Ryan O’Neal wishes he’d never had children and is so estranged from his own kids that he didn’t recognize his actress-daughter Tatum — and shamelessly flirted with her — at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral, the actor admits in an explosive new interview.
“I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away,” O’Neal, 68, said, “when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces 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,” O’Neal said. “It’s so sick.”
The actor recounted the bizarre encounter in the September issue of Vanity Fair magazine, which hits stands this week.
Asked if he’s sorry he had children, O’Neal nodded and said, “A couple of them I would take back.
“I don’t think I was supposed to be a father,” said the actor, who had Tatum, 45, and Griffin, 44, with first wife Joanna Moore; son Patrick, 42, with actress Leigh Taylor-Young; and son Redmond, 24, with Fawcett.
“Just look around at my work — they’re either in jail or they should be,” O’Neal said.
He said Redmond, who is in jail for violating probation on drug charges, is the only child he still sees.
“I’m not in touch with them now,” O’Neal said of his other kids. “And I’ve never been happier.”
When asked about the exchange with her dad at Fawcett’s funeral, Tatum told VF, “That’s our relationship in a nutshell . . . You make of it what you will.
“It had been a few years since we’d seen each other,” she said with a sigh. “And he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.”
Ryan O’Neal isn’t as tactful talking about his daughter.
“She wrote a book — bitch!” Ryan fumed about Tatum, who penned a tell-all about her dysfunctional family, replete with details about her parents’ over-the-top drug use and her dad’s physical and mental abuse of his children.
“How dare she throw our laundry in the street for money!”
Of Griffin — whom O’Neal barred from Fawcett’s funeral — O’Neal declared: “I hate him!”
Griffin retorted to VF that his dad is a “narcissistic psychopath” who tried to make money off Fawcett’s death.
“All those crocodile tears!” Griffin sniped. “I consider him a vulture presiding over a carcass.
“My dad’s only goal was to make sure he would be in the will,” O’Neal’s eldest son said.
“It was so disgustingly transparent as soon as he found out she was terminal . . . Ryan thought he was going to get everything.”
Tatum, meanwhile, said her dad “had every right to be angry” about her book, telling VF, “No parent wants to hear their kid saying s – – – – y things about them.
“Anyway, it’s past; I’ve moved on,” Tatum said. “I’m older now, and I forgive him.”
In the piece, O’Neal takes a much softer tone when reminiscing about his life with longtime love Fawcett, who died in June after a long battle with cancer.
“I wish I could do it over with [her],” O’Neal said.
“I would have been much kinder, more understanding, more mature. I’d lose some of the savagery.”