It’s April 20, 2001, my sixtieth birthday, and I’m numb. I’ve just been told I have leukemia when Farrah calls. “You can’t die,” she says. “We’ll fight this together; we’ll beat this.” We’ve barely been on speaking terms. I’d actually started to believe her disappointment in me had turned to loathing. But Farrah is weeping and she’s never been a crier. That’s when I realize, this is lethally serious.

I can envision the headline, “Death Sentence for Ryan O’Neal; Life Imitates Art as Star of Love Story Diagnosed with Leukemia.” I’m scared and though Farrah and I are estranged, I’m not surprised by her call.

Nothing makes you question your life more than reading about your own mortality, knowing that for once, the newspapers got their facts straight. While my leukemia would eventually go into remission, thanks to a new drug called Gleevec, which was approved for treatment around the time I was diagnosed, in that moment on the phone with her, I could have listed a dozen reasons why she shouldn’t be there for me, and only one reason why she should: we were still in love with each other.

I’ve never been a New Age kind of a guy. Karma, chakra, abracadabra, it’s all the same to me. But lately I’ve been starting to rethink my perspective. Maybe the New Agers are on to something. Look at my old chum George Hamilton. He’s been enlightened since Jimmy Carter was president. He’s also a genuinely nice guy comfortable with himself and the world. I envy him that. And then there’s Shirley MacLaine, who seemed to grow younger after she discovered her past lives, a concept I must admit I do find romantic. I wonder if Farrah and I were lovers in a past life. Those who espouse the theory believe that in each lifetime you’re given the chance to work out unresolved issues from a previous life. If that’s the case, Farrah and I must have shared dozens together, and they all began to align that spring at the dawn of my sixth decade.

It was four years almost to the day that we broke up, and while admittedly there were good reasons, there were even more bad excuses. Though I didn’t understand it in 1997, it became abundantly clear to me as I began ruminating about our love affair in the days and weeks following my diagnosis. Farrah and I each chose the excuses we thought we needed to flee from each other. We were cowardly, and now we had no choice but to be brave. My first valiant act would be accepting the inevitable with Leslie, whom I had grown to love. Ours wasn’t the soul mate version. Farrah always occupied that part of me. But Leslie was kind and her generosity boundless. As much as I wanted to be back with Farrah, it was still hard letting go of this appealing young woman who embodied qualities I wished that my daughter exhibited. Leslie was with me when the oncologist broke the news. She was in the room when the doctors inserted this enormous needle into my spine to extract a bone marrow sample. They needed cells to confirm the type of leukemia. The pain was excruciating. I almost came off the table twice and had to be held down. They pumped me with pain meds until finally they got what they needed. I couldn’t walk afterward. I went in there a strapping guy and I came out in a wheelchair. Leslie witnessed all of this, and I think it got to her, not that she wouldn’t have been there for me through the long haul. She would have because she was caring and unselfish, but by then she’d met actor James Spader on location for a film. They’d eventually marry and have children. Leslie thought it best to exit gracefully, and I’ve always admired her for that.

My second act of bravery was to occur when I got home from the doctor’s office. Tatum showed up because she’d heard the death knell. I wasn’t expecting much by way of sympathy, but I sure wasn’t ready for what I got. She verbally stripped me bare, recounting the highlights of my failed life and then, before slamming the door on her way out, she said, “Well, at least my mother died with dignity.” I worry that if that episode in our lives comes up on the reality show, I won’t be able to manage it. But then nothing should surprise me. I didn’t get a call on my fiftieth birthday either.

While one of my children was sticking in the knife that spring, another was twisting it. Griffin was back in jail. He had been up to his old tricks: more high-speed car chases, more guns, more violence. Only this time when the cops had him cornered, he attempted suicide by police. I didn’t believe it at first until several months later when I saw it in a letter he wrote me from prison. He was in solitary twenty-three hours a day for thirty-six weeks. His words still haunt me: “I begged the officer to shoot but he didn’t.” Cancer patients often say their illness makes them feel helpless. I can assure you that nothing makes you feel as helpless as your adult children sabotaging their own futures. When they’re little, you can exert discipline, protect them. Then they hit an age when despite how desperately you want to save them from themselves, you can’t. I asked Farrah once, “If we had never separated, do you think Redmond would still have gotten into trouble?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe because she knew the answer was yes.

By the time Leslie and I broke up in 2001, Farrah and I had been driving back and forth to visit Redmond at various facilities for several years, a ritual we would sadly have to keep repeating and that I continue to this day. Some of the places where Redmond was staying were located in isolated areas where there were more tumbleweeds than streetlights. I’d do whatever I could to keep our spirits up. I’d take her to a local movie theater, or we’d find rustic restaurants and cafés. We’d try to see the humor in our bizarre circumstance. And believe me, we encountered our fair share of bizarre. Some of these camps asked parents to participate in group therapy sessions that often included weird rituals led by wacko facilitators. These activities were meant to strip us of our defense mechanisms. It never worked on me. I remember one so-called group leader who insisted that a couple pick another member of the group, lift the person off the floor, and swing him or her around so he or she could experience “flying.” I’m not embellishing. Remember that famous scene from Titanic in which Leonardo DiCaprio holds Kate Winslet as she leans forward on the bow of the ship and tells her she’s flying? That’s what we had to do except there was no wind, no boat, no ocean, and no James Cameron, just green linoleum and gray walls. One time Farrah and I were attending another group encounter and the facilitator, who was a double for Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, told Farrah she had to take off her sunglasses. Farrah was sporting a nasty sty in her right eye that day. The woman was insistent, even going so far as to try to remove the glasses from Farrah’s face. I thought Farrah was going to take the woman down. Instead she smiled demurely and said: “Touch my Maui Jims and your hand will come back without fingers.” The facilitator retreated. I glimpsed Farrah winking at me behind those glasses. It was the tiny triumphs that kept us going. The big ones were much fewer and farther between.

I’d like to believe that it wasn’t the leukemia that brought Farrah and me back together. Farrah had begun to mellow. Gone was the frustrated, angry woman. Replacing her was this patient person who seemed comfortable inside her own skin. Maybe we both had grown up. Still, reconciliation didn’t happen quickly. It would take time for us to trust each other again, something Mia and Frank could never do. This might be a good time to lighten things up a bit and tell you that story.

The year, 1965. The place, 20th Century Fox Studios. Mia and I are on lunch break from Peyton Place. We’re walking to the commissary. We pass the set of Von Ryan’s Express, a movie about escaped prisoners of war in which Sinatra is starring. Fencing designed to imitate barbed wire surrounds the set. The effect is so realistic, it’s as if we’re standing in front of a POW camp. The cast is milling about. Mia asks me to point out which of the actors is Sinatra. “I can’t spot him,” I say. Suddenly a gate at the other end of the set opens and a golf cart piled with six guys in army fatigues pulls out. “Look at the driver,” I whisper to her. “That’s Sinatra.” I watch her face. I can almost hear the lyrics to “I’ve Got a Crush on You” playing in her head. A couple days later back on the set of Peyton Place, Mia pulls me aside. “I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Frank Sinatra yesterday,” she says. I asked her how she found the time. Our production schedule had been grueling the day before. “They were shooting interiors on the next stage and I just walked over and introduced myself,” she answers. I was even more perplexed. “You met Frank Sinatra in a hospital gown?” Peyton Place was shooting hospital scenes that week. “No, I put on a robe and slippers first.”

She was nineteen years old. He was forty-eight. They wed two years later. I was married to Patrick’s mother, Leigh Taylor-Young, at the time. We enjoyed many evenings with Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra. They were wonderful to us. Frank liked having his friends around and what a cast of pals they were: fellow rat packers Dean Martin; Joey Bishop; Sammy Davis, Jr.; childhood friend Jilly Rizzo, known as much for his ties to Mulberry Street as for his eponymous eaterie; comedian Shecky Greene; actor Brad Dexter. And what you have to understand is that these men were old school, Frank especially. Not always the easiest environment for a serious-minded young bride with a Hollywood pedigree. Mia’s father, John Farrow, was a respected Australian-born film director and her mother was famed Irish-born actress Maureen O’Sullivan.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Frank. He could be a gentleman. But he had an uncontrollable jealous streak. One night Leigh and I were driving down Sunset Boulevard on my motorcycle. We’d just had a lovely dinner with Jacqueline Bisset and her partner of many years, Michael Sarrazin. He was a wonderful actor. Anyway, Leigh and I are on the bike when suddenly someone whooshes past us in a Dual Ghia. This is an expensive Italian sports car and there weren’t too many of them on the road. I knew that Frank had one. There’s a red light ahead of us and I see the Ghia come to a screeching halt behind another car. I drive up alongside the Ghia, and Leigh and I glance to our right. Sure enough, it’s Frank at the wheel, and sitting next to him in the passenger side is Mia. They don’t see us. Mia’s hands are clasped tightly on her lap and she’s sitting there rigid. She looks terrified. It’s a long red. Frank can’t wait. He wheels out from behind the other driver, nearly sideswiping him, and runs the light.

The next afternoon, Leigh and I are expected at their home for Sunday brunch. When we arrive, there are large pieces of furniture all over the front yard: an armoire, a dresser, a hand-carved desk, custom cabinets, even a piano. It looks as if an absentminded auctioneer started to set up for an estate sale, said “Aw, the hell with it,” and left. I ask myself, At only five foot nine and a hundred and forty-five pounds, could Frank possibly have dragged all this furniture out of the house by himself? The adrenaline must have been really flowing. But I heard he didn’t like the way the owner of the antique shop looked at his wife when she purchased that furniture. And Frank was a very possessive man.

Though Mia and Frank’s marriage survived only a few years, their friendship would endure a lifetime. He loved her and she loved him, but he couldn’t own her. She was her own girl then, and an exquisite woman now. I still hear from Mia from time to time. After Farrah died, she sent me a beautiful letter that only someone of her depth and grace could have written. Leigh had replaced Mia on Peyton Place in 1966. We were married the next year in Hawaii. Leigh was pregnant with Patrick and chose to leave our prime-time soap, which wasn’t making good use of her considerable talent. Patrick is now a well-regarded sportscaster in LA. We speak frequently. I salute him and bow to Leigh, who has been as good a mother as she was an actress.

Thinking about Frank Sinatra is a painful reminder of my own jealous streak. Back in 2001 when I found out I had leukemia and Farrah rushed to my side, there was a part of me that was still smarting from her affair with James Orr. I wish I could say I was man enough to let it go, but I wasn’t. It would take being told I might die of cancer for me to finally move past it. And I thought Farrah was stubborn. All these years I let her infidelity eat away at me, and though we never did speak of it after my diagnosis, I forgave her in my heart because reconciling meant more to me than holding on to something that was over and done with. While I was writing Chapter Six of this book, I asked Farrah’s archivist to see if he could find any of the call sheets from Man of the House because I wanted to try to confirm as best as I could the exact production dates. He couldn’t find her calendar. What he did find was more important: Redmond’s summer reading list from that year: Treasure Island, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Secret Garden. It’s full of notes in Farrah’s handwriting on his progress with each book. Redmond spent his summer break in 1994 on location with Farrah. He was with her the entire time. I don’t know why I didn’t remember that. And when she begged me to believe her that nothing had happened with Orr, why didn’t I realize then that Farrah would never have had an affair with her son present.

All that agony for nothing. She was telling the truth.

What a revelation: our second chance wasn’t just because I got sick. It wasn’t even only for Redmond. Though a heavy new burden is handed to me—the knowledge that the woman I loved died thinking I believed she had been unfaithful—another is lifted.

As 2001 churns forward and the specter of my mortality recedes into the wormhole of memory, Farrah and I slowly find our way back to that comfortable place we thought could never be recaptured. She moves part-time into the beach house and occupies the bedroom across from mine. As fate often dictates, I had just added a third bedroom upstairs, never imagining it would become Farrah’s room.

When you love somebody, you cherish their signature quirks. One for me was Farrah’s sleeping habits. Once when she was about ten, her family—her mother, father, and sister—was going to a drive-in. She got in the car first and fell asleep. They drove to the drive-in and saw two movies while she slept. When they got home and parked in the driveway, she wakes up and says, “Well, I guess we’re not going.” And those qualities stayed with her. When she’d take a nap, there’d be this tiny indentation on one side and the rest of the bed would be untouched. You wouldn’t even have to remake it afterward, just smooth over one side of the covers. She could sleep anywhere, airplanes or cars; the moment her head touched the pillow, she’d be out just like a little girl.

During our estrangement, I had forgotten some of these appealing aspects of Farrah’s personality. Perhaps it was my way of coping with our having lost each other: I wouldn’t let myself remember anything endearing because it hurt too much. Once Farrah reenters my life in 2001, all the delightful qualities of hers that I’d been blocking come flooding back. Farrah had a whimsical side that could be infuriating one moment, and enchanting the next. For instance, she loved to wiggle her way into my physical exams. Once, when we were at my oncologist’s office and he was examining me, Farrah, ever so sweetly and with this coquettish smile, lifts up her arm and says in her best Texas drawl, “Doctor, this wouldn’t happen to be a little old lymph node would it?” You could almost hear the batting of her eyelashes. And of course, he’s soon attending to the spot on her arm while I’m sitting there with my shirt off, waiting for him to check my lymph nodes. The same thing happened years before when Farrah was in her ninth month of pregnancy with Redmond. I had a chicken-eye corn between my toes. Farrah is there and the doctor and I are discussing whether it’s best to treat it topically with ointments or get it surgically removed. Suddenly Farrah is kicking off her shoes, and then hoisting her leg onto the examining table (no easy feat at nine months along), saying, “Doctor, would you take a look at these nasty old warts on my foot?” Within minutes he’s abandoned me and is removing them for her. Both she and I believed it was the foot doctor who brought on her labor because only hours later her water broke. Back then, these sorts of things made me chuckle.

And in 2001 I was relieved to know that Farrah still had that connection to me, that it had never died; it was just asleep for a while the same way she had been that night at the drive-in movie. Now we were both awake and our love had deepened. Farrah had forgiven me for Leslie. She had finally come to understand why I had gone.

While I’m recuperating, Farrah’s still busy preparing for her art exhibit. She had recently sold the house on Antelo and moved into a spacious condo in an exclusive building on Wilshire Boulevard, which also doubled as her studio. In addition to her art projects, she’s starring in episodes of Spin City. She played a judge and she was delightful in the part. Her comic timing was spot on. Interestingly enough, during this time Farrah had found some old episodes of Good Sports on video and we watched them together. “You know, that show wasn’t half bad,” she said. “We were better together than we thought.” I smiled: we always were.

I’ve been so immersed in reminiscing that it just occurred to me: 2001 was the year of 9/11. Farrah was filming in LA and tending Redmond. I was in Istanbul with Freddie and Corina Fields. We had been in Greece when Freddie got an invitation to visit Turkey from a woman he thought might finance a movie. I was doubtful but having read Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, I wanted to see Istanbul. The first night, I was having a drink at the bar. This lovely young American woman on holiday starts chatting with me. It was a sweet conversation between two tourists, but by the second glass of wine, she began hinting at something more, and having just gotten back on the mend with Farrah, the last thing I wanted was a Mediterranean fling. So I politely excused myself. The next morning I’m in the hotel restaurant reading the breakfast menu and she’s sitting with her luggage at the table next to me. She asks me to join her, which I do. Not the smartest thing, I know, but she was a nice woman, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and I felt bad about the night before. We order breakfast and she tells me she’s flying to New York in a few hours for an important job interview. “But I could push it back and fly tomorrow instead,” she suggests. “Then we could spend the day together.” I gently tell her no, that she needs to make it to her interview as scheduled, and I need to stop talking to pretty girls. She kept trying to change my mind. “Come on, I’ve never done anything spontaneous like this before and I may never get the chance to again,” she said. We finished breakfast and I helped her with her bags and watched her get into a cab for the airport.

That was September 10, 2001. Her interview was at 8:30 a.m. at the World Trade Center the following morning.

It was early evening the next day in Istanbul. I’m dressing when Freddie calls saying to turn on CNN, which I do, just as the second plane hits the second tower. My first thought was for my family, all of whom I immediately tried to call, and would be dialing for hours before I would finally be able to get an open line. All the while, in my mind’s eye, I kept flashing back to an image of that girl. Freddie and I were supposed to attend a dinner party that night. I bowed out. He later told me that when he arrived, the hostess said the terrorists were Japanese, as was being reported on Turkish radio and television, not Muslims.

While the death toll in New York punctuated that year for every American, Farrah had to face one much closer to home. On October 16, her beloved older sister, Diane, died of cancer at sixty-two years old. Not a good number for the Fawcetts.

Our lives would continue to be driven by ups and downs both personally and professionally. In 2002, following her successful stint on Spin City, Farrah’s television career would see another resurgence with four appearances on the hit legal drama The Guardian. Her portrayal was of a troubled single grandmother, for which she received another Emmy nomination, her fifth. That’s when I realized how far she’d come since the weeks and months leading to her fiftieth birthday. Before, it would have eaten at her that she was being cast as a grandma; whereas now, not only did she take it in stride, she had come to appreciate her age and had even begun to enjoy the early rewards of maturity. For me, Farrah accepting that role in The Guardian and inhabiting it with such aplomb was her homecoming to herself.

My career was sputtering along like that old Model T Mose drove in Paper Moon. Around the same time Farrah was taping The Guardian, I was in production for the film People I Know, with Al Pacino. It’s about a slick New York press agent whose actor client gets himself into a publicity mess that he has to clean up. I play the actor. Yes, I do see the irony. And no, not even Pacino was enough to save this movie when it was released in May of the following year. I’m like a homing pigeon for embarrassing footnotes to the careers of the otherwise ridiculously successful. I wonder if it’s a gypsy curse.

And my good luck would just keep on coming. The following fall, in 2004, Tatum releases her autobiography titled A Paper Life. A mess on paper is more like it. I didn’t read it when it came out in hardcover, and not only because my friends warned it would make me unhappy. I figured I’d heard it all before. So I can’t recommend that you buy it. Though I may seem to be making light of my daughter’s memoir, the truth is, it did hurt.

Despite whatever setbacks we were facing in any given moment, whether they were troubles with Redmond or my other children or our jobs, Farrah and I were growing stronger together, and our relationship, though still not completely healed from the wounds of years past, was becoming more elastic and able to bend without breaking. By the end of 2004, the tabloids had been hinting for more than a year of a Fawcett-O’Neal wedding. Sometimes we’d curl up on the couch at the beach house and read each other the articles.

During this period, the cable network TV Land offered Farrah a million dollars to do a day-to-day reality series called Chasing Farrah. This was long before reality mania, and I had reservations about unrehearsed exposure, but she was intrigued by the idea and wanted to give it a try, so I supported her decision. I even agreed to be in an episode. We taped it at the beach house. When I watch it now, I see just how remarkable Farrah and I were together. The footage of us at the beach—her sitting on my lap while I smiled and kissed her—would look to anyone who didn’t know our story as if we had never been apart.

The series ran for only seven episodes before being canceled, but it was worth it for Farrah. It established her as a dignified pioneer of an emerging television genre, and it also gave her the chance to honor her love for her mother. In March of 2005, Farrah and the crew went to Texas to tape an episode with her family. Pauline, whose health was failing, was able to take part. She died weeks later, with Farrah knowing how proud she was of her daughter.

I lost my mother in 2005 too. She was ninety-five. I’ll never forget the year before when my brother called to tell me it was time. Mom was leaving us. She was in the hospital then and had been there for a while, never having recovered from hip replacement. After the surgery, she began to fade away and my brother and I were living in that awful limbo of “any-day-now-speak” that the doctors give you. When I arrived at her bedside, her breathing was shallow and her pulse was faint. Kevin and I kissed her hand, told her we loved her, told her what she meant to us and how important she was in our lives. Mom was in an older wing of the hospital and there was a fire exit outside her room. Kevin and I sat on the steps and we reminisced about our life with her. We laughed and told stories. Then we went back inside. I held her in my arms, and I said good-bye to my beloved mother. The next morning, I got another call from Kevin.

“She’s back,” he says.

“Who’s back?” I ask.

“Mom!” Kevin replies.

“Mom? You mean she’s still alive?”

“Yes, she’s right here,” he says. “Do you want to talk to her?”

She’d rallied. My mom had apparently decided she would live another year, so she did. It was in character. For decades she had personally answered all of Tatum’s and my fan mail, always making sure that every person who took the time to write was given the courtesy of a thoughtful response. I still miss her.

As the year comes to a close, I’m given an uplifting surprise. The producers of Desperate Housewives invite me to make a guest appearance as character Lynette Scavo’s father-in-law. I happily accept. I always liked the sardonic wit of that show and who wouldn’t want to spend a day with that gorgeous cast?

The holidays are thankfully uneventful.

2006 begins innocuously. It will not end that way.