​Loving Farrah, Hating Ryan

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Since reopening my Facebook page, one thing has returned almost immediately: the hatred of Ryan O’Neal. What I find interesting is that Ryan does not even have to be in the photograph, the video, or the discussion for his name to appear. I can post an image of Farrah by herself, and someone will still find a way to bring him into the conversation. The subject may have absolutely nothing to do with Ryan, yet the same arguments show up repeatedly. She was manipulated. She was trapped. She was controlled. She could not get away from him. In my view, once Ryan begins appearing in discussions that have nothing to do with him, the issue is no longer simply whether fans dislike him. It becomes a question of how some fans have chosen to interpret Farrah Fawcett’s life.

This also creates an obvious contradiction. Some of the fans most determined to minimize Ryan’s place in Farrah’s legacy are often the same people who make him central to nearly every judgment they make about her. They do not want Ryan defining Farrah, yet they repeatedly use him to define what they believe was her greatest personal mistake. In other words, Ryan becomes important precisely because they believe he should not have been. Her relationship with him is treated as the one part of Farrah’s life that requires explanation, correction, or, in some cases, complete reinterpretation.

I have no interest in defending Ryan O’Neal. That is not the purpose of this essay. There are many things in the public record that deserve criticism, and Ryan’s own account supports some of that criticism. In his memoir, Both of Us: My Life with Farrah, he acknowledged that he and Farrah sometimes became physical during arguments and admitted that neither of them had the emotional discipline to recognize that what was happening was not normal. His account also includes infidelity, anger, emotional withdrawal, and considerable family dysfunction. For this reason, I will not turn their relationship into something it was not. The relationship could be volatile and unhealthy, and recognizing that does not require us to reach the separate conclusion that Farrah had no agency within it.

Independence is one of the qualities most often associated with Farrah. She left Charlie’s Angels at the height of its success because she wanted something different for herself. She pursued dramatic roles that challenged the public image that had been created around her, took her art seriously, challenged doctors during her cancer treatment, and fought publicly after her medical privacy was violated. Farrah said that college was when she “became my own person.” Later, when discussing bravery, she described herself instead as someone with conviction who acted when she believed something was right for her. This is what Farrah fans regularly celebrate: independent, stubborn, determined, and willing to make decisions other people did not necessarily understand.

However, when the subject becomes Ryan O’Neal, that same independence often seems to disappear from the discussion. If Farrah stayed with Ryan, she was trapped. If she left and later returned, she was manipulated. If she said she loved him, then apparently she did not fully understand what was happening to her. If people close to her say she loved him, their observations can be dismissed because they supposedly did not understand the relationship either. The problem with this kind of argument is that it becomes almost impossible to disprove. Anything Farrah said or did that contradicts the conclusion can simply be turned into additional evidence that she was under Ryan’s control.

This is a form of selective agency. Farrah’s independence is accepted when the choices she made agree with what fans believe she should have done, but it becomes much less important when those choices involve Ryan. This does not mean that independent people cannot be manipulated, abused, pressured, or emotionally dependent. Of course they can. Strong people can stay in unhealthy relationships, and intelligent people can make decisions others consider damaging. However, dysfunction does not automatically erase every choice Farrah made, every feeling she expressed, or every decision she repeated over decades.

Farrah’s own words make the simplest version of the Ryan narrative difficult to maintain. In Farrah Fawcett Forever, she was asked about Ryan’s reputation for wanting control and how that fit with her own desire for independence. Farrah said Ryan had been one of the first men in her life to encourage her independence. She said he was proud of her, encouraged her career, and did not make her feel guilty for being away working. She connected that support directly to why their relationship had remained strong. This does not prove that Ryan was never controlling, nor does it settle every question about their relationship. It does establish that Farrah did not describe the relationship in the simple terms often applied to it today.

The same complexity appears when Farrah talked about Ryan more generally. She said they made each other laugh, that they loved one another, and that she respected him. She also acknowledged times when she had to tell him that something he did was not respectful. Farrah described love, commitment, and a support system while also acknowledging conflict. That description is more useful than either extreme because it lets the relationship remain complicated. It does not require Ryan to be either a wonderful partner or a complete explanation for everything that went wrong in Farrah’s life.

In Farrah Fawcett Forever, Mela Murphy was direct when asked about Farrah’s feelings for Ryan, saying, “She loved him madly. Madly.” Alana Stewart also described the pattern she had witnessed between Farrah and Ryan: Farrah could become furious with him, insist she would never speak to him again, and then find her way back to him days later. Alana described Ryan as the love of Farrah’s life and said that, whatever happened between them, they always seemed to find their way back to each other. None of this proves the relationship was healthy. Love and a healthy relationship are not the same thing. However, it does make it difficult to argue that Farrah’s feelings for Ryan were simply invented after the fact or misunderstood by everyone around her.

Alana Stewart’s account in My Journey with Farrah: A Story of Life, Love, and Friendship is also important because much of what she wrote came from direct observation during Farrah’s illness. The book draws heavily from Alana’s dated journals, which repeatedly place Ryan in Farrah’s life during those years, including medical appointments, treatments, family gatherings, and hospital visits. In May 2007, Alana described Farrah and Ryan as looking happy and loving together. Near the end of Farrah’s life, Alana wrote that their love seemed deep, special, and lasting; on June 9, 2009, she stated that Ryan called to say he had asked Farrah to marry him and that Farrah had said yes. These observations do not tell us whether every part of their relationship was healthy. Still, they do show that Ryan remained an important part of Farrah’s life and that people close to her recognized their emotional bond.

For this reason, there is an important difference between judging Ryan and deciding what Farrah was allowed to feel about him. Anyone can look at Ryan’s behavior and conclude that Farrah deserved better. Someone can believe she should have left him permanently, dislike him, distrust him, or even hate him. Those are judgments about Ryan. What I question is the next step: when a judgment about Ryan becomes certainty about Farrah’s inner life, and her own statements no longer count because they do not support the conclusion we have already reached.

Her later relationship with Ryan makes this even clearer. After Ryan developed leukemia, Farrah returned to his side and the relationship gradually rebuilt. According to the documentary Farrah Fawcett Forever, they did not move back in together because Farrah wanted to maintain her own independence. Yet she remained involved with him and cared for him. Near the end of Farrah’s own illness, the same account says that Ryan had again become a major presence in her life, that she wanted him there, and that she accepted his proposal. This is important because Farrah had already established a separate life. She had her own home, career, friends, and independence. She still chose to maintain a relationship with Ryan.

We are free to believe that was a bad choice. We are free to say we would have wanted something different for her. However, I don't think we can celebrate Farrah as independent throughout the rest of her life and then automatically decide that her choices involving Ryan weren't really hers simply because we dislike them. If Farrah’s independence only counts when she chose what we wish she had chosen, then we are no longer respecting her independence. We are respecting our preferred version of it.

This is where fandom can create a version of a person that becomes easier to admire than the person who actually lived. Over time, fans decide what Farrah represented, what she would have wanted, whom she should have trusted, and which decisions reflected the “real” Farrah. Fans accept evidence that supports that interpretation, while they explain away evidence that complicates it. Ryan O’Neal has become one of the clearest examples of this. Some fans insist he should not define Farrah, yet they repeatedly make him the central failure by which they judge her life. The irony is that the more they argue Ryan should not be central to Farrah’s legacy, the more central they make him.

I do not think the most useful question is whether Ryan O’Neal was good enough for Farrah. People can argue about that indefinitely, and there is enough negative evidence in the record to make criticism of him perfectly reasonable. The more interesting question is whether we are willing to accept Farrah’s agency when she used it to make choices we would not have made for her. Respecting Farrah does not mean agreeing with every decision she made, and it does not mean pretending that love made the relationship healthy. It means letting Farrah remain the person she actually was rather than correcting her life after the fact so it better fits the person we wish she had been.
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Farrah could be strong and still vulnerable. She could be independent and still emotionally attached to Ryan. She could leave him, return to him, be angry with him, love him, and still maintain a life of her own. None of those things automatically cancel the others out. For this reason, loving Farrah does not require loving Ryan O’Neal, defending him, or excusing anything he did. It may, however, require accepting that Farrah loved him and allowing that choice, however uncomfortable it may be for some fans, to remain hers.