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
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.
“Okay, what are we going to do?” she asked. “We’ve got to make an announcement.”
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.