Coreyography: A Memoir (7 page)

It’s my brother’s room. His crib is in the corner. I don’t know where Devin is. I think my mother and I are the only two people in the house. “Take off your clothes,” she hisses. I do as I’m told while she bolts to the other end of the room and starts pulling at the window. It dawns on me what she’s reaching for—the long wooden dowel resting in the sash, acting as a window stop. It’s at least an inch in diameter, solid oak, heavy. For a fleeting moment, I feel like laughing. Surely this must be another of her games. Surely, she must be joking.

The first blow stings, but it’s more of a shock than anything else. It’s when she raises the dowel high over her head, again, that the pain starts to register, searing the top of my back and my shoulders, and I start running in circles around the room.

“How could you fucking do this to me?” she screams. She is out of control, wild-eyed, like an animal. Her face is bright red and blotchy, her cheeks are streaked with mascara. “You know I need this fucking money. I will kill you. I will fucking
kill you,
you worthless piece of shit.”

I drop down on all fours and scurry underneath Devin’s crib, wedging myself as far back as I can, my spine stretched out flush against the wall. I can see her feet, the chipped toenail polish, and then the sawed-off end of the stick as it comes charging toward me. She’s bent at the waist, ramming the pole under the cotton eyelet dust ruffle, jabbing at my ribs, my arms, my face. My skin is raw and bleeding. I think that, maybe, she is serious. She really does want to kill me. Then everything goes black. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what happened after that.

*   *   *

The next morning
I fed and changed Eden and Devin, crept out into the living room, and turned on the television. I was scrolling through the channels, looking for something to watch, when—all of a sudden—I couldn’t breathe. The wind had been knocked out of me with a swift swat to my back, the remote ripped from my fingers, flung across the room to the couch.

“You think you’re going to watch TV? You’re not watching TV, pal. You’re fucking grounded.”

It was Tom, my mom’s new boyfriend.

Ironically, things with Tom had started out pretty well. I liked him better than Max, the first in a steady stream of men who filed in and out of our house in the months following the divorce, the guy who drove a Harley and wore a leather motorcycle jacket and more or less left me alone. Tom, unlike those other men, had actually taken an interest in me. He would rattle up to the house in his rusted out pickup and take me for long hikes in Chatsworth Park. I loved climbing the switchbacks, scrambling to the top of a boulder outcrop and looking south over the sprawling suburbs of L.A. But then Tom started inviting some of his buddies along on our regular hikes, and someone would inevitably show up with a six-pack. Tom, it turned out, was very different when he drank. By the time I realized that, he had more or less moved in.

At first, the worst part about having Tom around was that he would emerge from my mother’s room and stumble down the hallway to the bathroom, stark naked. I had never seen a grown man naked before. It made me feel strange and uncomfortable. But then one night he came home drunk, reeking of booze. He punched his hand clear through the front door, leaving sharp shards of wood and glass, as well as smears and drips of blood, in the foyer. This was
after
he ripped the screens from the windows and left them in twisted heaps and piles around the lawn, and screamed—demanded—to be let in. Finally, Mindy called the police. My mother swore that we’d never have to see Tom again, but a month later he was back.

“You’re spoiled and you’re lazy and now you got yourself fired. The least you can do is clean your mother’s fucking house,” Tom is saying to me now, towering over me, a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’m going to teach you what
real
work is. You’re going to learn some fucking responsibility. Get the broom.”

My mother has stumbled out of the bedroom. She’s half-dressed and her makeup is smeared across her face. She slumps down in the couch cushions. I look at her, but she shrugs.

“Didn’t anybody teach you how to fucking sweep?” he asks after I’ve pulled the broom from the pantry and started dragging it across the floor, pushing mounds of dog hair into tidy little piles.

“We always had a maid,” I say.

“Well, no more maids when you lose your job. That’s what happens when you’re broke.”

*   *   *

“I’m going to
kill you.”

My mother delivers this line in a sing-song cadence, like she’s just suggested we go on a picnic, or make balloon animals, or fly a kite in Chatsworth Park. I haven’t seen her fully lucid in weeks. “On Saturday,” she says, with a wink.

All week long she taunts me, ticking down the days until my eventual demise. Years ago—no,
weeks
ago—I would have thought she was kidding, that this is just her macabre sense of humor talking, but after the beating under the crib, I can’t be so sure. I need help. Real help. And then it occurs to me where I might get it.

On Saturday morning, I make my escape. After scribbling a quick good-bye note and packing a small bag of clothes, I sneak out the back of our house, scale the privacy fence, tear through the neighbor’s yard and down the hill, and for another mile or two, all the way to the local police station. I push open the giant glass doors and walk right up to the first man I see in uniform. I try to explain to him that my mother is torturing me, that I’m lonely and abused and afraid for my life. That I think, next time, she really will kill me, but the words are coming out in a jumbled heap.

“Please don’t make me go back there,” I finish, out of breath. “I’ll go anywhere but back there with her.”

He peers down at me from behind a clipboard. He seems annoyed. He sighs. “Is your father around?”

I think about how to answer that, how to explain that my father isn’t much of a father, that he left home because at least
he
knows that my mother is crazy, but he didn’t take me with him. But I soon realize none of that matters anyway, because I can’t remember his new phone number. When the officer dials the number I’ve given him, instead of my father answering, it’s my agent on the other end of the line.

CHAPTER 4

By early 1982, I’ve gotten my career back on track. I’m in the pilot for
Gloria,
a spin-off of
All in the Family
starring Sally Struthers. I work with Gary Coleman on a made-for-television movie called
The Kid with the Broken Halo
. I snag the role of Corey “Kip” Cleaver in
Still the Beaver
, a two-hour “reunion” movie on CBS. And then I get a call from my agent about an upcoming film. It’s big, she tells me. Very hush-hush. They want me to come in and read for a part.

“Great,” I tell her. “What’s the movie?”

“It’s called
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
. Steven Spielberg is directing.”

*   *   *

Nine years earlier,
in the summer of 1973, a virtually unknown director was hired to make a film abut a maniacal great white shark terrorizing a tiny New England town. Despite a ballooning budget, massive production days, and a finicky animatronic title character, he created an Academy Award–winning masterpiece, spawning “Jawsmania,” inventing the “summer blockbuster,” and grossing nearly half a
billion
dollars in the process. The twenty-nine-year-old then rebuffed offers to direct
Jaws 2,
as well as a smattering of superhero movies, opting instead to write and direct a strange little film about UFOs.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
earned nine Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director. By the time I show up at the MGM lot in Culver City,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
has just hit theaters. Steven Spielberg has been anointed. He is the Next Big Thing.

I’m reading for the part of Elliott’s best friend. It’s a pivotal role and I’m nervous. But Steven, who at thirty-six looks to me like a young Chevy Chase, is nothing like what I expected. He is free-spirited and funny; we hit it off right away. These days it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about how nice Steven Spielberg is, but it’s true—he really is one of the kindest men in the business.

“That was great. Really great,” he tells me when I’ve finished with my audition. “You’ve got the part.” Then he drapes his arm across my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. “Why don’t I show you how things work around here?”

Steven is busy producing (and according to murmurings within the industry, unofficially directing) a new horror film, so he takes me on a tour of the various soundstages until we reach a giant set, which will be at the center of a terrifying scene: the actress JoBeth Williams and her on-screen children will appear to be flying through the air, grabbing onto headboards and doorjambs to avoid being sucked out a window in their California home by a strange demonic force called The Beast. Steven shows me how the actors will dangle from harnesses, how their hair and clothes will be blown back by the strength of several industrial fans, while the interior of the room—a huge motorized set piece—will rotate completely upside down. Effects-wise, this is groundbreaking stuff. The film, he tells me, is called
Poltergeist
.

*   *   *

E.T.
still had
a solid six months left of preproduction, so I knew it would be awhile before things got rolling. In the interim, I auditioned for a show called
Madame’s Place,
a sitcom featuring the bawdy, double-entendre-laced comedy of “Madame,” a lifelike puppet.

Madame’s Place
was unusual in that it was a first-run syndication show, meaning that it was scheduled to air on a lot of different channels (rather than owned—and aired—by only one network), five days a week. The first order was, therefore, enormous, somewhere between fifty and a hundred episodes, way more than the standard thirteen. This would guarantee a steady income, and my family needed the money. But I was worried that I’d be tied down to a silly television show when the call for
E.T
. eventually came. “Go in on everything,” my mother told me. “Better to get the offer and turn it down than to not get the offer at all.”

I did get an offer, though it was for less money than I had been making. My mother made me take the part anyway. So, I became Buzzy, Madame’s nosy next-door neighbor.

Working with Madame—to my surprise and utter delight—was a lot like working with a major Hollywood movie star. Her personality was so big; I could be doing a scene and completely forget that I was talking to a puppet, that she wasn’t actually real. Her puppeteer, Wayland Flowers (who was already famous for his appearances alongside Madame on
Hollywood Squares, Laugh-In,
and
Solid Gold
), made her seem larger than life. And Wayland, I quickly realized, was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. On breaks during filming he would invite me back to his dressing room and show me how he operated the sticks to move Madame’s hands and head, how he transformed his own voice to create something entirely new. At home I had a little stuffed monkey with Velcro hands and feet. It reminded me of Madame, so one day I decided to bring it in to show off to my new friend.

“Can I borrow that?” he asked me.

A few days later, he brought it back to set, completely restyled to look like one of his puppets, complete with the little sticks to move the monkey’s hands and feet.

“I gave him an upgrade,” Wayland said when he showed me. “Now he works just like Madame.”

I was elated. The great Wayland Flowers had
made
me a puppet. But when I showed it to my mother, she harrumphed.

“Wayland Flowers is gay,” she told me.

I didn’t know what that meant, of course, but it wouldn’t really have mattered if I did. Practically no one in the entertainment industry was “out” back in the early ’80s.

“How do you know he’s
gay
?” I asked.

“
Trust me,
” she said. “I just know.”

Wayland was the first in a series of older men in the industry to take me under his wing. The second was an actor named Joe Penny, who guest-starred with me in an episode of
Lottery!,
a short-lived show about two guys who travel the country presenting lottery winnings to strangers and watching how the money changes their lives. I played a troubled kid (a role I was starting to get cast in a lot), and I remember that at the end of filming, Joe Penny gave me his phone number. “Call me anytime,” he told me, “if you ever want to catch a ball game.”

Joe and I spoke on the phone several times over the next few months. He gave me career advice. We talked about what kinds of roles I might take. He was someone I could actually trust. I didn’t have many people like that in my life.

My grandparents, however, were not impressed.

“Why is this grown man giving you his number?” my grandmother asked me, when she caught me up late, talking on the phone. “It’s not normal, Corey. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Joe just wants to be my friend,” I told her. “This is how Hollywood works. The older guys reach out to the kids.” That was how I saw it and, eventually, that’s how my family saw it, too. The more adult males I befriended, the less strange it started to seem.

*   *   *

As production on
Madame’s Place
dragged on, I started to become more and more concerned about
E.T.
I hadn’t heard a peep in months—not from my agent, not from the casting director, not from MGM, not from anyone.
Nada.
And then finally, on a rainy, otherwise uneventful afternoon, Steven called me at home.

“Hey, Corey,” he said. “How ya doin’?”

“When are we getting started?” I blurted out. “I’ve been waiting and waiting!”

I could hear Steven breathing on the other end of the line and, immediately, my heart sank. I could already tell, this was not going to be the call I had been hoping for.