Leif Garrett - Idol Truth: A Memoir

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Idol Truth:

A Memoir

2019 by Leif Garrett with Chris Epting

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-236-2

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-237-9

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

Interior photographs courtesy of the author.

All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the authors memory. While all of the events described are true, names and identifying details may have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

Every experience is a lesson.
Every loss is a gain.

Sathya Sai Baba

And when they played they really played.
And when they worked they really worked.

Dr. Seuss

M y bedroom is womblike: all dark wood and sealed off on the bottom floor of the house, overflowing with my stuff. A box of 1970s concert T-shirts with my picture on them. Old stage costumes. Lots of CDs and obscene amounts of Hot Wheels and old backstage passes and all-access laminates. I recently took lots of things out of storage and it surrounds me, mingled with newer purchases like candle holders, incense, and other Zen-like items. My personal cave. I live high up in the wild canyons of Los Angeles, with Malibu below on one side and the San Fernando Valley below on the other. At the top of this mountain, my rustic house feels like an aerie. Being nestled up in the trees like this has always made me feel safe and secure. My clock blinks 2:07 a.m. As usual, Im restless and having a hard time sleeping. Maybe its the generations of ghosts from my past that find some perverse pleasure in both haunting and taunting me. Whatever it may be, its the dead of night and Im wide awake, edgy, and alone in my bed.

A full moon in a deep blue summer sky bathes the ancient woods outside in a silvery light. The young bushy-tailed coyote on my property that has accepted me as a friend is yipping somewhere on the hill. Beyond that, all is quiet and still. My orange-brown cat, a formerly feral warrior named Gizmo, aka Walter Kitty, pads over to me before settling in at the end of the bedlike me, restless and instinctively on guard. Then I get a strange urge. I pick up the iPad a friend gave me. Ive sort of sworn off technology, holding out for the longest time in even getting a cell phone because I just did not want to be bothered. I like working with my hands. Painting, writingcrafting things. I always have. Computers have always left me cold. Still, theres this strange urge. I power up the slim machine and the screen illuminates my face, pale blue light in the dark, tightening my pupils. Im curious.

I click a link and then all of a sudden there I am. The child actor. Ive never done this before. Ive never sat and clicked on myself. On the right of the screen other clips of me sit there, waiting for me to choose them. So I do, one after another. There I am in so many movies and TV shows in the 1970s. The Odd Couple . The Dating Game . There I am on The Waltons . I keep clicking. Other people have home movies; I have Hollywood productions to chart my growth, along with European and Asian productionsbasically things from everywhere except the Arctic. My parents and siblings change from scene to scene. A handful of additional clicks and the shy, sensitive young actor magically transforms into the late-1970s teen idol/sex symbol. I have never done this before. And its making me anxious. Nervous even. There I am chatting with Dick Clark on American Bandstand . Seamlessly, I dissolve from being in Japan to being in Australia, then Germany, Korea, England, prancing and sashaying across stages while singing my big top-ten hit, I Was Made for Dancing. Then I come across a video graphic: Leif. Its my network TV special when I was just eighteen years old, with Bob Hope. There I am at the London Palladium doing a comedy bit with the master. I was the youngest person ever at that time to have his own network special. Girls are screaming for me. There I am doing comedy with Brooke Shields and Marie Osmond. Another click and there I am with Tatum ONeal. Models. Playmates. Old girlfriends and lovers. Nicollette Sheridan. I found something beautiful in all of them, and I wanted them all.

I keep clicking. Like so often in my life, I get addicted. I see myself growing older. It hits me: My life is literally flashing before my eyes. And then I get to those clips. The ones that I never wanted to see. The ones in which I have become addicted to heroin. Im watching myself as a man now, and Im watching myself lying to people in a series of interviews. Theres a news clip about my arrest. That damned mug shot. Then I get to the documentary, the one it seemed like the whole world watched about me. The big one. Im sitting there on camera saying that I was clean. But I wasnt. I just wish that I wasnt the only one that thought no one else knew. I was kidding myself and it wasnt funny. That was my secret; at least I thought it was. Did everyone know? Was I kidding myself? The night that show first aired, back in 1999, Janes Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro had a viewing party at his infamous Hollywood Hills house, where we had been doing drugs for years. I had to leave the room. I couldnt stand to watch myself betraying myself. (And Dave, Im sorry about nabbing that ball of tar heroin you left out for someone to steal. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker; you know how addicts are always jonesing with no money in their pockets).

Alone in the dark, its becoming more and more obvious just how many truths I have kept in over the years. Not just from those around me, but most important, from myself. Ive denied and buried so much. Decades worth of emotions, stories, deceit; layers of joy and pain.

Behind those flickering images, I now see a story in front of me, and I know its finally time to tell that story. Theres no more time to waste. No more running from the past. There are no more people to be scared of. No more abusers to hide from. Im tired of the ghosts. Im ready to confront everyone and everything. Im also ready to relive the magic that I got to experience, and there was a lot of it. I decide in that moment that these ghosts need to come out. All of them. So they will.

T he sickening screams were coming at me in stereo. About fifty feet down the hill, my friend Rolands voice, though muffled inside my flipped-over black Porsche 911, still managed to pierce the cool November air. Get me out of here, he wailed. I cant feel my legs.

Up near the top of the hill, where I had just managed to climb in search of an emergency call box, the family whose car we had clipped just before rolling down the embankment was standing outside their car. The father was yelling at me, What the hell were you doing? You could have killed us. Down below, Rolands screams kept wafting up, fainter but still there. The screams of anger and screams of agony transformed a normal night into a nightmare. Just an hour earlier, I had been on top of the world. I was the one everyone desired. I was a jet-set pop star, a pinup, a platinum-haired teen idol with gold and platinum records to back it all up. In this moment right after the crash, scarred and scared, I felt everything being stripped away and my truth being revealed. The singing career, the teen idolit was all a fraud, a fantasy concocted by adults who knew how to make money but knew nothing about protecting a child. I wasnt that made-up androgynous fantasy on countless Tiger Beat magazine covers. I wasnt even a singer. I was an actor, and a good one. I was also, at that moment, a petrified, confused, lonely seventeen-year-old kid on a hillside in the middle of a horrifying Hollywood night that was getting worse by the second. I was also a functioning alcoholic and a drug addict, already hooked on Quaaludes, pot, and cocaine. I had everything, but I had nothing. The screams continued, rattling both sides of my brain, tearing at the seams of my dwindling sanity. I never could stand the sound of screams.