BEVERLY HILLS (California) • Actress Tatum O’Neal was taping her new podcast, Tatum, Verbatim, at a studio the other day and arguing with her producer, Brian Howie.
Howie wanted O’Neal to project the logo of her podcast – a black and white photo of herself with the words Tatum, Verbatim imposed over it – on a large flat-screen television sandwiched between black leather sofas where she and her daughter, Emily McEnroe (her father is tennis player John McEnroe), were sitting.
“Why would I want a big picture of myself next to me?” O’Neal said.
Howie pressed on, as producers are apt to do. “No,” she told him.
Why is it, he wondered, that the first thing out of a woman’s mouth is the word “no”?
If Howie, who runs a relationship podcast called The Great Love Debate, was joking, the joke fell flat.
O’Neal stuck to her instinct. “No,” she said. “It’s tacky.”
At 54, she is used to putting her foot down, she said later that day over lunch at Spago.
“My entire life, I’ve been saying no…
