Tatum O’Neal on near-fatal overdose and daddy issues: ‘Weird s – – t happened’
In May of 2020, troubled former child star Tatum O’Neal, 59, had a near-fatal overdose and landed in a coma. Now she’s breaking her silence on what happened — and her ongoing issues with her famous dad.
It started in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she lived on a high floor of an apartment building in Century City, California, she explained.
“I kept on wanting to fall off [the building] and die,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “I had never been so sick. I didn’t know I had COVID.”
To combat her illness, she took painkillers — opiates and morphine.
“I’ve had problems with drugs for many, many years. But I overtook my medicine, for sure,” she said. “And that’s it. I fell asleep. That’s what happened.”
She was in a coma for over a month. When she woke up after her overdose and stroke, she had to relearn how to speak. She currently lives in a retirement community specializing in memory care, where most of the inhabitants are 20 years older than her.
At that time, she was also preparing to reunite with her famous dad, Ryan O’Neal, 82, with whom she co-starred in the 1973 movie “Paper Moon.”
She still holds the record for being the youngest Oscar winner, thanks to that film — nabbing Best Supporting Actress at age 10.
“He loved me, but then hated me, because I won the Academy Award,” she said about he father.
He sent her a note congratulating her on her Oscar win, but her mother, Joanna Moore, who died in 1997, never acknowledged her daughter’s Oscar.
“Weird shit happened. It kind of went in the wrong direction to happiness,” said O’Neal, who connected with her father earlier this year after not having seen him since 2020.
Her kids from her marriage to John McEnroe (to whom she was married between 1986 and 1994) — Kevin, 37, Sean, 35, and Emily, 32 — hadn’t seen their grandfather in 17 years.
“I think he’s gotten a little bit better in his life,” O’Neal said. “I mean, he’s an amazing man, my dad, and I miss him terribly. I don’t want him to die,” she says. “I love him. I love my dad. I mean, I’ve had a hard life with my dad — but I still love him.”
O’Neal’s struggles with addiction run in the family. Her parents married in 1964 but divorced in 1967, and Moore took Tatum and her brother, Griffin.
“My mother was on stuff all the time,” O’Neal said. “I could see it bad — with her teeth and all that stuff. She got mean — really, really mean — as a drug addict. I felt like I was in this old, scary movie. It was just unbelievable.”
Ryan O’Neal got custody back when Tatum was 6.
“I was just glad I was still alive, that a bunch of crazy people on drugs weren’t all around me,” she recalled.
In her autobiography “A Paper Life,” which also details instances of sexual abuse by her father’s friends, and verbal and physical abuse by her father, she recounted that she lived a party lifestyle right alongside her father in Hollywood from a young age.
“I often did sleep in my father’s bed, even when he had women over,” she wrote in the book, recalling an incident when she was 12 and walked in on her father in bed with Menalie Griffith (then 18). He allegedly invited Tatum to sleep in bed with them.
After she divorced McEnroe in 1994, and he got custody of their kids (due to her addiction struggles), she said of the tennis pro, “He was very mean to me. Really, really, really mean to me. Like the meanest man I’ve ever loved — besides my dad.”
She said her relationship with McEnroe was a “similar situation” to her relationship with her father.
“I did love being with my ex-husband. I did. But then I wanted to leave, and he didn’t want me to leave. And then when he found out that I did leave, he really hurt me in a really crazy way. In a way that I couldn’t even describe — it was awful, awful, awful. It really kicked in my drug problem in a huge way.”
O’Neal added, “I’ve had a hard time with a lot of things. I’ve had a very hard life. Not an easy life. There’s been some amazing things and some really scary things.”
After recently reuniting with her father for the first time in three years, O’Neal said that it went “well,” but they didn’t talk about a lot.
“But there was happiness … He was asking me things about me, and I said, ‘I have a bad back. But I’m trying so hard. I’m alive.’
“But then when I tried to text him two days ago to see if I could go back, he didn’t call me back. So then it gets a little weird, unfortunately.”
