Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:
Actor Ryan O'Neal told a jury on Monday that he is the rightful owner of an Andy Warhol celebrity portrait that hangs over his bed. It is of the woman he considers the love of his life, "Charlie's Angels" star Farrah Fawcett. Warhol painting sold for $105.4 million.
Fawcett, who died of cancer in 2009, bequeathed her art collection to her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin; the university is accusing O'Neal of stealing away with its Warhol.
"The painting is mine," testified the 72-year-old actor, who rose to fame as the impossibly handsome star of the 1960s television soap opera "Peyton Place" and the 1970 film "Love Story."
He admitted taking the portrait, a striking black and white print with ruby red lips and turquoise eyes, from a wall outside the bedroom of Fawcett's Wilshire Boulevard condominium about a week after her death on June 25, 2009.
"I removed the painting a week or more after she died," he testified.
The portrait now hangs over O'Neal's bed at his Malibu beach house -- just as it did from 1980 until 1998.
Over the heated objections of O'Neal's lawyer, Marty Singer, the jury heard about how the portrait came to leave the beach house in the wake of the couple's infamous "falling out" in February 1997. The love affair between two baby boomer icons hit an extremely rough patch when she walked in on him in bed with a much younger woman.
"That person that was in her -- in your beach house at the time was 25 years old, right?" an attorney for the university, David Beck, asked. Singer's objection was sustained before O'Neal could answer. Beck persisted, asking if Fawcett was "furious."
"No," O'Neal responded. "She was hurt. She was in shock." He added that she felt "pitiful and disgraced."
Beck pushed on, asking whether the portrait was hanging over his bed at the time.
"It was," O'Neal acknowledged. But not for much longer.
"About a year after the incident I asked her to keep the portrait with her, store it for me, because my young friend was uncomfortable with Farrah staring at her," O'Neal testified.
Fawcett's response, according to his testimony: "I'd like you to leave it there because I want to make her uncomfortable."
By the time Fawcett moved into her L.A. condo in 1999, she had possession of the Warhol portrait -- as well as a twin print Warhol created at the same time. O'Neal insisted they reconciled a couple of years later. "She forgave me."
Like so many of the facts in this case, the impetus for Fawcett's turn as a model for Warhol is in dispute. O'Neal says Warhol, an old friend of many years, approached him in 1980, about a year after he started seeing Fawcett. By then she was already famous for her role on "Charlie's Angels" and that ubiquitous red bathing suit pin-up poster.
But Beck has suggested another scenario. He says Warhol approached Fawcett directly, at a luncheon at a Houston country club.
Both O'Neal and Fawcett attended the two-hour session at Warhol's New York studio, known as The Factory. Dozens of Polaroid photographs were taken, but there wasn't much fuss. "It didn't take long," O'Neal said. "Doing her hair took longer than taking the pictures."
Later, he said, he received a call to pick up the paintings and saw them stacked with several others, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. O'Neal said he and Fawcett each received a painting as part of the deal. They carried them out and loaded them into a Checker cab.
And so, O'Neal said, he can't steal what's already his. He also said it was his idea that Fawcett leave her art to the University of Texas, but that the Warhol portraits weren't part of the plan.
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http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/03/showbiz/oneal-warhol-fawcett-trial/
