HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Ryan O’Neal is opening up about his estranged relationship with daughter Tatum, admitting that he accidentally hit on her while attending Farrah Fawcett’s funeral on June 30.
“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,” O’Neal reveals in the September issue of 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 with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”
O’Neal describes himself as a “hopeless father” in the interview, a title that his “Paper Moon” co-star doesn’t exactly argue with.
“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” Tatum tells the mag when asked about the funeral exchange. “You 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, a bon vivant.”
O’Neal and Fawcett enjoyed a 30-year romance that was filled with plenty of ups and downs, including a split in 1998.
“I believe Farrah was going through some kind of life change,” he says of the breakup. “I didn’t have a change of life. I was always a jerk. But they’re hard work, these divas; I was sick of it, and I was unappreciated.”
The grieving 68-year-old actor says he quickly found romance in the arms of Leslie Stefanson, an actress who was 30 years younger than him.
“She was more a daughter to me than a lover, and my own daughter had flown the coop, so here was this replacement,” he says of the fling.
O’Neal recalls an incident in which he was in bed with his new girlfriend, only to be greeted by Fawcett paying a surprise visit on Valentine’s Day.
“It was terrible,” he says. “I didn’t expect to see her down there. I tried to put my pants on, but I put both legs in one hole.”
