Coreyography: A Memoir (5 page)

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.

My father always had dreams of becoming a rock star. A couple of times, he came pretty close. He played bass for Strawberry Alarm Clock, the psychedelic rock band that topped the charts with their hit single “Incense and Peppermints.” That was years before my father joined, however, after the band had already broken up twice and re-formed a third time with a smattering of new members. Sometime later he formed Scream with a few of his buddies, and they somehow managed to accumulate a loyal following of several hundred women who would travel from amusement park to amusement park, mad for my father in his vintage plaid shirt, which he wore unbuttoned practically down to his navel, exposing a forest of curly black chest hair.

When he wasn’t busy performing, he sometimes took me with him to one of several rehearsal rooms he frequented; very often, these turned out to be someone’s dank and dirty garage, lit up with black lights and lava lamps and reeking of dope. Sometimes the drummer might pull me onto his lap during a song and I would feel the pulse of the bass drum reverberate through my body, the nearness of the cymbal crash both exciting and terrifying. If I was lucky, one or two of my dad’s bandmates would bring along their kids and we’d play on the floor of the rehearsal room, the feedback from old ’67 Fender amps ringing in our ears.

Finally, after what felt like a year of waiting, I woke up one morning and realized that my father was home—I had smelled the familiar musty, skunky smell of smoke wafting beneath the door of my parents’ bedroom. When I peered around the edge of the door frame, there he was, lounging in his bell-bottom jeans and the thick black dress socks he always wore stretched halfway up his shins, watching football. I hadn’t had so much as a game of catch with my dad, and I wasn’t an innately athletic child; I much preferred the sketch comedy and variety shows that Mindy and I watched with my mom. I hovered near the door to the bedroom until, eventually, I summoned the courage to tell him my news. He seemed impressed.

“You like Shaun Cassidy, huh? You want to see him in concert?”

“That would be fun!” I told him.

“Well then I’ll find out when he’s coming to town and I’ll take you.”

For weeks, I fantasized about what it might be like to attend my first real concert, what it might be like to see Shaun Cassidy, the teen dream, in person, close enough to reach out and touch. Of course, my dad never got the tickets. He left again, and I didn’t see him for nearly a month.

*   *   *

During the two
or three years I spent guest-starring on popular ’70s sitcoms, Paramount Pictures, a sprawling sixty-five-acre complex on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, became like a home away from home. I knew that the huge blue wall painted to look like the sky, which had been sitting idly in the middle of a parking lot for weeks, was actually the backdrop for
Gilligan’s Island
. During breaks in filming, on the rare occasion that I didn’t have to hightail it back to the school trailer, I loved wandering through the backlots meant to sub for the gritty streets of New York City, and I learned to recognize stars like Tony Danza and Robin Williams when they walked by (though in Robin’s case, he was usually pedaling past on a bike). I spent so much time on the lot, in fact, that I developed a natural, easy rapport with the head of television casting, a sweet little old man whom I will call Bill Kaufman. I knew that if Bill was casting a show, I had a good shot at getting a part. So when he announced that he was casting a new series called
The Bad News Bears
, based on the movie starring Walter Matthau as the little league coach to a team of preteen misfits, I figured I had a chance, even if most of the actors were between the ages of ten and fifteen, while I was still only seven. Bill held cattle call–style auditions across the country, but I won the role of Regi Tower, a one-in-a-million gig.

None of the Bears were supposed to be particularly gifted ball players, but Regi was especially awful. He was angry and uncoordinated and constantly getting pummeled in the head by the ball. This, of course, was fitting. I had no innate athletic talent, and essentially no athletic experience. I’d certainly never been on a real Little League team before; I had always been too busy working. But the more the producers realized that I actually
was
inept, the more they played up the fact that I couldn’t catch. Whereas the first few weeks of filming had been filled with adventures—water balloon fights, carnival rides, and go-karting—it suddenly started to feel as though the bulk of my time on set was being spent watching some young production assistant drag a bag of baseballs to a spot just off-camera, where he’d prepare to launch them at me, one by one. The entire
Bears
cast, including Jack Warden in the role of Coach Morris Buttermaker, had already become like a surrogate family to me, and though I had never been to summer camp, running around the Paramount lot with nine or ten other kids my age, I imagined this must be what it was like. But getting whacked in the head with a baseball, it turned out, was not near as much fun as launching water balloons at my costars, or learning to drive a go-kart. (Though it is perhaps misleading to say that I actually learned how to
drive,
because I burned out more than a few go-kart engines by slamming on the brakes and the gas at the same time. It’s not like I had an idea what I was doing. I was seven. But it really pissed off the producers. Whether that added to the frequency with which Regi got smacked with an errant baseball, I can’t be sure.)

The Bad News Bears
was heavily promoted by CBS, and as the weeks wore on, my entire family grew more and more excited for the debut of my first “real” television show. I loved seeing myself in the commercials, and knowing that I would be on air every single week gave me something to look forward to on Saturday nights. But when the big day finally came and everyone gathered in my grandparents’ den to watch the premiere, I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. In the original pilot, I only had one or two lines. “I’m not in it much,” I began warning everyone around me. “You’ll probably blink and miss me. It’s probably the smallest thing I’ve done on television.” I was terrified that my family would be disappointed when they realized how unimportant my role really was.

As we settled in to watch the show, however, it became clear that the editors had recut the pilot, using additional scenes from episodes we shot after the program had been picked up by the network.

“What are you talking about?” my grandpa barked, slapping my back for emphasis. “This is your show, kid!’

It was official—I had usurped Mindy’s role as the star of the family. By the tender age of ten, her career was already on the decline.

*   *   *

Being a naturally
clumsy, awkward kid apparently made for good television, but my dad—no doubt inspired by the size of my new paycheck—soon decided that he needed to teach me the finer points of baseball “for the job.” I couldn’t tell you why he was suddenly spending more time at home but, at first, I reveled in the attention. Other than the times he carted me with him to band rehearsal, we had never spent much one-on-one time together, just as father and son. Obviously, the Shaun Cassidy concert had been a bust. When it became clear that teaching me how to play baseball had quickly become the driving force in his life, however, I started to rethink things. Every evening, after a long day on set, I’d watch the minutes on the clock tick by until seven, when he would show up with a glove, a bat, and a ball and beckon me to the backyard. I reluctantly trudged behind him, dragging my feet the whole way.

“You have to focus on it, Corey. Keep your eye on the ball,” he said, his eyes narrowed and his forehead crinkled in concentration. Then he hurled the ball across the yard.

I was terrible. It didn’t matter where he aimed or how fast he threw it, the ball sailed over my head, or smacked me in the chest, or—on the rare occasions I actually managed a catch—stung my tiny hand. Once my father was sufficiently disgusted with me, I’d retreat to my room and the pursuits I was actually good at, such as the
Star Wars
spoof I was writing, based on an article I’d found in
Mad
magazine.

It was around this time that my father suddenly volunteered to become my primary on-set guardian. It was an unexpected development, and I had assumed it was because he wanted to keep a close eye on my progress as a burgeoning baseball star. I soon figured out the real reason: he had an excuse to spend the entire day away from my mother, whooping it up with the other
Bears
dads in the Paramount Studios parking lot. Within weeks he had become such good friends with the other parents that he announced we were taking a trip to Knott’s Scary Farm, a seasonal Halloween event where all of Knott’s Berry Farm is turned into a series of haunted houses filled with monsters and mazes. We piled into the back of someone’s rusted-out Chevelle wagon. In the middle of I-5, somewhere south of Bell Gardens, somebody sparked a joint.

I turned to Kristoff St. John, my closest friend in the cast. (He would later star as Neil Winters on
The Young and the Restless
, a role he has played for more than twenty years.) “What’s that smell?” I asked him.

“It’s weed,” he said casually.

“What’s weed?”

“It’s stuff parents do,” Meeno chimed in. Meeno Peluce was Soleil Moon Frye’s half brother. Their mother looked—and sounded—exactly like Janice, the hippie guitarist on
The Muppet Show.

I recognized the smell, of course. It was the same smell that wafted from my mother’s bedroom whenever my father was home, the same smell that sometimes greeted me when I climbed into his car after I’d wrapped on the set of the
Bears
. I knew instinctively that “weed” probably wasn’t something he should be enjoying with me in the car, but I was still only seven. I didn’t know anything about drugs, and my parents weren’t exactly the type to sit me down and talk about the dangers of them.

*   *   *

With our family
finances on the rise, we moved to a beautiful new home at the top of a colossal hill in Tarzana, complete with huge Corinthian columns, a sweeping marble entryway, and a swirling spiral staircase. My dad traded in his old beater for a Mercedes, and my mother bought herself a Cadillac. We also hired a full-time maid.

Technically, I was not allowed to ride my bike anywhere around my new neighborhood. The hills, my mother explained to me, were far too steep and a scrape or a scratch might jeopardize my job. “You have responsibilities now,” she told me, shoving my bike into the far corner of our two-car garage.

But one particular morning, when my mother was still asleep, I decided to take it out anyway. Clear blue, cloudless skies stretched for miles. I let go of the handlebars and leaned my head back, closing my eyes, feeling the sunlight warm on my face until, suddenly, I was going too fast. I felt my foot slip from the pedal, the front tire shake from left to right, and then I went careening over the handlebars, tumbling end over end down the street. When I recovered, the skin was gone from my elbow, I had scrapes all over my hands and face, and there was a pool of blood on the sidewalk.

“Goddamnit, Corey,” my mother said when she saw me, crying, covered in blood and gravel and snot. “You’re going to fuck everything up. I swear to God, if that director sends you home tomorrow, I’ll make you
wish
you were still tumbling down that hill—that’ll feel like nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you.”

The next day I slid from my father’s car and scampered over to the makeup lady’s chair, set up just to the left of third base underneath an enormous yellow umbrella.

“Please fix it,” I told her, trembling. “My parents are going to kill me if I can’t work.”

*   *   *

California law dictates
that child actors can work a maximum of eight hours a day, three of which must be devoted solely to education. For the bulk of the last two years, I’d been given a lesson plan from the public school where I was still technically enrolled and studied on set with a private tutor. Lessons are conducted in a designated “school trailer” or, if there aren’t any other kid actors on set, in the privacy (and cramped quarters) of my dressing room. The mandated three hours, however, almost never comes in one uninterrupted block of time; it’s broken up into chunks, no fewer than twenty minutes, squeezed into natural gaps in the shooting schedule, in between camera setups or while other actors are at work on a scene.

Occasionally, a really well-organized producer will arrange for my day to be “shot out early,” meaning that all of my scenes will be shot one right after the other so I can be dismissed from set with a full three hours (or more) still left in the day. More often, though, we would wrap a scene and the assistant director would call out, “Okay, Corey goes to school.” Then I’d stroll over to my dressing room, transitioning from a foul-mouthed little leaguer to an ordinary second-grader, cramming for a quiz on consonants and vowels or learning the fundamentals of fractions.

Working with child actors is, frankly, a giant pain in the ass. They bring with them a cadre of on-set guardians and labor workers, private tutors and chaperones (all of which are expensive), but if a production is running behind schedule, “school time” is the first thing that gets cut. Producers get around the legal implications of that through a system called “banking.” On a day when you’re not much needed, you might go to school for, say, five hours rather than the mandated three. Those two extra hours can then be rolled over, applied to a day when there isn’t time for school at all. This jiggering of schedules makes learning difficult, to say the least.