LI have asked her to marry me, and she has said yes. Ryan O’Neal, emotional, live, on television, recounted in June 2009 how he had rediscovered love with Farrah Fawcett, who had been his intermittent lover for 30 years and then was dying of cancer that would end his life days later. The public, eager for romantic stories, ‘bought’ the moving version and the press spared no headlines. Those same days, a journalist, Leslie Bennetts, spent hours with O’Neal and listened to comments that even her confessed addictions do not make less serious: “Don’t forget that I worked in love story; I already have experience in dealing with patients.”
Not by far the most amazing thing Bennetts had to hear. When Farrah turned 60 [en 2007, ella ya estaba muy enferma], we celebrate a party at home. At one point I fired a shot at my son,” O’Neal told me matter-of-factly, as if there was nothing extraordinary about it. “I could have hit him, but I didn’t. Farrah was in bed and she could hear everything: the fighting, the screaming, the gunshots…Welcome to the O’Neal home!’
It is true that the actor alternates these unfortunate comments with tears and goes through all kinds of moods with ‘artificial’ ease. Although he downplays his addictions – he has never hidden that he consumes drugs and alcohol – they have undoubtedly marked his life and that of those around him, especially that of Farrah, his most stable partner despite his ups and downs, and that of his four children, who had three different mothers.
O’Neal has no qualms about confessing his infidelities to Farrah, with whom he lived for 18 years. But the loudest and most definitive episode took place in 1997, when Fawcett caught O’Neal with Leslie Stefanson, a 25-year-old actress, on Valentine’s Day. “It was horrible,” Ryan recalls in Vanity Fair–. She didn’t expect her to show up at home that day. Leslie hid under the duvet. I thought Farrah was going to hit her, but she just said, ‘What’s your name?’ And she left “.
On Farrah’s 60th birthday, Ryan O’Neal shot her son Griffin, who, in turn, was implicated in the death of Francis Ford Coppola’s son
The son that Ryan O’Neal shot was Griffin, the fruit of his first marriage and with whom he maintains a fierce confrontation. It is he who has been clearest about the abuse of his father and the one who has most questioned his true love for Farrah. He has detailed infidelities and assaults. “My father forced me to take cocaine for the first time when he was 11 years old.” That’s how blunt he is when talking about O’Neal’s “psychopath.”
Griffin, in turn, also has a track record. A drug user, he has been arrested for various offences, including illegal possession of weapons, but his most serious offense occurred in 1986, when he was behind the wheel of a speedboat under the influence of drugs and alcohol and a crash occurred. accident that killed his friend Giancarlo, son of Francis Ford Coppola. Griffin was acquitted of manslaughter but convicted of reckless driving.
Griffin is the brother of Tatum, O’Neal’s most famous daughter for winning an Oscar at the age of ten, marrying tennis player John McEnroe, and losing herself in the world of heroin soon after. O’Neal’s next offspring, Patrick, the product of his second marriage to Leigh Taylor-Young, a minister of a sect called the Insight Movement, appears to have led a more normal life. He hosts a sports show and is doing well, though Ryan claims that he “is a nasty person.” The only one of his children that he talks to is, in fact, Redmond, the youngest, 30 years old, the one he had with Farrah and who has gone to jail on several occasions for possession of narcotics and for armed robbery .
If his relationship with his children is like this, it is not difficult to imagine what it is like and, above all, what it was like with his wives. When O’Neal met Fawcett he was a celebrity, the Brad Pitt of the ’70s. He got his start on a hit TV series, Peyton Placebut became a star in 1970 with love story, a romantic drama with a tragic ending. His career from there should have been lightning-fast, and yet it went nowhere, in large part, because of his unbearable temper stemming from drug use.
O’Neal had already gone through two marriages when in 1979 his friend, actor Lee Majors, married to Farrah Fawcett, asked him, since he was going to be away filming a movie, to take his wife out to dinner so she wouldn’t get bored. A recklessness in the case of a seducer like O’Neal who had already conquered Diana Ross or Barbra Streisand. The Fawcett-Majors couple did not survive that first date.
Texan Farrah Fawcett was then the most spectacular blonde in Hollywood cinema. Her participation in 1976 in Charlie’s Angels is one of the most impressive sociological phenomena generated by the small screen. However, his career also stalled. After his departure from the series, he achieved some success in the cinema, but by the mid-80s he was no longer working in television miniseries and began to become depressed.
Farrah exposed her illness, an anal cancer with metastasis to the liver, in a documentary that showed her moaning, vomiting and losing her mythical hair.
In 1985 her son Redmond was born, which should have balanced her, but didn’t. The boy began to have addictive problems at a very young age –according to Farrah, because of his relationship with Griffin, O’Neal’s son; according to Griffin, due to the permissiveness of his father, who even supplied him with narcotics– and he ended up going from boarding schools to detoxification centers and from there, to jail.
Over the years, the situation worsened. The couple’s continuous fights were known, but their final separation in 1997 sank Fawcett, although she soon began another relationship, with producer James Orr, which ended up in court. Orr was convicted of assaulting Farrah, although the judge acknowledged that she had previously attacked him with a baseball bat.
The panorama changed when O’Neal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001. Despite everything, Farrah returned to his side. His disease, which is under control today, coincided with Fawcett’s cancer; hers, from the anus with liver metastases, turned out much worse. At first, Fawcett recorded some visits to the doctors with a camera for her personal use, but the actress, who was convinced that she would get over it, thought that her experience could be useful to other patients. This is how the documentary was born Farrah’s storythe diary of his fight against cancer, which NBC aired shortly before his death to overwhelming ratings success.
Fawcett appeared on television vomiting, moaning and losing her hair as, at 62, she was dying hopelessly. O’Neal spoke precisely about the loss of her splendid hair in one of the many interviews she has given since she became ill and confessed that she had stayed with him when she cut it off during chemotherapy. Her son Griffin, however, does not see anything sentimental in this gesture and assures that Farrah’s hair will end up auctioned off to the highest bidder.
During his funeral, Ryan O’Neal, in the front row, helped carry the coffin and was described by the press as “overwhelmed with grief”. Perhaps, but an anecdote that he himself recounts is more than revealing. “After I left the coffin, a blonde came up and hugged me,” Ryan says. I told her that she needed a drink and asked if she had a car. She exclaimed: ‘But, dad! It’s me, Tatum!’ You see, I was flirting with some kind of unknown Swede, and she turned out that she was my daughter … Don’t tell me it’s not horrible ».
Farrah Fawcett | A fallen angel in hell from a toxic relationship