all is a miracle.

Her parents were both actors, and addicts — they were careless with her, abusive and neglectful. She was given alcohol at age 6 at her mother’s house, then endured years of physical and verbal abuse from O’Neal after he gained full custody of her in 1970. He punched her, for instance, after learning she was nominated for “Paper Moon” and he wasn’t. O’Neal, who died in 2023, openly did drugs in front of her when she was a child. “Pills and painkillers, cocaine,” she says, ticking them off on her fingers. “And then, of course,” she says of the procession of women who came and went from their home, “girls, girls, girls.”

Pills nearly ended her life in May 2020, when she overdosed in her Century City apartment, causing a severe stroke. During the lockdown period of COVID, while suffering from chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, O’Neal had been prescribed morphine by a doctor who either didn’t know or didn’t care about her addictions. Isolated, she remembers not wanting to be here anymore, even for her kids. “I love them so much, but I’d already given so much,” she says. “Part of me just didn’t want to make it, you know?”

She fell into a coma that lasted six weeks. Kevin McEnroe recalls having a conversation with a doctor who asked him if he knew whether O’Neal would “want to live essentially as a vegetable.” But he made a bet that she was still in there. “There’s something in her that you can’t explain — that perseveres through even horrible situations she put herself in,” he says.

When O’Neal woke up, her prognosis was dire: She was unable to talk or walk or even see. It’s been a very long road from there, but she’s continued to make improvements, relearning everything, steady as she goes. And the biggest improvement has come from within. “Now I don’t want to hurt myself,” O’Neal says, speaking with that familiar steely rasp, untouched by time. “Now I don’t want to fucking take drugs again — I really don’t.”

So today, we’re not here to tell sad stories: This is the story of how Tatum O’Neal has survived all of it. She never did get an apology from her father — in fact, his coup de grâce was when she learned after his death that he’d cut her out of his will. But he has given her something after all, something priceless: She’s now free from the malignant shadow he cast over her life. Toward the end of the shoot, photographer Nino Muñoz urges McEnroe to pose with his mother, for a portrait just for them. He stands behind her — he’s very tall, as O’Neal points out more than once — and she leans back, still not entirely steady on her feet. “I love my son!” O’Neal shouts again.

Ryan O’Neal, inextricably linked to Malibu, was among the most famous residents of the beach enclave. As fires swept through Los Angeles County last month, O’Neal got a text from one of her former neighbors that her father’s house was gone. On Threads, where O’Neal posts frequently, almost compulsively, she wrote: “It’s the saddest ever so sad I could cry. My father’s house is gone Malibu gone.”

It had been her childhood home, after O’Neal took her from her mother, Joanna Moore, who had proved incapable of parenting at all (Moore’s 15-year-old boyfriend had run the place). But Tatum hadn’t been so much rescued as set up for exploitation, as well as a lifetime of trying (and failing) to please her father. When she first moved in, though, O’Neal remembers looking at the ocean and thinking, “I’m in the happiest place I’ve ever been.”

It was in Malibu that O’Neal first met Bogdanovich. But this is where her memory gets tricky; she can’t remember Bogdanovich’s name, so McEnroe helps her — serving this function is why he traveled to L.A. “Peter Bogdanovich, yes!” she then echoes. “I loved him so much.” At 8, O’Neal, a precocious, adorable kid, didn’t choose to audition for the director, but was instead simply paraded before him by her father.

As she recounted in her riveting, harrowing 2004 memoir “A Paper Life,” after the film was released in May 1973, O’Neal turned on his daughter. That’s because, though the movie and his performance were both well received, Tatum was deemed the standout by critics. “Things got ugly quick,” she says.

Not only did he hit her out of jealousy after her nomination, but he refused to attend the Oscars with her. He was in Ireland, filming Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” and wouldn’t come back. Instead, O’Neal — who had chosen the tux because, as a tiny, budding fashionista, she had been inspired by style icon Bianca Jagger, “who I’m obsessed with!”— was escorted to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion by her grandparents. In a clip from that night, Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland list the nominees, and O’Neal covers her eyes, as if she can’t look, smiling big when Ireland reads her name. Poised at the podium, she says: “All I really want to thank is my director, Peter Bogdanovich, and my father — thank you.”

If a 10-year-old won an Oscar today, there would be, for better and for worse, an entire apparatus behind them, intent on keeping the momentum going. Instead, O’Neal says, when she was asked to audition for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” for the role of the child prostitute that would eventually yield Jodie Foster her first Oscar nomination, “my father said, ‘No, you can’t,’” because he thought it was “a little too naked” — but, of course, maybe it was just his jealousy talking. “And I never really recovered from that.” She certainly went on to make a few good movies that were successful: “The Bad News Bears” (1976) is a classic, and “Little Darlings” (1980) — with Kristy McNichol and Matt Dillon — was a hit.

But she also did strange projects like “Circle of Two,” in which she played a 15-year-old who falls in love with a 60-year-old painter played by Richard Burton. “He was brilliant — and the movie we did was terrible,” O’Neal says. Through today’s lens, the whole enterprise was utterly repellent — just wrong on every level. She had to appear topless in it (“I was horrified”), and says that Burton, a famous drinker, offered her booze and then propositioned her with the salvo, “Would you like to have a kiss?” O’Neal was always treated like a little adult. “‘Yikes’ is the right word,” she says. “I loved Richard Burton, but I was like, nah, I ain’t going to do that.”

When it came to acting, her father had gotten into her head. “He was controlling, and telling me, ‘No, you’re not good,’” she says. “And so then I started to get not good, feeling scared all the time.”

Ryan O’Neal died on Dec. 8, 2023, at age 82. After years of bitter fighting and estrangement, Tatum had actually seen him three times after her health crisis, including a visit to the Malibu house right before his death. He had been in poor health for years, and she didn’t know that he was dying, though “he didn’t look well at all.” During her final visit, he offered her drugs. “I know he was drinking, smoking a lot of pot, and he was like, ‘Here, take a pill,’” she says. “I was like, ‘No, thank you.’” McEnroe, who is also sober and intent on accountability, says: “She drank that day though. Every single time she’s seen her dad my entire life, something happens.”

As far as the will goes, she thinks he removed her after she wrote “A Paper Life,” the first of her two memoirs, in which she thoroughly documented his violent temper. She also revealed that she’d been sexually abused by a member of O’Neal’s entourage, who was banished only briefly before being allowed back into the inner circle. “The first book that I wrote was just a fucking honest book,” she says. “And that’s what got him.”

Money, though, is an issue — so being left a bunch of it would, of course, have been a relief. O’Neal’s adult career never achieved its previous heights, nor its paydays. After her divorce from McEnroe in 1994, she tried to resume acting, but that was when she began experimenting with heroin, and fell into serious addiction. And during that period, McEnroe says, “there was an accountant who took advantage of her,” stealing $1 million.

As an adult actor, the only jobs she’s proud of are her recurring role on FX’s “Rescue Me,” where she was well cast as Denis Leary’s character’s brash, vulgar sister, and a guest appearance on the 2003 “Sex and the City” episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes.” (O’Neal plays a deliciously smug mom who makes guests take off their shoes upon entering her apartment, and Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolos inexplicably vanish.) In one cash grab, she and her father did a grim single-season reality series for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN cable channel in 2011, called “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” in which they attempted to reconcile. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.) And throughout the 2010s, she took acting jobs to keep her SAG-AFTRA insurance.

Since her overdose and stroke, she’s lived off the money from investments she made when she was young and highly paid. But health care is expensive — she recently had neck surgery, and has speech therapy twice a week (she’s learning how to read again).

Naturally, O’Neal was devastated to find out she wasn’t in her father’s will. Yet she soon felt a steely resolve emerging out of Ryan O’Neal’s final fuck-you from beyond the grave: “Keep it, motherfucker.”

McEnroe is nodding, and adds, “It’s blood money.” O’Neal is participating in a documentary project about her life, which would bring in money (but is too nascent to detail here). “I think the best revenge is your own success,” McEnroe says. And from his perspective, now that O’Neal’s father is dead, she has started “letting go of how much space he took up in her life.” To her detriment, “she was defined as the person who was abused by Ryan.”

In the aftermath, O’Neal’s survival and continuing recovery feel like a victory. Looking directly at his mom, McEnroe says: “There wasn’t much of a desire to be like, ‘I can do great things.’ And I think today you can do great things.”

I ask O’Neal why she was such an adoring parent, when she’d had no models for that — but the question stymies her. McEnroe jumps in: “She is full of love — and I think that that’s something that she was born with.”

She responds in kind: “I gave birth to my oldest son. He was the most joyful, the most loving. And then both of us got into drugs, and that really changed us. And look at him now and look at me now. It’s just beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” It’s as if they’re each other’s hype men. “He’s a writer, just so you know,” O’Neal says out of nowhere at another point. “My son Kevin is brilliant. Brilliant!”

We’re having this conversation the day after the photo shoot, in the quiet, cozy dining room of the retirement community in the Valley where O’Neal has lived since she was able to leave the various hospitals and memory care facilities that got her through the worst of her post-stroke rehabilitation. Before she had the neck surgery in mid-January, she would swim in the pool, ride a bike in the gym and go hang out with friends who live here. But of late, she’s been waiting for the pain to subside. Even in pain, though, O’Neal is cheerful, smiling and laughing as we discuss some of the darkest events of her life — she’s an open book as I ask her about her addictions, her health, her miserable late father. She has a light inside her that’s impossible to extinguish.

O’Neal attends recovery meetings over Zoom, but sobriety remains a struggle: Her birthday, Nov. 5, was election night, and when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win, she began drinking. “I was with my gay friends, and was like, ‘I’m going to have a glass of wine — maybe two,’” she says. “And then I was like, ‘OK, damn: I have one day of sobriety.’” One thing McEnroe wishes for his mother is that she get a full year of sobriety under her belt. “Because I’m not sure she’s ever felt the kind of peace that comes with that,” he says.

She’s lost some words and memories, and a lot of people’s names: McEnroe and I are sent down a deep rabbit hole to remember one of her former co-stars, with O’Neal enthusiastically delivering such hints as “famous actor,” “the other brilliant British guy!” and “Nazi!” The answer turns out to be Christopher Plummer, with “Nazi” referring to his role as Captain von Trapp, who escaped from them in “The Sound of Music.” But O’Neal doesn’t get frustrated, and speaking with her feels like a fun adventure. When I correctly guess “Walter Matthau” from the context clues of (again) “famous actor,” “my favorite New Yorker!” and “who did my second movie,” I feel as if I’ve won a prize.

She’s protected here, maybe for the first time in her life, McEnroe says — which is a relief for him and his siblings, Emily and Sean. But it’s better than that, actually: Since O’Neal’s near-death experience in 2020, he feels a real difference in her. “There’s something that’s happened,” McEnroe says. “Maybe it’s the removal of drugs and alcohol, too, and this feeling that she’s safe and she’s living. And there’s this verve. …”

In June, McEnroe is getting married in Northern California. It will be the first time in many years, decades even, that O’Neal and John McEnroe are in the same room together. Their divorce was followed by years of acrimonious, ugly custody battles and vicious fighting.

But both mother and son are sure the reunion will be fine — great, even. “The anger is gone,” O’Neal says. Kevin McEnroe seems downright psyched. “She’s going to make a speech at the wedding,” he says. Addressing his mother again, he continues: “I think since this happened, everybody has rallied and has wished you the best.” In response, O’Neal says: “All the good stuff. All the good stuff.”

We’re coming to the end of our conversation, but once again, we discuss life after Ryan O’Neal — and whether O’Neal has finally been liberated. “As she changes, I think opportunities have begun to change for her,” McEnroe says. “More things are coming our way as she starts to see the good in people and the good in the world. Something really shifted when he died that allowed her to be —”

O’Neal joins in: “Yes, just Tatum! Without my dad.”

“Just Tatum is enough,” McEnroe says.

Do you feel like you’re almost there? I ask. Almost enough?

O’Neal smiles. “Yes!” she says. “Even better than almost enough.”

Styling: Linda Medvene; Makeup: Fiona Stiles/A Frame Agency/Chanel; Hair: Ericka Verrett/A Frame Agency/Oribe; Manicure: Merrick Fisher/celestineagency.com/Orly; Photographed at Smashbox Studios/Culver City. Look 1: (Dress): Badgley Mischka. Look 2 (Jacket: Zegna); Dress: ALC; Necklace: FoundRae