The Lost Boys is, of course, a movie about hunting vampires. In the final stages of the film, most of the actors are covered in thick, gooey slime—Hollywood’s answer to vampire blood. There were enormous vats of this stuff in the special effects department, and to it were added little chunks of Styrofoam to simulate guts; we’d get hosed down with this concoction, from what looked like a fertilizer sprayer one would attach to a garden hose.
There is a particular sequence of the film in which Haim, Jamison, and I are crawling through tunnels with the vampire gang of Santa Carla in hot pursuit. The tunnels themselves—merely crawlspaces, barely wide enough for us to pass through—were positioned high in the air, above the practical sets inside one of the soundstages; atop the tunnels was a complicated system of trusses, from which members of the lighting department could perch or, in this particular case, pelt us with “debris.” As we crawled through, with Joel yelling, “Faster! Faster! This is no joke! These vampires are going to kill you,” grips threw handfuls of dirt and bits of Styrofoam to simulate the crumbling nature of the caves. By the time we were finished, I was wet and cold and covered in slime, sweaty and weighed down by several layers of dirt-covered costume, my fingernails caked in grit and grime.
Movies, however, are rarely shot sequentially. One minute you might be filming such a scene, and the next you might be needed on another set, to redo a shot from the beginning of the film, pre-gore and guts, when you’re supposed to be completely, angelically clean. Dick Donner had allowed us the use of the private shower in his office, so I would run across the lot to his bathroom, where I’d have to untie my laces, get out of my sopping vest, my harness, my flak jacket, my T-shirt, pants, and underpants, shower, then put the whole thing on again, strap up, lace up, boot up. Then I’d run over to makeup, where the ladies would wipe me down and make me back up again. And the entire time, Joel would be screaming for you, wondering why you still weren’t on set. “I already fired you once,” he would holler, “don’t make me fire you again! What the fuck is taking so long? Stop being such a prima donna!” Meanwhile, I’d be finding unwashed bits of slime encrusted to my scalp, pulling my hair out in chunks.
In one of the best-known (and oft-quoted) scenes in the film, Brooke McCarter, playing the role of the vampire Paul, descends on the home of Sam (Haim) and Michael (Jason Patric).
“Garlic don’t work boys,” he says when he sees that we’ve filled a bathtub with about a thousand bulbs.
“Try holy water, death breath!” I shout, before splashing him in the face with my hands.
Brooke had on the makeup, the hair, and the contact lenses, he was snarling and chasing us, but no matter what he did, Joel was just not having it. He thought Brooke was expecting all the makeup to do his work for him.
“Get pissed! You need to get pissed! You want to kill these kids! You’re a fucking vampire, for Christ’s sake!”
We shot multiple takes, Joel got more and more angry, until finally he was full-on screaming at the top of his lungs. It put the fear of God in us.
If Joel was acting that way with the grown-ups on set, there was no telling what he might do to one of us kids. Things got much more serious after that.
* * *
Haim and I were back at the apartment. We had wrapped for the day, but my dad was still at the office. Corey pulled down our stash of triple-X magazines from their hiding place high in the cupboard, and before long he had an idea.
“Hey, do you know some girls? We’re in L.A. now, man. I know you know some girls. Let’s call some girls.”
I hated when Haim was like this. These moods of his drove me crazy. “Dude, I just broke up with my girlfriend. I don’t know any girls right now. I’m not Hugh Hefner, okay?”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said, pacing around the apartment. A moment later: “But can you just call up some girls, please? I really need to hook up with a girl right now. I just need, like, five minutes. I just need someone to put her arms around me and hold me. It’s not even about the sex. I mean, a blow job would be great. If you know any girls who would come over here and blow me, that would be awesome. Look at my dick, dude. It’s hard as a rock.”
I went to the fridge to get myself a soda. “That’s great, man. I don’t need to see your dick.”
“I’m just showing you because this is how frustrated I am right now. I just want to get laid. Is that really such a bad thing? Is that really such a big deal?”
Before I even realized what was happening, he started in with, “Hey, why don’t we just mess around, why don’t we just touch each other?” I was used to his persistence; I was not accustomed to being hit on myself. I said no, I scooted farther away from him on the couch, I repeated that it wasn’t “my thing” until finally, exasperated, I said, “Corey, are you gay?”
“I’m not gay, man. This is just what guys do. It’s totally normal. Why don’t we just do it?”
I yelled. We nearly came to blows. I smoked some weed of my father’s, tried to settle myself down.
“Okay,” he said after a long silence. “What about that one guy, Marty Weiss?”
I glared at Haim. “I’m not talking to him anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because he started a company with my mom, and my mom and I aren’t really talking, and I think what happened in Santa Cruz was really fucked up and I just don’t want to be responsible for that again.”
“Okay. Don’t you know anyone else?”
Actually, I did know someone. Every time I had seen Tony Burnham at one of Ralph’s parties, he would be on and on about Corey Haim, about how good-looking Haim was and how much he wanted to meet him. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Tony was an adult and Haim was a minor; I was thinking that I would do just about anything to get Haim to shut up, to stop him from hitting on me.
“Okay, who is this guy?” Haim asked.
“His name is Tony. He’s older, and he’s kinda fat. He’s really not at all attractive.”
“Have him come over.”
“Are you serious?”
Haim raised his eyebrows and gave me a frustrated nod.
“Look, I don’t feel comfortable with this,” I told him. “Why can’t you just go out and get yourself laid like everyone else?”
“Just call him up, man. Just please do me a favor and call him.”
Whatever happened between Tony and Haim that day, I cannot tell you—they went off to the laundry room in my father’s building. Next thing you know, Tony was always at Haim’s side, driving Haim around town, hanging out with Haim’s mother, passing himself off as a friendly big-brother type. Looking back, I think Tony must have thought of Haim as his boyfriend. I think he believed they were having a real relationship. I didn’t understand that what he was doing was wrong, or what it would eventually do to Corey Haim. I just thought that if Haim seemed to be okay with it, I should learn to be ok with it, too.
* * *
I probably should have been prepared for the strangeness of fame when, a year or so earlier, I got a call from Steven Spielberg’s office. Drew Barrymore, apparently, had a crush on me and someone had finally decided, on her behalf, to intervene. She had been calling in to Amblin regularly, begging someone to give her my phone number.
“Isn’t she a little young for me?” I had asked at the time. She was ten. But Hollywood agents and producers love to arrange these little meet-cutes; it’s like casting a movie, but with real-world results.
Drew’s mother, Jaid, had called me to arrange the meeting. It was all very innocent, of course. Drew and I went to a movie; her mother drove. Despite her age, though, Drew was already a huge star; the fact that she had wanted to meet me was quite the ego boost.
This, however, was different. By the time The Lost Boys wrapped, you could tell that things in my life were really starting to change. And it happened fast. Almost, it seemed, overnight.
The first indication was the fan mail. I had received fan mail before, especially after Th
e Goonies premiered in the summer of 1985, but it had trickled in to my agent’s office, a letter or two at a time. Now I was getting bags of it, delivered to me twice a week. Nearly half of the contents were from Japan; I knew that some of my films had been big overseas, especially Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, but that still didn’t explain what I was supposed to do with the giant box of plastic sushi someone sent me from the other side of the world.
Next were the billboards. Just like the fan mail, there had been billboards before, too, including a giant one for The Goonies, with moving parts that swayed in the breeze, perched high above Sunset Boulevard. But there were more now—billboards, newspaper ads, including a full-page “For Your Consideration” ad in the back of Variety, lauding the success of the newly released Stand by Me. The film was distributed, at first, in limited release, playing in only a few theaters in New York and L.A. When those showings sold out, it was clear that Stand by Me would become the sleeper hit of the summer—within four weeks we were number one at the box office.
The rise of “the two Coreys” was even more surreal. You could sense that people were excited to see us together. The paparazzi had started paying attention to us, following us around, asking us questions—“You’re both named Corey? And you’re both actors?”—snapping our pictures whenever we went out to eat. The very next day you’d see the snapshot splashed across the pages of magazines. Fans had not yet started to stalk us, but that would come soon enough.
My father had taken over as my manager, and was practically drowning in publicity requests, for personal appearances, photo shoots, interviews. Suddenly, I was invited everywhere, L.A. opened itself to me like a flower. The Comedy Awards—where someone snapped a photo of Shari Belafonte and me, wearing Groucho Marx–style fake glasses, with the mustache and the oversized nose; it ran in practically every entertainment and teen magazine—the American Music Awards, the Grammys. I was invited to ride in the Hollywood Christmas parade, where I got to meet Stevie Wonder. And everywhere I went, my father was right there with me, introducing himself as my dad. “Hi, I’m Bob Feldman, Corey Feldman’s father”—that was his opening line. I may have been the burgeoning teen heartthrob, but dropping my name was getting him laid.
Anytime anybody asked me to do anything, my father would book me, without hesitation. I was doing a photo shoot or an interview—most often for one of the teen magazines—practically every day of the week. Having strangers ask me about my personal life was unsettling. I had no intention of speaking plainly about the realities of my life at home, so I kept things nice and fluffy; told them my favorite color, told them my common nicknames. Even back then, at age fifteen, I was conscious of wanting to stay positive, to affect people positively, so I aimed a lot of my spare time at doing charity work, showing up for pediatric cancer fund-raisers, cooking for the homeless at soup kitchens, making appearances at the children’s hospital, becoming a spokesman for the “Just Say No” campaign. I had watched Michael Jackson navigate this side of fame; this was, of course, long before his first brushes with scandal, when he still had an almost unimpeachable reputation and had become one of the most philanthropic of all entertainers. I was consciously molding that part of my career after him, albeit on a much smaller scale.
I hadn’t seen Michael in months, but we finally made plans to get together. He picked me up in his Mercedes—Bill Bray, his longtime security chief, was driving—Michael and I sat in the back. He was location scouting in preparation to shoot the video for “Smooth Criminal”; we were headed to 20th Century Fox to check out one of the sets for The Two Jakes, the sequel to Chinatown. He thought he might get inspired, since what he wanted for Smooth Criminal was a 1930s gangster-era vibe.
Being friends with Michael had its difficulties—either no one believed me (at least no one outside the entertainment industry; the kids I knew from school tended to be rather skeptical), or everyone wanted me to arrange an introduction. On that day, I had brought with me a little tape recorder. I put it in the pocket of my parachute pants.
“What is that?” he asked as I climbed in the car.
“What?”
“It looks like you have a brick in your pocket.”
“Oh!” I had already almost forgotten it was there. “It’s a tape recorder. I was wondering if I could record some of our conversation today, just to have it? You know, just to keep?”
“Sure,” he said, without a second thought, without a care in the world about being recorded. During the hour-long drive from Encino, talk shifted from the abuse I had suffered at school and at home, to the abuse he went through with his parents (at nearly thirty years old, he was still absolutely terrified of his father), to, suddenly, matters of business. He started grilling me about my management, about things I had never even thought of, let alone knew anything about. Did I have a lawyer? An agent? A business manager? Who was my accountant? What kind of instructions did I give him? What kind of percentage were these people taking from me? Where was my money invested? Did I have a portfolio? I remember laughing; I thought it was funny, like he had forgotten that I was still just a kid. What the hell did I know about business managers and portfolios? I wish I had thought a little more about what and why he was asking.
At some point, conversation shifted to a discussion of his upcoming sixteen-month, fifteen-country world tour, which would launch the following summer. “After the tour, I’m done,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m changing everything. I’m going to have a whole new look. No more glove. No more hat.”
“What do you mean no more glove?” I asked. “You can’t get rid of the glove!”
“I have to, Corey. I can’t keep doing the same thing forever. You have to keep changing and evolving. That’s the magic of what we do. You can’t be predictable. The second your fans think they know what they can expect from you, you become uninteresting. You have to keep moving forward.”
“That makes sense,” I said, playing with the tape recorder in my lap. “You still have to wear the glove, though. At least wear it when you sing ‘Billie Jean.’”
“You think?”
“If you don’t wear the glove for ‘Billie Jean,’ your fans are going to be disappointed. I’ll be disappointed. You have to at least wear it for that one song.”
He thought about that for a while. “Okay, what I’ll do is, I’ll do all the other songs. Then at the end, I’ll pull out the glove, and everyone will know what’s coming.”
“They sure will.”
“Okay, I’ll do the glove and the hat, but only when I sing ‘Billie Jean.’”
* * *
Ralph Kaufman was moving up in the world.
Gone were the days of hosting young actors inside his modest home in Hollywood; he teamed up with a businessman based in New York and grew the parties in scale and size, relocating them to penthouse suites or ballrooms at Hollywood hotels. On the surface, “Ralph Kaufman’s club” was a private social space for famous teens; in reality, it became a promotional tool to popularize a new brand of soda. The soda came in a lot of kid-friendly flavors—strawberry, bubble gum, cream soda—and exploded in popularity, thanks to its unofficial endorsement by those who frequented the club: Sean Astin and his brother Mackenzie, Scott and Heather Grimes, Ke Huy Quan, Alfonso Ribeiro, Drew Barrymore, Ricky Schroder, Harold Pruett, Christina Applegate, David Faustino, Tina Yothers, Corey Haim, and Alyssa Milano and me; Ralph asked Alyssa and I to cohost the first of his flashy new parties.
At the outset, Ralph’s club was very exclusive, aside, perhaps, from the presence of photographers and members of the Hollywood press; it proved to be a safe and comfortable, age-appropriate place for all of us to hang out with one another (no alcohol was ever served, neither officially nor even in secret, and most of the kids there—at least in the early days—were more or less still sober). Ralph’s club could also reasonably take credit for bringing together a number of young Hollywood couples. Haim, in particular, began dating a
string of ingénues; first Kristy Swanson (star of Flowers in the Attic and, later, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), then Alyssa Milano, and finally Nicole Eggert, of Charles in Charge and Baywatch. But as more and more celebrity kids showed up, the pressure to expand began to mount. Ralph’s quickly morphed from smallish get-togethers of about fifty people, to elaborate affairs with two hundred or three hundred guests, relocating along the way from private suites to expansive roof decks and, eventually, to warehouse-size ballrooms.
I was too naïve to know that all of us should have been compensated with appearance fees; Ralph and his promoters were able to charge for tickets, sell out of soda, and pack the place with kids who were trying to break into the business. None of our parents were savvy enough to discern this, either. As the parties grew, however, the atmosphere started to feel exploitative. I felt like I was being clawed at. What had been a respite from the madness was fast becoming the primary cause of it. Ralph’s stayed popular for nearly two years, but I outgrew it fast. By age fifteen, I was ready to enter the world of adults.
By late 1986 or early 1987, my father had hired a man I’ll call Ron Crimson, a young, good-looking guy in his early twenties, to work in the offices of New Talent Enterprises. Every time I walked across the street to talk business with my father, Ron would saunter over and manage to say something outrageously funny. We hit it off immediately. It was almost eerie how similar we were. It was as if he had studied me and was copying my every move. Before long, he was spending most of his time at the apartment, or driving me to restaurants and clubs around town.
One night we headed to dinner at The Palms. Just as I was opening the doors, out walked Sam Kinison, wearing his trademark beret. Back to School, the 1986 film he starred in with Rodney Dangerfield, had just come out; I recognized Sam immediately from the late-night talk-show circuit. We had never met, but we bumped right into each other.
“Hey,” I said, startled, “you’re Sam Kinison, right?”
Coreyography: A Memoir Page 15