Both of Us Read online

  It’s the spring of 1980 and for me a season of endings and beginnings. Farrah’s divorce from Lee enters its final stages. She has to buy him out of the house, but at least he’s gone. He knew the marriage was over and eventually allowed their uncoupling to be largely amicable. And Farrah and I are free. We’re launched. I’ve won Farrah. I’ve lost my daughter. It’s as if Tatum has moved to a very strict boarding school that doesn’t allow telephone calls or visits from parents. A letter a month at most. This girl was a chatterbox as a child. We’d exchange 1,000 words an hour; 950 came from her. There’s this emptiness in my life now; that musical voice, that comforting background presence that helped make my house a home is gone. My old Catholic soul finds it ironic that Easter, the season of renewal, is just a week away. Tatum never blamed Farrah. She blamed me. That spring, Tatum moves out of the beach house into an apartment in Beverly Hills, across the street from her mother, who is dangerous for her, a complex and bitter personality still struggling with addictions and depression. I enjoy my wine and an occasional toke, and have for years, but I have never known the hell of addiction. It will be twenty-five years before my daughter and I will reconcile. And now all of America will be able to watch us struggling with our history on a reality show … dear Lord. I’m doing this because Oprah is a friend and Tatum needs a job. These are not career decisions; they’re about repaying a loyal supporter and soothing my ancient anguish of having lost my daughter more than two decades ago.

  There’s a famous 1981 photo of Farrah, Tatum, Griffin, and me at a Rolling Stones concert that’s always reminded me of an Ultrabrite toothpaste ad. It was the first picture ever taken of us together, the proud single father with his beautiful girlfriend and his talented, adorable children, arm in arm, laughing and happy, a perfect image of what was becoming a new version of the modern American family. I remember the photographer introducing himself and then politely asking my permission before he snapped the photo. While such respect from a paparazzo was not commonplace then, it would become even rarer in the months and years ahead, but I wasn’t thinking about any of that then as the four of us smiled for the camera. It was a glorious day.

  Farrah has just finished shooting Murder in Texas, the first movie in which she’s recognized as a serious actress. It was shot on location. I visited the set as often as I could. Though my own schedule is hectic, my career isn’t what it once was, but Farrah’s is about to ignite and I want to contribute to her growth and success. She responds well to my coaching and it solidifies us as a couple. I soak up every sweet moment. It’s also more rewarding than trying to restart my own career. Though I’m getting work, the scripts are mediocre and the films forgettable. When my old friend Freddie Fields offers me the lead in a movie he’s producing called Rambo: First Blood, I turn it down. I tell him it’s because I don’t think the role is a good fit for me, which though it may be true, isn’t the reason. I don’t want to leave Farrah. Between you and me, and this is not an easy thing for a man to admit, there was always a part of me that was afraid that if I was away from her for too long, I’d lose her. It turns out to have been the right decision. Sylvester Stallone does an effective job. Though I do wonder where my career might have gone had I told Freddie yes.

  At the time, my mind is elsewhere. I feel most alive whenever I’m on set with Farrah. The energy of our collaboration is exciting and constructive. I remember a scene in Murder in Texas in which she has to sing, and she’s nervous; so I tell her to throw her leg up on the chair like Mae West and belt it out. It works. Her nervousness transforms into moxie, and if you look at the scene closely, you can see the moment it all clicks. Though I try to be subtle whenever I’m on set, usually communicating my suggestions through a series of hand signals that we’d devised, every so often it causes a problem. One time a director will attempt to have me removed. At Farrah’s insistence, he’ll be replaced.

  Around this same time, Farrah has also completed work on the screwball comedy Cannonball Run with Burt Reynolds. I’m not there. I know Burt well and I expect him to make a play for her, but surprisingly, he doesn’t, not until he casts her in Butterflies Are Free at his theater in Florida. She tells me that one day he’s climbing all over her and he says, “I know Ryan, he’s great, he’s funny, but if somebody pulled a gun on you, Ryan wouldn’t throw himself in front of the bullet, but I would.” So I say to her, “Now wait a minute, why would someone be shooting at you; what did you do? Besides, maybe good old Burt has a point. He can sacrifice himself. Why should both of us have to take a bullet?” I make light of it for Burt’s sake as well as for my own. He’s a friend. I know that he honestly can’t help himself and who could blame him? When the situation was reversed, I wasn’t able to resist Farrah either.

  Though both of our schedules are challenging, often putting us on opposite coasts, we seize every opportunity to be with each other on location. While I’m doing the action/adventure movie Green Ice with Omar Sharif and Anne Archer in Mexico, near Acapulco, Farrah visits during a break from Cannonball Run. The day she arrives, I’m doing a scene in which I’m being chased out of a club. The bad guys are gaining on me and I’m running toward the beach. I dive into the water and start swimming out to sea to avoid capture, at which point I’m being filmed from a helicopter. The pilot is hovering low to provide the cameramen a good angle. The propellers on this bird are powerful; they’re roiling the water and making waves and I can feel myself being pulled under by the swell. I keep waving my arms and yelling.

  The director gives me a thumb’s-up from the cockpit. I’m breathing in more water than air and I can hear these gurgling sounds coming out of my mouth. “More!” he signals. I see him gesturing for me to “go broader!” I nearly drown by the time they figure out I’m not acting. There’s a photo of me coughing and sputtering in Farrah’s arms. It’s embarrassing. The whole enterprise ends up being an embarrassment. Though working with Omar Sharif is a joy. He’s touched by Farrah’s warmth and sincerity. A genuinely kind man, several years later when Farrah and I are in Paris and she’s hospitalized with a bad case of food poisoning, Omar is very helpful to us both.

  Omar is also a wonderful raconteur. One evening over dinner after we’ve wrapped for the day on Green Ice, he tells Farrah and me about meeting Rita Hayworth for the first time. This happened long before he was a star, when he was a young actor from Egypt and new in LA. Hayworth takes a liking to him at this party and says, “Do you have a car?” He’d hired a car and driver for the evening so he answers yes. “Then you may take me home,” she says. She lives high up in the hills of Beverly and it’s a long, dark drive through steep winding roads lined by dense foliage. Omar keeps telling the driver to slow down. In Egypt, the houses aren’t perched on the edge of cliffs. When they arrive, Hayworth turns to him and says, “Dismiss the driver.” He gladly obliges. They go into her house, an exquisite bungalow beautifully furnished. It smells like gardenia and woman. Now he’s wearing a tuxedo and she’s in an elaborate gown so he’s delighted when she politely excuses herself to slip into something more comfortable. While she’s out of the room, he begins to take off his tux. He’s down to his boxers and obviously excited. She emerges in loose pants and a gray sweater. “What are you doing?” she says. “Is that what you thought?” And she escorts him out. This is decades before cell phones and he has no way of contacting his driver to come back for him. He walks home. Omar had been led to believe that women of the California variety were straightforward and understandable. He’d obviously been misinformed.

  Rita Hayworth was suffering from Alzheimer’s long before anyone knew what it was. I remember being at a party at David Selznick’s when he was married to Jennifer Jones. It’s a formal dinner. There are about sixty of us, and I’m seated next to Rita. There are wine decanters on the table so I offer to pour her a glass. “Ms. Hayworth, which would you prefer, red or white?” She tries to answer, but her speech is so hesitant I’m not sure what she’s saying. Everybody around us thought she was drunk, but she ne
ver had a single drink. I listened to her the rest of the evening. I didn’t have to hear what she was saying. I just kept looking into those beautiful eyes, grateful and happy merely to be there.

  Rita represented a Hollywood era when the major studios ruled. If you were an actor, they reinvented your past to suit their publicity machine, they defined your present by assigning you films, and they held your future hostage because without a studio contract it was almost impossible to get work. While people of extraordinary talent and irrepressible personalities such as Bette Davis fought back—occasionally to her detriment—actresses such as Rita and Myrna Loy flourished in the system. I would have been perfectly happy with a long-term studio contract, but some guys from my era, such as Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda, natural-born independent filmmakers, would have revolted.

  That same year I make Green Ice, I have to be in New York for three months to shoot So Fine, a comedy for Warner Brothers with Jack Warden and a wonderful Italian actress, Mariangela Melato. Farrah wants an apartment with a sauna, so I find this place on Fourteenth Street, a loft, that has both a sauna and a Jacuzzi. We live there while I’m shooting the film. My ex-wife Joanna Moore is in no shape to care for Griffin, who’s sixteen, so we take him with us to try to get him into the music school at Juilliard. We realized it was a stretch for a drummer but we wanted the best for him. By this point, Griffin has been in and out of numerous schools, exhibiting many of the same behavioral problems as his mother, and I’m worried for his future. But at the time, all I wanted was for my boy to be able to pursue his dream of becoming a professional musician. Though Juilliard doesn’t accept him we’re able to find him a music tutor while we’re there. It’s a wonderful time for us. Griffin and Farrah like each other and she gives him all her support. Farrah so wanted to love my children and have them love her in return, and the more Tatum withdraws, the more Farrah tries to funnel her love to Griffin and Patrick. Griffin doesn’t always make it easy. Patrick glows from her attention.

  Farrah loved New York pretzels, the ones street vendors sell out of carts. They cost fifty cents back then and she would always keep two quarters in the front pocket of her purse so if she wanted to buy one she’d have exact change ready. One day, Griffin steals the fifty cents and, boy, does she ever chew him out! An old friend also visits us during that time. I’ve known him since high school. He had gone to prison for smuggling pot. When he gets out, I hire him to be my assistant, what we now call a handler, and to do stand-in work for me. Years later, Tatum will skewer him in her memoir A Paper Life, accusing him of everything from supplying my family with drugs to molesting her. To this day, my daughter and I disagree about my friend. But back to the early eighties in New York with Farrah …

  The media continue to track us. The divorce is still not finalized and we’re trying to maintain our privacy for everyone’s benefit. It proves impossible and eventually comes to a head the night Farrah and I are meeting Tatum, who’s flying in to see Richard Burton on Broadway in Camelot. Tatum had recently starred with him in the film Circle of Two.

  Farrah and I have on our fancy best. We’re leaving the Pierre Hotel, where we’ve stopped to see some friends before the show, and paparazzi are swarming the entrance. I’m holding a bottle of Coke. We make our way through the throng of photographers and get into the limo. It won’t start. The driver gets out to check the engine and a bunch of thugs with cameras jump into the front seat. I start pushing them out of the car and suddenly the bottle goes flying out of my hand and shatters against the curb. At the time, neither Farrah nor I think anything of it and hop out of the limo to take a cab to the theater. Another limo picks us up after the show, and on the way home, as we’re telling the driver what happened earlier, he says that photographers pay limo drivers to say the car is stalled, that it’s a standard trick. The whole thing was a setup. Soon after, a security guard from the Pierre who was supposed to have been protecting us that night claims I threw the bottle of Coke at him deliberately and injured his eye. He files a civil suit. The story is everywhere. The tabloids emphasized the fact that the security guard was a police officer (even though he was off duty at the time) and they turned the bottle, which never came into contact with anything except concrete, into my assault weapon. It becomes a ten-year battle costing me a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. Farrah’s testimony is persuasive and a jury ruled that the security guard was not entitled to any damages.

  Yes, I could have settled, but for me this wasn’t about money; it was about not getting taken. I end up having to sue my insurance agent because all my legal fees should have been covered by my homeowner’s policy, but he never filed the claim. Welcome to the world of celebrity. Sadly, it will be only the first chapter of what will become a long, winding story of animosity between the press and me. I’ve been told I should have handled the media differently over the years. I never commented when asked if I had something to say because I didn’t believe they’d quote me accurately. I thought I’d just be feeding the machine. A one-day story would turn into a week’s worth of stories. And as my parents were fond of saying, “Today’s headlines will line tomorrow’s birdcages.” Wisdom will come too late, but I didn’t know that then.

  It seems drama follows Farrah and me almost everywhere we go during that summer of 1982 in New York. One afternoon we’re walking past the Russian Tea Room near Carnegie Hall, on Fifty-seventh Street, and a producer I know, Lester Persky, comes out of the restaurant, insisting that Farrah and I join him for tea. I’d met Lester through Andy Warhol and liked him. Several years later, he’ll executive produce one of Farrah’s most successful made-for-TV movies, Poor Little Rich Girl, about heiress Barbara Hutton. We agree to join him, and when we get to the table, the last person in the world I would want to see is sitting there: Diana Ross. We had a brief fling years earlier and unfortunately things did not end smoothly. The moment Diana spots us she bursts into tears and runs into the ladies’ room. And she doesn’t come out. Farrah is sympathetic and I don’t have to explain. Farrah and I had had that conversation. She’d asked around about me. She was neither shocked nor surprised that there had been beautiful women in my life before her and a few hearts were broken. “I never expected you to be celibate,” Farrah said. “That would have shocked me. But I sure was relieved to learn you have a reputation for never cheating. I can’t tell you who told me. She’s a good friend of yours. She said not to worry. And I trust her.” To this day, I don’t know who my fairy godmother was.

  Long before I met Farrah, Diana Ross and I were signed to costar in The Bodyguard. John Boorman, who made Deliverance, was the director. Diana was difficult and opinionated. All she did was complain about the script. We went through three screenplays. It would have been one thing if none of the scripts were good, but they were excellent. I eventually got fed up with her imperiousness and we never did do the picture. More than a decade later it would be made into a box office smash with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. And yes, Diana and I did have a brief fling during preproduction for the film. But she killed whatever spark there was between us when she put on her diva act. I remember taking her to the airport one day. I had a Rolls-Royce at the time, and we ran out of gas. I made her help me push the car to a gas station. I thought that was funny, this big star pushing a Rolls-Royce down Century Boulevard, cars whizzing past us. She didn’t. I read her autobiography. I wasn’t in it.

  Farrah and I would travel back and forth to New York often in those early days. There are stirrings of trouble to come in our relationship, but like any couple in the grasp of romance, we ignore the clues. We make a special trip for Andy Warhol. I had met him several years earlier at a barrestaurant popular with the downtown New York avant-garde crowd, Max’s Kansas City, and to my surprise, we hit it off even though Andy was a man of few words, to say the least. I introduce Farrah to him at his legendary studio, the Factory. ABC’s 20/20 is doing a story on him and they want to film him manufacturing a portrait of a pop star. Andy asks if I’d do him a favor
and persuade Farrah to pose. I tell him I will if in turn, as a kind of payment, he gives me two copies of the portrait. He’s happy to agree. One of those copies Farrah wills to the University of Texas, her alma mater. The other still hangs over my bed in Malibu. I’m currently in a dispute with the University of Texas over its ownership. We bring Tatum with us to Andy’s studio, one of our many attempts to win her over. So we’re at the Factory and Farrah’s in this little dressing room area getting ready. All Andy needs from her is a series of Polaroids. She’s taking forever so I open the door and she’s upset at being interrupted. Righteous anger. Still, her response rubs me the wrong way. We’re staying at the Pierre, and on the cab ride back I’m silent. I don’t even go into the hotel with her and Tatum. I take a walk around the block to calm down. I didn’t like being talked to as if I were a minion, especially when I’d organized the whole thing.

  When I get to the hotel room, Farrah’s drinking a bottle of soda, and suddenly I become convinced that she’s going to hurl it right at my face. I knock it out of her hand. She’s stunned. Her eyes well with tears. I storm out. Immediately afterward I feel terrible. Joanna used to do things like that, dangerous things. I had seen those weapons before. I was gun-shy. And so I overreacted, dramatically. Adding to my mortification, I ask Tatum to fix it for me, which surprisingly she does, smoothing things over with Farrah. I now realize just how severely being married to Joanna had affected me. Farrah also carried a lot of emotional baggage from her years with Lee Majors. We would both continue to be haunted by our marital histories.