The face you see here was not the one Ms. Huston had
in mind when she made this remark. This one was taken in 2008 by the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, after Ryan O’Neal was arrested, along
with son Redmond, on charges of drug possession.
Granted, nobody is going to look good in a mug shot.
And O’Neal has looked even worse since then. That would be normal to expect for
a leukemia and prostate cancer survivor who, as it happens, also turns 80
today.
But Ms. Huston would have it that the actor—a romantic
heartthrob since his days on the primetime 1960s soap opera Peyton Place
and the 1970 weepie, Love Story—is finally paying the wages of sin. In
other words, the once-handsome actor now looks as ugly as the way he once acted
towards others.
In a period when she was separated from longtime companion
Jack Nicholson, Ms. Huston took up with O’Neal. It’s a safe bet to say, judging
from her recollections, that this relationship-on-the-rebound is one she deeply
regrets.
O’Neal, an amateur boxer before he started his acting
career, not only exhibited his pugilistic skills onscreen in The Main Event,
but also during an argument with Ms. Huston, according to her 2014 memoir Watch Me:
“He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair and hit me in
the forehead with the top of his skull. I saw stars and reeled back. Half blind
I ran away from him.”
Even as his celebrity has dimmed over the years (his
latest roles were guest appearances on Bones), O’Neal has had a tabloid
half-life because of the drug use of three of his four children, as well as their charges that he acted violently towards them when they were growing up.
Pointing to how their lives turned out, the actor has
acknowledged he was a “hopeless father,” admitting he wasn’t ready for
parenthood in his early twenties. But his defects are worse than a substance
abuse problem: well into his sixties, he was a narcissistic roue to an
extraordinary extent even for Hollywood. (At the 2009 funeral of longtime lover
Farrar Fawcett, according to this article from Huffington Post, he made
a pass at an attractive younger woman—who turned out to be his Oscar-winning
daughter Tatum, from whom he’d been estranged for years.)
For all his tabloid exploits, O’Neal was fortunate
indeed that Ms. Huston’s charge of abuse (which he does not appear to have
denied) came a few years before the #MeToo movement. The noise afterward might
have been deafening.
Watching a onetime celebrity—with looks ravaged by
disease and time—can be disheartening. But some, having lived their lives with
dignity, go out the same way, while others who made grave personal and
professional mistakes successfully grab at a last shot at redemption.
For the longest time, O’Neal did not follow that
script. Within the last year, he has been photographed with his troubled offspring, in an image long thought unthinkable. Whether that
reconciliation will hold, given this troubled family, is another matter.
But while he was at it, it wouldn’t have hurt for him to
try to make amends—even publicly—with Ms. Huston, in the hope that others might
learn from his example of taking responsibility for domestic violence.
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