Zen was carted off to the NICU. I stayed with Susie while the doctors stitched her up. But, after the dramatic birth, she was understandably exhausted. I left her to sleep, and crept out of the room to go see my son.
Zen was nestled in another oxygen chamber, intubated, hooked up to wires and monitors, with a little visor-like contraption covering his eyes (he had jaundice, which is common in premies); he looked like a little robot baby. As I bent over to stare at him, a nurse appeared at my side. “Would you like to hold him?”
I hadn’t even realized that would be possible.
She unhooked him from all the machines, wrapped him up like a little burrito, and placed him in my arms. He was just shy of three pounds. His entire head fit neatly within my palm. I had never seen anything so tiny in my life. I was petrified. But as I pulled the visor from his eyes, Zen looked right at me. He zeroed in, as if to say, I’m okay, Dad. I’m a fighter, and I’m going to be just fine. I kissed him. I was going to give my little boy all the love that I had missed.
Leaving my wife and my newborn son to shoot some ridiculous movie in Bulgaria—three days after his traumatic birth—was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. But we arranged for a friend to stay with Susie, and by the time I got back to L.A., Zen was able, finally, to come home.
Still, Zen’s first few months of life were tough. He had difficulty sleeping, terrible cramping and gas, and two hernias, for which he would eventually need a small operation. Like all new parents, Susie and I barely slept. We eventually began taking turns; I’d be up most of the night on dad duty, Susie would take over by morning. I spent most of those first six months terrified that something would go wrong. It was amid this sleepless haze, and a mountain of dirty diapers, that I got a call from the journalist Martin Bashir.
In the spring of 2003, Susie and I had watched the devastating footage that made up the ABC News special Living with Michael Jackson. It aired more than a year after Michael and I had had our public falling out, at a time when I was no longer a child, someone who blindly idolized the self-professed King of Pop. I was an adult, and a soon-to-be father, as well as someone who had been abused. But as I watched the show—and just like so many millions of people, there was footage that I found disturbing—I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I remember asking Susie, how could he have allowed this to happen? How could he have been so easily taken advantage of again? It wouldn’t be long before I found out.
Almost immediately after the show’s airdate, Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara D.A., launched an official investigation. By November of that year, Michael Jackson had been arrested. And the first time Martin Bashir came calling, almost two years after taping the interview that started it all, I turned him down. Bashir, however, was persistent. He kept calling me, as well as my agent.
In the weeks that followed, Bashir convinced me that he hadn’t attempted to defame Michael Jackson when he first descended on Neverland Ranch. That seemed plausible. Surely, he and his crew had simply unearthed some uncomfortable information, and the rest had unraveled from there? In the meantime, I had entered talks to star in an off-Broadway play in New York, and was hard at work on my next album. A little publicity certainly couldn’t hurt. And all along, Bashir had claimed that he only wanted to ask me a few Jackson-specific questions; the proposed 20/20 special, on the whole, was supposed to be an hour-long retrospective on my life. I thought it would be a chance to debunk some myths and misconceptions, to show the world who I really am. In the end, he appealed to my ego. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.
Before I actually sat down in front of the cameras, I insisted that none of the footage be used as part of another Jackson exposé. Of course, that’s exactly what happened.
The interview aired in February 2005. As soon as I saw the promos—Child Actor Corey Feldman Speaks Out Against Michael Jackson—I had a sense of what I was in for. At the same time, I immediately began racking my brain. I couldn’t remember saying anything that seemed all that groundbreaking. I did admit that Michael had once shown me a book filled with pictures of adult genitalia affected by venereal disease—that happened at his apartment in Westwood, en route to our overnight, undercover adventure at Disney. And I did say that, as a father, I would never have agreed to send my kid to an overnight at Neverland Ranch. At the time, I actually didn’t believe this was a particularly controversial statement.
I don’t have any evidence that Michael ever molested any child, and I have always insisted, emphatically, that he never did anything to me. But he obviously had issues. His health was rapidly deteriorating; anyone who followed the tabloids could easily attest to that. Plus, I had witnessed first-hand his issues with paranoia, had interacted with people in his own camp who perhaps didn’t always have his best interests at heart. It wasn’t the first time such accusations had been lobbed in his direction. And, child molester or not, Neverland Ranch had become a center of controversy, gossip, and rumor. Why would anyone drop off their kid in the middle of all of that?
Not surprisingly, the interview immediately exploded in the press. It looked like an attack piece, which is never what I intended. But I certainly should have been smart enough to predict how this would play out. Not long after the interview, I was subpoenaed to testify in the case; it was widely reported that, come March of that year, I would be taking the stand not in defense of Michael, but on behalf of the prosecution.
When members of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office searched Neverland in the fall of 2003, they seized reams of pornography, but found absolutely zero child porn. They confiscated alcohol, but the notion that Michael had ever plied children with drink—or “Jesus juice,” as it came to be known in the press—was certainly never proven. The D.A. tried to present these artifacts as “evidence” of Michael’s transgressions, because he knew their very existence would be at odds with Michael’s public persona and that, in turn, might “prove” his guilt.
By indulging his inner-child, by building a sprawling home and calling it Neverland Ranch, Michael had become, by the early aughts, a caricature of himself. In that infamous interview with Bashir, he even admitted that he often thought of himself as a real life Peter Pan. When you think of Peter Pan, you don’t imagine that he’s got some porn and some booze stashed out back in his shed. Sneddon knew this, and he sought to exploit that disconnect in order to win his case.
But the truth is that Michael wasn’t a cartoon character. He was a grown—if spectacularly misunderstood—man.
There was one unexpected perk from having agreed to the Bashir interview: because I had gone on the record so many times before in support of Michael Jackson, and because it seemed as though I had suddenly changed my mind, neither the defense nor the prosecution believed I would be a viable witness. Instead of being compelled to testify, I would move to New York with my family and watch the trial unfold from afar.
CHAPTER 22
Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy was an off-Broadway spoof of the 1980’s cult film starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. It’s a hilarious concept and a wacky script; I played the lead role, a character called—wait for it—Michael Douglas. A “traditional” Greek chorus provided the narration, a ridiculous combination of ancient text and not-so-ancient quotes from the original movie.
The play ran from July to August 2005, and though it was a small production, I earned some of the best reviews of my entire career. My stage debut had been a success, and I returned to L.A. with newfound focus.
I had actually been planning on doing more work behind the camera when I got a call from the producer Greg Goldman, who pitched me an idea for a show. It was a scripted sitcom, but it would be filmed to look like a documentary, kind of like The Office. It would be a bit like Three’s Company, but Haim would play the bad-boy bachelor to Susie’s and my domesticated, drama-free marriage. The working title was Three’s a Crowd.
Corey and I had been approached many, many times with ideas for shows and movies over the years. B
ack in the early ’90s, we shot a pilot for a sitcom that never got picked up. In the early aughts, I even took a meeting with Jeff Cohen, Chunk from The Goonies, who had grown up to become a successful entertainment attorney. By the end of 2005, however, it was like everyone in Hollywood had suddenly gotten the memo—ideas for ways to reunite the “Two Coreys” were flying in from every direction. Some pitches weren’t half bad, some were outright ridiculous—someone actually pitched the idea of dressing us as Mounties (the pitch came from Canada), and having us host a cooking show. Of all the ideas I had heard, Three’s a Crowd was easily the best of the bunch. I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to go there. In the last few years, Haim had turned into a mess.
Haim often stayed with Susie and I, whenever he was in town, whenever he needed a place to crash for a few days to get on his feet. He stayed with us in the fall of 2001, not long after Susie and I returned from New York, and he stayed with us again in 2003, shortly after we filmed Dickie Roberts. That’s when he was at his worst. His hair was thinning, he was close to three hundred pounds, his body was falling apart—still, I had no idea how bad things had really become.
A day or two before he arrived, I got a call from his mother.
“If he’s going to come and stay with you,” she said, “you’ll need to be prepared. So, you should go to the pharmacy and pick up a bottle of charcoal tablets.”
“What?”
“Charcoal tablets. Buy a bottle, and whenever you see him overdosing—which will probably happen on a daily basis—you’re going to take a handful of pills and shove them down his throat. If he’s foaming at the mouth, or if his eyes roll back in his head, or if he’s so inebriated that he can’t put a sentence together, if he’s not making any sense, that’s when you’ll know to do it.”
“What if he’s choking?”
“If it’s so bad that he can’t swallow, you’ll have to call the paramedics. But hopefully you can get to him before things get that bad.”
It was the most surreal conversation of my life—and I starred on a show called The Surreal Life. It was as if we were chitchatting about vitamins or something. “You really think this is necessary?” I asked her. “You really think I’ll have to do this?”
“It’s not a matter of if. This is just his condition right now.”
I went out and bought the charcoal, and Haim’s behavior over the next few days scared me half to death. In the morning, he’d be a little slow but still lucid. An hour or two later, he’d start with the slurring. An hour or two after that, he’d be drooling and completely incomprehensible. Then came the eyes rolling back in the head and the charcoal. This happened every day, without exception.
At one point, it occurred to me that he just didn’t understand what he was putting people through. So, I decided to film him, at various points throughout a typical day, to show him. I wanted to put the evidence right in front of his face. The footage is devastating—by five in the afternoon, he couldn’t tell me where he was, couldn’t name the president of the United States. He was, to be frank, a drooling slob of a human, and I was afraid that he’d even done permanent damage.
By the time the idea for Three’s a Crowd came about, Haim was back in Canada. I had heard he was doing better, but I needed to see for myself. I called him up, told him about the premise of the show, and gave him an ultimatum. “If you want to do this,” I said, “you’ve got to clean yourself up. You have to lose the weight. You have to get yourself in shape.”
“Don’t worry, man. No problem.”
“Corey, if it was that easy you would have done it already.”
“Just trust me, man. Give me six months.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you need to understand, if after six months you show up and it’s obvious that you haven’t been taking care of yourself—if I even think you seem fucked up—I will walk. Do you understand? Right then. No hesitation.”
“I got it. I really appreciate what you’re doing for me. I promise, I won’t let you down.”
With that, we moved straight into preproduction. We had shopped the idea to a number of networks, but A&E was willing to order a full series without having to first complete a pilot. Plus, I would be one of the executive producers, which meant I would have a certain amount of control—this was essential, since I still had a bad taste in my mouth from my experience on The Surreal Life. I wanted to make sure that Haim and I wouldn’t be manipulated. And we set up some ground rules: some things—his history of drug abuse, for one—would be off-limits, and Zen would not be in the show. I want my son to have a normal life. He can’t do that if people recognize him because of me. So, Zen was not to be photographed, filmed, or in any way represented, even though he was right there with us the entire time.
We also got to work writing an outline of the entire season. The Two Coreys was never supposed to be a true “reality” show; it was a controlled, semiscripted sitcom. We didn’t have actual dialogue—the majority of lines were ad-libbed and improvised—but every scene was planned out in advance. Episode 1, Scene 1: Haim arrives at the house; Episode 1, Scene 2: the Coreys go grocery shopping, etc. We also made the decision to shoot the show in Vancouver; because of Haim’s troublesome immigration status, it was easier if all of us came to him.
During this months-long process, Haim and I stayed in touch via the telephone, but I hadn’t actually seen him. So, when it came time to film the first scene—Haim showing up at Susie’s and my home (which was actually a rental; we had no desire to film in our actual house)—my reaction was a hundred percent genuine. He looked incredible. He was down more than a hundred pounds. He was lucid, totally with it. I was beyond impressed.
As a result of Haim’s transformation, we did some of the best work we had ever done together. No one could make me laugh at the drop of a hat or turn my mood like Haim; he knew all my buttons. He was also one of the wittiest, smartest men I’ve ever known (though Haim often played dumb for the camera). There were times during filming of the first season—even during the “fight” scenes, which were scripted, totally made up for television—that the cameramen would laugh so hard their cameras would shake. There was so much potential at that point. Haim and I would look at each other and think, we’re back! Then it all came crashing down.
Even before production began on The Two Coreys, I was approached by the folks at Warner Brothers about potentially making a Lost Boys sequel. There had been talk about making a sequel for years, pretty much since the original debuted and proved to be such a success. A script for Lost Girls was floated around Hollywood, I heard that Kiefer Sutherland had his hands on something, but nothing ever materialized. What Warner Brothers eventually sent over, however, was a cheap, schlocky script for a straight-to-DVD movie, in which I was being invited to shoot a five-minute cameo. I couldn’t believe that of all the versions that had been tossed out over the years, this was the one they wanted to move forward with.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked one of the producers. “Where’s Jamison Newlander in this? Where’s Corey Haim?”
He told me the studio didn’t want anything to do with Haim. At that point, he had developed too much of a reputation.
The Lost Boys had always been Haim’s favorite. It was the most successful of the “Two Coreys” films, but he always thought of it as his movie. He was very proud of it, and he wanted to make sure that if a sequel was ever done, it was done the right way, with a solid script, a guaranteed theatrical release, and a superb director (hopefully Joel Schumacher). When I saw what Warner Brothers was proposing, I turned them down flat. There was no way I was going to appear in a Lost Boys remake without my brother.
Meanwhile, filming of The Two Coreys was well underway. In the second episode, Haim, Susie, Jamison Newlander, and myself attended a special twentieth anniversary screening of the original Lost Boys film. After that, Haim was on and on about writing a sequel himself, until I eventually had to tell him that a sequel was already in the works, that it was going forward without
him, and that I had passed on a part. I broke the news off camera first; when I told him on camera, it was actually the second time we’d had the conversation.
It wasn’t long after that when a “friend” brought Haim an enormous amount of Valium. Haim quickly returned to slurring his words. He wasn’t able to get through his scenes. He would get angry, and provoke fights with Susie and I and the crew. At his worst, he became unable to differentiate between what was real and what had been scripted for the purposes of the show.
By the time we started the publicity tour in the summer of 2007, Haim’s relapse hadn’t been made public, but one of the Lost Boys producers, Mary, had seen an advance copy of the show. She attended The Two Coreys premiere party in Hollywood, and told me she still wanted me for the movie. The entire script had been rewritten. Not only that, but she was willing to capitulate to my demands; Haim and Jamison would both be awarded parts. I told Haim the news, again promised him that I wouldn’t move forward without him. Together, we both agreed to sign on.
The problems started at the very beginning of production. Mary and another one of the producers approached me, and told me they needed me to make “the call.”
“Oh, God. What happened?”
“Apparently, Haim’s not coming.”
“What do you mean he’s not coming?”
“He doesn’t like his wardrobe choices.”
“You’re telling me that after twenty years, and I don’t know how many script rewrites, and all the shit I went through to get him in this movie, he’s not coming because he doesn’t like his wardrobe choices?”
I called Haim, and was able to talk him through his wardrobe dilemma. But the next day there was some new problem. And some new problem the day after that. He backed out of three different plane tickets, continually screwed up the shooting schedule. Finally, Haim was just fired.
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