When news emerged this week that late Love Story star Ryan O’Neal’s stunning Malibu beach house – with its sweeping views over the Pacific – had been reduced to rubble it marked more than the end of a family home.
‘The house is nothing but ruins now so you can’t even say “if walls could talk,”’ a neighbor who grew up on the same stretch of beach told me. ‘The house did have bad ju-ju… there will never be another place like that in Hollywood, that’s for sure.’
The two-story $3.5 million house overlooking La Costa Beach was party central not just to people in Malibu but to everyone in Hollywood. It’s where O’Neal wooed stars like Angelica Houston, Ursula Andress, Diana Ross, Joan Collins and the great love of his life, Charlie’s Angels actress Farrah Fawcett.
O’Neal’s son, actor and sportscaster Patrick O’Neal, 66, broke the news on Monday that the house – at 21368 Pacific Coast Highway – had been lost in the Pacific Palisades wildfire, still burning out of control. The blaze is just one of five in and around LA that have killed at least two dozen people, destroyed more than 12,000 homes, schools and businesses, and forced more than 100,000 to evacuate.
Patrick posted videos and images of himself going through the rubble of his famous father’s home on Instagram. He included an uplifting photograph of a rainbow over the still-smoldering wreckage. Understandably upset, Patrick said: ‘It’s truly devastating to have grown up here in Malibu and to just now have seen that our family house is gone.’
Without a doubt, the destruction is unthinkable and wrenchingly tragic, but not everyone shares Patrick’s fond memories of Ryan’s place.
News emerged this week that late Love Story star Ryan O’Neal’s stunning Malibu beach house, with its sweeping views over the Pacific, had been reduced to rubble.
The two-story $3.5 million house overlooking La Costa Beach was party central not just to people in Malibu but to everyone in Hollywood.
It’s where O’Neal wooed stars like Angelica Houston, Ursula Andress, Diana Ross , Joan Collins and the great love of his life, Charlie’s Angels actress Farrah Fawcett (pictured with O’Neal in 1989).
The mid-century modern structure cantilevered over the sand, shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, will be forever remembered as one of the most infamous party pads of all time.
‘The tales of debauchery coming out of there never stopped,’ the source said. ‘Ryan would have week-long drug parties which would descend into mayhem with people shooting guns off the deck. It was the wildest house in LA.
‘Everyone who was anyone came through there,’ I was told. ‘Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, all the bad boys. Of course, they attracted the beautiful girls. And the partying attracted all the drug dealers. You could get any drug you wanted at Ryan’s. I honestly don’t think there has been a party house like it before it or since.’
O’Neal, a ruggedly handsome former semi-professional boxer, first made his name as a D-list soap star on the 60s TV drama Peyton Place. But it was the 1970 film ‘Love Story’ – a tearjerker in which O’Neal played an Ivy League grad who falls for the charms of a ‘regular’ girl (played by Ali McGraw) – that turned him into a superstar.
The film, which sees McGraw’s character die of cancer, with its tagline ‘Love Means Never Having To Say You Are Sorry’, cemented O’Neal as a $1 million-a-picture leading man.
In 1973, ‘Paper Moon’ starring his daughter Tatum O’Neal – still the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, aged 10 – made him what he described as ‘catnip’ to women and the partying began in earnest.
O’Neal bought his 2,344 sq. ft. three-bedroom, three-bathroom house for $151,000 in 1976. Built in 1952, it sat on a 6,764 sq.ft. lot with steps leading down to pristine La Costa beach, known to locals as ‘the Cove’ and had huge glass windows in the living room and Ryan’s master bedroom which ‘were always left open so you could hear the waves crashing.’
O’Neal lived there until his death in December 2023, aged 82, but the stories of his harum-scarum days never faded.
‘You’d go for a walk in the morning and there would be all these bodies of people who passed out from the night before splayed out on the beach,’ the source said. ‘The cops were always being called but they didn’t do anything. Back then half of them probably joined in.’
Patrick posted videos and images of himself going through the rubble of his famous father’s home on Instagram. He included an uplifting photograph of a rainbow over the still-smoldering wreckage.
‘Ryan (pictured in 1975) would have week-long drug parties which would descend into mayhem with people shooting guns off the deck. It was the wildest house in LA,’ a source said.
The mid-century modern structure cantilevered over the sand, shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, will be forever remembered as one of the most infamous party pads of all time.
O’Neal hit his professional peak during an era of free sex, cocaine, hard drinking and hard living in Hollywood. He checked all the boxes. But there was a dark side to the hedonism.
O’Neal, who openly admitted he was a ‘lousy’ father, had three young children: Tatum and Griffin – from a failed first marriage to actress Joanna Moore, an alcoholic and Patrick – from a second failed marriage to actress Leigh Taylor-Young.
Tatum, now 61 and sober, would later recount in her 2004 memoir A Paper Life (itals) that her mother, unable to cope, off-loaded her and her brother onto O’Neal who raised them in ‘feral’ conditions in the Malibu home.
Tatum had her own battles with drugs and would end up losing custody of the three children she shared with ex-husband tennis ace John McEnroe. She said the Malibu home was a free-for-all.
The Malibu source said: ‘Tatum would walk in on her father having sex in the kitchen with random women. She saw things no little girl should have to see.’
She first took drugs at age eight. At 12 years old, she was lured into an opium-fueled orgy with one of her father’s drug dealers. ‘When your parents are off getting drunk or high they are not watching what happens to their children. I suffered years of abuse, both emotional and sexual,’ she said.
Tatum came home one day years later to find her father in bed with her best friend, actress Melanie Griffith, then 18.
For younger son Griffin, 60, the Malibu house harbored equally painful memories.
In an interview a few years ago, Griffin told me how his father once punched his teeth out during a drunken row. On another occasion, O’Neal pointed a loaded revolver at Griffin’s head and ‘threatened to blow my brains out.’
In 1973, ‘Paper Moon’ starring his daughter Tatum O’Neal (pictured with her father in 1975) made him what he described as ‘catnip’ to women and the partying began in earnest.
His own drug addiction began at age nine when his father taught him to roll a marijuana joint and things went downhill from there. ‘My father gave me cocaine when I was 11 and insisted I take it,’ Griffin once revealed.
‘He was violent all the way through my upbringing. He was a very abusive, narcissistic psychopath.’
Griffin would later accidentally kill his best friend, Gian-Carlo Coppola (son of Godfather legend Francis Ford Coppola) in a boating accident in 1986.
The great love of O’Neal’s life, actress Farrah Fawcett, moved into the Malibu home in 1979 shortly after she left her husband, Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors.
O’Neal would later joke that Majors, his best friend, asked him to keep an eye on Farrah while he went out of town. Within 24 hours Farrah was in O’Neal’s bed – and Majors was toast.
The source said: ‘Farrah brought stability to the Malibu place. There were fewer parties. Ryan loved her and she loved playing house. She’d have dinner parties every Friday night and you never knew who you would meet there. She was into art and books and you would walk in to find Andy Warhol sitting next to Jack Nicholson.
‘There was a Warhol painting of Farrah on the wall in the living room. There was talk the family sold it after Ryan’s death. I can’t imagine it would have been left in there to burn.’
In 1985, Fawcett became pregnant with her and O’Neal’s son, Redmond.
‘Ryan wanted to go back to partying but Farrah kicked into mom mode,’ Fawcett’s friend told me. ‘She ended up taking her own place in Westwood to get Redmond out of there.’
The breathtakingly beautiful actress kept trying to make the relationship work until she came home one day to find Ryan in bed with actress Leslie Stefanson, thirty years his junior and one of her closest friends.
O’Neal later said: ‘I didn’t expect to see her (Farrah) down there at the house. I tried to put my pants on but put both legs in one hole.’ Try as she might to keep Redmond isolated from his father’s recklessness, Fawcett couldn’t. Redmond ended up moving in with his father at 15 and rapidly became addicted to crystal meth, cocaine and heroin. There were multiple stints in rehab.
‘Farrah brought stability to the Malibu place. There were fewer parties. Ryan loved her and she loved playing house,’ a source said. (The couple are pictured here in 1984).
O’Neal lived there until his death in December 2023, aged 82, but the stories of his harum-scarum days never faded. (He is pictured here in 2003).
Police busted both Redmond and O’Neal at the house in 2008 for possession of crystal meth. Redmond is now believed to live in a long-term psychiatric facility in the LA area. Fawcett died of cancer in 2009 aged 62.
But, for all the pain and drama, the loss of the Malibu house clearly resonated deeply with O’Neal’s family this week.
Tatum, who made amends with her father before his 2003 death from cancer, said: ‘It’s the saddest ever. So sad I could cry. Gone gone gone gone. It’s so scary. I am so freaking sad.’
Son Patrick, who said he had always enjoyed a good relationship with his father, was also devastated.
Whether the O’Neal family decides to rebuild remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, the legend of Ryan O’Neal’s party house will live on in Hollywood infamy for years to come.