Coreyography: A Memoir (31 page)

Just a few days before we were scheduled to leave the country, we attended a friend’s wedding in Palm Springs. (I actually became ordained online, at the couple’s request, in order to officiate the ceremony.) It was August and it was hot, the temperature had been averaging well over a hundred degrees. Still, we wanted to stay through the weekend, turning the trip into something of a mini-vacation. Besides, Susie was planning on getting a maternal massage, and she needed it; she’d been struggling with pretty severe back pain for the past several months. The morning after the wedding, though, I woke up and reached across the bed for her. Susie wasn’t there.

That part wasn’t unusual. Susie has restless leg syndrome, which frequently kept her up at night. She often left our bed in the wee hours of the morning, in an attempt to get comfortable, and in an attempt not to disturb me. I woke up many mornings to find her curled up in random spots throughout the house. I looked around our hotel suite, and found her in the sitting area, laying on her back with her feet stretched straight up in the air.

“You okay?”

“I haven’t slept,” she said, visibly exhausted. “My back is killing me. Maybe it’s the heat?”

We went about our day as planned, lounging poolside, relaxing and unwinding before we would make the long ride home, host a baby shower, and then make our way across the Atlantic. But all throughout the afternoon, she kept saying she just didn’t feel
right.
She felt off. And then she told me that she hadn’t felt the baby move in a while.

“What?” I shouted, the panic already creeping in.

“I haven’t felt the baby move since yesterday. I think that’s why I was up all night.”

I insisted we head home. I wanted to get Susie nearer to her doctor. It didn’t make sense to stay in Palm Springs, even if nothing was really wrong. We packed up the car and started the two-hour trek, and as we entered L.A. county, she suddenly felt the baby kick.

“There he is!” she shouted, breathing an audible sigh of relief.

“You still want to call the doctor?”

“No, I’m sure everything’s fine,” she said. “I think we panicked for no good reason.”

Now that we were back home, a day earlier than expected, we decided to go out for a quiet dinner and a movie. But as we left the theater later that evening, again Susie said, “I haven’t felt him move.”

“What are you talking about? I thought everything was fine now. I thought you said he moved earlier.”

“He did,” she said. “But I haven’t felt anything else since then.”

“Well, that’s it,” I said. It was time to call the doctor.

We checked into Tarzana Medical Center, and Susie was immediately hooked up to all kinds of equipment and fetal-monitoring machinery. We were shocked to discover that—at just thirty-two weeks along—she had gone into preterm labor. More terrifying still, the ultrasound tech poked and prodded Susie’s belly, but the baby still wasn’t moving; she couldn’t get him to respond. On the fuzzy black-and-white monitor, the baby looked almost frozen. Then, as they moved the wand across Susie’s belly, they discovered a little white blip on the baby’s brain. No one could explain what had caused it, only that, at some point, the baby had suffered a “loss of oxygen,” which had been caused by some kind of “traumatic event.” That’s when the doctor dropped a bomb, the single scariest sentence ever uttered to expectant parents: “Your baby may not turn out …
normal,
” he told us. The baby’s chances of being born with MS were great. He might never run, laugh, or play. The options were laid out before us: leave the baby in and “see what happens,” or take the baby out and hope for the best. We prepared for an emergency C-section.

I stood next to Susie’s head, behind the giant blue surgical curtain separating the top half of her body from the bottom, and when those first few, gentle cries rang out we were both flooded with relief. But then the baby went stiff again, and started turning blue. He was immediately placed in some kind of oxygen tent—it looked like a scene straight out of
E.T.,
the doctors all standing around him in their surgical masks, poking and prodding and pumping. Susie was hysterical. She kept screaming out, “What’s wrong?” So, I lied to her, told her that everything was fine, and prayed harder than I ever had. I begged God to let my son turn out all right. Finally, he started to cry again, more robust now. I could hear him crying his way back to life.

Zen was carted off to the NICU. I stayed with Susie while the doctors stitched her up. But, after the dramatic birth, she was understandably exhausted. I left her to sleep, and crept out of the room to go see my son.

Zen was nestled in another oxygen chamber, intubated, hooked up to wires and monitors, with a little visor-like contraption covering his eyes (he had jaundice, which is common in premies); he looked like a little robot baby. As I bent over to stare at him, a nurse appeared at my side. “Would you like to hold him?”

I hadn’t even realized that would be possible.

She unhooked him from all the machines, wrapped him up like a little burrito, and placed him in my arms. He was just shy of three pounds. His entire head fit neatly within my palm. I had never seen anything so tiny in my life. I was petrified. But as I pulled the visor from his eyes, Zen looked right at me. He zeroed in, as if to say, I’m okay, Dad. I’m a fighter, and I’m going to be just fine. I kissed him. I was going to give my little boy all the love that I had missed.

Leaving my wife and my newborn son to shoot some ridiculous movie in Bulgaria—three days after his traumatic birth—was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. But we arranged for a friend to stay with Susie, and by the time I got back to L.A., Zen was able, finally, to come home.

Still, Zen’s first few months of life were tough. He had difficulty sleeping, terrible cramping and gas, and two hernias, for which he would eventually need a small operation. Like all new parents, Susie and I barely slept. We eventually began taking turns; I’d be up most of the night on dad duty, Susie would take over by morning. I spent most of those first six months terrified that something would go wrong. It was amid this sleepless haze, and a mountain of dirty diapers, that I got a call from the journalist Martin Bashir.

In the spring of 2003, Susie and I had watched the devastating footage that made up the ABC News special
Living with Michael Jackson.
It aired more than a year after Michael and I had had our public falling out, at a time when I was no longer a child, someone who blindly idolized the self-professed King of Pop. I was an adult, and a soon-to-be father, as well as someone who had been abused. But as I watched the show—and just like so many millions of people, there was footage that I found disturbing—I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I remember asking Susie, how could he have allowed this to happen? How could he have been so easily taken advantage of again? It wouldn’t be long before I found out.

Almost immediately after the show’s airdate, Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara D.A., launched an official investigation. By November of that year, Michael Jackson had been arrested. And the first time Martin Bashir came calling, almost two years after taping the interview that started it all, I turned him down. Bashir, however, was persistent. He kept calling me, as well as my agent.

In the weeks that followed, Bashir convinced me that he hadn’t attempted to defame Michael Jackson when he first descended on Neverland Ranch. That seemed plausible. Surely, he and his crew had simply unearthed some uncomfortable information, and the rest had unraveled from there? In the meantime, I had entered talks to star in an off-Broadway play in New York, and was hard at work on my next album. A little publicity certainly couldn’t hurt. And all along, Bashir had claimed that he only wanted to ask me a few Jackson-specific questions; the proposed
20/20
special, on the whole, was supposed to be an hour-long retrospective on my life. I thought it would be a chance to debunk some myths and misconceptions, to show the world who I really am. In the end, he appealed to my ego. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.

Before I actually sat down in front of the cameras, I insisted that none of the footage be used as part of another Jackson exposé. Of course, that’s exactly what happened.

The interview aired in February 2005. As soon as I saw the promos—
Child Actor Corey Feldman Speaks Out Against Michael Jackson
—I had a sense of what I was in for. At the same time, I immediately began racking my brain. I couldn’t remember saying anything that seemed all that groundbreaking. I did admit that Michael had once shown me a book filled with pictures of adult genitalia affected by venereal disease—that happened at his apartment in Westwood, en route to our overnight, undercover adventure at Disney. And I did say that, as a father, I would never have agreed to send my kid to an overnight at Neverland Ranch. At the time, I actually didn’t believe this was a particularly controversial statement.

I don’t have any evidence that Michael ever molested any child, and I have always insisted, emphatically, that he never did anything to me. But he obviously had issues. His health was rapidly deteriorating; anyone who followed the tabloids could easily attest to that. Plus, I had witnessed first-hand his issues with paranoia, had interacted with people in his own camp who perhaps didn’t always have his best interests at heart. It wasn’t the first time such accusations had been lobbed in his direction. And, child molester or not, Neverland Ranch had become a center of controversy, gossip, and rumor. Why would anyone drop off their kid in the middle of all of that?

Not surprisingly, the interview immediately exploded in the press. It looked like an attack piece, which is never what I intended. But I certainly should have been smart enough to predict how this would play out. Not long after the interview, I was subpoenaed to testify in the case; it was widely reported that, come March of that year, I would be taking the stand not in defense of Michael, but on behalf of the prosecution.

When members of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office searched Neverland in the fall of 2003, they seized reams of pornography, but found absolutely zero child porn. They confiscated alcohol, but the notion that Michael had ever plied children with drink—or “Jesus juice,” as it came to be known in the press—was certainly never proven. The D.A. tried to present these artifacts as “evidence” of Michael’s transgressions, because he knew their very existence would be at odds with Michael’s public persona and that, in turn, might “prove” his guilt.

By indulging his inner-child, by building a sprawling home and calling it Neverland Ranch, Michael had become, by the early aughts, a caricature of himself. In that infamous interview with Bashir, he even admitted that he often thought of himself as a real life Peter Pan. When you think of Peter Pan, you don’t imagine that he’s got some porn and some booze stashed out back in his shed. Sneddon knew this, and he sought to exploit that disconnect in order to win his case.

But the truth is that Michael wasn’t a cartoon character. He was a grown—if spectacularly misunderstood—man.

There was one unexpected perk from having agreed to the Bashir interview: because I had gone on the record so many times before in support of Michael Jackson, and because it seemed as though I had suddenly changed my mind, neither the defense nor the prosecution believed I would be a viable witness. Instead of being compelled to testify, I would move to New York with my family and watch the trial unfold from afar.

CHAPTER 22

Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy
was an off-Broadway spoof of the 1980’s cult film starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. It’s a hilarious concept and a wacky script; I played the lead role, a character called—wait for it—
Michael Douglas
. A “traditional” Greek chorus provided the narration, a ridiculous combination of ancient text and not-so-ancient quotes from the original movie.

The play ran from July to August 2005, and though it was a small production, I earned some of the best reviews of my entire career. My stage debut had been a success, and I returned to L.A. with newfound focus.

I had actually been planning on doing more work behind the camera when I got a call from the producer Greg Goldman, who pitched me an idea for a show. It was a scripted sitcom, but it would be filmed to look like a documentary, kind of like
The Office.
It would be a bit like
Three’s Company
, but Haim would play the bad-boy bachelor to Susie’s and my domesticated, drama-free marriage. The working title was
Three’s a Crowd
.

Corey and I had been approached many, many times with ideas for shows and movies over the years. Back in the early ’90s, we shot a pilot for a sitcom that never got picked up. In the early aughts, I even took a meeting with Jeff Cohen, Chunk from
The Goonies,
who had grown up to become a successful entertainment attorney. By the end of 2005, however, it was like everyone in Hollywood had suddenly gotten the memo—ideas for ways to reunite the “Two Coreys” were flying in from every direction. Some pitches weren’t half bad, some were outright ridiculous—someone actually pitched the idea of dressing us as Mounties (the pitch came from Canada), and having us host a cooking show. Of all the ideas I had heard,
Three’s a Crowd
was easily the best of the bunch. I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to go there. In the last few years, Haim had turned into a mess.

Haim often stayed with Susie and I, whenever he was in town, whenever he needed a place to crash for a few days to get on his feet. He stayed with us in the fall of 2001, not long after Susie and I returned from New York, and he stayed with us again in 2003, shortly after we filmed
Dickie Roberts
. That’s when he was at his worst. His hair was thinning, he was close to three hundred pounds, his body was falling apart—still, I had no idea how bad things had really become.

A day or two before he arrived, I got a call from his mother.

“If he’s going to come and stay with you,” she said, “you’ll need to be prepared. So, you should go to the pharmacy and pick up a bottle of charcoal tablets.”