Both of Us by Ryan O'Neal Read Free Book Online Page A

photographers and get into the limo. It won’t start. The driver gets out to check the engine and a bunch of thugs with cameras jump into the front seat. I start pushing them out of the car and suddenly the bottle goes flying out of my hand and shatters against the curb. At the time, neither Farrah nor I think anything of it and hop out of the limo to take a cab to the theater. Another limo picks us up after the show, and on the way home, as we’re telling the driver what happened earlier, he says that photographers pay limo drivers to say the car is stalled, that it’s a standard trick. The whole thing was a setup. Soon after, a security guard from the Pierre who was supposed to have been protecting us that night claims I threw the bottle of Coke at him deliberately and injured his eye. He files a civil suit. The story is everywhere. The tabloids emphasized the fact that the security guard was a police officer (even though he was off duty at the time) and they turned the bottle, which never came into contact with anything except concrete, into my assault weapon. It becomes a ten-year battle costing me a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. Farrah’s testimony is persuasive and a jury ruled that the security guard was not entitled to any damages.
    Yes, I could have settled, but for me this wasn’t about money; it was about not getting taken. I end up having to sue my insurance agent because all my legal fees should have been covered by my homeowner’s policy, but he never filed the claim. Welcome to the world of celebrity. Sadly, it willbe only the first chapter of what will become a long, winding story of animosity between the press and me. I’ve been told I should have handled the media differently over the years. I never commented when asked if I had something to say because I didn’t believe they’d quote me accurately. I thought I’d just be feeding the machine. A one-day story would turn into a week’s worth of stories. And as my parents were fond of saying, “Today’s headlines will line tomorrow’s birdcages.” Wisdom will come too late, but I didn’t know that then.
    It seems drama follows Farrah and me almost everywhere we go during that summer of 1982 in New York. One afternoon we’re walking past the Russian Tea Room near Carnegie Hall, on Fifty-seventh Street, and a producer I know, Lester Persky, comes out of the restaurant, insisting that Farrah and I join him for tea. I’d met Lester through Andy Warhol and liked him. Several years later, he’ll executive produce one of Farrah’s most successful made-for-TV movies,
Poor Little Rich Girl
, about heiress Barbara Hutton. We agree to join him, and when we get to the table, the last person in the world I would want to see is sitting there: Diana Ross. We had a brief fling years earlier and unfortunately things did not end smoothly. The moment Diana spots us she bursts into tears and runs into the ladies’ room. And she doesn’t come out. Farrah is sympathetic and I don’t have to explain. Farrah and I had had that conversation.She’d asked around about me. She was neither shocked nor surprised that there had been beautiful women in my life before her and a few hearts were broken. “I never expected you to be celibate,” Farrah said. “That would have shocked me. But I sure was relieved to learn you have a reputation for never cheating. I can’t tell you who told me. She’s a good friend of yours. She said not to worry. And I trust her.” To this day, I don’t know who my fairy godmother was.
    L ong before I met Farrah, Diana Ross and I were signed to costar in
The Bodyguard
. John Boorman, who made
Deliverance
, was the director. Diana was difficult and opinionated. All she did was complain about the script. We went through three screenplays. It would have been one thing if none of the scripts were good, but they were excellent. I eventually got fed up with her imperiousness and we never did do the picture. More than a decade later