Ryan O’Neal’s Both of Us and Farrah Fawcett’s Posthumous Story
James Cowman
The public arguments surrounding Farrah Fawcett’s final years often begin near the end of her life. They concentrate on a disputed documentary, an alleged betrayal, a private romantic claim, a disagreement over who understood her wishes, and an accusation that someone else controlled her story. These subjects may deserve examination. However, they become misleading when they are separated from the decades of personal history that came before them.
Ryan O’Neal’s Both of Us: My Life With Farrah is important because it places those later disputes inside a much larger life. Published in 2012, the memoir follows Farrah and Ryan through courtship, domestic life, parenthood, professional conflict, separation, illness, reconciliation, and death. It does not establish that Ryan’s interpretation of every event is correct. It does establish that the final years cannot be understood as though Farrah’s life had suddenly begun when later claimants entered the public discussion.
That broader context becomes especially important when the memoir is compared with the public narratives advanced by Greg Lott and Craig Nevius. Their claims are different and should be treated separately. Lott has presented a romantic account in which Farrah’s emotional allegiance during her later life was not necessarily what the public was made to believe. Nevius has concentrated more heavily on Farrah’s Story, its production, its authorship, and the contention that Farrah’s intentions were betrayed or distorted. One narrative is primarily about romantic importance. The other is about authority over Farrah’s final public representation. However, both narratives depend to some extent on narrowing the subject. Farrah’s life becomes a contest over who had access to her, who possessed her confidence, who remained loyal, who spoke for her, and who had the right to explain what she really wanted. Both of Us challenges that way of representing her history. It does not defeat either man through a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead, it requires the reader to account for the entire life surrounding their claims.
Before using the memoir in this way, however, Ryan’s position as its author must be considered. He is obviously not a neutral witness. He chooses what to include, interprets Farrah’s behavior, explains his own motives, and writes with the knowledge that he has been publicly blamed for many of the tragedies associated with their family. The memoir is also an act of grief and self-defense. For this reason, I would not use it as an affidavit, an independently verified biography, or the final ruling on Farrah and Ryan’s relationship.
The book’s value does not depend on granting Ryan that kind of authority. In my view, its credibility comes partly from the fact that he does not make a convincing attempt to present himself as innocent. He admits jealousy, vanity, sexual betrayal, emotional immaturity, failed parenting, and a persistent need to receive love from people he did not always know how to love responsibly. He does not describe himself as the stable man who protected Farrah from everyone else. He repeatedly shows how his insecurity and behavior contributed to the instability he later mourned. This makes Both of Us different from a simple defense written against hostile outsiders. Ryan does criticize other people, sometimes harshly, but he also directs much of the book’s criticism toward his younger self. The journal entries are especially important in this regard. They preserve some of what he believed and felt at the time, while his later commentary shows that he no longer interprets those moments in quite the same way.
The older Ryan often recognizes pressure where the younger Ryan believed he was offering support. He recognizes insecurity where he once saw passion and emotional avoidance where he had assumed an understanding existed between them. In other words, the journals do not merely verify that he loved Farrah. They reveal how incomplete his understanding of that love could be while he was living inside it.
The sections involving Farrah’s career provide one of the clearest examples. Ryan portrays himself as someone who believed in her dramatic ability and wanted her to move beyond the limitations imposed by Charlie’s Angels and the famous poster. That support was real within his account. However, he also acknowledges that support could become interference. When discussing projects such as Small Sacrifices and Good Sports, Ryan recognizes that his coaching and advice sometimes crossed into control. He later recalled overhearing Farrah complain that he was giving her too many instructions, even telling her when to blink. What he considered professional guidance could make her feel observed, pressured, or diminished. The example is important because it prevents the reader from accepting an easy division between a supportive Ryan and a Farrah who misunderstood his intentions. Ryan eventually accepts that good intentions do not erase the effect of intrusive behavior.
A similar tension appears throughout Ryan’s descriptions of Farrah. He admires her beauty to the point of worship, but the memoir also contains a sustained attempt to identify the person hidden by that beauty. In the early part of the story, Farrah is presented in relation to Lee Majors and to the older expectations placed on marriage, femininity, and Hollywood stardom. Her public identity is becoming enormous, while her private freedom remains more complicated. Ryan remembers her warmth, Texas hospitality, religious feeling, lack of pretension, and comfort within domestic life. He also remembers her ambition, discipline, anxiety, anger, fear, and determination to be taken seriously as an actress. The Farrah in this memoir is the poster, but she is not limited to the poster. She is a public fantasy and a working actress, a partner and a mother, a woman who could be affectionate and controlling, confident and frightened.
This does not mean Ryan escapes the problem of simplifying her. At times, he explains Farrah’s motives too confidently and interprets her inner life through his own emotional needs. He occasionally appears to believe that loving her gave him a clearer understanding of her than the memoir itself supports. Nevertheless, the book repeatedly shows him discovering that Farrah’s thoughts and fears had exceeded his understanding. That recognition prevents his version of her from becoming entirely possessive.
The limitations of Ryan’s perspective are important, but they do not diminish the length or complexity of the relationship he documents. Legally, that relationship was difficult to define from the beginning. Ryan begins with the story of a marriage that did not happen. After he proposed with the gold band from a Cuban cigar, he and Farrah drove from Tahoe toward Reno intending to marry. A flat tire interrupted the trip, and they eventually turned back. They never got married. That story could be read as a charming accident, but it also introduces a problem that became more important after Farrah’s death. Ryan and Farrah lived for many years as a couple and family without acquiring the formal status that would have made their bond easier to define. They also separated, reunited, disappointed one another, and maintained lives that did not fit comfortably inside a simple description such as husband and wife, former lovers, or permanent partners.
These openings in the record make later reinterpretation easier. The absence of a marriage certificate can be used to reduce the relationship. Their separation can be presented as evidence that the bond had ended. Ryan’s failures can be used to argue that he had forfeited emotional legitimacy. Yet the chronology presented in Both of Us makes such conclusions difficult to sustain. Whatever label is applied to the relationship, it remained part of the structure of their lives.
Redmond provides the clearest evidence of that continuing bond. He is not merely one subject among many in the memoir. His birth transformed Farrah and Ryan’s relationship into a shared family history that continued even when their romance became unstable. His later addiction and legal problems also turned that history into a tragedy neither parent knew how to deal with or control. Ryan is unusually direct about his shortcomings as a father. He acknowledges that he often wanted affection when his children needed discipline and authority. He had already seen the damage created by weak boundaries in the lives of his older children, including Griffin, but he did not consistently change his behavior with Redmond. Farrah’s stricter approach, which Ryan sometimes regarded as excessive, is later reconsidered as fear. She had seen what could happen and did not want Redmond to follow the same path.
This retrospective change is one of the most revealing parts of the book. Ryan repeatedly concludes that Farrah’s behavior was motivated by concerns he had underestimated. Her anxiety was not necessarily simple moodiness. Her strictness was not necessarily a desire to dominate. Her anger could reflect fear for Redmond, fear of professional humiliation, fear of losing control over her image, fear of abandonment, or fear of what illness was taking from her. Ryan cannot verify every interpretation simply because he reached it later. However, the pattern shows that the memoir is not organized around the belief that he possessed complete knowledge of Farrah. Much of it is organized around the opposite realization: he frequently understood her too late.
That larger family and emotional history changes how Greg Lott’s public claims should be evaluated. Lott does not occupy a significant place within Ryan’s memoir. This absence does not prove that Lott’s account is false. A memoir is selective, and the omission of a person cannot establish that the person was unimportant to Farrah. Ryan had his own reasons for organizing the story as he did. However, the absence remains relevant to the competing narratives. Within the life Ryan documents, there is no empty emotional center waiting for another romantic claimant to fill. The memoir is built around homes, a child, shared work, arguments, separations, reunions, illnesses, and repeated returns. Farrah had relationships and experiences beyond Ryan, but Ryan’s account makes it difficult to reduce her late emotional life to a displaced romance existing outside the family history she had built with him and Redmond.
The argument of Both of Us is not that Farrah and Ryan remained continuously happy, conventionally romantic, or mutually faithful. The book would be less credible if it made that claim. Their relationship survived in a damaged form. They hurt one another, lived apart, and failed to resolve many of the problems between them. Yet they continued to return. Farrah reentered Ryan’s life when he was ill, and Ryan later became part of the intimate reality of her illness. This continuity does not invalidate every other attachment Farrah may have had. It does mean that her relationship with Ryan cannot reasonably be treated as a public misconception that concealed an entirely different emotional life. The history presented in the memoir is too extensive for that.
Craig Nevius presents a different problem. His public importance is connected less to romance than to authorship, representation, and control over the story told through Farrah’s Story. In Ryan’s memoir, Nevius appears during the late conflict surrounding the documentary. He does not appear as one of the people who organized the preceding decades of Farrah’s personal life. That placement should not be mistaken for factual proof against Nevius. Ryan is openly angry, and his hostility can distort his descriptions. Any specific disagreement involving production decisions, contracts, footage, authorship, or Farrah’s expressed wishes must be examined through the evidence connected to that disagreement. Ryan’s dislike of Nevius cannot settle those questions.
What the memoir does establish is proportion. The documentary dispute occurred during a period already overwhelmed by Farrah’s cancer, medical uncertainty, treatment trips to Germany, Redmond’s addiction and legal crisis, NBC’s involvement, Alana Stewart’s participation, and the urgency of finishing the program while Farrah might still be able to watch it. When the dispute is placed back inside that environment, it becomes one crisis within a collapsing family and medical situation. It does not become the complete meaning of Farrah’s final years.
This is why I find simple control narratives unconvincing. Both of Us presents too many people, conflicting responsibilities, medical pressures, and emotional failures for the period to be explained entirely through one villain who controlled Farrah or one excluded person who alone remained faithful to her intentions. Ryan’s account is incomplete, but incompleteness is not the same as irrelevance. His version makes the final period appear less like a carefully managed conspiracy and more like a tragedy that nobody involved could manage well. Farrah was dying. Redmond was in crisis. Ryan carried a long history of personal failure along with his devotion to her. Alana was trying to help. Professionals were attempting to finish and shape a documentary. Medical decisions were being made under extraordinary pressure. At the same time, the public remained interested in Farrah as both a suffering woman and a former national symbol. No single dispute can explain all of that.
The hospital scenes are important for the same reason. Ryan describes Farrah leaning on him, watching the documentary, suffering through pain and sedation, and gradually losing the physical independence that had defined her public image. These scenes do not prove that he understood all of her wishes or made every correct decision. Being present does not make his interpretation automatically true. However, his presence within that final domestic and medical reality cannot be dismissed as meaningless.
That combination of intimacy and limitation is contained in the title itself. Both of Us describes a shared life, but Ryan can tell that life only from his own position. He does not claim to be writing a neutral biography called The True Farrah. The title asserts intimacy, but it also acknowledges a relationship. It directs attention toward the space created between two people rather than pretending that Ryan can speak from Farrah’s position.
Of course, Farrah’s life cannot be contained even by that relationship. She was more than Ryan’s partner, just as she was more than Lee Majors’s wife, Redmond’s mother, Lott’s alleged private love, Nevius’s documentary subject, the Charlie’s Angels star, the poster, or the cancer patient. Every person who tells her story selects a role and a period through which to explain her. The danger begins when that selection is presented as the whole person.
For this reason, Both of Us should be read neither as Ryan’s acquittal nor as the final correction of everything said after Farrah’s death. It is a partial and self-interested memoir written by a man who loved her, failed her, returned to her, and wanted the public to understand that history. Its limitations should remain visible. However, those limitations do not cancel what the memoir contributes. It records the length and density of a relationship that later narratives often reduce to an obstacle, an embarrassment, or a false public impression. It restores the homes, the work, the child, the arguments, the journals, the estrangements, the illnesses, the reconciliations, and the grief surrounding the final disputes.
The most useful question is therefore not whether Ryan O’Neal possessed the final truth about Farrah Fawcett. He did not. The better question is whether any account of her later life can be credible while treating the history documented in Both of Us as incidental. In my view, it cannot.
Ryan’s memoir does not resolve every claim made by Greg Lott or Craig Nevius. It does something more important. It restores the life around those claims. Once that life is placed back into the record, Farrah becomes much harder to claim, rescue, control, or explain through one private relationship or one disputed project. She returns to the scale of an actual person whose life was larger than the arguments made over her after she was no longer able to respond.
Sources Consulted
James Cowman
The public arguments surrounding Farrah Fawcett’s final years often begin near the end of her life. They concentrate on a disputed documentary, an alleged betrayal, a private romantic claim, a disagreement over who understood her wishes, and an accusation that someone else controlled her story. These subjects may deserve examination. However, they become misleading when they are separated from the decades of personal history that came before them.
Ryan O’Neal’s Both of Us: My Life With Farrah is important because it places those later disputes inside a much larger life. Published in 2012, the memoir follows Farrah and Ryan through courtship, domestic life, parenthood, professional conflict, separation, illness, reconciliation, and death. It does not establish that Ryan’s interpretation of every event is correct. It does establish that the final years cannot be understood as though Farrah’s life had suddenly begun when later claimants entered the public discussion.
That broader context becomes especially important when the memoir is compared with the public narratives advanced by Greg Lott and Craig Nevius. Their claims are different and should be treated separately. Lott has presented a romantic account in which Farrah’s emotional allegiance during her later life was not necessarily what the public was made to believe. Nevius has concentrated more heavily on Farrah’s Story, its production, its authorship, and the contention that Farrah’s intentions were betrayed or distorted. One narrative is primarily about romantic importance. The other is about authority over Farrah’s final public representation. However, both narratives depend to some extent on narrowing the subject. Farrah’s life becomes a contest over who had access to her, who possessed her confidence, who remained loyal, who spoke for her, and who had the right to explain what she really wanted. Both of Us challenges that way of representing her history. It does not defeat either man through a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead, it requires the reader to account for the entire life surrounding their claims.
Before using the memoir in this way, however, Ryan’s position as its author must be considered. He is obviously not a neutral witness. He chooses what to include, interprets Farrah’s behavior, explains his own motives, and writes with the knowledge that he has been publicly blamed for many of the tragedies associated with their family. The memoir is also an act of grief and self-defense. For this reason, I would not use it as an affidavit, an independently verified biography, or the final ruling on Farrah and Ryan’s relationship.
The book’s value does not depend on granting Ryan that kind of authority. In my view, its credibility comes partly from the fact that he does not make a convincing attempt to present himself as innocent. He admits jealousy, vanity, sexual betrayal, emotional immaturity, failed parenting, and a persistent need to receive love from people he did not always know how to love responsibly. He does not describe himself as the stable man who protected Farrah from everyone else. He repeatedly shows how his insecurity and behavior contributed to the instability he later mourned. This makes Both of Us different from a simple defense written against hostile outsiders. Ryan does criticize other people, sometimes harshly, but he also directs much of the book’s criticism toward his younger self. The journal entries are especially important in this regard. They preserve some of what he believed and felt at the time, while his later commentary shows that he no longer interprets those moments in quite the same way.
The older Ryan often recognizes pressure where the younger Ryan believed he was offering support. He recognizes insecurity where he once saw passion and emotional avoidance where he had assumed an understanding existed between them. In other words, the journals do not merely verify that he loved Farrah. They reveal how incomplete his understanding of that love could be while he was living inside it.
The sections involving Farrah’s career provide one of the clearest examples. Ryan portrays himself as someone who believed in her dramatic ability and wanted her to move beyond the limitations imposed by Charlie’s Angels and the famous poster. That support was real within his account. However, he also acknowledges that support could become interference. When discussing projects such as Small Sacrifices and Good Sports, Ryan recognizes that his coaching and advice sometimes crossed into control. He later recalled overhearing Farrah complain that he was giving her too many instructions, even telling her when to blink. What he considered professional guidance could make her feel observed, pressured, or diminished. The example is important because it prevents the reader from accepting an easy division between a supportive Ryan and a Farrah who misunderstood his intentions. Ryan eventually accepts that good intentions do not erase the effect of intrusive behavior.
A similar tension appears throughout Ryan’s descriptions of Farrah. He admires her beauty to the point of worship, but the memoir also contains a sustained attempt to identify the person hidden by that beauty. In the early part of the story, Farrah is presented in relation to Lee Majors and to the older expectations placed on marriage, femininity, and Hollywood stardom. Her public identity is becoming enormous, while her private freedom remains more complicated. Ryan remembers her warmth, Texas hospitality, religious feeling, lack of pretension, and comfort within domestic life. He also remembers her ambition, discipline, anxiety, anger, fear, and determination to be taken seriously as an actress. The Farrah in this memoir is the poster, but she is not limited to the poster. She is a public fantasy and a working actress, a partner and a mother, a woman who could be affectionate and controlling, confident and frightened.
This does not mean Ryan escapes the problem of simplifying her. At times, he explains Farrah’s motives too confidently and interprets her inner life through his own emotional needs. He occasionally appears to believe that loving her gave him a clearer understanding of her than the memoir itself supports. Nevertheless, the book repeatedly shows him discovering that Farrah’s thoughts and fears had exceeded his understanding. That recognition prevents his version of her from becoming entirely possessive.
The limitations of Ryan’s perspective are important, but they do not diminish the length or complexity of the relationship he documents. Legally, that relationship was difficult to define from the beginning. Ryan begins with the story of a marriage that did not happen. After he proposed with the gold band from a Cuban cigar, he and Farrah drove from Tahoe toward Reno intending to marry. A flat tire interrupted the trip, and they eventually turned back. They never got married. That story could be read as a charming accident, but it also introduces a problem that became more important after Farrah’s death. Ryan and Farrah lived for many years as a couple and family without acquiring the formal status that would have made their bond easier to define. They also separated, reunited, disappointed one another, and maintained lives that did not fit comfortably inside a simple description such as husband and wife, former lovers, or permanent partners.
These openings in the record make later reinterpretation easier. The absence of a marriage certificate can be used to reduce the relationship. Their separation can be presented as evidence that the bond had ended. Ryan’s failures can be used to argue that he had forfeited emotional legitimacy. Yet the chronology presented in Both of Us makes such conclusions difficult to sustain. Whatever label is applied to the relationship, it remained part of the structure of their lives.
Redmond provides the clearest evidence of that continuing bond. He is not merely one subject among many in the memoir. His birth transformed Farrah and Ryan’s relationship into a shared family history that continued even when their romance became unstable. His later addiction and legal problems also turned that history into a tragedy neither parent knew how to deal with or control. Ryan is unusually direct about his shortcomings as a father. He acknowledges that he often wanted affection when his children needed discipline and authority. He had already seen the damage created by weak boundaries in the lives of his older children, including Griffin, but he did not consistently change his behavior with Redmond. Farrah’s stricter approach, which Ryan sometimes regarded as excessive, is later reconsidered as fear. She had seen what could happen and did not want Redmond to follow the same path.
This retrospective change is one of the most revealing parts of the book. Ryan repeatedly concludes that Farrah’s behavior was motivated by concerns he had underestimated. Her anxiety was not necessarily simple moodiness. Her strictness was not necessarily a desire to dominate. Her anger could reflect fear for Redmond, fear of professional humiliation, fear of losing control over her image, fear of abandonment, or fear of what illness was taking from her. Ryan cannot verify every interpretation simply because he reached it later. However, the pattern shows that the memoir is not organized around the belief that he possessed complete knowledge of Farrah. Much of it is organized around the opposite realization: he frequently understood her too late.
That larger family and emotional history changes how Greg Lott’s public claims should be evaluated. Lott does not occupy a significant place within Ryan’s memoir. This absence does not prove that Lott’s account is false. A memoir is selective, and the omission of a person cannot establish that the person was unimportant to Farrah. Ryan had his own reasons for organizing the story as he did. However, the absence remains relevant to the competing narratives. Within the life Ryan documents, there is no empty emotional center waiting for another romantic claimant to fill. The memoir is built around homes, a child, shared work, arguments, separations, reunions, illnesses, and repeated returns. Farrah had relationships and experiences beyond Ryan, but Ryan’s account makes it difficult to reduce her late emotional life to a displaced romance existing outside the family history she had built with him and Redmond.
The argument of Both of Us is not that Farrah and Ryan remained continuously happy, conventionally romantic, or mutually faithful. The book would be less credible if it made that claim. Their relationship survived in a damaged form. They hurt one another, lived apart, and failed to resolve many of the problems between them. Yet they continued to return. Farrah reentered Ryan’s life when he was ill, and Ryan later became part of the intimate reality of her illness. This continuity does not invalidate every other attachment Farrah may have had. It does mean that her relationship with Ryan cannot reasonably be treated as a public misconception that concealed an entirely different emotional life. The history presented in the memoir is too extensive for that.
Craig Nevius presents a different problem. His public importance is connected less to romance than to authorship, representation, and control over the story told through Farrah’s Story. In Ryan’s memoir, Nevius appears during the late conflict surrounding the documentary. He does not appear as one of the people who organized the preceding decades of Farrah’s personal life. That placement should not be mistaken for factual proof against Nevius. Ryan is openly angry, and his hostility can distort his descriptions. Any specific disagreement involving production decisions, contracts, footage, authorship, or Farrah’s expressed wishes must be examined through the evidence connected to that disagreement. Ryan’s dislike of Nevius cannot settle those questions.
What the memoir does establish is proportion. The documentary dispute occurred during a period already overwhelmed by Farrah’s cancer, medical uncertainty, treatment trips to Germany, Redmond’s addiction and legal crisis, NBC’s involvement, Alana Stewart’s participation, and the urgency of finishing the program while Farrah might still be able to watch it. When the dispute is placed back inside that environment, it becomes one crisis within a collapsing family and medical situation. It does not become the complete meaning of Farrah’s final years.
This is why I find simple control narratives unconvincing. Both of Us presents too many people, conflicting responsibilities, medical pressures, and emotional failures for the period to be explained entirely through one villain who controlled Farrah or one excluded person who alone remained faithful to her intentions. Ryan’s account is incomplete, but incompleteness is not the same as irrelevance. His version makes the final period appear less like a carefully managed conspiracy and more like a tragedy that nobody involved could manage well. Farrah was dying. Redmond was in crisis. Ryan carried a long history of personal failure along with his devotion to her. Alana was trying to help. Professionals were attempting to finish and shape a documentary. Medical decisions were being made under extraordinary pressure. At the same time, the public remained interested in Farrah as both a suffering woman and a former national symbol. No single dispute can explain all of that.
The hospital scenes are important for the same reason. Ryan describes Farrah leaning on him, watching the documentary, suffering through pain and sedation, and gradually losing the physical independence that had defined her public image. These scenes do not prove that he understood all of her wishes or made every correct decision. Being present does not make his interpretation automatically true. However, his presence within that final domestic and medical reality cannot be dismissed as meaningless.
That combination of intimacy and limitation is contained in the title itself. Both of Us describes a shared life, but Ryan can tell that life only from his own position. He does not claim to be writing a neutral biography called The True Farrah. The title asserts intimacy, but it also acknowledges a relationship. It directs attention toward the space created between two people rather than pretending that Ryan can speak from Farrah’s position.
Of course, Farrah’s life cannot be contained even by that relationship. She was more than Ryan’s partner, just as she was more than Lee Majors’s wife, Redmond’s mother, Lott’s alleged private love, Nevius’s documentary subject, the Charlie’s Angels star, the poster, or the cancer patient. Every person who tells her story selects a role and a period through which to explain her. The danger begins when that selection is presented as the whole person.
For this reason, Both of Us should be read neither as Ryan’s acquittal nor as the final correction of everything said after Farrah’s death. It is a partial and self-interested memoir written by a man who loved her, failed her, returned to her, and wanted the public to understand that history. Its limitations should remain visible. However, those limitations do not cancel what the memoir contributes. It records the length and density of a relationship that later narratives often reduce to an obstacle, an embarrassment, or a false public impression. It restores the homes, the work, the child, the arguments, the journals, the estrangements, the illnesses, the reconciliations, and the grief surrounding the final disputes.
The most useful question is therefore not whether Ryan O’Neal possessed the final truth about Farrah Fawcett. He did not. The better question is whether any account of her later life can be credible while treating the history documented in Both of Us as incidental. In my view, it cannot.
Ryan’s memoir does not resolve every claim made by Greg Lott or Craig Nevius. It does something more important. It restores the life around those claims. Once that life is placed back into the record, Farrah becomes much harder to claim, rescue, control, or explain through one private relationship or one disputed project. She returns to the scale of an actual person whose life was larger than the arguments made over her after she was no longer able to respond.
Sources Consulted
- Ryan O’Neal. Both of Us: My Life With Farrah. Crown Archetype, 2012.
- Public interviews and statements by Greg Lott concerning Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal.
- Public statements and claims by Craig Nevius concerning Farrah’s Story and Farrah Fawcett’s final years.