Coreyography: A Memoir Read online

  The McDonald’s commercial has energized her, and she is full of ideas, plans, and strategies—besides just changing my hair color—to help me with my new career. For example, if I can learn a repertoire of folky songs, like “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and Jim Croce’s “Junk Food Junkie,” I will almost certainly book more jobs.

  “You’re going to sing a song and they’re going to go, isn’t he cute?” she tells me, before locking me in my room with Mindy’s record player and instructions not to come out until I have learned every word.

  Learning the words, however, is not the hard part—I have no trouble memorizing dialogue, even though I am only four. The problem is that I can’t carry a tune to save my life. My voice squeaks and strains. I can’t match the notes that I hear in the recordings.

  When I emerge from my room to perform for her approval, she sighs. “You’re not much of a singer, are you?” It’s clear that she enjoys making fun of me. It’s obvious that she finds pleasure in making me feel inadequate. She points her finger toward the narrow hallway and sends me back to practice more—however long it takes, she says—until I get it right.

  I can’t get it right, but I quickly learn how to stick my hands in the pockets of my Osh Kosh overalls at the end of an audition, don a sort of aw-shucks pose, and say, “Hey, do you mind if I sing a song for you?” Then I belt out some horrifically off-key, awkward version of “Put on a Happy Face” for a panel of casting directors. It works like gangbusters. I shoot ads for Apple Jacks, Colgate, Hawaiian Punch, Pan Am, Dole Pineapple, and Wyler’s Grape drink mix, one right after the other. By the age of ten, I will have filmed more than one hundred.

  * * *

  Mindy and I are generally responsible for making our own breakfasts—my mother, after all, isn’t a “morning person.” But the sugary cereals I love, the cookies and crackers and snacks, have started to disappear, hidden on a shelf high in the kitchen that I have to crawl on top of a counter to reach. One morning, my sister and I take our seats at the small round table and Mindy pours herself a bowl of Alpha Bits. I love Alpha Bits. I can spell all kinds of words in my spoon. I reach to pour myself a bowl when my mother, appearing out of nowhere, suddenly yanks the box from my hand.

  “You can’t eat that,” she says. “It’s fattening.”

  “Why does Mindy get to eat it?”

  She turns and glares at me. “Because Mindy isn’t fat.”

  Whenever we happen to walk past an overweight person while we’re out looking for strays, my mother physically recoils. “Fat pig,” she whispers under her breath. Her secret nickname for my father’s mother, admittedly a rather large woman, is Piggy Feldman. So I know that being fat is the worst thing you can possibly be. I do have round, chubby, cherubic cheeks, but I always thought that I would grow into them. Now she tells me that if I’m not careful, I’ll grow up to be a fat, disgusting pig, too. She lifts my shirt and pinches a fold of my skin between her fingers. “See?” she says. “That’s more than an inch.” (My mother is obsessed with the new “pinch more than an inch” Special K campaign; she’ll continue pinching me like this for years.)

  Soon there is a new rule: No eating—at all—until she wakes up. This is especially challenging, because sometimes she stays in bed until two or three in the afternoon. I distract myself with my toys, or put on my grandmother’s Rubbermaid dishwashing gloves and tie a blue hand towel around my neck, zooming around the living room like a superhero, flying off furniture, trying to ignore the low, gurgling sound of the rumble in my tummy. And then I decide, after a while, that no one will actually notice if I quietly make myself a snack.

  * * *

  “Corey, get in here.” She’s in her room again, the door barely cracked ajar.

  “Yes?” I retrace my steps down the hallway until I’m standing outside her door. She’s lying on her bed, half-dressed, watching a haze of gray static glowing from the television.

  “Did you eat the cookies in the cabinet?”

  I feel a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. “No,” I say, in a voice no bigger than a whisper.

  “No? Why are there crumbs in your bed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, perhaps you’d like to explain. Did the dog eat the cookies, Corey? Did Shadow climb up into the cupboard?”

  “Maybe…?” I venture, hoping she’ll let my thievery go.

  “Don’t lie to me, Corey. You’re lying. Did you eat the cookies?”

  “Well, maybe I ate one.”

  “Maybe you ate one?”

  “Or two.”

  “Which is it? One or two?”

  I swallow, hard. “I ate two.”

  She sits up a little at my admission. “Well, then, you’re grounded. Those cookies are not for you and you know it. So now I want you to come in here and stare at the wall for one hour. And you’re not going to have anything else to eat for the rest of the day.”

  I walk slowly into her room and take my place in the corner. I look at my feet, at the wall, at anything but her. She drones on and on until I suddenly realize that I am afraid of her, that I hate her. Still, I want nothing more than to crawl into her big bed and watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, or listen to her stories about bunnies and parties and what her life was like before me.

  “You have no right to disrespect me like this.” She’s in a rage now, huffing and puffing. “You ungrateful shit. How dare you look at me like that?”

  “I’m not looking at you,” I say.

  “Well then turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you! Do you have any idea how lucky you are? Do you realize that most women would die to look like this after two kids? Look at these tits,” she says, cupping her breasts in her hands. But I don’t want to look at her. I just want something to eat.

  I thought back to the Baskin-Robbins commercial I had filmed just a few weeks before, to the mountains of pumpkin ice cream that had stretched before me, to the way the assistant director had smiled when he handed me a spoon. Actors are generally encouraged not to swallow on shoots like these; ingesting bite after bite, shooting take after take, would be enough to make most people sick. But I had learned a clever trick. I would only pretend to spit out my food in a napkin. That’s how I went through one-and-a-half gallons, secretly savoring every bite.

  I knew my mother was getting worse, her behavior more erratic. I couldn’t, however, understand why. From my perspective, nothing much had changed, except that I was working more, booking more jobs, going on more auditions. And yet, she still knew how to turn on the charm, how to perform for people’s approval. She might have spent the entire morning in bed, calling me “fatso” and “piggy” and ordering me around the house, but then we’d drive to an audition and she would immediately switch gears. As soon as we stepped onto the parking lot pavement, she’d jerk my arm and say, “That’s enough now. Wipe off the tears.” Then we’d breeze through the door of the casting office and she’d be bright and buoyant, a giant smile plastered across her face. If someone inquired about my red eyes and blotchy cheeks, she’d simply shrug.

  “I don’t know what he’s so upset about,” she would say. “He’s such a good actor, this kid. He’s so dramatic. Always acting. That’s what he does best.”

  CHAPTER 2

  People have always noticed my voice.

  It’s low and raspy; even as a child I was often mistaken for someone much older than my actual age. By my mid-teens, once I had become well known within the industry, directors would know I was on set just by the sound of my gravelly voice echoing down the hallway. But years before that, on a spring day when I was still just five years old, my mother schlepped me to Disney headquarters in Burbank because my sister, the Mouseketeer, had to work. As I entertained myself in Mindy’s dressing room, playing imaginary games with my superheroes, a casting director happened to walk by. Expecting to find an elderly woman with a smoking problem, she was shocked when she turned the corner—it was just little old me.

  What I di
dn’t know at the time was that the studio had just finished a major casting call and had all but given up trying to find a child who could emulate the voice of a young hound dog for their next animated feature. After several weeks of debate and a series of callbacks, the decision was made. Walt Disney Productions had found their Copper.

  The Fox and the Hound would become the final “classic” of Disney’s early animation era, and it marked my transition to working on the big screen (though it would be another few years before I’d make it back). When I got the part, I was taken on a tour of the animation building and shown artwork for my character, a droopy-eyed, long-eared pup, and his unlikely friend. “I want to meet the kid who plays the fox!” I said. I recognized Keith Coogan from auditions (he was the grandson of screen legend Jackie Coogan and would later star in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead).

  “You won’t be meeting him,” the casting director told me. “Voice-over work is done separately.” Any visions I had had of Keith and I bringing our characters to life, side-by-side, were dashed, and I was reminded again of the strangeness of Hollywood. This time, I wouldn’t so much as meet my costar.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Mindy and I were playing together, huddled in front of the television in the den. I was sitting mere inches from the twelve-inch black-and-white set, turning the old-fashioned dial to change the channel, searching for one of the life-size puppet programs I loved so much, like Kukla, Fran and Ollie; H.R. Pufnstuf; or Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, when suddenly I noticed the faintest hint of a strange smell. Within seconds, a wall of smoke was charging at us, enveloping the house like a blanket.

  “We have to get out!” My mother, who had been out back feeding the horses, was practically throwing us out the door by our shirt collars. “Get out! GET OUT! The house is on fire!” We ran to the neighbor’s house, and from the safety of her yard watched as fire trucks barreled down the street and our home was engulfed in flames. We were lucky to have made it out in time.

  The official story, at least according to the fire department, was that a burning candle had somehow been knocked over, igniting a nearby curtain. But there were murmurings within the family, hushed voices whispering in dark corners, suggesting that my mother had burned down the house to collect the insurance money. We moved into an extended-stay motel for a few weeks before ultimately settling in with my grandparents.

  Woodland Hills, situated just a few miles south of our old home in Chatsworth, became like a refuge for me, a safe (if also temporary) haven from the volatility of my mother’s mood swings. Which is ironic, because my grandfather, Bedford Goldstein, might be the most terrifying man I have ever met. By the time my family and I moved in, he was in his sixties, balding—the few white hairs he had left somehow stood straight up when he was angry, which was very nearly all the time—and his right arm shook constantly, a side effect of advancing Parkinson’s. But when he spoke—in a booming roar, his stories dripping with profanity—you’d have thought he was a much younger man. Grandpa was a highly decorated WWII vet as well as a former boxer, so he often regaled me with sordid tales of either killing Nazi soldiers “with his bare hands,” or slugging some man half his age who made the unfortunate mistake of cutting him off in traffic. (As it happens, beating up strangers on the 405 was a frequent occurrence, and continued well into his eighties.) Stories of his abuse were legendary, and I often wondered if the day would come when he’d chase me around the house with a baseball bat, just as he’d done to my uncles Mervyn and Murray when they were kids. In fact, all of the men from my mother’s side of the family had hair-trigger tempers, an ample amount of barely contained rage rumbling just below the surface.

  Despite the fear of impending violence, I felt free—for the first time in my life—during those months at my grandparents’ house. I could spend the afternoons outdoors, riding my bike along the winding streets of the neighborhood or playing with other kids who were actually my age. I even had a real, properly enforced bedtime (though I sometimes slipped out of bed after everyone else was asleep to watch Star Trek and, later, Solid Gold, with the volume turned practically down to mute). On rainy days, my grandmother taught me to make macaroni and cheese or fried matzah or let me roll out the dough for sugar cookies, or sometimes she’d just busy herself in the kitchen while I pulled out all of her pots and pans and converted them into a mini drum set. The most incredible part was that she didn’t even mind.

  There was also Michael, my only friend, Uncle Merv’s youngest son. We both loved screwball sketch comedy, and we spent hours imitating the greats from Saturday Night Live, such as Steve Martin and Gilda Radner, using a little cassette recorder to document our impressions, then playing them back, over and over, so we could improve on our “act.” I had never had a best friend before—in Chatsworth, I’d hardly been allowed out of the house, to say nothing of actually inviting anyone over—and I’d never been on a sleepover. So when the time came for that, too, I was practically manic with excitement, picturing Michael and I chattering late into the night, snuggled under piles of blankets on the matching twin beds in his room.

  Bedtime, however, was awkward. Around nine, Uncle Merv and his wife, Mary, came into the bedroom. They kissed Michael’s forehead, they pulled the blankets tight up to his chin, and then told him, in affectionate whispers, that they loved him. I had only ever seen that on television. That’s when I realized that what Michael had was normal, and that what I had at home was not. I ached for Merv to come over and say those things to me, to gently rub my back until I drifted off to sleep. I loved staying over at Michael’s house, but on those nights, when the lights were finally out, I often turned my back to him and quietly cried myself to sleep.

  * * *

  By the late 1970s, I had more or less graduated from shooting commercials to becoming a day player in a string of successful sitcoms. With the money, we moved to a home on Singing Hills Drive, near the golf course at Porter Valley Country Club in Northridge, a thriving community in the northwest corner of the Valley. Since we no longer had the acreage to keep horses, or to house the city’s overpopulation of stray dogs and cats, my mother began collecting smaller, more “friendly” family pets, namely birds and hamsters. She went through a string of parakeets, one right after the other, because our cat Meow kept eating them.

  Shadow, our family’s black lab, was bad enough. He was a rescue, taken in by my mother after a lifetime of abuse and neglect and, apparently, ample training as a guard dog. He once took a bite out of a burglar who was prowling around our house and was rewarded with a medal of valor from the local police department. But he was also vicious and destructive. He tore up carpets, shoes, Persian rugs and, evidently, people. It wasn’t until years later that I learned Shadow had already attacked seven different strangers before lunging at my friend Eric, and that my parents had somehow managed to escape the city’s orders to have him put to sleep.

  We did have a routine in those days: before bringing anyone into the house, you were supposed to locate Shadow, drag him to the pantry, and lock him in. But that afternoon, walking home from the bus stop with Eric, I was so excited at the prospect of actually having a friend come over that I rushed inside and left the front door wide open. Shadow had Eric in his jaws before he had even crossed the threshold. Eric, wide-eyed in fear, stood stock still for a moment before bolting down the street. (My father, who certainly would have heard the screaming, came flying down the stairs, took one look at the carnage, and smacked me so hard across the head that blood came shooting out of my nose, staining the front of my shirt.)

  Shadow was bad. But walking through the front door to find a dusting of yellow, bloodied bird feathers scattered all over the floor was truly terrifying.

  For the first time in a long time—perhaps ever—my family was in a comfortable financial situation. As for me, I was growing to really love my work. Not only did it give me an excuse to get out of the house, an especially good thing, now that I was back in the care of my mo
ther, but I was suddenly working alongside the actors I had grown up watching late into the night in the darkness of my mother’s room. In quick succession, I was booked on Eight Is Enough, Angie, and Alice—I had gone from crying myself to sleep at night to sitting in Mel’s Diner with Mel, Alice, and Flo. I adored Dick Van Patten, and was mesmerized by Charo, better known to me at the time as the “coochie coochie” girl. I even got to play the son of the great comedy duo Stiller and Meara on an episode of The Love Boat. But with my father in and out of the house, and my mother descending deeper into madness, there remained the issue of who would ferry me to and from set, who would act as my guardian during my eight- to twelve-hour long days. With increasing frequency, that responsibility fell to one of my grandparents. This also meant, mercifully, that I was still spending a lot of time at their house, even if I was technically no longer living there.

  It was during the days at my grandparents’ that I remember discovering music for the first time, on my own, when it wasn’t being shoved down my throat, when I wasn’t being made to memorize every schmaltzy lyric to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Boobie had an antique upright piano, which had once belonged to her mother, and which I now own and treasure. Sometimes, when my great aunt was visiting from Ohio, they would teach me how to play “Chopsticks,” or show me the basics of playing scales. I had already discovered my grandmother’s Bill Haley and the Comets album—the fact that she actually owned a record by the guys who sang the theme song to Happy Days was a revelation. Not long after that, I found Shaun Cassidy.

  There was something about that album cover, the way his hair sparkled in the light, the way his eyes twinkled. I stared at that album cover for hours until, one day, I turned it over. On the back was a picture of Shaun at age two or three, standing in front of what I figured must have been his grandmother’s piano. I was so impressed by that, the idea that music had been in his life practically since birth. I decided that I wanted to be like that, too. I wanted to have a music career, and to be able to look back and say, remember when I was standing in front of Boobie’s piano, learning how to play “Chopsticks”? I decided that, next time my dad was home, I would tell him about my newfound idol.