Ryan O'Neal's "Sick" Parenting: He Hit On Tatum at Farrah's Funeral

Father of the Year, here he comes—actor tells Vanity Fair he propositioned estranged daughter after failing to recognize her at memorial service

By Gina Serpe Aug 03, 2009 2:15 PMTags
Tatum O'Neal, Ryan O'Neal Brad Barket/Getty Images; Michael Bezjian/Getty Images

Someone should tell Ryan O'Neal that hitting on your daughter is not one of the steps included in the five stages of grief.

But that didn't stop the 68-year-old daddy dearest—who we'll give the benefit of the doubt and dub extremely grief-stricken at the time—from apparently failing to recognize 45-year-old daughter Tatum when she approached him at Farrah Fawcett's funeral last month.

So he did what any Father of the Year abhorrent lothario would do and propositioned her. And then he did what any publicity-starved actor would do and told Vanity Fair all about it.

Yeah, looks like that father-daughter estrangement isn't going anywhere soon.

"I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away, when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me," he told the magazine's September issue in a lengthy interview, the creepiest portions of which are excerpted online.

"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."

And lest anyone think O'Neal is, for whatever reason, exaggerating the circumstances of the anecdote, Tatum herself confirmed the incident to the magazine.

"That's our relationship in a nutshell," Tatum said. "You make of it what you will."

Oh, don't worry…

"It had been a few years since we'd seen each other," she went on, "and he was always a ladies' man, a bon vivant."

Funny, that's not the term we would have used.

________

Remember Ryan's longtime ladylove in our Farrah Fawcett gallery.