RYAN KIDS’ UNLOVED STORY
Only one of O’Neal’s children at burial – and Farrah myth assailed
Three out of Ryan O’Neal’s four children were absent at the 82year-old star’s small memorial service and burial alongside longtime love Farrah Fawcett — and one of his sons says he was banned from the ceremony.
“I wasn’t even invited to send him off,” Griffin O’Neal told The Post.
“I’m the hated son who told the truth. Dark times in this family. Love means never having to say you’re sorry — and Ryan never did, to anyone.”
Griffin, 59, the younger brother of actress Tatum, 60, Ryan’s two children with his first wife, Joanna Moore, said he drove 2,000 miles from his current home in Houston last week only to be told the memorial service would not be until the weekend after Christmas.
Then it took place on Saturday.
Rough times
Ryan O’Neal died Dec. 8 of congestive heart failure. He had also battled leukemia and prostate cancer.
Patrick O’Neal, 56, an LA sportscaster who had grown close to his dad in recent years, organized the service, which was attended by only about 25 people, including Patrick’s mother, actress Leigh Taylor-Young, 78, Ryan’s second wife.
Griffin said he hadn’t spoken to his father in 17 years — after the two brawled at Ryan’s Malibu home in 2007. Griffin allegedly swung a fireplace poker at his dad, and Ryan took aim at him with a shotgun.
Griffin also said Tatum and their half-brother Redmond, 38, currently incarcerated at a state hospital in California, were both not invited. Griffin, who had a minor acting career decades ago, has had his own problems with drugs and brushes with the law — including a prison stint in 2011 for crashing into another car while driving drunk. He says he is now sober.
Redmond appeared in shackles at his mother’s bedside when she was dying and also went to Fawcett’s funeral in shackles.
Tatum did not return a call from The Post and Redmond’s guardian, Mela Murphy, Fawcett’s former hairdresser, threatened a Post reporter before saying she had no comment and hung up.
Redmond, whom his father once called “the poor, stupid boy” in a Vanity Fair interview, is currently in lockdown at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, Calif., where he was sent in 2019 after being deemed mentally unfit to stand trial on attempted murder and drug charges.
Although in 2013 Redmond was reported to be the chief beneficiary of his father’s estimated $30 million estate — including the $5 million Malibu beachfront home that Ryan bought in 1976 for $151,000 and an Andy Warhol portrait of Fawcett that he fought to keep — two sources familiar with the situation say that the will has probably been changed and that Patrick will be the chief beneficiary.
“I wish them all well. I really do,” Griffin O’Neal said. “But Ryan was not the easiest father. He was stubborn. All those years, he never reached out once.”
Ryan has long had problems with all his kids. Tatum was estranged for him for about 20 years before reconciling — sort of — after Fawcett’s death from cancer in 2009 — and co-starring with him in a brutally frank 2011 reality show called “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals” on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network.
Tatum co-starred with her father in 1973’s “Paper Moon” and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar but has had serious drug issues for years. She briefly lost custody of her three children with tennis champion John McEnroe because of it.
Farrah fairy ‘tales’
Tatum’s scathing 2005 memoir, “A Paper Life,” eviscerated Ryan in part, claiming he had been abusive to her, Farrah and others — but she also made it clear that she always loved him.
Tatum had a stroke following a drug overdose in 2020 but reunited with her father twice after that, including visiting him in Malibu for his birthday in April 2023.
“I feel great sorrow with my father’s passing,” Tatum said in a statement after her father’s death.
“He meant the world to me. I loved him very much and know he loved me, too. I’ll miss him forever, and I feel very lucky that we ended on such good terms,” Tatum added.
But Tatum’s kind words are not echoed by others who were once in Farrah and Ryan’s inner circle.
Fawcett’s large tombstone in the celebrity-heavy Westwood Village Memorial Park had been oddly left blank except for her name at the top since her death at age 62 in 2009 — awaiting the name Ryan O’Neal, to be added below.
Longtime pals of Fawcett say she never wanted to be interred in Los Angeles. She wanted to be cremated like her mother, Pauline, two friends told The Post.
She wanted both their ashes to be returned to their native Texas.
“She never wanted a burial or a monument where people could come gawk at her,” Fawcett’s University of Texas college sweetheart, Greg Lott, told The Post. “Ryan created this narrative like it was this big love story, and they [Ryan and his lawyers] took over her life at the end, sedating her and forging documents. “
Though Ryan and Farrah were one of Hollywood’s biggest power couples in the 1980s and ’90s, their golden aura was long gone at the time of her death, they said.
Lott and others say that O’Neal, whose volatility and violence overshadowed his lengthy acting career, manipulated his relationship with Fawcett in the last years of her life, especially when she was dying, to make it seem as if they had shared an affair for the ages, a saga mirroring the plot of his best-known movie, 1970’s “Love Story.”
O’Neal even lied about her hav
ing a colostomy bag, in part to preserve his own image as the lover of the 1980s golden girl whose 1976 swimsuit poster is one of the most iconic of all time, according to Craig Nevius, Farrah’s friend and the producer of the 2005 reality TV show, “Chasing Farrah,” and the 2009 documentary about her fight with cancer, “Farrah’s Story.”
“He denied millions of people who suffer with the stigma of having a colostomy bag from knowing that Farrah had one, too,” Nevius told The Post. “His ego couldn’t take anyone knowing. He wanted her poster-girl perfection to remain intact.”
Nevius also said O’Neal and his team took advantage of Fawcett when her illness worsened, isolating her in her Wilshire Boulevard condo and persuading her to sign documents that were not in her best interest.
“I don’t think he had the authority to decide that she would be buried and him later with her — but that’s clearly what he did,”
Nevius said. “It’s been so bizarre to see her name at the top of this big gravestone with nothing on the bottom. My guess is that his name will be on there soon, with the words ‘Love Story.’ ”
‘I’ll kill you’ threat
O’Neal also fought Nevius over the “Farrah’s Story” film, ultimately wresting control of it from him and recutting much of the footage to ensure he had a prominent role in it.
Nevius said O’Neal also threatened him, saying, “I’ll kill you with Farrah and then I’ll kill you in real life.”
Nevius and others say that Farrah did not feel the same way about Ryan ever since she caught him cheating on her at his Malibu home with actress Leslie Stefanson in 1997 and broke up with him.
“In spite of what has been said, they were really not together in the last years of her life,” Nevius told The Post. “He was like an exhusband. He was around. She was sort of stuck with him because of their son.”
Alana Stewart, 78, Rod’s ex-wife and Farrah’s friend of many years, vehemently denied accusations that O’Neal took advantage of Fawcett or made their relationship seem more than it was.
“He and Farrah loved each other deeply,” Stewart told The Post. “She died in his arms, and she was there for him when he had leukemia. I saw their love as this great love story. Sure it had its dark moments. He could be volatile. But Ryan could also be the sweetest, most generous, funniest guy in the world.”
Stewart dismissed any “naysayers” as “people who never really knew Ryan.”
O’Neal’s other champion is his son Patrick, the only one of the late Hollywood star’s children to get along with him in recent years and who sounded a lot like his pugnacious dad when he warned the world “not to talk s--t” about him.
“If you choose to talk s--t about my dad, even though you have no clue what you are talking about, you will get called out. If you go that route, I recommend you take a good look in the mirror first,” Patrick, a longtime sportscaster who is currently a play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Angels, wrote on Instagram.
True to his word, a few days later Patrick called out a CBS reporter who aired a story on Ryan that Patrick found offensive. “I want the feature pulled right now. NOW,” he wrote.
Patrick also referred to his father being his “hero,” although Ryan told Vanity Fair in 2009 that he wasn’t thrilled with any of his kids, including Patrick, who by far has been the most stable and successful.
“I don’t like him either. He’s not likable,” O’Neal told Vanity Fair.
The Post was not able to reach Patrick O’Neal for comment.