Some Close Encounters

By Ellie McGrath

In the latest remake of the movie A Star Is Born, a rock-'n'-roll manager has a cache of cocaine ready backstage at an outdoor concert. When Kris Kristofferson, playing the rock star, arrives, the manager gives him a "one and one"--a toot in each nostril--just before he leaps onstage. Fireworks!

In the public mind, glamour is the trademark of coke. The archetypal users are still rock stars, movie actors, pro athletes, jet-setters--people who might be assumed to rely on coke to meet the pressures of peak performance. It is true that some show-business figures have used cocaine to bolster their creative energies, and record producers have dispensed the drug to keep rockers recording all night. But many signs indicate that celebrities, like other people, use coke chiefly for recreation. Few dancers will snort coke before a performance; it throws off their precise mind-body coordination. Few football players toot before the big game; those who use drugs might seek the longer-lasting boost of amphetamines, or "speed." Instead, coke fuels the victory parties, fills the void when the applause is over, coaxes away inhibitions. The man in the moon sniffing coke from a spoon: under that tableau at New York City's Studio 54, trend-setters used to disco all night.

Much about the use of cocaine by celebrities has been highly publicized, including the arrests. Among them: Linda Blair, cherub-faced star of The Exorcist; Louise Lasser, the ill-fated Mary Hartman; Symphony Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who plea-bargained down to a disorderly-conduct charge; Rolling Stone Guitarist Keith Richard, whose hard living is legend; Comedian Flip Wilson, who was taken into custody only hours before a scheduled meeting with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. Not even the White House has been untouched. Dr. Peter Bourne, the Carter drug adviser who resigned after giving an aide a prescription for Quaaludes under a fictitious name, once stated that there was "occasional" use of cocaine among White House staffers (although a later charge that Carter's Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan had sniffed it on an outing to Studio 54 proved groundless).

Few celebrities actually go to jail for cocaine habits, but Football Players Randy Crowder and Donald Reese of the Miami Dolphins were not so lucky. Arrested in 1977 for trying to sell a pound of coke to undercover police, they were sent to the Dade County stockade for a year. Texas Rangers Pitcher Ferguson Jenkins made headlines with his arrest and conviction last year after Canadian customs officials found cocaine, marijuana and hashish in his suitcase. Although Jenkins' conviction was erased, he was suspended for two weeks by Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Last February, Thomas ("Hollywood") Henderson, a former Dallas Cowboys linebacker, checked him self into a Scottsdale, Ariz., drug rehabilitation center. Says he: "Drugs became my downfall. I lost friends, family and career."

The National Basketball Association has sponsored a drug education program for seven years. The National Football League has retained professional drug counselors in the 28 N.F.L. cities. Houston Oilers Coach Ed Biles is starting a drug course for his players this fall, to be taught by doctors and the Houston vice squad. Says Biles: "We're trying to stay ahead of the game."

The white tornado seems to have hit Hollywood particularly hard. At this spring's Oscar ceremony, Johnny Carson remarked: "The biggest moneymaker in Hollywood last year was Colombia. Not the studio--the country." Reports abound of coked-up parties and drugged-out meetings. Earlier this year, TV Guide lent a degree of credence to such talk in a two-part series concluding that, among other things, cocaine was partly responsible for the low quality of television programming inflicted upon Americans. Though the articles were understandably short on names and specifics, the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control somewhat hastily set up hearings in Hollywood to probe drug abuse. Even some of the entertainment world's most outspoken opponents of drugs, such as Cathy Lee Crosby and Edward Asner, refused to testify, calling the hearings a witch hunt.

Says Grant Tinker, head of MTM Productions, who took full-page ads in the trade papers denouncing the TV Guide articles: "The blizzard is exaggerated. With the affluence around, I'd guess there's the same amount of use on Capitol Hill and Wall Street." That is not necessarily a comforting defense. Protests Jeff Wald, Helen Reddy's manager and husband, himself a former heavy cocaine user: "I've never seen coke used as a means of barter or a way of making a deal."

Nonetheless, cocaine may be taking its toll. Authoritative reports persist of recording sessions that have to be scrapped because of spaced-out musicians, and of movie shoots that are disrupted because members of the cast or crew are under the influence. According to a member of the Heaven's Gate crew, thousands of dollars' worth of coke was being sent up to the Montana location from Hollywood regularly from July to November 1979.

Julia Phillips, 37, who won an Academy Award for The Sting, admits that she was using cocaine heavily while producing that other-worldly movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hers is a terrifying odyssey from the front lines of the movie business to a retreat behind the white walls of her Benedict Canyon home. She is one of the few celebrities who will talk with candor about a close encounter of the worst kind.

"The reason people who are in the entertainment business are so attracted to coke is that it picks you up," Phillips says. "It's a very erratic business. Say you're an actor and you're performing for twelve weeks and then you wait a half-year for work. I'm still not sure about why I became such a heavy user. I think I used coke as a manipulative instrument. Men traditionally have used coke for sexual favors. I dispensed it for creative favors. I mean, I did get two or three jobs done in a very short time."

During the 18-hour days of filming Close Encounters, Phillips became a dedicated coke user. "It didn't do much for personal relationships," she says, "and a lot of this business is personal relationships. I could stay up all night thinking up ideas, but I wasn't likely to present them in the nicest fashion possible. I mean tact goes out the window."

Phillips began the dangerous practice of freebasing in 1978. She fell into a pattern of staying awake for three days, then sleeping for 24 hours. Her weight dropped from 110 Ibs. to 93. "I looked like someone out of Dachau," she recalls. "I had terrible hallucinations, particularly when night fell. There was always a prowler outside my front door with evil in his heart and a gun in his hand. I thought I had bugs coming out of my skin."

Divorced in 1976 from Producer Michael Phillips, she has joint custody of their seven-year-old daughter. "My little girl used to follow me around the house with a deodorant can spraying behind me because she hated the smell from freebasing," she says. "I started locking doors behind me and finally one morning she said, 'I know what you're doing. It's better if you leave the door unlocked.' "

Finally, worried about her own survival and her ability to care for her daughter, who was urging her to stop, Phillips turned to U.C.L.A. Psychopharmacologist Ron Siegel. "Ron showed me pictures of monkeys that had been fed freebase, batting away at unseen enemies. One of them had retreated from the whole chimp community up a palm tree. I looked at him at the end of the branch, holding on with an expression of such terror, and I saw myself in the face of the monkey."

Phillips estimates that she spent $1 million on cocaine in ten years. Now working on film projects at MGM and a book based on her own drug experience, Phillips says: "Living on the edge is one thing, but when it becomes clear that you are about to fall off, it's another. I don't want to be caught in that cocaine maelstrom again."

Many other show-business people are finding cocaine less than glamorous. Says TV Writer-Producer Edward Zwick (Family): "There's a growing back lash in the industry about it. The way it exaggerates or exploits people's characterological weakness is quite evident." Actor Richard Pryor, who nearly died in a fiery explosion last June, denies that he was using cocaine at the tune, although he admits that he had been freebasing for three days before the accident. He is now living on health foods in Hawaii. John Phillips, 45, former lead singer of the Mamas and the Papas (and no relation to Julia), was arrested at his house in Southampton, N.Y., last summer for conspiracy to distribute narcotics. Both he and his daughter, Actress Mackenzie Phillips, 21, checked in to a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey to cure their cocaine habits. Now they are working as counselors to help other addicts. Says John: "Getting arrested was the best thing that ever happened to me."

The latest antidrug crusade is by Robert Evans, producer of Urban Cowboy and Popeye: involved in a $19,000 cocaine case last year, he agreed to create a series of musical mini-spectaculars for TV and radio, scheduled to debut this fall, in which such stars as Bob Hope, Muhammad Ali and Carol Burnett offer teen-agers an alternative to drugs --namely, self-respect. But the ultimate warning may be the drugs themselves. Says Jeff Wald: "My 18-year-old daughter is totally turned off drugs by seeing their prevalence. We may very well be entering an age of detoxification."

Perhaps. But a detoxified Julia Phillips still admits, "There isn't a day I don't think about starting again. If I were in a room where people were smoking freebase, I'd have to leave be cause it is still too great a temptation. "

--Ellie McGrath.

Reported by Robert L Goldstein/Los Angeles

With reporting by Robert L Goldstein/Los Angeles

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