Dad, Can I Borrow The Keys?

Actor Ryan O'Neal arrested with son for drug possession
By NANCY DILLON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Updated Thursday, September 18th 2008, 9:09 AM




LOS ANGELES - Like father, like daughter, like son.

Actor Ryan O'Neal, 67, and 23-year-old Redmond - his son with actress Farrah Fawcett - were busted Wednesday on felony drug charges.
Deputies found what is believed to be methamphetamine on them during a probation sweep of their Malibu home. Father and son were later released on $10,000 bail each.

"Authorities found Redmond in possession of narcotics and later discovered the father, Ryan O'Neal, was also in possession of narcotics," spokesman Steve Whitmore told the Daily News.

A vial of the alleged narcotics was found in Ryan O'Neal's bedroom at his Malibu home.

Whitmore said the discovery came as "part of a routine probation compliance search" stemming from a previous drug case involving Redmond.

Redmond is serving three years' probation after admitting he was carrying heroin and crystal meth when he was caught on a Malibu joyride in the predawn hours of Jan. 26.

Redmond's older sister Tatum O'Neal grabbed headlines in June when she was arrested one New York's lower East Side buying crack and powder cocaine from a homeless man.

A Giant Passes.

Motown songwriter, producer Norman Whitfield dies
2 hours ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Norman Whitfield, songwriter and producer who co-wrote a string of Motown classics including "War," "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," has died. He was 67.

A spokeswoman at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Whitfield died there Tuesday. He suffered from complications of diabetes and had recently emerged from a coma, The Detroit Free Press reported.

The New York-born Whitfield was a longtime Motown producer who during the 1960s and '70s injected rock and psychedelic touches into the label's soul music.

Many of his biggest hits were co-written with Barrett Strong, with whom he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004. He and Strong won the Grammy in 1972 for best R&B song for the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone."

Many of Whitfield's songs from late '60s and early '70s have a strong political tone, including the Temptations' 1970 "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," and Edwin Starr's 1970 "War."

In his only No. 1 hit, Starr sings in an anguished voice that war is "a heartbreaker, friend only to the undertaker. ... What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" Whitfield produced as well as co-wrote the song.

Among Whitfield's other songs were "Cloud Nine," "Beauty Is Only Skin Deep" and "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)," all hits for the Temptations; and "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby," a 1969 hit for Marvin Gaye.

The group Undisputed Truth had a top five hit in 1971 with Whitfield and Strong's "Smiling Faces Sometimes."

Palins Big Ugly Bucket Of Hate.

"Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies."

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list. "
- RFK JR.