Coreyography: A Memoir Read online

  The divorce threw our family finances into sharp relief. I had been working steadily for more than five years, but my parents had no idea how to manage their money. After befriending a real estate agent, they snapped up properties with abandon, then ended up taking out a second and, later, a third mortgage on our home in Tarzana before eventually losing the house to the bank. My mother, my sister, my new little brothers, and I piled into her car and moved to a one-story rental in Canoga Park. There was nothing left to show for my success; just like that, we were back to being broke.

  * * *

  “You need an operation.”

  My mother was coming at me with scissors and a syringe, which she had no doubt pilfered from Actors and Others for Animals, the nonprofit where she occasionally volunteered. She had recruited Mindy to help hold me down and suddenly I was on my back on the floor. My wrists were pinned and my mother was straddling me, one knee on either side of my stomach. “Your nose just keeps growing,” she said, doing her best impression of a surgeon, cupping my chin in her hand and angling my face from side to side. “Yep, you definitely need a nose job.” She started lowering the syringe down closer to my face. Mindy howled with laughter—she still thought it was a game.

  I squirmed and bucked, desperately trying to wriggle out from underneath my mom. My legs were flailing, I was trying to backpedal my way across the carpet, but it was no use. When the tears started, Mindy let go of my arms.

  “Mom, it’s not funny now. Come on, stop it,” she said. But my mother didn’t stop. Mindy clearly didn’t know what to do, so she got up and walked out of the room, leaving us all alone.

  “You need an injection to sedate you for the operation.” She took the scissors and pressed them against my throat, poking but not quite piercing the skin. I screamed for her to stop, squeezed my eyes shut and craned my neck as far away from her as I could. My chest heaved with deep, guttural sobs. Finally, she got up and went to her bedroom, cackling the whole way down the hall.

  My mother was unraveling. She was either glassy-eyed and listless and starting to slur her words, or she was manic, barreling through the house like a freight train, trying on hot pants and see-through tops and chattering on about how she was going to find us a new father, one who actually “gave a shit” about the family. One evening, when I poked my head into her bathroom and asked what time she might be home, she ripped the toilet seat from the hinges and threatened to bash my face in. Her newest trick, which was especially terrifying, was to sneak-attack my sister and I in the middle of the night, seizing on a shirt left on the floor of my bedroom or a pair of pants casually tossed on a chair. “What the fuck is this?” she would yell, waking me up from a dead sleep, holding up the offending pair of pants in her hand. Before I even had a chance to respond, she would yank clothes from the hangers, pull them from the drawers, and toss them around the room. It looked like the aftermath of a category 5 tornado.

  “Clean your fucking room, you slob,” she told me. It was four in the morning. I had to be up for school in three hours. I learned that the only time I was really safe was when she was asleep.

  * * *

  Though I can’t pinpoint the reasons why, my mother suddenly announces that she wants to live more “independently.” Instead of relying on my aging grandparents, she hires my first set-sitter, someone to drive me to and from jobs and, essentially, to babysit me while I’m at work. Her name is Sheri. She’s a sweet woman with bright red hair, but her sneezes—and there are a lot of them—smell terrible. This is my first sneeze-odor experience. I’m not sure what to make of it.

  I get hired to film an episode of Mork & Mindy. I’m one of several children—the show is in decline and the writers are trying all kinds of new subplots to boost the ratings, so Mork is now running a daycare—and I only have three or four lines, but Robin Williams and I get along famously, even though he insists on calling me Damien, because he thinks I look like the kid from The Omen. Every time he sees me, he starts whistling the movie’s haunting theme song, and shouting, “Daaaamien … DAMIEN!” The producers like me, too, so I’m quickly written in to another episode, and there’s talk of bringing me back later on in the season, perhaps as a regular guest star.

  By the second episode, though, things at home are starting to take their toll. I am desperate for some kind of positive attention, but I have no idea how to get it. So, I whine. I complain. I act out. I ask repeatedly when we’re going to wrap, when I might have a break, when is it going to be lunchtime. The word obnoxious is thrown around a lot, and my chance to become a series regular is quickly scrapped.

  I get rebooked on another episode of The Love Boat, but things aren’t any better over there. I am inconsistent and bratty. I am nominated for a Young Artist’s Award for Best Young Actor, Guest on a Series, but there are a lot of calls to the agent. Then comes strike number three.

  All the Way Home, a Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Tad Mosel, was nominated for a Tony award when it debuted on Broadway in 1960. Now it’s going to be adapted for television, but the producers want to broadcast it live on NBC. It’s an ambitious project with an impressive cast. Sally Field, fresh off an Oscar win for Norma Rae, will star in the role of Mary Follett, a newly widowed woman in 1915-era Tennessee. William Hurt will play her dead husband. I assume that I will be cast as their son, Rufus, but the role goes instead to a boy named Jeremy Licht. He seems like a nice enough kid; I’ve palled around with him at auditions, but he doesn’t have much of a résumé. (Eventually, he will play one of the Hogan boys on the 1980s sitcom Valerie alongside Jason Bateman.) I am cast in some tertiary supporting role, way, way down in the billing. I have one, maybe two, whole lines.

  Rehearsals for the play, which are scheduled to last for a couple of months, start out well, though I have such a small part that the majority of my time at work is spent at “school” (which, for this production, is a room in the basement), banking hours. Some days I don’t even get called to the set at all. Jeremy, however, quickly proves to be a bit of a prankster. He starts out innocently enough, flicking my ear or tugging on my hair or tripping me on the way to lunch, but he is a master at making me out to be the troublemaker. As soon as I react, he raises his voice just loud enough for the nearest adult to hear. “Hey, why are you fighting with me?” he says. “I’m here to work. I’m trying to do my job.” You have to hand it to him, actually. He really is one hell of an actor. And I am an easy target.

  I sink deeper and deeper into despair. My parents are divorced, I have virtually no relationship with my father, my first real television show has been cancelled, and now here I am doing this tiny part in this stupid play and taking crap from Jeremy Licht. The more he teases me, the angrier and angrier I get. And then finally I decide I can’t take it anymore. Instead of being a punching bag, I hit him back.

  For the first time in my life, I get fired.

  * * *

  “Please, please, please don’t tell my mom.” Sheri is driving me home and I am begging her—pleading with her—not to break the news to my mother. The closer we get to the house, the more desperate my begging becomes.

  “I have to tell her, Corey,” she says. “There’s really no way around it.”

  “But she’s going to kill me.”

  “She’s not going to kill you. You’re overreacting. Your mother seems like a lovely woman. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Everything will certainly not be fine, I know, and I’m convinced that Sheri must be some kind of a moron. I glare at her. How does nobody else see it? That my mother has gone completely and utterly insane? I make one final plea as she steers the car into the mouth of the driveway, then follow her slowly to the front porch, my chin tucked tightly to my chest, cowering behind her as she rings the doorbell.

  The next few moments play out in slow motion. My mother comes to the door, looking slightly dazed, and Sheri begins explaining the situation. I can hear their voices, but they sound distant and far away, like the “wa wa wawa wa” of the
adults in the Peanuts cartoons, like I have water in my ears. When I hear Sheri use the word dismissed, though, everything comes back into focus, the truth of the thing rushing at me all at once. My mother snaps her neck and glares at me.

  “You got fired?”

  We stare at each other for a few awkward moments.

  “Go inside and wait for me,” she says. She closes the door behind her, and they talk for a while on the porch. When I hear Sheri’s engine rumble to life in the driveway, I freeze. It’s going to be bad. I know it.

  “Corey!” My mother slams the door behind her. It rattles in the frame. “Get your ass in that room. Right now.”

  It’s my brother’s room. His crib is in the corner. I don’t know where Devin is. I think my mother and I are the only two people in the house. “Take off your clothes,” she hisses. I do as I’m told while she bolts to the other end of the room and starts pulling at the window. It dawns on me what she’s reaching for—the long wooden dowel resting in the sash, acting as a window stop. It’s at least an inch in diameter, solid oak, heavy. For a fleeting moment, I feel like laughing. Surely this must be another of her games. Surely, she must be joking.

  The first blow stings, but it’s more of a shock than anything else. It’s when she raises the dowel high over her head, again, that the pain starts to register, searing the top of my back and my shoulders, and I start running in circles around the room.

  “How could you fucking do this to me?” she screams. She is out of control, wild-eyed, like an animal. Her face is bright red and blotchy, her cheeks are streaked with mascara. “You know I need this fucking money. I will kill you. I will fucking kill you, you worthless piece of shit.”

  I drop down on all fours and scurry underneath Devin’s crib, wedging myself as far back as I can, my spine stretched out flush against the wall. I can see her feet, the chipped toenail polish, and then the sawed-off end of the stick as it comes charging toward me. She’s bent at the waist, ramming the pole under the cotton eyelet dust ruffle, jabbing at my ribs, my arms, my face. My skin is raw and bleeding. I think that, maybe, she is serious. She really does want to kill me. Then everything goes black. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what happened after that.

  * * *

  The next morning I fed and changed Eden and Devin, crept out into the living room, and turned on the television. I was scrolling through the channels, looking for something to watch, when—all of a sudden—I couldn’t breathe. The wind had been knocked out of me with a swift swat to my back, the remote ripped from my fingers, flung across the room to the couch.

  “You think you’re going to watch TV? You’re not watching TV, pal. You’re fucking grounded.”

  It was Tom, my mom’s new boyfriend.

  Ironically, things with Tom had started out pretty well. I liked him better than Max, the first in a steady stream of men who filed in and out of our house in the months following the divorce, the guy who drove a Harley and wore a leather motorcycle jacket and more or less left me alone. Tom, unlike those other men, had actually taken an interest in me. He would rattle up to the house in his rusted out pickup and take me for long hikes in Chatsworth Park. I loved climbing the switchbacks, scrambling to the top of a boulder outcrop and looking south over the sprawling suburbs of L.A. But then Tom started inviting some of his buddies along on our regular hikes, and someone would inevitably show up with a six-pack. Tom, it turned out, was very different when he drank. By the time I realized that, he had more or less moved in.

  At first, the worst part about having Tom around was that he would emerge from my mother’s room and stumble down the hallway to the bathroom, stark naked. I had never seen a grown man naked before. It made me feel strange and uncomfortable. But then one night he came home drunk, reeking of booze. He punched his hand clear through the front door, leaving sharp shards of wood and glass, as well as smears and drips of blood, in the foyer. This was after he ripped the screens from the windows and left them in twisted heaps and piles around the lawn, and screamed—demanded—to be let in. Finally, Mindy called the police. My mother swore that we’d never have to see Tom again, but a month later he was back.

  “You’re spoiled and you’re lazy and now you got yourself fired. The least you can do is clean your mother’s fucking house,” Tom is saying to me now, towering over me, a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’m going to teach you what real work is. You’re going to learn some fucking responsibility. Get the broom.”

  My mother has stumbled out of the bedroom. She’s half-dressed and her makeup is smeared across her face. She slumps down in the couch cushions. I look at her, but she shrugs.

  “Didn’t anybody teach you how to fucking sweep?” he asks after I’ve pulled the broom from the pantry and started dragging it across the floor, pushing mounds of dog hair into tidy little piles.

  “We always had a maid,” I say.

  “Well, no more maids when you lose your job. That’s what happens when you’re broke.”

  * * *

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  My mother delivers this line in a sing-song cadence, like she’s just suggested we go on a picnic, or make balloon animals, or fly a kite in Chatsworth Park. I haven’t seen her fully lucid in weeks. “On Saturday,” she says, with a wink.

  All week long she taunts me, ticking down the days until my eventual demise. Years ago—no, weeks ago—I would have thought she was kidding, that this is just her macabre sense of humor talking, but after the beating under the crib, I can’t be so sure. I need help. Real help. And then it occurs to me where I might get it.

  On Saturday morning, I make my escape. After scribbling a quick good-bye note and packing a small bag of clothes, I sneak out the back of our house, scale the privacy fence, tear through the neighbor’s yard and down the hill, and for another mile or two, all the way to the local police station. I push open the giant glass doors and walk right up to the first man I see in uniform. I try to explain to him that my mother is torturing me, that I’m lonely and abused and afraid for my life. That I think, next time, she really will kill me, but the words are coming out in a jumbled heap.

  “Please don’t make me go back there,” I finish, out of breath. “I’ll go anywhere but back there with her.”

  He peers down at me from behind a clipboard. He seems annoyed. He sighs. “Is your father around?”

  I think about how to answer that, how to explain that my father isn’t much of a father, that he left home because at least he knows that my mother is crazy, but he didn’t take me with him. But I soon realize none of that matters anyway, because I can’t remember his new phone number. When the officer dials the number I’ve given him, instead of my father answering, it’s my agent on the other end of the line.

  CHAPTER 4

  By early 1982, I’ve gotten my career back on track. I’m in the pilot for Gloria, a spin-off of All in the Family starring Sally Struthers. I work with Gary Coleman on a made-for-television movie called The Kid with the Broken Halo. I snag the role of Corey “Kip” Cleaver in Still the Beaver, a two-hour “reunion” movie on CBS. And then I get a call from my agent about an upcoming film. It’s big, she tells me. Very hush-hush. They want me to come in and read for a part.

  “Great,” I tell her. “What’s the movie?”

  “It’s called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Steven Spielberg is directing.”

  * * *

  Nine years earlier, in the summer of 1973, a virtually unknown director was hired to make a film abut a maniacal great white shark terrorizing a tiny New England town. Despite a ballooning budget, massive production days, and a finicky animatronic title character, he created an Academy Award–winning masterpiece, spawning “Jawsmania,” inventing the “summer blockbuster,” and grossing nearly half a billion dollars in the process. The twenty-nine-year-old then rebuffed offers to direct Jaws 2, as well as a smattering of superhero movies, opting instead to write and direct a strange little film about UFOs. Close Encounters of the Thi
rd Kind earned nine Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director. By the time I show up at the MGM lot in Culver City, Raiders of the Lost Ark has just hit theaters. Steven Spielberg has been anointed. He is the Next Big Thing.

  I’m reading for the part of Elliott’s best friend. It’s a pivotal role and I’m nervous. But Steven, who at thirty-six looks to me like a young Chevy Chase, is nothing like what I expected. He is free-spirited and funny; we hit it off right away. These days it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about how nice Steven Spielberg is, but it’s true—he really is one of the kindest men in the business.

  “That was great. Really great,” he tells me when I’ve finished with my audition. “You’ve got the part.” Then he drapes his arm across my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. “Why don’t I show you how things work around here?”

  Steven is busy producing (and according to murmurings within the industry, unofficially directing) a new horror film, so he takes me on a tour of the various soundstages until we reach a giant set, which will be at the center of a terrifying scene: the actress JoBeth Williams and her on-screen children will appear to be flying through the air, grabbing onto headboards and doorjambs to avoid being sucked out a window in their California home by a strange demonic force called The Beast. Steven shows me how the actors will dangle from harnesses, how their hair and clothes will be blown back by the strength of several industrial fans, while the interior of the room—a huge motorized set piece—will rotate completely upside down. Effects-wise, this is groundbreaking stuff. The film, he tells me, is called Poltergeist.