The latest podcast star? Actress Tatum O’Neal
‘Tatum, Verbatim’ is growing in popularity because of its honesty.
The actress Tatum O’Neal was taping her new podcast, “Tatum, Verbatim,” at a studio the other day and arguing with her producer, Brian Howie.
Howie wanted O’Neal to project the logo of her podcast — a black and white photo of herself with the words “Tatum, Verbatim” imposed over it — on a large flat-screen television sandwiched between black leather sofas where she and her daughter, Emily McEnroe (her father is John McEnroe, the tennis player), were sitting.
“Why would I want a big picture of myself next to me?” O’Neals aid.
Howie pressed on, as producers are apt to do. You should want a picture of yourself there, he told her. I have a picture of my logo flashing next to me during my podcast, he insisted.
“No,” she told him.
Why is it, Howie wondered, that the first thing out of a woman’s mouth is the word “No”?
If Howie, who runs a relationship and dating podcast called “The Great Love Debate,” was joking, the joke fell flat. O’Neal, whoowns the podcast, stuck to her instinct.
“No,” she said. “It’s tacky.” At 54, O’Neal is used to putting her foot down, she said later that day over lunch at Spago. “My entire life, I’ve been saying no to everything. No, no, no,” she said. “I want to be a yes person.”
O’Neal was born to actors Joanna Moore and Ryan O’Neal, who split up when she was 4. In 1974, at 10, she was the youngest person to win an Oscar, for her role in “Paper Moon,” a movie she stole from her father, who was her co-star. Soon, she became his accessory in Hollywood, befriending adults like Cher, Bianca Jagger and Angelica Houston. When O’Neal was 16, her father left her in charge of her younger brother at their home in Malibu when he move d in with Farrah Fawcett in Bel Air, as she wrote about in her 2004 book, “A Paper Life.”
In 1986, when she was 21, she married tennis star John McEnroe, then at the height of his career. They had three children and six years later they separated, with People magazine screaming: “End of the Love Match.” Their relationship was immortalized in an Andy Warhol painting, which sold in 2008 for over $300,000.
After her children were born,
O’Neal became addicted to heroin. She spent years trying to get clean. She had her children taken from her. She had a public relapse and arrest in 2008. In 2011, she tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with her estranged father through a reality show called “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” which aired on OWN.
Years after the youthful success she enjoyed in movies including “The Bad News Bears” and “Little Darlings,” there were also new acting roles: as Denis Leary’s belligerent, alcoholic sister Maggie Gavin on “Rescue Me”; as a vacant trophy wife in “Basquiat”; as Kyra the shoe shamer on “Sex in the City.” Last month, she filmed “God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness” with John Corbett in Arkansas.
O’Neal, for the record, wasn’t dying to say “yes” to a podcast. She barely knew what a podcast was. But it’s a growth industry, with 46 million monthly podcast listeners in 2015 expanding to 67 million this year, according to Edison Research, a data company.
Women host only about 10 of the top 100 podcasts on iTunes (one is Oprah’s “Super Soul Conversations,” which isn’t new material), but their voices are growing. In 2015, Werk It, a women’s podcast festival began. There’s “2 Dope Queens,” “Anna Faris Is Unqualified,” “Invisibilia” and “Another Round.”
Sheri Salata, who was copresident of OWN until 2016, and who is now a host of a podcast, “This Is Fifty With Sheri and Nancy,” believes O’Neal is a modern-day truth teller.
“She has nothing to hide,” Salata said. “She doesn’t have to put pink paint on anything because throughout her life, when she had the opportunity to tell her story, she’s been incredibly honest.”
O’Neal’s son Kevin McEnroe, an author, said that people had approached them to do reality shows for years, which he felt was the worst possible thing to do.
“You’ll just end up with an edited version of yourself versus what she has, which is that kind of natural charisma. And she’s funny,” Kevin McEnroe said. “With this new medium, you can see what it’s done for people in recovery like Marc Maron. You can speak openly about things, when maybe you didn’t have a chance to otherwise.”
O’Neal can’t not speak openly, but she was concerned about sounding too self-involved. She didn’t want to just talk about old Hollywood. She wanted the podcast to reflect her curiosity about life in the present. When you stop being curious, you’re in trouble, she said. She didn’t just want to rehash her stories, either — she wanted to explore other people’s stories. Which is why she brought her daughter in.
Emily McEnroe, 26, has a deep, gravelly voice — a combination of her father’s Queens-influenced stony delivery and her mother’s rasp — and is a fitting sidekick. She talks about being harassed as a door girl at a bar in Los Angeles. (A guy grabbed her recently and said, “Time to go to the strip club!”) She discusses her voice-over and acting auditions.
In the first few episodes, O’Neal and her daughter tackled heavy topics: What is it like to have famous parents? What was it like to have a mother who is a drug addict?
On and off the air, O’Neal is noticeably sensitive to the wounds inflicted by addiction.
“We’d talk about it, and I would be triggered by something,” McEnroe said. “My mom would check in with me. ‘Are you OK with this? Is it bringing up feelings for you?’ Because for a long time, I got inward as a teen and stopped talking.” But, “I really want to have this conversation brought up more and not be taboo and not be strange. I don’t think it’s something that should be filled with shame.”
Learning to Listen
O’Neal would like to host John Frusciante, the musician and former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who also had a very 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.” 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 O’Neal’s hair off. It’s why O’Neal wore that ontrend pixie cut to the Oscars.
There was the time she was staying at the Stanhope Hotel when she was 20 and 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 lunch, there were more stories. The time she was in her early teens and she and Melanie Griffith, also in her teens, went to Roman Polanski’s apartment in Paris and he showed them the X-rated, sexually violent Japanese film “Realm of the Senses,” an experience O’Neal describes in her book. “He didn’t touch me or do anything at all, but that was a lot to see,” at that age, O’Neal said. “I shouldn’t have been there.”
Many therapists will tell you that you have to go backward to go forward. 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 towards enlightenment.”
Her daughter quizzed her a little about this and O’Neal explained that for her, it was about distancing herself from her past so that she didn’t always live in the pain of what happened to her. That she wanted to find a sense of empathy for the people who have hurt her. She wants to release all of the damage that happened in her life.
“I’m nowhere near any kind of enlightenment,” O’Neal said, in her typical self-depreciating delivery. “So I just want to preface that.”
But 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.”