The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(110)

As beautiful as this setup was, I concluded I had better things to do in Burbank. I was already driving back there three or four times a week to see my drug buddies and fortify my stash. So I disenrolled, thinking no further down the line than Cotton Candy and the paycheck it promised. I’m not sure I would have necessarily benefited from a college education, but I regret that I never gave college a fair shake. By the way, Cotton Candy was my first and last major screenwriting credit to date.

I did myself no favors by entering adulthood free of the regimented structure of school or series television. By the 1980s, my boozing and using were no longer the merry, consequence-free habits I had perceived them to be as a teenager. I wasn’t content merely to snort cocaine, for example. Most people had never heard the word freebasing until Richard Pryor burned his face trying to smoke vaporized coke in 1980, but when I heard about his accident, I thought, Yeah, I know exactly how that happened.

I spent the 1980s skidding along bedrock. In one particularly terrible bout of drug-induced paranoia, I pieced together some facts that, to me, irrefutably proved that I was the Antichrist: (1) I shared a birthday with Adolf Hitler; (2) When I was ten, I played a boy who predicted the end of the world in the anthology TV series Night Gallery; and (3) when I was twenty, I played an outcast cadet at a military academy who becomes possessed by Satan and murders his tormentors in the horror movie Evilspeak.

There was a period when I didn’t even have keys to Mom and Dad’s house in Toluca Lake, my childhood home, because they couldn’t trust me in my behaviorally compromised state. I can’t blame them. I scared the hell out of myself. I also scared the hell out of my neighbors. One day in 1988, I was so wigged out on speed and liquor that I literally tried to jump out of my body, my very being. In so doing, I jumped over a property wall and into the yard next door, where my unglued presence terrified the guests at what had been a sedate, pleasant gathering. They called the cops on me.





RON


I sensed something amiss with Clint as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. He had taken to arriving late for events and appointments, not his normal style. When he did this on Dad’s birthday, his voice ragged and his eyes puffy as he finally joined us for a celebratory dinner at the Smoke House, I could no longer rationalize his drug use as recreational. I had by then witnessed enough behind the scenes in show business to know that Clint couldn’t keep living the way he was if he wanted to survive into the next century. I confronted him with my concerns in 1980, when we went together to Super Bowl XIV, which was played between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Los Angeles Rams at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. “It’s one thing to use drugs and another thing to let drugs use you,” I told him.





CLINT


Ron gave me a kindhearted big-brother talk. He does those well. He always begins with the words, Now I’m going to give you some unsolicited advice.

Over the years, I have sometimes gotten irritated when Ron uttered those words. Oh, jeez, here it comes again, The Talk. But I’ve also always appreciated his efforts and loved him for trying. He’s never approached things subliminally. He’s never tried to couch what he was doing in some sort of BS parable or metaphor. He addresses the subject straight-on.

I politely received Ron’s admonition. But I was at the Super Bowl, for crying out loud, not on a psychiatrist’s couch. I told Ron that he had made some good points. But I wasn’t ready to act on them. I was still having too good a time and had no idea how worried my family was.





RON


Clint’s behavior weighed heavily on my mind during one of my last acting jobs, in a 1980 TV film called Act of Love. Mickey Rourke and I played brothers. In the movie, his character has been rendered quadriplegic by a motorcycle accident. He begs his younger brother, my character, to end his life. The younger brother heeds the older’s wishes. Then he has to stand trial for his actions.

I had an emotional monologue to perform on the witness stand, explaining how much I loved my brother, how much he meant to me. Truth be told, it had been years since I had gone to a deep emotional place in a scene; somewhere in my adolescence, I had closed off my access to raw feelings. I resorted to fake tears and ammonia capsules, show-business crutches that were supposed to be anathema to us Howards.

But on the day we shot the courtroom scene, I began to connect the speech I had memorized with my worries about Clint: my barely acknowledged fear that I could possibly lose him to addiction. In the wide master shot, I could feel my face flushing hot with emotion. The director, Jud Taylor, was sensitive to actors. He whispered in my ear that I should go somewhere quiet and hang on to whatever I was working with.

Within minutes, the crew had hustled a camera into position for my close-up. When Jud quietly called “Action!,” I let images of Clint, loaded and straight, flood my mind as I spoke. I was no longer recalling Gulliver the dog’s death; I was connecting to my mature fears about my vulnerable little brother and what he was going through.

That’s the take that the director used. It’s the last time that I wept real tears on-screen.





CLINT


I tried to get sober a few times, the first in 1984, of my own initiative. I opened up the Yellow Pages and found a listing for Beverly Glen Hospital, which offered a twenty-eight-day inpatient program for treating drug and alcohol dependency. Little did I know how fortunate I was to happen on this of all places. A mere two years earlier, Beverly Glen had hosted the very first meetings of Cocaine Anonymous—it was ground zero for what is now a worldwide organization.