Ryan O'Neal Hits on Daughter Tatum

While attending the funeral of his long time significant other, Farrah Fawcett, Ryan O'Neal pulled the ultimate indiscretion. Indeed the incident brings to mind a turgid pseudo Hitchcock film directed by Brain De Palma in the mid 1970s.

More of that anon.

This is the story that Ryan O'Neal tells on himself as quoted from a Vanity Fair article in the Huffington Post:

"'I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,' Ryan told me. '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.'"

Sick it was indeed, albeit in a farcical way. If anything, it proves that father and daughter really need to keep in touch.

There is some shaking of the head about Ryan O'Neal trying to pick up any woman just as he was about to put his beloved into the ground. The last thing, it is suggested, that he should be thinking of is sex.

But there is another way to look at it. When in the middle of horrendous grief, people have their own way of coping. Some people go into analysis. Some people pray. Some people drink. And some people, like Ryan O'Neal, seek solace in someone's arms. His daughter Tatum does describe him as a "Bon vivant" so it would seem to be in character.

Now to the movie this reminds one of. The film was called Obsession and is about a real estate developer played by Cliff Robertson who loses his wife and child in the mid 1950s in a kidnapping case gone wrong,

Spoilers follow.

Twenty years later, Robertson's character meets a young woman in Italy who is the splitting image of his late wife, played by the then beauteous Genevieve Bujold. They fall in love. They plan to marry. There is one complication.

The Italian lady is in fact Robertson's character's daughter, having survived the kidnapping snafu and having been raised with the notion that she had been abandoned by her father. The whole meeting had been arranged by an evil business partner, played by John Lithgow, with the aim of despoiling Robertson's character of his share of the real estate firm. Murder, mayhem, an attempted suicide, and a touching reunion at the air port ensue.

Mind, Ryan O'Neal's little faux pas goes nowhere near anything besides a momentary embarrassment. Still one should be a little more careful about whom one hits upon. Otherwise people might write snarky articles about it.

Sources: Ryan O'Neal: I Hit On My Daughter Tatum At Farrah's Funeral, Huffington Post, August 3rd, 2009

Obsession, IMDB