The acting seems like it’ll be a welcome challenge. Dream a Little Dream is like an endlessly more elaborate version of Freaky Friday; half the time I’ll be acting as though my body has been inhabited—in a kind of metaphysical, meditative dream state—by the spirit of Coleman Ettinger, a character the great Jason Robards is playing. I’ll also be allowed to act as a sort of uncredited, unofficial producer; I’ll have a say in the casting process. And I’m getting an opportunity not only to write an original song for the film, but to choreograph an on-screen original dance. By early 1988, I’ve developed a little reputation for being able to mimic the moves of Michael Jackson. I’ve been hard at work on my singing, too. Prior to the emancipation, I was spending hours at Recording Star, a sort of do-it-yourself recording studio in Westwood, bringing demo tapes home to my dad. I hadn’t been any good, but I desperately wanted to be. Now I was going to have my very own single, which would be released on the Dream a Little Dream soundtrack.
It’s a lot of firsts. With all of the added pressure and the mountains of responsibility, I decide to curb my drug use. I’m not ready—or willing—to give up partying completely, but I make an effort to slow things down.
A few weeks into casting, we’ve already zeroed in on a trio of young actresses to play the role of Lainie Diamond, the fourth lead and my on-screen high school crush. The frontrunners are Meredith Salenger, from the Oscar-nominated Disney movie The Journey of Natty Gann; Ione Skye, who in a matter of months will have her breakout with Cameron Crowe’s cult classic Say Anything, a movie that also stars my sister; and a virtual unknown named Jennifer Connelly. She’s only done a few films, most notably Labyrinth, the campy vehicle for David Bowie, but she’s got my vote. She’s not only a stunning beauty, but obviously immensely, insanely talented. Unfortunately, she wants too much money. Meredith Salenger wins the role. I find—to my delight—that we have incredible chemistry.
I go away for a few days to attend to some business, and when I come back one of the producers informs me that he’s got some good news.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Lala is doing the movie,” he says. Lala is Laura Sloatman, Frank Zappa’s niece and Corey Haim’s current girlfriend. They’ve been having a torrid love affair, attached at the hip since License to Drive, but their relationship is a dysfunctional ball of drama. I’m not too keen on introducing that dynamic to this film. “Why is that good news?”
“Because Lala only agreed to do the film if Corey Haim agreed to do it, too.”
Now, I love Corey Haim like a brother, but I’m wary of doing another film with him, especially on the heels of License to Drive. I’m trying to clean myself up, to branch out, to work on my music, and in two days’ time my breakout film has been turned into another “Two Coreys” movie. It’s suddenly clear that I never really had any say in it at all.
* * *
Dream a Little Dream is filming in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’ve already been here once, to assist with location scouting, but now I’m back, checking into my room at the Shell Island Resort. Ron is with me, still acting as my assistant. By the time filming ends, he’ll have scored his second cameo in one of my movies—I managed to get him a small role in License to Drive as well.
As we’re nearing our first official day of shooting, I get an unexpected call from one of the producers.
“There’s a problem with Haim,” he tells me. “He might have to back out at the last minute.”
“What? Why?”
“He’s had an accident. He broke his leg.”
Apparently, Haim had been attempting to teach his mother, Judy, how to ride a motorized scooter. We each own one—I actually purchased the exact Vespa that Haim’s on-screen sister, Natalie (played by Nina Siemaszko) rode in License to Drive. But Judy, still a shaky novice, had run Haim’s scooter into a brick wall, injuring herself and breaking her son’s leg in the process.
We’re able to write Haim’s injury right into the script, so that he—and his cast—can still be in the movie, but to my knowledge this is his first experience with prescription painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin. While I don’t have any evidence that Haim is abusing these drugs, he does manage to play up his injury, to the point that we’re forced to take an insurance day or two. This isn’t the first time he has managed to shut down an entire production, and it certainly won’t be the last. But looking back, I think those few weeks marked the beginning of what would be, for Haim, a lifelong battle with prescription drugs.
* * *
Tony Fields was one of the dancing zombies in “Thriller,” so I know he knows a thing or two about Michael Jackson–style moves. We begin our work together, choreographing the now-famous scene in which I dance my way down the bleachers, performing for Lainie Diamond, who at this point in the film has been inhabited by the mind of Coleman’s wife, Gena. I’m looking forward to showing the world what I can really do, but the scene itself calls for some interesting concessions.
Technically, my body has been inhabited by the spirit of Coleman, so I’m merging the spritely dance style of a teenager—heel spins and freezes reminiscent of Michael Jackson—with vaudevillian-type moves with which an elderly Coleman might be familiar, like Fosse-esque jazz hands and Broadway-style balance checks. This is an awful lot to convey within a two- or three-minute dance sequence—the sheer complexity of it should have probably signaled a problem within the script. But I’m too excited about showcasing my dance moves to realize we’ve wandered into the territory of the esoteric. I can’t see that the script is muddled, and deciphering all of these nuances is going to be a problem for the average moviegoer. It’s one of many cues—or clues—that I am about to miss.
Back in L.A. I get a call from Joe Dante’s office. I haven’t seen him since our days on the set of Gremlins but he’s interested in having me read for a part in a new film starring Tom Hanks. I’ve gotten my driver’s license, but I don’t yet own my own car. So, I ask my neighbor, Chris, if I can borrow his. Chris lives across the hall from me at the Oakwoods, and he operates with immunity as the complex’s unofficial coke dealer. All I have to do is knock on his door; a few hours later, he’ll discretely slide a little package underneath my door, and I’ll deliver him the cash. It’s incredibly convenient, which makes the arrangement exceedingly dangerous.
Chris owns a burnt orange Chevy El Dorado, a real ’70s-era junker that’s completely falling apart. This is what I’m driving when I pull into the Universal Studios lot to audition for The ’Burbs. I haven’t seen Joe in five years, not since I was a clean-cut, precocious twelve-year-old. Now I’ve got ratty black hair extensions, a too-cool-for-school attitude, and a coke problem I’m trying to keep under wraps. Plus, I’m driving a beater. It must have been a shocking transition, but my new burnout persona is a perfect fit for Ricky Butler, the long-haired, loud-mouthed resident of Mayfield Place, the fictional setting for Joe’s campy take on a Hitchcockian send-up. I’ve got enough of a chip on my shoulder to be miffed that I’m not being offered a starring role, but I’m excited about working with Tom Hanks and Princess Leia.
In the interim, I hire a new assistant. I keep Ron around as a friend—I’m still too afraid of being alone to completely cut him out of my life—but I don’t want him working for me anymore, not after he made a crack in Wilmington about missing “play time” together; it was the first time he had ever verbally acknowledged the abuse. So, Tony Burnham hooks me up with Gary Hayes, a no-nonsense kind of guy with a girlfriend. Ironically, he appeared to have a problem with gay people. I figure he’ll be a safer, more appropriate fit.
Fresh off an official offer to star in The ’Burbs, I feel like I’m moving up in the world, so I buy myself a BMW and send Gary out to look for houses. I don’t even bother looking at the one he suggests, a “perfect house with a view on Picturesque Drive.” I rent the place sight-unseen. It’s a craphole, a one-bedroom shack with a kitchenette instead of a kitchen, but it does have an impressive view of the Valley. My cousin Michael drops
out of school to move in with me—rent-free. Michael and Ron (who I’m also allowing to squat) configure a sort of apartment for themselves in the screened-in portion of my cliff-side balcony.
* * *
I may look like shit—skinny and wiry and drawn—but I’m more or less sober. Which is why it’s frustrating that Joe Dante and Carrie Fisher have insisted on taking me aside on the set of The ’Burbs and talking to me about what they’re calling my “spiraling drug problem.”
“What are you talking about?” I shout, probably a little more forcefully than is necessary. “I’m not even doing drugs anymore. I mean, I do them once in a while, for fun. But it’s not like I’m an addict or anything. I barely even do coke anymore. You should have seen me last year on the set of License to Drive.”
Carrie and Joe do not agree. Joe tells me he’s very concerned, reminds me that he’s known me for years. He points to Carrie, and explains that she’s dealt with her fair share of pain and addiction. Her semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, has just been published; her struggles with alcohol are widely known.
“Please, listen to me,” she says. “You are such a talented actor, but if you keep going down this road, you’re going to throw it all away. You’ve got to stop before it’s too late.”
“I really appreciate you guys taking the time,” I say. “But you’re completely off base with this.”
And when I said that, I really believed it. Because only a month earlier, my circle of friends had convened a meeting to address the fact that we were all getting a little out of control. As a result, Haim and our friend Kevin had checked themselves into rehab; Ron went off to get sober (supposedly) in Arizona; and Alfonso and Ricky had told their parents everything, they were no longer allowed to hang out with the rest of us. I felt like we had each done what was needed. I may not have been going off to rehab, but if all of my friends were getting sober, I imagined I’d wind up sober, too. It’s not like I had any intentions of partying by myself. I was past all that, and almost a little annoyed that Carrie and Joe couldn’t see it. Then came the last day of production, when, for the first time, it occurred to me that they might be right.
It’s the middle of summer and we’re working at the Universal lot, in broad daylight, trying to get a tight shot on my face. Joe wants to catch the Klopeks’s car in the reflection of my sunglasses, but I’m so coked out, I’m having a hard time holding still.
“Corey, you have to stop twitching,” one of the crew members is whispering in my ear.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I, uh, had a lot of caffeine today.”
Sometime after we finished filming, Joe Dante gave an interview, in which he talked about how much I had changed since our days together on the set of Gremlins. He said that filming The ’Burbs was the only time in his career that he dreaded coming to work in the morning, because he had to deal with Corey Feldman.
The ’Burbs will debut at number one, but it will be my last starring role in a major studio film for a long, long time. My career is about to take a plunge, but I’m too far gone to stop it.
CHAPTER 16
I’d been dating Charlie Spradling, a quintessential B-actress and wannabe Playboy pinup, since we met on the set of License to Drive (she has a small, uncredited cameo, where she makes out with Heather Graham’s on-screen boyfriend). It was a whirlwind romance, full of drama and fighting and lying and suspicion—rumors are swirling that she’s been cheating on me with Charlie Sheen; people seem to love seeing “Charlie and Charlie” together, even though she’s been living with me. Now, our relationship has crashed and burned; only a month or two after moving in, she’s on her way out. Seeing as how she had been living with her previous boyfriend, Dave Mustaine, the lead singer of the metal band Megadeath, at the beginning of our relationship—I actually went to Dave’s house to help her pack up her things—I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when a van full of long-haired musicians, all part of some new rock band I haven’t yet heard of, pulled up outside my home on Picturesque Drive. She announced that she was now “dating the band”—as in, all of them—and that they were there to help her move out. Still, I’m devastated by the breakup. When Ron and Michael return home (the four of us had been cramming ourselves into my tiny one-bedroom house), I’m sulking, alone, on the balcony.
“I know how to make you feel better,” Ron said. “Let’s do some coke.”
I sighed. “Coke will just make me stay up all night talking about her. I don’t want to talk about Charlie. I don’t even want to think about her tonight.”
Ron put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “We could do acid?”
“I’m fucking depressed, man. If I take acid I’ll just have a really bad trip.”
“Well,” he said, “how about heroin?”
“What?” I looked at him like he was crazy.
“We could do heroin,” he said again.
“I’m not going to put a needle in my vein, man. That’s disgusting.”
“You don’t have to shoot it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t have to shoot it. You can snort heroin, just like cocaine.”
That was interesting. I’d always thought heroin was an intravenous-only type drug. “Well,” I said, “what does heroin … do?”
“I’ve only done it once, but it’s sort of like pain medicine.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Where would we even get any?”
“You just go downtown. All the Mexicans sell it. It’s called chiva in Spanish. You just drive downtown, stick your head out the window, and say chiva.”
For someone who had supposedly only done heroin once, he was starting to sound pretty familiar with the process. “I really don’t think we’re going to be able to drive downtown, stick our heads out the window, yell chiva, and expect someone to run right up.”
“Trust me.”
“All right, fine,” I said. “I think you’re crazy, but I’ll try it.”
Ron turned out to be right—it really was that simple. Back at the apartment, latex balloons in hand, we just sort of stared at each other until finally someone broke one open. Inside was a gooey, tarlike brown slime. It smelled a bit like burnt sandalwood. “How are we going to snort this?” I asked.
It also turns out that your microwave has all kinds of convenient and unexpected uses. Nuke some chiva, and it becomes hard enough to crush into powder and snort.
Heroin wasn’t anything like what I imagined. It didn’t give me the psychedelic, hallucinogenic high of acid, wasn’t as in-your-face as the knock-me-to-my-knees force of crack. I felt a warm, slightly tingly sensation pass over my body, like an internal heat wave. I was a little itchy, and felt the temptation to keep scratching my skin. But I couldn’t believe this was the effect of big, bad heroin, the worst drug in the world, the scariest stuff you could do. I felt relaxed and at peace. Thoughts of Charlie were gone with one quick snort.
The effects of heroin, at first, are subtle; in the past I’ve described it as a delicate flower. It seems harmless, because it takes awhile to consume you. It was months before my flower had become a Venus flytrap, eating me from the inside out.
* * *
We’ve hired the singer and soap opera star Michael Damian (best known for playing Danny Romalotti on TV’s The Young and the Restless), to produce and record “Rock On,” a cover of the David Essex song, for the Dream a Little Dream album. In addition, he’ll be working with me on my song, which is to be featured in the film as well as on the soundtrack. It’s a tight deadline, and we get to work right away, throwing out ideas and playing with melodies in the living room of my home on Picturesque Drive. The work we do here lays the foundation for “Something in Your Eyes,” which is to become my first original single.
The transition to music seems like a no-brainer, a natural, even obvious next step in my increasingly successful career. The release of License to Drive had brought with it the first glimpses of what
the press would eventually dub “Coreymania.” Even as far back as filming, Haim and I had once found ourselves locked in a trailer—a screaming crowd of frenzied fans was pounding, chanting, literally rocking the trailer, as if they were trying to shake us out. We had looked at each other in disbelief, and asked ourselves, Is this real? Is any of this really happening? Overnight, the two of us together had become a security team’s nightmare. We brought with us total pandemonium. It was as if I had woken up one day and started living Michael Jackson’s life. It was as if I had wanted so badly to be famous that I had willed it into fruition. And as much as this new reality was completely surreal and insane—in many ways, I still felt like the shy, awkward outcast who was made fun of at school, ignored by girls, and getting a cup of spit overturned on his head—I ate it up.
With all the attention, as well as all the press I’m doing for my new single—I’m telling everyone it’ll be on the soundtrack—a number of opportunities arise. I’m invited to be part of an all-star lineup of teen actors at a charity event in Idaho, where I’ll get yet another chance to sing “Something in Your Eyes.” I decide to invite Haim, not to make it an official “Two Coreys” trip, but because by now, I’m worried about him. He’s been living with Brooke McCarter—vampire Paul from The Lost Boys, who’s acting as some kind of combination manager/life coach—but I know Haim is now heavily into crack. Whereas I have lined up and filmed The ’Burbs, Haim hasn’t booked anything in months. He’s on some kind of self-imposed hiatus, the results of which can’t be good. I think bringing him with me to Idaho might help him reconnect with his fans, might encourage Haim to straighten himself out.
The concert is being held at a local high school—I believe it’s a Mothers Against Drunk Driving event. Everyone gets checked in to the hotel and then I’m off to rehearsals. I’ve got “Something in Your Eyes” ready to go, plus two or three other originals.
Coreyography: A Memoir Page 18