Tatum O’Neal, her daughter share openly through joint production
be taboo and not be strange. I don’t think it’s something that should be filled with shame.”
O’Neal would like to host John Frusciante, formerly of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who also had a highly public battle with heroin addiction. She is working on her interviewing skills.
“I don’t necessarily listen as well as I’d like to listen,” she said. “But I’m learning to do that.”
During the podcast taping that day, O’Neal talked about how her father dropped her off to stay with Stanley Kubrick’s family for a year while he was making “Barry Lyndon.’’ (“So, a play date forever,’’ Emily McEnroe deadpanned.) O’Neal and Vivian Kubrick (Stanley Kubrick’s daughter) were 9 and 12. One night the two girls were playing in the bathtub, and Vivian Kubrick cut off O’Neal’s hair. It’s why O’Neal wore that ontrend pixie cut to the Oscars.
She also talked about staying at the Stanhope Hotel when she was 20. Someone broke into her room and scrawled on the wall, in her red lipstick, “Who do you think you are, Shirley Temple?” A profanity was added for good measure.
At the opening of her podcast, O’Neal declared, “I was going to start with something super-highfalutin’,” then added as an afterthought, “I’m bumbling my way toward enlightenment.”
Her daughter quizzed her a little about that statement, and O’Neal explained that she needed to distance herself from her past so that she didn’t always live in the pain of what happened. She wants to find a sense of empathy for the people who have hurt her, she said, and she wants to release all of the damage done to her from her life.
“I’m nowhere near any kind of enlightenment,” O’Neal said, in her typical self-deprecating delivery. “So I just want to preface that.”
But Emily McEnroe disagreed. “I think you are,” she said.
“You do?” O’Neal said, her voice rising an octave.
“Yeah,” McEnroe said. “You’re on the road. That’s all you can be.”