What I’m about to give you is a lesson in how to break an unbreakable trust. This is for educational purposes only.
First, a little history. Back in the last century, a boy actor named Jackie Coogan costarred with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid and became a star. In fact, he was so successful that he became the youngest self-made millionaire in history.
As happens with a lot of child stars, his popularity didn’t survive into adulthood. When he asked his mother and stepfather for the money he’d earned as a child, he found out that they’d spent most of it on high living, and intended to keep the rest. He sued to recover the money, but the judge ruled that all the millions he’d earned as a minor belonged not to him, but to the adults who’d been his legal guardians.
As a result of the scandal surrounding Coogan’s suit, the Coogan Law was passed in California, in which fifteen percent of a child actor’s earnings are to be placed in a trust until the actor becomes a legal adult.
Personally, I think fifteen percent is a little low. Don’t you?
(Coogan, by the way, later went on to originate the role of Uncle Fester in The Addams Family, though personally I think his most unforgettable performance is to be found in the equally unforgettable Mesa of Lost Women [1953], a movie so completely original that it can rightly claim to be in a genre of its very own.)
I started working in commercials at the age of four, and my loving Mum and Da set up my very own Coogan trust at a local bank. A Coogan trust is “blocked trust,” meaning that no withdrawals can be made until the recipient’s eighteenth birthday.
Between the ages of four and eighteen I made something like thirty million dollars, between my work on Family Tree, commercials and acting gigs, dolls, lunch boxes, and endorsements. The mathematically inclined among you will have noted that when I attained my majority, my Coogan trust should have contained $4,500,000, plus interest.
Instead, almost all that money disappeared.
You have to understand the family dynamic at work here. My dad is a thief and a con artist and, now, a fugitive. My mom, on the other hand, is a spiritually evolved individual of a type not uncommon in Southern California, meaning that she’s the sort of religious person who would live in Beverly Hills and drive an S-Class Mercedes with a vanity plate reading OMSHIVA.
Remember, first of all, that 85 percent of my income belonged to my parents anyway, minus taxes and dues to the Screen Actors Guild (and boy, did Dad ever complain about the union dues!). The first thing that happened was that Dad became my manager, and skimmed twenty percent off the top. (Agents are legally entitled only to 10 percent, but managers charge whatever the market will bear.)
Maw and Paw saw to it that I became a corporation, Star Child LLC. (I detect my mother’s drifty style in the name of the company.) All my disposable income went into my corporation. Mums and Pups were the chief officers, and paid themselves very large salaries out of my earnings. They also bought themselves a large Beverly Hills mansion, a sixty-five-foot motor yacht, and a dazzling array of expensive automobiles. We had servants, my mom had a driver, and we had a cook who specialized in ayurvedic cuisine.
They lived well off my work. But that fifteen percent sitting in a bank in an unbreachable trust—that $4.5 million—clearly nagged at them. From their point of view, they had worked hard to create me and my success. Clearly they were entitled to all the rewards.
I later had to hire a forensic accountant to figure out what happened. Not that it helped, particularly.
First, my dad shopped around for just the right bank in which to stow my earnings. He found a smallish Monterey-based bank with branches in Los Angeles. They’d probably never even heard of Coogan trusts, but that didn’t matter. Dad soon enlightened them.
The bank got bought by another bank, which got bought by another. This bank then sold the bank to another bank. Between my fifth and eighteenth birthdays, the bank holding my trust was bought and sold no fewer than seven times.
The result was that the trust officers came in and out as if on a merry-go-round, and soon the only expert on the provisions of the Sean Makin Trust was my dad. The trust officers took his word that certain expenses were necessary—including paying large fees to Mum and Dad for all the hard work they did as trustees.
Withdrawals from trusts are allowed in cases of personal hardship, illness, or the need to provide the principal an education—normally you need a judge’s permission for this, but no one at the bank seemed to know this. They were happy to take my dad’s word that I was a hardship case who, in addition to a Beverly Hills mansion, needed a Malibu beach house in order to provide a roof over his head. Educational expenses included my dad’s trips to Las Vegas, where he dropped a lot of Star Child money on the highly educational roulette tables, and my mother’s stays at a health spa in Arizona, where she had her highly educated chakras polished and her aura cleansed, along with her bowels.
I also learned that my father told the bank that I suffered from bone cancer, and had to go to Mexico for secret treatments, because if my illness were known I’d lose my work.
The bank also charged its own fees, which they’re not supposed to do. Oops.
The only thing I got from my own trust was my Mini Cooper. I don’t know whether that was an educational expense or not.
After Family Tree was canceled, my movies flopped, and I began more and more to physically resemble a character from a Tim Burton movie, Ma and Da decided it was time to liquidate. The yacht and most of the cars were sold, along with the Beverly Hills home, which had always been in their name. Mortgages were taken on the beach house.
By that point my mother had become a follower of Babaji Sivadas Kadaitswami, and decided to join him in his ashram and receive instruction at the feet of the master.
The feet of the master, it turns out, are pretty much for sale. Those who choose to leave the world and follow Babaji into the cloister do so on a strict caste system—not caste in the Hindu sense, but caste in the cash sense. To live in the same compound as Babaji costs a certain amount. To live in the same house as Babaji costs considerably more. To live in the same house and to become his personal servant costs even more, and nearest to godhead are those who pay for the privilege of sharing at least one meal per day with the swami, assuming of course that he’s in town and not off fund-raising in some other district.
My mom bought herself a lifetime of meals for something like $850,000 of my money. Kadaitswami, which means “Master of the Marketplace,” turns out to be an appropriate name. He’s as larcenous as my father, only more successful at keeping the cash.
When I turned eighteen, Star Child LLC was turned over to me. Mom was already gone to Andhra Pradesh, and I was more traumatized by my parents’ separation than my father was. My dad moved to Palm Springs, though he maintained an office in LA, where he pretended to manage my career, and presumably kept his bags packed in case he needed to slip away.
There was a little under two hundred thousand dollars left in my Coogan trust. Star Child was heavily in debt. The Malibu house was mortgaged.
The Mini Cooper, it must be admitted, ran fine.
Now I am aware that there are plenty of eighteen-year-olds who would be happy to start their adult years with a Mini Cooper and a couple hundred grand. I’m not claiming hardship. But I’d also worked hard for fourteen years, and in the end I’d made less than fifteen thousand a year. I could have earned more in a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s.
When I asked Dad where my money had gone, he smiled at me. “It just went,” he said. When I complained, he laughed. “We had fun, didn’t we?”
My friends urged me to take my parents to court. I resisted, but sanity eventually prevailed. I had papers served on my dad’s office, but he’d displayed his usual uncanny sense of timing and scarpered ahead of the marshal. There was no way to sue my mother unless she came out of Babaji’s compound, and so far as I know she never has.
I had no way of paying the mortgage on the Malibu house, so I was f
orced to sell, unfortunately at the bottom of the market. I think I ended up making a few thousand bucks.
I sued the bank that had allowed my parents to plunder my estate. The judge ruled that, in view of the fact that the bank had been bought and sold so many times, the legal entity that collaborated in the robbery no longer existed, and the current legal entity was guilty of no wrongdoing. He advised me from the bench to get on with my life.
Another judge—rather grumpily, I thought—refused to hold Star Child LLC responsible for debts contracted before I’d attained my majority. So at least I was no longer in debt, except to the lawyers and the forensic accountant, who took every penny I had left.
I hired some private investigators to track my father, and discovered that some years earlier he’d acquired Belizean citizenship, something that in those days you could get for $25,000 cash. Presumably he’s traveling on his Belizean passport, moving from one tax haven to another.
I couldn’t afford to keep the investigators on the case. My only consolation is that the way my dad spends money, he won’t keep any of it for long.
I even called Babaji to ask him to return the money that my mother had stolen from me. In a sweetly humorous Indian voice, he told me that everything happens for a reason, and that the wise man does not seek enlightenment on the path of materialism.
“In that case,” I said, “you’ll want to avoid the path of materialism yourself, and send me the money.”
Babaji gave a long, merry laugh that went on for some time. And then the Master of the Marketplace hung up on me.
It occurs to me now that Babaji would do very well in the picture business. He has all the right moves.
I survived for a few years on residuals from reruns of Family Tree, and scraped enough money together to make a down payment on a third-rate condo apartment in Burbank. I lost the Mini Cooper in a collision with a palm tree. I drive my mother’s car now, and probably will till it falls apart, because she still owns it and I can’t sell it on my own.
I can’t work out entirely what to make of this story. My parents remain a mystery to me.
My impression of Mom and Dad, at least till my eighteenth birthday, was that they were kind, loving parents. My father was controlling, and my mother was a self-absorbed space case, but I have no reason to complain about my upbringing, especially as compared with the chaotic, neurotic, despotic circumstances in which so many of my friends and acquaintances grew up. The work I was doing was hard, but I enjoyed it; I had friends; I was beloved by millions; I had any toy or game that I liked; and my parents threw extravagant parties for me on my birthday and any other day that struck their fancy. I was the center of their world. I never had any doubts that they loved me.
What I have a hard time comprehending is that while I was living my happy life in Beverly Hills, my parents were systematically plundering me. Did they work it out together? I wonder. Did they sit over their coffee in the morning and cold-bloodedly plan exactly how they’d deceive the trust officer and wring another few hundred thousand bucks out of the bank? Was my dad the leader, and my mom his clueless accomplice who never thought to wonder where the money for her yoga vacations was coming from?
I’d like to think so, but the fact that her signature is found on all the incriminating documents argues against this interpretation.
Perhaps they had no more consciousness of their actions than a pair of sharks. Sharks are predators by nature, and not given to self-examination—they consume their prey until they die, and that’s that. My parents saw money and took it. It wasn’t doing anything but earning a little interest, it was badly protected, and the possession of it would give them pleasure. Why not?
I wonder if they ever thought of themselves as thieves. The fact that they both planned their exits so carefully suggests that this theory has merit.
The only conclusion I can draw is that I never knew my parents at all. They remain an enigma. I have no more access to their minds than I do to that of the Man in the Moon.
Do they think about the past? Do they wonder where they’ve been? Do they think about me at all?
Probably not. In Hollywood, you learn it’s possible to create a new existence for yourself. You can abandon your old self and become someone new. In Hollywood you can live out your fantasies and the consequences can be nothing more than a few scratched feet of celluloid. People in Hollywood do this every day.
And this is nothing if not a Hollywood story.
Comments (3)
FROM: TooSaint
Whiny rich kid arent you.
FROM: Coldplay
Makin your such a tool.
FROM: Krumble
Cant even beat a junky like Blogjoy hahaha.
FLASHBACK—SEAN’S POV
There are all sorts of things that can kill you: illness, drugs, war, violence. Desperation can kill as well, especially in a place like Hollywood. I’m a case in point.
But the desperation didn’t kill me, instead it killed a friend.
Timothea Wilhelm was a staff writer on Family Tree during the first season, before she got fired—she really wasn’t a sitcom writer at heart. But while she was there, she met the young director Joey da Nova, who early in his career directed twenty or so episodes. Timmi and Joey met on the show and married two months later, and their combination of talents led to enormous success.
Joey provided a brilliant eye for visual composition and a talent for directing kinetic action. His sinuous camera technique made even staid conversations seem like kung fu combat. He worked very well with actors. Timmi had the sense of a film’s deep structure, the talent for bright, fresh dialogue, and an ability to create character in just a few brief lines—she wrote all the scripts, whether she got credit or not.
Their combined talent happened to be exactly what was required to produce intelligent blockbusters. The Third Assassin, Hedgehog, One Tin Soldier…the films opened big, stayed in theaters for a long time, and earned the respect of critics.
Timmi was tall and glamorous, with abundant chestnut hair—she seemed a throwback to an earlier kind of style, poised and elegant, that you could see on the cover of a 1940s edition of Vogue. Joey was a tough kid from Long Beach, an outspoken Southern California bad boy, often outrageous just for the hell of it. He got headlines with his opinions and public feuds with celebrities, and his delight in sarcasm equaled that of the average eleven-year-old.
Joey and Timmi were forever associated with the words “power couple.” They were seen at premieres, Sundance, exclusive parties, Cannes, the Academy Awards ceremony. They jetted from place to place in their Gulfstream. They had a famously rowdy premiere party on a converted minesweeper on the Thames in which Joey was thrown into the drink and had to be rescued by Bill Nighy. Joey and Timmi wore leathers and were photographed on their identical Vincent Black Lightnings, classic motorcycles that in their day had been the most powerful production bikes in the world, and that they snaked down Parmenter Canyon every morning on their way to their offices.
I was on the Hollywood A-list myself in those days, and so I saw them often at parties and premieres. My dad was always trying to get Joey to direct me in a big movie, and though the film never materialized, it meant that I stayed in touch.
Despite their formidable reputations, I found them approachable. Maybe they had a weak spot for children. In any case, I was invited to many of their parties, and often I was the only kid there.
Timmi was sweet to me. Even while playing hostess to fifty important people on the A-list, she would take me aside for a cookie and a talk about my work. She hadn’t worked in television in years, but for my sake she still pretended to be interested in the world of Family Tree. When I was eleven or twelve, I was madly in love with her.
After my career crashed, Timmi and Joey proved to be the two A-listers who still returned my phone calls. I played minor roles in a couple of their films, and earned enough that I didn’t have to get a low-paying job in some service industry.
T
hen I paid Timmi back for all her kindness by killing her.
This was a result of my brilliant plan to garner publicity by becoming a fake alcoholic. The idea was to attend one of Joey and Timmi’s parties, be seen to be drinking heavily, and then on my way down the canyon run my Mini into a guardrail. I’d chug some overproof rum to boost my blood-alcohol levels, then sit back and wait for headlines and fame.
This plan wasn’t as insane as it sounds. Because the whole point wasn’t whether or not I got labeled as an alcoholic, it was whether or not I got headlines.
Because there would be headlines when I got arrested, and more headlines when I pleaded guilty, and more headlines when I went into rehab, and even more headlines when I left rehab and announced I was clean and sober and ready for work.
There had been a long spell with no work, and I was desperate. I needed to get my name in front of the public again—jog some memories, hit them with some memorable drama, some soap opera. Call attention to the fact that I still existed, and point out that if only I could get a job, the deadly despair that had caused my drinking would abate, and I’d be the happy little boy from Family Tree again, the boy who had warmed their hearts and tickled their funny bones. Hundred-dollar bills and beautiful women would then fall like manna from the sky and attach themselves to me, as they had in the past.
The plan had worked for others. It really had. Why wouldn’t it work for me?
The night Timmi died started as a typical party at the Parmenter Canyon home. Jean-Marc and Jaydee and Allison and a lot of Joey’s regulars were there. The writer/director Sandy McGinnis was present, having just shed her second husband and acquired arm candy in the form of a pool boy from Sonora. Nataliya Hogan was in the house, sixteen years old, with a brand-new driver’s license and a brand-new Boxster Spyder. The party should have been typical, but somehow it wasn’t. There was a strange vibe in the air, something I couldn’t quite identify. I wasn’t the only person there drinking heavily—Timmi got completely skunked, and then had a loud argument with Mac MacCartney, the director who later made Mister Baby Head. It was unclear to me what the argument was actually about. It was Timmi who stormed out of her own party in her own house, taking her Black Lightning down the canyon road toward who knew where. Joey, who was hammered himself, was bewildered, and couldn’t figure out why his wife had gone. Mac mooched around for half an hour, drank half a bottle of wine, and then left.
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