You Cannot Be Serious (25 page)

Why didn’t they? The answer is simple, but not so pure: They had a show to put on, and my presence put behinds in the seats. It happened at tournament after tournament: I would freak out, the umpire would hit me with a warning, a point penalty, maybe a measly fine or two (in a year where I was earning a couple of million dollars, seven hundred was pocket change), and life (and the match) would go on. If I went home, they lost money. The tournament directors knew it, the umpires (who got paid by the tournament) knew it, and the linesmen knew it. I knew it. The system let me get away with more and more, and—even though to some it looked as if I was glorying in my bad behavior—I really liked it less and less.

Since the tournament didn’t have the nerve to default me, the ATP suspended me from playing tournaments for three weeks. It was originally going to be six weeks, but then they said that if I agreed not to play any exhibitions, they’d cut it to twenty-one days. (If I could play exhibitions whenever I wanted, a suspension wasn’t much of a disincentive.) Even the Association of Tennis Professionals wanted to keep the biggest bull in the china shop happy.

However, that suspension was just what I wanted. I badly needed to take a few weeks off from playing tennis.

Here’s how distanced I was from real life in those days: Having never voted before, I wanted to cast my ballot in the 1984 presidential election, so I flew from Stockholm to London, then took the Concorde back to New York. (I’d registered to vote in Long Island, where I’d recently bought a house in Oyster Bay. It had been my father’s lifelong dream to have a property with a tennis court, and now my parents lived in one of the three houses on the property.) But there was a snowstorm in the city, my flight was diverted to Washington, and I never made it to the polls. In fact, I never made it, period, until the
2000
election.

I
HAD THE THREE WEEKS OFF
I’d been looking for, so I flew to Los Angeles. Tatum and I had talked—and talked—while I was in D.C., and I realized I had to get back to her.

However, it was also Hollywood that I had to get back to. There had been something about that party at Richard Perry’s that night—something so exciting, so seductive. It was Tatum I missed, but it was also Tatum
in her element.

At the end of 1984, I’d gone from someone who’d had trouble getting into Studio 54 to a celebrity on the Hollywood A-list. At the time, it seemed fantastic. In London, fame was almost a liability. In New York, people tried to act blasé about it. In Los Angeles, though, people were uncynically excited about it: Fame applauded itself constantly. In L.A., fame seemed to be your ticket to all the best things life had to offer, whether it was hanging with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood before a Rolling Stones show (and feeling, God, there was no place on earth you’d rather be), or being at yet another Hollywood party where the cast of characters was a total Who’s Who of the movies, and the stiffs were the big TV stars.

I remember going to Penny Marshall’s birthday party. She and Carrie Fisher had the same birthday, and so each threw a party for the other in alternating years at their respective houses. I looked around the room and saw Bette Midler, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson. I thought Nicholson was the greatest actor of all time—and then he walked up to me, shook my hand with an admiring look in his eyes, and said: “Don’t ever change, Johnny Mac.”

It was happening more and more. Suddenly, I had such grand notoriety that people I looked up to seemed to be looking up to me—whether it was Jack Nicholson, or Mick Jagger, or Carlos Santana, who told the crowd at a concert, “I’m dedicating this song to John McEnroe,” and then went into a soliloquy about what a beautiful person I was.

Part of me thought it was great—and part of me was glancing backward to see if they were talking to the person behind me. I was only a tennis player! But I also was a kind of performer, and my performances—my televised outbursts—broke through the clutter and drone of canned television. I had anger, presence, integrity. I was a rebel.

And I was
famous.

Still, some deep part of me felt that I was out of my depth in the starworld of Los Angeles. And Tatum knew that world like the back of her hand; she was nonchalant, almost jaded, about it. I thought she could help guide me through it.

Was I looking for the love of my life? I don’t know. I was searching for something. In a sense, finding her then was a matter of timing as much as anything else. I was just sick of feeling empty. I wanted something more than money out of all I’d accomplished.

After having played an insane schedule for the past seven and a half years, I felt I was slipping, that something bad was going to happen. I didn’t know what, but things were clearly going from bad to worse: I couldn’t control my behavior anymore. I just couldn’t stay on the merry-go-round.

I thought Tatum could help me, and I thought I could help her. The more I got to know her, the more she seemed like the perfect partner for me. I thought she was a young woman coming into her own. As the daughter of a famous father, and as someone who had had early success and a tough time afterward, she had obviously struggled with her identity. Now she was trying to break out and find herself.

Tatum told me she was planning to leave Los Angeles and move to New York. She wanted to make a clean break from her mother and father, who had been divorced for a long time, but who each continued to have a bad influence on her. She wanted a fresh start.

She seemed like a diamond in the rough. I saw a person who had been through a lot of what I’d been through—dealing with the media, the paparazzi—and done a reasonably good job. I thought, believe it or not,
This is a better version of myself.

I was more attracted to her all the time. She had grown up a bit of a tomboy, so she did certain things unexpectedly well—she was an excellent pool player, a great Frisbee thrower, a good skier. She was very easy to spend time with: In some ways, it was like being with one of the guys.

I felt we were a good match. We were both shy, but we each also put up a tough front—although as I got to know her, I realized her toughness was more real than mine; she had been through a lot more than I had.

She talked constantly about her father. I began to feel I was in a strange kind of competition with him: that what Tatum was really looking for in me was a better version of her dad. I eventually came to feel that Ryan was a very manipulative guy, but when I first met him, he could be extremely charming. He was the type of guy who could walk into a party or Spago and wow a room—you could practically hear an announcer saying, “Here’s Ryan O’Neal!” He would crack jokes and tell great stories and tell you how terrific you were. And you’d say, “Man, this guy is wonderful company.”

And then there were moments when it seemed he could tear your head off. I sensed that during one of the first times Tatum took me up to Farrah Fawcett’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Her father was living with Farrah, whom Tatum hated. I got the feeling that he and Farrah were so obsessed with their looks that they’d spend the whole day doing fanatical workouts. I remember seeing Ryan running on the beach all the time—the guy would run for five or six miles, but he wouldn’t eat the whole day; he’d get the munchies, but still he wouldn’t eat, and then he’d take a steam or a sauna and sweat some more….

So by the time they said, “Do you guys want to come up for dinner at six?” Ryan was probably at the point where he’d eat anything! Besides which, if you go through a day like that, you’re probably going to end up incredibly angry.

We went to the house, and he said, “Let’s play racquetball.” Before dinner.

I’d only tried racquetball a couple of times in my life, but never with anyone who really knew how to play. I was in my jeans, he was in his shorts, and I saw right away that he was pretty good. I could see immediately that it was a game of angles—that you could hit the ball in the corner where it wouldn’t bounce, and that was how you won points.

Ryan would hit a shot and plant himself right in front of me. Now, if you hit the other guy in racquetball, you’re supposed to play the point over, so I was forced to lob the ball to try and keep it away from him—then he’d put it away.

I thought, “God, this is screwed up.” But he kept doing it! I could have put welts in his back, but I never laced into him, because I thought, “I’m not going to risk getting into a fight with this guy.” And I lost, something like 21–18.

In retrospect, it’s lucky that I didn’t get into a fight with him—he was crazy about competing in general, and he’d been a Golden Gloves champion as a kid. There were also a few times he put on boxing gloves with me. I’m lucky he didn’t punch my lights out. I caught him in good moods. He’d sort of let me hit him, and he’d just bob and weave, and after a minute my arms would get tired. His build was the opposite of mine—he had a big upper body and skinny bird legs, and I have big legs and a small upper body. I didn’t think that boded too well if the boxing ever got serious.

B
UT NOTHING BODED WELL
, now that I look back on it. The first time Tatum and I made love, we were high, and it was terrible.

Shouldn’t that have told me something?

Tatum said, “Let’s go up to Farrah’s place.” I don’t even know why she wanted to go up there—I think it was just because she knew that Farrah and Ryan weren’t at home, and we happened to be close by. It wasn’t a particularly romantic occasion. We were jittery, a little paranoid. We both seemed to be feeling, “Let’s just do it to do it, so we can say we did it, and then we’ll know we mean something to each other, and we’ll really get into it when we’re in a better frame of mind.”

We went up to the house, up to the guest bedroom. It was very cold in that room—it felt like forty degrees! The combination of the cold and that weird buzz…It was just awful, not an especially good start. The truth is, though, I was as responsible for it as Tatum.

It wasn’t as though she was saying, “Please, let’s do drugs.” I was the guilty party also. In fact, in retrospect, I believe she was trying to get away from all that: That was part of her reason for wanting to move to New York. Her mother, in particular, was in horrible shape. Tatum was trying to escape from what felt to her like some sort of terrible destiny.

I pulled her back into it, in a way, just because I was burnt out and looking for relaxation. I exacerbated the problem, not recognizing at the time how much of a problem it was….

The next morning, we were down at the beach, and we decided to go to a restaurant I knew for breakfast. I was sitting there eating, when I looked up and saw, a hundred yards away, a guy taking our picture! I thought, “What the hell?!” That had never happened to me before; I had never been in the
National Enquirer
until that picture. I still remember the headline: “McEnroe–O’Neal Love Nest: The Brat and The Brat.” It started the whole ball rolling. But Tatum had an incredible ability just to let all of that roll off her back….

My suspension ended, but the end of ’84, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, was a strange time for me. I’d committed to play the Davis Cup final in mid-December, in Sweden, but then I pulled out of the Australian Open, which started the week after Davis Cup.

I had had enough; going to the Australian didn’t matter to me. In retrospect, since I wound up never winning the Australian, it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to go and play the tournament when I was at the top of my game.

But tennis was the last thing on my mind at that moment. I was in love. And when you’re in love, of course, you don’t always see things too clearly.

It was time for me to leave L.A., to go back to New York to train for Davis Cup. Tatum was still talking about moving, as soon as she could track down some kind of place in Manhattan. And impulsively, I said to her, “Just come stay with me.”

We flew east together.

Y
OU KNOW THAT LINE
in the Beach Boys song “Sloop John B.”—“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”? That’s what it was like to fly to Sweden and play Davis Cup that December. As it would turn out, it was my last Cup match for three years. I really went out with a bang.

My heart sank as the plane took off from Kennedy. Tatum was back at my apartment. Connors and I still weren’t speaking. My mind was a million miles from tennis. I sighed and sank into my seat, hoping the week would pass quickly.

I arrived in Gothenburg Tuesday morning to find a debacle already in progress. Jimmy had come over despite the fact that his wife was just about to give birth to their second child, so he was totally on edge, and acting like it. To give just one instance, the car that had been supposed to pick him up for practice on Monday hadn’t come, so he was furious, and—if you can believe it—wrote a nasty message to Arthur in the snow.

Things felt frosty between Peter Fleming and me. And Jimmy Arias was our fourth player, and he’s always been a personality I don’t quite get—I just don’t understand his sense of humor. Add to this the fact that I was in love and wishing I wasn’t there in the first place….

What’s the opposite of team spirit? That’s what we had in Gothenburg.

Connors played Wilander the first day, and he completely lost it. He just snapped. I certainly know what it’s like to make an ass out of myself on a tennis court, but this was one of the all-time displays. He cursed and lashed out at everyone in sight, to the point where it felt like a miracle they didn’t default him. In Sweden! In the Davis Cup final!

The Swedes had done the same thing the French had at Grenoble in ’82—built an indoor court of slow red clay, to work against Jimmy and me, and for their baseliners. However, the court was horrific: It hadn’t been packed down well enough—they’d wanted it as slow as possible—and it was literally coming apart.

The whole scene was just ugly, and Arthur didn’t know what the hell to do. His way of dealing with it was not to deal with it at all. He wouldn’t sit us down and talk to us—nothing. It was a terribly uncomfortable situation. Ironically enough, after Jimmy lost it, I played a miserable match and I didn’t get mad at all. I lost to Henrik Sundstrom, who at the time was a top-ten pro, a very good clay-court player. It was actually one of the few times that I barely said anything.