Coreyography: A Memoir (22 page)

“Uh, I’m sorry, sir,” he said, fumbling around with some papers. “Uh, just one moment. Let me see what I can do.”

I don’t know if they threw some poor people out in the middle of the night or what, but a few minutes later we were directed to a small room on the second floor, roughly the size of a shoebox. You would think Michael Jackson would have insisted on something more grand, an elaborate, multiroom suite maybe, but he wasn’t at all bothered by the casual accommodations; he was just happy to have a room. When he realized, however, that there was only one bed, he immediately picked up the phone.

“We’re gonna need a cot.”

He insisted that I take the bed.

*   *   *

I had spent
the night at Hayvenhurst before, but I was usually ushered out early the next morning. So I was surprised when Michael woke up, looking perfectly put together, like he hadn’t slept at all, and said, “What do you want to do today? Let’s have another adventure.”

Unfortunately, I had to go home.

“My dad’s got me doing these side jobs, just to bring in some income,” I said. “I have to film a game show today.”

Michael looked at me strangely. “What kind of game show?”

“
Hollywood Squares.
”

“Corey! No! You can’t do that. That’s a huge mistake!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Shows like that are for people at the end of their careers. They’re for people who don’t have anything else going on. You’re at the beginning of your career. You need to be focused on serious, important projects. Please don’t do that show.”

I had to admit, he made sense. “But it’s not up to me,” I said. “It’s up to my dad. My dad is my manager now.”

“You have to talk to him.”

“Well, maybe if
you
talked to him, my dad would listen.”

“All right,” Michael said. “Call him up.”

That’s how Michael Jackson ended up giving my father career advice. I was floored, however, when my father didn’t take it. He explained that he had already committed me to an appearance. “I made a commitment that my son would be there, so he’s going to be.” I could hear him, his voice crackling over the static-filled phone.

Michael handed me the receiver with a look that meant, Well, I tried.

He dropped me off at the apartment, and I did the game show as planned. It was the last time I spent any quality time with Michael Jackson. I would still see him, of course, many more times over the next several years, but we never shared another night like that, hanging out, having fun, just the two of us.

*   *   *

Hollywood Squares
was
only the latest in a series of bad decisions my father had made concerning my career. I was, after all, living in a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on a sofa bed, and being molested by a man my father had hired, while he was booking me on every low-rent game show on television and ignoring career advice from the most successful entertainer of all time. To top it off, I’d come down with mono on the way home from a publicity trip to New York. The drug use, the incessant partying, coupled with a nonstop schedule of photo shoots, interviews, and appearances, had literally made me sick. I needed a break. But if my father had any say in the matter, I wasn’t going to get one.

“There’s this PBS movie called
The Frog,
” he told me one afternoon at his office. “They’re interested in you for the lead, but you’ll have to go in and audition.”

“You want me to audition for a PBS movie?”

“It’s a really good opportunity.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “How’s that?”

“It’s a starring role, Corey. It’ll be your breakout performance.”

It was true that every role I had played up until that point had been part of an ensemble cast, that I’d been looking for a project in which I could be the solo star. I had been hoping that film would be
License to Drive
. I had already auditioned for the lead role of Les, though each time I went in, the producers were slow to respond, or would suggest that I come in “one more time,” before they made a decision. After my fourth audition, talk had turned to the idea of having me read for the secondary role of Les’s friend, Dean. I wanted my next role to be a starring one, but a PBS movie about a talking frog clearly wasn’t what I had in mind. I needed to be focusing on big-budget studio films with reputable directors attached.

“I think we should wait for
License to Drive,
” I told him.

“Well, they’re not budging. They’re not convinced you can carry the movie. Now, I’ve got you booked to sign autographs at a baseball game this afternoon, so go get yourself ready and I’ll come over to pick you up.”

I went home, sat on the couch, and thought. Michael Jackson was right. My previous four films—
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
(number one at the box office),
Gremlins
(number two),
The Goonies
(number two), and
Stand by Me
(number one)—had already grossed nearly $300 million;
The Lost Boys
(number two) would gross another $32 million on top of that. Now, right when I was starting to pop, my father wanted me to audition for PBS. He was, it seemed rather obvious, on the verge of ruining my career. When he got back to the apartment that afternoon, I told him no. I was going to pass on the frog movie.

“Well, I’m your father and your manager, and I say you need to do this movie.”

“Dad, I’m sick and I’m tired. If it’s not a big-budget studio film, I’d rather take a break. I need the rest.”

“Son, I am telling you, as your father and your manager,
this
is what you need to do.”

To be honest, I wasn’t all that surprised by his response. I took a breath, and went ahead with my prepared speech. “Dad, I don’t want you to manage my career anymore. I love you, and I’m happy to be living with you, but you’re more like a friend than a father and you don’t know how to manage me. I don’t think you’re choosing the right things. I don’t think you’re taking my career in the right direction. I think it’s time I found new representation.”

He looked at me coldly. “So, that’s how it is?”

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re in control, then?”

“Dad, I’m just saying this is the way it has to be.”

“Let me tell you something,” he said, staring me right in the eye. “If I’m no longer your manager, then I’m no longer your father. You can pack your bags and find a new place to live. Now, get the fuck out of my house.”

*   *   *

I called Tony
Burnham. He was the only person in my immediate circle who wasn’t molesting
me,
but who was also old enough to drive a car.

By then, Haim and his mother had moved into an apartment in Tony’s complex, so while I was sleeping on the sofa, Haim was living just five feet from Tony’s doorstep. It was a ridiculous arrangement. At some point amid this chaos, Tony, Ron, Haim, and me all did blow together, even though I was laid up with mono, sick as a dog, and sometimes couldn’t stay awake for more than an hour or two at a time. If it wasn’t the first time Haim experimented with cocaine, it was definitely one of the first. That knowledge has been exceedingly difficult to live with, knowing that I helped influence his drug use and, ultimately, unwittingly contributed to my best friend’s demise.

*   *   *

In the mid-eighties,
very few child stars had filed for (not to mention won) legal emancipation from their parents. Laura Dern, Courtney Love, and Juliette Lewis come to mind, but the maneuver was more often employed to flout child labor laws than it was to recoup squandered earnings or to sever all ties to the parents themselves. The most famous of all legal emancipations, those of Drew Barrymore (1991) and Macaulay Culkin (1997), wouldn’t happen for several more years. So when Ron suggests I get myself a lawyer, I don’t at once know exactly what he has in mind.

Carol Warner, my eighty-year-old attorney, explains the realities of legal emancipation—it’ll mean controlling my own business, writing my own checks, and living in my own apartment. It sounds like a brilliant—and perhaps the only—way to gain real control over my life. During the lead-up to the hearing, however, I’ll have to continue staying at Tony’s (since he seemed like a responsible guardian, at least in the eyes of the court), demonstrate that I can be self-sufficient, and prove that I’ll have the ability to earn income. My agent goes about looking for film deals, while I round up a business manager to add to my management team.

The entire process, despite its potentially drastic and serious repercussions, lasted only a few months, and by the time I arrived at the courthouse on the day of the hearing, I had my regular cast of crazies in tow—Ron and Tony were there, plus Mark Rocco, who was now prepared to hire me for his film
Dream a Little Dream,
as well as a few producers from
License to Drive,
for which I’d now officially signed on (I’d play the supporting role of Dean, since Haim had snatched the lead); all are prepared to testify that I could be independent. Not only did I have the potential for work, I had already locked down two films.

From my seat at the front of the courtroom, I turned around and watched as my entire family filed in. I had had virtually no contact with either of my parents since getting kicked out of my father’s home, and now they were actually
holding hands,
parading around like members of the Brady Bunch. These were two people who had barely spoken in eight years, and what little they did say was usually about how much they hated each other. According to my mother, my father was a deadbeat who wrote child support checks, photocopied them to show me as evidence, and then cancelled them before my mother could collect the funds. According to my dad, my mother was a lying sack of shit. Now here they were, united together against me.

Ironically, parental consent is sometimes required to grant a legal emancipation; the rules vary from state to state and from case to case. After several hours of testimony, the judge called the key participants into his chambers, and explained that my parents would actually have to sign off on the decision we reached here today. By then, my mother had already checked out; she had more or less given up. My father, however, was a bit more persistent.

In preparation for the hearing, my lawyer had given me some homework: I was to find out exactly how much money I had made, and exactly how much money I had left. I was able to track my career earnings through the Producers Pension, Health, and Welfare plans (operated by the Screen Actors Guild); by 1987, I had earned a little more than one million dollars.

My father was convinced that by stepping in during filming of
The Lost Boys
and managing my career for the previous six to nine months, he had neglected his own business and should therefore be compensated for the loss. An appropriate payout, he suggested, would be approximately $40,000—which was interesting; $40,000 was exactly how much I had left.

The judge granted my emancipation, and I wrote my father a check. I was fifteen years old, and—just like that—completely on my own, not to mention flat broke. But at least I was finally free.

CHAPTER 15

Ron and I are on our way to Arizona.

He left his job at New Talent Enterprises and I hired him as my assistant, though a good half of his “official” duties were drug-related. I was also more or less living with him, in the apartment he shared with his mother. It was closer to 20th Century Fox than my sister’s place in Woodland Hills, which is where I had moved immediately following the emancipation (emancipated or not, the judge ordered me to live with another legal adult). But Mindy and I—pitted against each other since childhood—had never gotten along, and I knew the living arrangement wouldn’t last. She had to know about the blow; I was out of my mind on coke round the clock. Plus, Ron was still having his way with me, and that wasn’t something I wanted her to ever know.

Like so many times before, we had been up for several days straight when we came back to Mindy’s apartment to crash. Like before, I woke up to find him crawling all over me, yanking at the waistband of my pants. But on this particular night, he was drunk, and more aggressive than usual. I could smell the booze on his breath, feel the roughness of his stubble against my skin. He kept trying to cuddle me, to
hold
me. He was being blatant about it. And then I felt him take off his pants. I felt his penis rub up against my back.

The time for subtle communication was over, but I have neither the strength nor the courage to confront Ron directly, so I’m thrashing my legs and yanking the covers over me and violently flip-flopping from side to side. It was enough for the night; Ron seemed to get the picture. But I was mortified that all this was happening with my sister asleep in the next room. What if she found out? What if
anybody
found out? I packed my bags, but the only place to go was to Ron’s. The fact that he shared the apartment with his mother made me think I’d be afforded some kind of protection (I wouldn’t), because surely Ron wouldn’t attempt to sodomize me with his own mother in the house (he would).

Now, only weeks later, we were driving to Arizona, ostensibly to visit Ron’s father, a sheriff in a town somewhere near Phoenix. Really, the trip is an excuse to drop acid and take a drive through the wide-open expanse of the desert. Road trips on acid have become one of our new favorite pastimes.

“What’s this music?” I ask, leaning back against the headrest, sinking low into the seat.

“This is Pink Floyd,” he says. “This is a real treat. There’s nothing like Pink Floyd when you’re on acid.”

He cranks up the music. I had always thought Pink Floyd was some kind of hardcore, death-metal band, but these instrumentals, this orchestration—it feels profound. Listening to Pink Floyd on acid is like putting on 3-D glasses—I’m convinced that I can
see
music, that I can feel colors. I feel like some unknowable doorway has opened deep within my mind.