Like mother, like son.
Back in 2008, I talked with a woman who had hit rock bottom. You think you have bad hangovers? This lady had just spent a night on a greasy mattress in a fetid Manhattan holding cell, lying next to a couple of “very nice” ladies you would not want to touch without the protection of a hazmat suit.
She was destroyed. Desperate. She was Tatum O’Neal, the former child actress who had spent years hooked on heroin, sobered up, and then one day decided to score crack and cocaine from a drug-addicted panhandler on a downtown street. She had money and fame, and she acted like a common junkie. And she was busted.
“I’m still sober!’’ Tatum O’Neal told me triumphantly shortly after getting sprung from jail.
“Just when I was about to change that, wreck my life, the cops came and saved me!’’
She was “eternally grateful’’ to the cops of the Lower East Side’s 7th Precinct who arrested her. “I didn’t do what my disease [drug addiction] was telling me to do.
“I’m still going to get my year [of sobriety].’’
She told me she lost it after her dog died and she took a “little break’’ from her boyfriend.
You call your best friend when life deals you tedious problems. Tatum O’Neal runs to the corner drug dealer.
She avoided jail time by pleading guilty to disorderly conduct and agreed to attend two half-day sessions in a drug treatment program. The case was dismissed.
And now, as it happens, history has repeated itself.
Tatum’s oldest son with former tennis player John McEnroe, 55, was busted as he tried to score drugs. Kevin McEnroe, 28, was buying six bags of cocaine, 10 OxyContin tablets and 20 morphine pills in New York’s Alphabet City from a drug dealer, sources said.
Why did this young man, allegedly, and his now-50-year-old mother — people with money and famous names — attempt to score garbage? Was it a quest for cheap thrills? A walk on the wild side? Tatum O’Neal called the 9th Precinct on Wednesday morning, desperately trying to find her son, according to sources.
Did she know? This should make for a tense Labor Day celebration in the McEnroe and O’Neal households.
Tatum O’Neal became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, taking homes a Best Supporting Actress statue at the age of 10 for her role as Addie in 1973’s “Paper Moon,’’ a movie that also featured her father, Ryan O’Neal.
A drug user since age 14, she was once so addled that she lost custody of her three kids to McEnroe in 1995, after divorcing him a year earlier following eight years of marriage. She wrote of her young life with an alcoholic mother in her 2004 memoir, “A Paper Life.’’
In her 2011 memoir, “Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home,’’ she talks of seeking forgiveness from her kids and her father — who admitted in Vanity Fair magazine that he tried to hit on his own daughter, whom he didn’t recognize, after the 2009 funeral of his wife, actress Farrah Fawcett.
It would take an army of shrinks to sort out the family dysfunction at play here.