Coreyography: A Memoir (17 page)

I had expected him to be older; he was probably in his early twenties. But at the screening that evening, he went on and on about all the young actors he knew in Hollywood. He seemed like a good person to know. He stuck by me most of the night, and later, as I was preparing to leave the event, he asked if I might want to hang out.

“My mom doesn’t really let me out much,” I told him. “I’m not really allowed to go out with friends.” (Encouraging me to attend industry parties was one thing; letting me out on a random afternoon just to have “fun” was not something my mother was going to agree to.)

“Hmm…” He thought for a moment, brought his hand to his chin. “Maybe we could have a
secret friendship
?”

That sounded like a great idea to me, but I still needed to manufacture an excuse to get out of the house. By then, my brothers needed constant supervision, and my sister had already begun slowly easing her way out the door. That left me as the sole “responsible party,” the only one available to watch my brothers while my mother slept all day in her cave.

There was only one surefire way to get out: my mother was still obsessed with my weight, so she permitted me to leave to go jogging. I’d put on my sweats and run a few blocks, to a poured-cement stairway that descends a grassy hill, and wait for Marty to pick me up on the street, where he’d be out of view if my mother happened to look out the window. Marty would take me to the local mall or an arcade, for a half hour to an hour at a time. If, upon returning, my mother seemed at all suspicious, I’d just explain to her that it was “a long run.”

Within weeks, Marty had introduced me to Jason Presson, the third star of Joe Dante’s follow up to
Gremlins,
an action-adventure film called
Explorers,
after River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke. Jason was awkward and shy and, frankly, a little off; he walked around with messy hair and scruffy clothes, like he didn’t come from much, like his family didn’t have money. But he was incredibly smart. Brilliant, in fact. The kind of kid who quite literally reads the dictionary for fun, who hangs back when others are deep in conversation, taking it all in, and only speaks his piece when everyone else is finished. I liked him instantly, and the three of us—Marty, Jason, and I—became practically inseparable.

One afternoon, Marty picked Jason and I up in his station wagon. I was riding shotgun, goofing around and being silly, doing character voices and generally sort of carrying on; Jason was in the backseat. I can’t remember what started it, whether it was an argument or good-natured teasing—I just remember Jason saying, “Shut up, Marty!” over and over—until, suddenly, he reached across the seat and whacked Marty over the head with his dictionary. Marty swerved, quickly corrected himself, but then he started breathing heavy, freaking out. I gripped the door handle, tugged on the seat belt strapped across my chest. I didn’t understand what was wrong.

“Oh, God. I’m having an attack. It’s gonna bring on an attack.”

He steered the car onto the shoulder, reached for his wallet, and flung a card at us, a medical information card about epileptic seizures. “Read the card”—he coughed—“you’ll know what to do.”

Then he started shaking, convulsing. It was scary, but it somehow brought us all closer. Maybe that’s why, a few weeks later, I agreed to sell Marty some memorabilia from
The Goonies.
Because forty dollars for the bicycle I rode all throughout production, and another twenty or so for my Members Only jacket, seemed like a good deal at the time.

*   *   *

In three months
time, I went back to read for Joel.

By then, the field of potential actors who might play Edgar and Alan Frog, the comic book–obsessed vampire hunters of Santa Carla, California, had been narrowed down to a select few. I read for Joel, first by myself, with my new long hair and my new tough look, before he started pairing the actors off. I watched as Joel tried this Edgar with that Alan, that Alan with this Edgar, which is common in the casting process—matching actors with one another to gauge their chemistry, to see how they look on screen together, to confirm that their ages, sizes, physical characteristics, and temperaments seem to fit. Slowly, however, the other Edgars started falling away.

Next, I was paired with a number of different Alans. The third actor I read with was a kid named Jamison Newlander, and I knew right away that there was nobody else who could play that part; his timing was incredible. Anything I threw out, any ad lib or improvisation, he reacted to perfectly. It was as if he’d been in my living room with me, practicing for weeks. Before long it was clear—to everyone—that Jamison and I were the Frog brothers.

A short time later, I was at a wardrobe fitting with Joel at Warner Brothers. He showed me the costume department, the makeup department, introduced me to a lot of people with whom I would be working. We were figuring out my character’s trademark costume, the camouflage, the red bandana, when the phone rang.

“Oh, it’s very exciting,” Joel started. “I have this beautiful cast. Oh, my God, so many great actors all together. We have Jason Patric, who’s just
gorgeous,
and the great Dianne Wiest, and Jami Gertz, who’s just this fabulously talented little actress. And all this fresh new young talent, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim…”

“Wait, what?” I blurted out. Joel waved me off, but I must have looked like a cartoon character, my eyes popping out of my head and steam coming out my ears. I hadn’t met this Corey Haim character, but I’d been hearing about him for months. He had auditioned for Mouth, my role in
The Goonies.
He had won the role of Lucas, a job I had auditioned for and hoped would be my breakout role. And, just a few weeks earlier, he’d even moved in on my would-be girlfriend. There was clearly a new Corey in town, and he was starting to become a pain in my ass.

The Youth in Film Awards, now called the Young Artist Awards, are like the Oscars for child actors. I had been nominated every year since 1983, for guest roles in
The Love Boat
and
Lottery
and starring roles in
Gremlins
and
The Goonies.
It was backstage at the Ambassador Hotel that I met a beautiful little red-haired girl in a pink dress, cute as a button, with a spray of strawberry freckles on her face. Her name was Robyn Lively, and her entire family was in the business; her mother, Elaine, was a talent manager, her brother Jason was an actor, too (he played Rusty, one of Chevy Chase’s kids in National Lampoon’s
European Vacation
); Blake Lively of
Gossip Girl
fame is Robyn’s half sister. The moment we met, I was instantly in love.

Robyn and I spent hours on the phone after that—she had this adorable Southern accent, which made everything she said sound that much cuter—when, suddenly, she started talking about this Corey Haim.

“What’s with this Haim kid?” I interrupted her. I had been planning to tell her how much I liked her; I was waiting for the right time to plant a kiss on her and make her mine, but this Corey Haim conversation was throwing a wrench in all that.

“Oh, my gosh, do you know him?” she gushed. “He’s such a sweetheart, and so talented. I just love him. He even comes and visits me sometimes. Corey Haim, bless his heart. He’s just the sweetest thing.”

“So … do you
like
this guy?” I asked tentatively. “I thought you and I were … I thought we were sort of … a
thing
.”

“You and I? Oh, honey, you’re more like my little brother,” she said gently. “But Corey Haim is somebody that I … we’re sort of dating.”

Whoever this Corey Haim was, I officially hated him.

It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks later when I came home to find this message waiting for me on the machine:

Hey, man. It’s Corey. Corey Haim. How are ya? Listen, I’m really excited ’cause I heard we’re going to be working together on
The Lost Boys.
That’s really cool. And we have the same name, so we’re probably going to end up being really good friends. Why don’t we plan a time to get together, man? I’d love to get to know you. Maybe we could go to the beach, throw a football around? I’m staying with my dad here in L.A. Maybe we could meet up with you. Let’s put something together, man. Call me.

Damnit, I thought. This Corey Haim kid really
did
seem like a sweetheart. And it was really cool of him to make the first move and reach out. I didn’t want to like him, but I could already feel him getting in.

*   *   *

We met at
Paradise Cove on Malibu Beach—ironically, the very same place we would eventually shoot National Lampoon’s
Last Resort,
our fifth film together—on a gloomy overcast day, our fathers in tow. It was the first visit I’d had with my dad in months, but it was as if Haim and I had known each other our whole lives. We had the same sense of humor, the same crazy ambition, the same interest in fashion, the same penchant for troublemaking, the same quest for adventure. It was an instant, electric bond. Even our dads got along.

After a few hours spent tossing a football on the deserted beach, we went back to Haim’s apartment in the Valley, which is when I noticed that he was wearing a short gold chain around his neck, with a little charm that said “222.”

“222? What’s that?”

He fiddled with the chain at the base of his throat. “Oh, it’s just a thing with me and my dad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, 222. It’s my favorite number. That’s
my
number, man.”

“Well, that’s pretty weird,” I said, “because
my
number is 22.”

I have always had a passing interest in numerology. Twenty-two is considered a “master number” and sometimes called the “master builder”; it’s somewhat sacred even, the most powerful of all the numbers. I had never met anyone else with the same interest and certainly hadn’t met anyone else with a number so close to mine.

“No way,” Haim said, amused.

“Yeah.”

“
No way
.”

“Yeah.
”

“Wait a minute. Your name is Corey, my name’s Corey. You’re Jewish, and I’m Jewish. You’re an actor, and I’m an actor. And your number is 22, mine’s 222?”

To two fourteen-year-olds, these coincidences—this cosmic connection—well, it all seemed very
deep.

Haim started to confide in me, about some intensely personal stuff, very quickly after that. Within hours of our first meeting, we found ourselves talking about
Lucas,
the film he made in the summer of 1985, the role I had wanted for myself. At some point during the filming, he explained, an adult male convinced him that it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the business to have sexual relations, that it was what all the “guys do.” So, they walked off to a secluded area between two trailers, during a lunch break for the cast and crew, and Haim, innocent and ambitious as he was, allowed himself to be sodomized.

“So…” he said, “I guess we should play around like that, too?”

The thing about sexual abuse is that it’s so taboo, so humiliating and depressing and generally difficult to comprehend, that it’s not very often openly discussed. For these reasons, it’s also often mischaracterized and misunderstood. Just because Corey wasn’t held down and physically restrained doesn’t mean he wasn’t raped. Just because he technically “allowed it,” doesn’t mean the abuse was somehow his fault. And it certainly doesn’t mean that he
asked for it
. Of course, this is a rather common defense among the accused—according to the
Los Angeles Times,
even Marty Weiss, sometime before his 2011 arrest, suggested that the defendant in his case “invited the sex” and that the Penn State scandal “was different because ‘those kids didn’t want it.’”

What researchers and psychologists understand now is that sexual promiscuity, sexual acting out, and an “inappropriate sexual knowledge and interest” are some of the strongest signs that a child has been sexually abused. And Corey talked about sex more than anyone I have ever known. He was abnormally sexualized. It was clear to me even then, on that first day that we met, that something had been done to him.

“No, that’s not what kids do, man,” I told him. “I’m a virgin, and I’ve never done anything like that. It’s not …
normal.
”

“Well, that’s what he told me. If you want to be in this business, you have to do these things.”

“Naw, man. I don’t know where you got that,” I told him. “I don’t think that’s true.”

In addition to being abnormally sexualized, Haim was also extremely hyperactive. He was constantly eating candy, or stuffing something else in his mouth, or talking a mile a minute, or rummaging through things, leaving a trail of destruction and clutter in his wake. Not long after his death, a costar or two commented on how hyper he had been during the filming of his final movie, how he seemed desperate for attention and affection. But he’d been like that for as long as I’d known him.

*   *   *

In the final
weeks before taking off for Santa Cruz, which would provide the backdrop for the fictional coastal town of Santa
Carla
(apparently, the mayor of Santa Cruz was none too happy about his town being portrayed as the “murder capital of the world” in film; we took Santa Cruz and the neighboring town of Santa Clara and mashed them together), I was struck by the ways in which my life had become a kind of dichotomy. On the one hand, I had impressed Joel Schumacher and booked
The Lost Boys
, I had found a new friend in Corey Haim, and just two weeks before leaving town, I met a beautiful young actress named Katie Barberi.

I had been invited to participate in a charity event at Raging Waters, a water park in San Dimas, California, about a half hour east of downtown L.A. There were lots of young actors there that day—Alyssa Milano and Scott Grimes come to mind—as well as Katie, who had filmed an episode of
Kids Incorporated
and an episode of
Silver Spoons
, but was more or less new to the business. She had these big, thick Brooke Shields eyebrows and the widest, sweetest smile; we fell into flirting immediately. That progressed to hand holding, then to cuddling each other on various rides, then to making out under the waterfalls. It seemed like the height of romance, and I couldn’t believe that I had finally found someone to love, who actually, unconditionally, loved me back (for Katie, my budding film career was irrelevant, my status in the business unimportant).