Just when you think you’ve heard it all.
Ryan O’Neal admits he has been so estranged from his daughter Tatum O’Neal that he hit on her at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral because he didn’t recognize her.
Farrah passed away June 25, a few hours before Michael Jackson.
“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,” Ryan told Vanity Fair.
“I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me, Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”
Fortunately, Tatum says she wasn’t creeped out.
“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” says the actress, who won an Oscar at age 10 for starring with Ryan in Paper Moon. “Make of it what you will. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man.”
Tatum had struggled with addiction growing up and hadn’t spoken to her dad in years. Penning her 2004 memoir A Paper Life didn’t help things, either.
Ryan recalls thinking. “How dare she throw our laundry in the street for money!”
Tatum, who was arrested for buying crack in June 2008, and has a history of problems, says her father “has every right to be angry about the book.”
“No parent wants to hear their kid saying sh!t about them… But what I wrote in the book was true. I’ve got a battle with drugs, but I’m a strong, independent person, and I fight for myself, and my father and I butt heads.”
“When I was 16 years old, he and Farrah moved in together, and after that I saw my dad periodically, and that took a long time to get over,” she says.
“Would I do that to my kids? No, but I don’t think Farrah was responsible for that. I truly thought Farrah Fawcett was inspirational and beautiful and kind. Anyway, it’s past; I’ve moved on. I’m older now, and I forgive him.”