Coreyography: A Memoir
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To the stars in my life that shone bright enough to illuminate my world: Jason Robards, Storm Thorgerson, Mary Goldstein, Bedford Goldstein, and my grandmother, Dena Goldstein, without whom I may never have survived my childhood.
And to the stars that faded much too soon: Corey Haim, River Phoenix, Michael Jackson, Sam Kinison, Marc Rocco, Jeff Conaway, Gary Coleman, and Harold “Pete” Pruett.
May God bless and keep you all.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
He was supposed to be at the dentist.
“I’ve got a problem with this tooth,” he’d said when we spoke on the phone that Monday afternoon. “It fell out again, man, but the soonest appointment I can get is a week and a half away.”
He was plagued by problems with his teeth—decades of drug abuse had rendered some of them loose, or rotten and decayed. But he didn’t have health insurance, which is why I had started sending him to my dentist. He was willing to work with him, let him pay when he was able to, in installments or whenever he got back on his feet.
In our business there are always ways to make money. Sign fifty autographs at twenty dollars apiece and you’ve got yourself an easy grand. Show up to a screening of The Lost Boys and you might make several times that. True, easy money used to be impossible for him to hold on to. He was impulsive and irresponsible, and—back when he could still get steady work—would somehow manage to blow through thousands upon thousands of dollars in only a matter of days. But by 2009, shortly after his mother, Judy, was diagnosed with breast cancer, he was getting himself together. He moved her into his two-bedroom apartment in Burbank and started accompanying her to chemotherapy. He was doing his best to be a better man for his mom.
“I’ve actually got an appointment on Wednesday,” I told him. “Why don’t you take mine and I’ll take yours next week?”
“Thanks, man, that would be great.” He paused for a moment. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. “How am I supposed to get there?”
He didn’t have a car, either. I told him that I would have my assistant Robin pick him up on Wednesday morning. She was on her way to his apartment when she turned on the radio and heard the news.
* * *
Someone was banging on the door to my bedroom.
“Corey? It’s Eden. Get up, buddy. It’s important.”
“What?” I called out in the darkness. No response. Had I imagined the knocking? I wasn’t fully awake yet, still halfway inside a dream.
“Corey? It’s Mindy. You need to get dressed now and come downstairs.”
I wiped the sleep from my eyes, reached for my cell phone, and pulled it off the charger: 8:45 in the morning, 135 new messages. That was unusual. I scrolled through the list until I found the first one, sent from Sean Astin at 5:32 A.M.: I am so sorry, bro. If there’s anything in the world I can do for you, please know that I am here.
I sat up in bed with a start. What in the hell is he talking about? And then, slowly, I realized that if my brother and sister were here, in my house, waking me up this early in the morning, something had to be seriously wrong. Then came that banging on the door again.
“I’m coming!” I hollered, impatient now. I wrapped my bathrobe around me and began making my way down the stairs.
My living room was filled with people—Eden; Mindy; Robin; Dre, my head of security; and Scott, my manager, were all sitting around in a circle, maniacally working their cell phones, splayed out in front of the television. I padded across the carpet, tugged tighter on the belt of my bathrobe, and suddenly everything stopped. I looked at the television and realized that I was staring at myself, at clips from The Lost Boys, License to Drive, and Dream a Little Dream—all films we had worked on together—and then at more recent footage from The Two Coreys, the semi-scripted “reality” show we had shot for A&E. Every channel, every station, was reporting the exact same thing: Corey Haim had suffered a drug overdose.
That was it. I had gone to sleep, and when I woke up my best friend was dead.
“There’s no way this is an overdose,” I said to no one in particular. I didn’t care what the news was reporting. I knew that he hadn’t OD’ed.
When something goes down in Hollywood—when someone you’re associated with gets arrested, or punches a member of the paparazzi, or runs off and gets married, or dies many, many years too soon—you will get a barrage of phone calls. My publicist, Stacy, was dialing me every two minutes now, trying to field requests from CBS Morning News, Good Morning America, the Today show, CNN, ABC, E! News, and Anderson Cooper. Every entertainment journalist, every talk show and news magazine producer, was hunting for a statement or an interview or something they could post on the Web. Everyone was pushing me to come up with some kind of media-friendly sound bite. Instead, I sat glued to the television and watched as helicopters hovered over the Oakwood apartments, where Haim had lived for the previous year.
“I know you’re upset, Corey,” I heard someone tell me, “but other people are already coming forward.”
I looked up and there was Alyssa Milano, Corey’s one-time teenage girlfriend. They had dated on-and-off throughout the final years of the 1980s, before any of us were old enough for a legal drink. Instead, we spent the weekends socializing with Drew Barrymore, Alfonso Ribeiro, Soleil Moon Frye, and other underage actors, loitering in expensive suites at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel or stumbling out of Ralph Kaufman’s club, the private dance party for famous teens. Alyssa was one of the first to tweet her condolences, but then the names started to flash in quick succession across the screen: Dave Navarro, Melissa Gilbert, Ralph Macchio, Kevin Smith, Christina Applegate, Hoda Kotb, Khloe Kardashian, Lisa Ling. Everyone was buzzing about how much they already missed Haim, how sad they were to hear of his passing. Tamera Mowry called him her first crush. Ashton Kutcher said Haim was his childhood hero.
I felt like I was going to be sick.
I pulled out my laptop and tried to collect myself. If I could just write a two- or three-paragraph statement and post it on my Web site, I thought, then maybe these reporters could use excerpts and leave me to contend with my grief. But by nine o’clock, the press was starting to assemble. Local police had draped yellow tape at either end of the block, news trucks with their satellites cranked up were lining the street, and a group of reporters was milling around the base of my driveway. They were unruly and impatient, and some of them were starting to creep farther into my front yard. I was fiddling with the blog post, still trying to come up with something coherent and respectful to say, when Stacy burst through the front door and plopped down in the center of the room.
I picked my head up from my hands and glared at her, but before I could say anything, I heard a reporter announce that I was preparing to give an impromptu press conference outside my Sherman Oaks home.
“Who in the hell said I was giving a press conference?” I shouted, standing up suddenly and throwing my cell phone directly at the television.
Stacy scooted over to me, trying to calm me down. “Look, we need something. Is there any way you can just get it together for two minutes and go out there and talk?”
“I’m not giving a fucking press conference!” I screamed. “I’m going to write this statement and take a shower and then I want to see Judy.” I thought about Corey’s mother, bald from the chemo, weak, and possibly all alone.
Stacy leaned in closer. “You’ve got to do one, Corey. You’ve got to do one interview and that’ll be it, but you’ve got to give me one.”
“Fine,” I told her, disgusted. And then I chose Larry King.
The last time I had been a guest on Larry King Live was three years earlier—I had appeared, coincidentally, with Corey Haim to promote the upcoming premiere of The Two Coreys, our reality show on A&E.
Before I ever agreed to do the show, I had insisted that Corey get his act together. And for the most part, he was succeeding. He had lost a significant amount of weight—nearly a hundred pounds, down from a high of three hundred—and cut way back on the Valium, which he had been guzzling for years at a rate of forty-to-fifty a day. Midway through filming, though, he was suddenly backsliding: slurring his speech, or forgetting his lines, or delaying production for days on end. When we started the press tour that summer, I knew he was still reeling. I hadn’t realized, however, just what kind of shape he was really in.
If you go back and watch it now, the Larry King Live episode plays out like a tennis match. What you see is the camera bouncing back and forth between me and Larry and Corey; rarely are we all on-screen at the same time. What you don’t see is that Corey was nodding out while we sat there, literally fading in and out of consciousness in the middle of live television. The cameraman would cut away when he started to drift and suddenly you’d be watching clips from the films we had made together. Then he would cut back to Corey just as he opened his eyes.
At the commercial break, Larry leaned over and asked if Haim was going to be okay, but he never said anything like that when we were actually on air. I suppose that made me trust him; it’s why I chose his show on the day Corey died.
* * *
When we pulled up outside Corey’s apartment complex, I didn’t see many reporters. That was good—I didn’t want anyone harassing his mother. But as we walked across the parking lot, Dre pointed out a few photographers who had hidden themselves in the shrubs. I should have known. Corey’s apartment complex is a hot spot for members of the Hollywood press.
The Oakwoods are affordable, prefurnished corporate apartments and temporary housing complexes. There are outposts all over the world, but the Burbank location is famous; it’s situated just a few feet away from the front gates of Warner Brothers, across the street from Universal Studios, less than two miles away from Disney. Out-of-town actors who arrive to work in L.A. are often put up at the Oakwoods, and during casting for pilot season (January through early spring), the place fills up with legions of would-be stars. The first time I visited was back in the early ’80s, when Kerri Green and Martha Plimpton were residents, but the list of famous people who have stayed there goes on and on and on.
Sometimes you’ll hear the Oakwoods referred to as “cheap” or “cut-rate” housing—in reality, the apartments are quite comfortable and relatively spacious. Inside Corey’s place, though, I felt claustrophobic. There was Judy, sitting on the sofa, surrounded by five or six of her so-called friends. Some of them I knew as legitimate and longtime supporters of the family, but others I recognized as neighbors, people that Corey and Judy had chatted with occasionally but hadn’t known for much more than a year. Judy and I hugged for a long while, and cried, and she told me the details of Corey’s sudden collapse, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that we were being watched, that we were sitting in the middle of a room full of rubberneckers. When talk eventually turned to funeral arrangements, one of the neighbors slid right over.
“You know,” he said, leaning closer, “my girlfriend is an incredible singer, and Corey was really supportive of her talent. I think he really would have wanted her to sing a song at his funeral.”
I couldn’t believe this guy had the balls to pitch me for a spot in a funeral. It was grotesque, and so incredibly surreal. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, in walked Warren Boyd.
More than twenty years ago now, when I first decided to get sober, I enlisted the help of a man named Bob Timmins, a former addict-turned-addiction specialist, better known in Hollywood circles as “Dr. Detox.” Timmins had become an expert at matching addicts with sponsors or “sober companions,” often testified on behalf of his clients in courtrooms across L.A., and was constantly consulting on treatment plans for drug-addled (and usually famous) defendants. He had helped guys like Steven Tyler, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe, and Robert Downey, Jr. get themselves sober. If you were a celebrity with a spiraling drug problem, Bob Timmins was your man.
I always figured Warren Boyd had an eye on taking Timmins’s place, but to me he seemed more interested in giving interviews and socializing with celebrities than keeping anyone’s nose clean. Whenever Corey ran out of money, Boyd up and disappeared. The last I heard, he was buzzing around again when we began production on The Two Coreys, filling Haim’s head with grand plans about coproducing additional shows. (Boyd had his own short-lived show called The Cleaner, a fictionalized portrayal of his life as an “extreme interventionalist,” that aired on A&E.) That was more than two years ago. Now, with Corey dead and the press sniffing around, here was Warren Boyd again, right by Judy’s side.
“We’ll put together a memorial service,” he was saying, “and I’ll invite all my high-end clients. Whitney Houston, Mel Gibson, only the AA-list people. We’ll do it in a studio backlot, so no one will have any access to it.”
Why the hell would Whitney Houston come to Corey Haim’s memorial service? I thought. What the fuck is this guy talking about?
“Corey didn’t know any of those people,” I told him. “I don’t think that’s what he would have wanted.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said, pacing the length of the apartment. “Why don’t you give me a list of people that you think should be there, and I’ll have my list, and Judy will have her list, then we’ll put it all together. When all is said and done, I’ll try to take care of a few of your people.”
My people? I couldn’t believe this guy—I half-expected him to point two finger guns at me and suggest that we “do lunch.”
“Lemme get this straight. You want to have a private memorial for two hundred to three hundred guests and you’re going to fill a room full of famous people, none of whom actually knew him?”
“Or we could do a fund-raiser?” he continued blabbering.
I started gathering my things to leave. The guy was just on and on about this celebrity and that celebrity, the president of this studio and the president of that studio. I wasn’t sure if he really knew any of these people, but I had had enough—and I was due to tape Larry King.
* * *
Larry wasted no time asking me if I thought drugs were to blame for Corey’s death, and I wasted no time imploring people to stop rushing to judgment. “Until the coroner’s report comes out, until we know exactly what the toxicology report says, nobody knows,” I told him. I also talked about how—despite the recent outpouring of emotion—practically no one had been around for Corey when he was actually still alive. Five years earlier, he had no work visa, no work, no money, and almost no friends. His life was in the gutter, and nobody seemed
to give a shit about him then.
When the cameras stopped rolling, Larry leaned forward to ask me one final question: “Do you really think the toxicology report is going to come back clean?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“What gives you that feeling?”
“I knew him better than anyone. Believe me, I would know.”
“Would you be willing to come back on when the report comes out?” he asked. “Even if his death is classified as an overdose?”
I told him I would be happy to, and Larry called out to one of the producers to track the story, to be sure and rebook me when the official cause of death was revealed.
Corey Haim’s official autopsy report was released on May 5, 2010—he died of pneumonia, with complications due to an enlarged heart. There were traces of eight drugs in his system, some prescription pills and some over-the-counter cold medicines, but none of them contributed to his passing.
Later that day I was booked to reappear on Larry King Live, but two hours before I was scheduled to arrive for taping, one of the producers called to cancel. We were bumped for coverage of the foiled Times Square terrorist bombing. Corey didn’t stand a chance against Rudy Guiliani and John McCain.
* * *
People always ask me about life after childhood stardom. Do I have any advice for Lindsay Lohan? What would I say to parents of children in the industry? How can child stars avoid the pitfalls of fame?
My only advice, honestly, is to get these kids out of Hollywood and let them lead normal lives—which is exactly what I told the producers at ABC’s Nightline, when they asked me to participate in an upcoming episode about the perils of underage fame. I usually don’t give interviews unless I have a project to promote, but I had grown so tired of hearing how great it is to be famous. Plucking children out of school and exploiting them for profit isn’t healthy; neither is turning your five-year-old into the family breadwinner, or living out dreams of celebrity vicariously through your kids. Is it really all that surprising that so many child actors have problems later in life? Since Nightline is a reputable program, I thought maybe I could do some good by throwing in my two cents. “If you’re interested in hearing that perspective, then I’ll agree to do the interview,” I had told them. “But if you want to hear that Hollywood is a great place for children, you might want to talk to somebody else.”