Hollywood Requiem

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

That first night they took away everything--my drugs, my booze, even my wallet, car keys and New Yorker magazine--and left me nothing but the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous and the promise (or was it a warning?) that I was under medical supervision. I was shown to a cold hospital detox room with rubberized sheets.

When the lights were turned off, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I'd made a terrible mistake. So it was a relief the next morning when I was introduced to a strapping, 6-ft., blond-haired, freckled, grinning, giddy fellow named Jay Moloney. He was an agent from Los Angeles, I was told. I was a writer. Our case manager seemed to believe these two professions gave us something in common.

Jay flipped the bag of laundry he was carrying onto his shoulder and shook my hand eagerly. He asked what I wrote, what part of L.A. I lived in. Then he smiled broadly, wagged his index finger at me and told me we were going to "rock this place." Last Tuesday night, four years after we left that place, and following numerous other efforts to clean up, Jay was found hanging in his bathroom, an apparent suicide.

Nothing seemed more unlikely that morning we met. I hadn't anticipated his sort of relentless good cheer on my first day in treatment. The center struck me as a cross between a mental hospital and a minimum-security prison. Yet Jay acted suspiciously happy to be there. I figured him a flake, one of those self-proclaimed talent agents who pass out business cards to aspiring actresses.

But as we became friends, I discovered that Jay was as golden as Hollywood golden boys get, a behind-the-scenes show-biz dealmaker with his hands on the levers of the starmaking machinery. One of the most successful agents in show business and a part owner of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, Jay represented Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman, David Letterman and other major names. He had been the protege of CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz and was already being touted, at 30, as a future studio head. He dated models and actresses, drove a Ferrari, lived in a Hollywood Hills mansion stocked with Warhols, Stellas and Picassos. Before becoming addicted to cocaine, he had been living the kind of life many of us dream of.

I, on the other hand, was in rehab because I hadn't yet really achieved any kind of life. My nascent marriage was showing signs of miscarrying. A contracted novel I had completed was about to be rejected. During the writing of that doomed book, I had taken to ingesting prolific amounts of narcotics. I didn't take these drugs--Vicodin, Percocet, Dilaudid, morphine sulfate, Talwin, Darvon, codeine, the occasional balloon of street heroin--to help me write; I took them to make me feel better about how badly I was writing.

So Jay and I had something very simple in common: we had both done too much. We hadn't known when to stop. We had become addicts. We had gone through dark seasons at the end of which someone--in his case his partners at CAA and in mine my wife--had given us an ultimatum: get clean or get out. And we ended up at this treatment center outside Portland, Ore.

By the time I arrived, Jay had been there two weeks, which to me, just beginning to come down from the pills and dope, seemed like an incredibly long time to stay clean. Over the next few weeks, his robust optimism and constant wisecracking would be an inspiration to me as I muddled through very early sobriety. I had been convinced after that first night that I would never laugh again. Jay was proof that life without drugs could be fun--that you could retain your sense of humor.

He was a tireless booster of whatever happened to be going on at that exact moment--group therapy, meditation, laundry. This enthusiasm was both his greatest strength and perhaps his fatal flaw. If on the job he channeled that eagerness into getting a client interested in a new script or a studio in a project, in treatment he pumped his fist about how great it felt to be drug free. He was always, consummately, in the moment. And for him, there had been some pretty hairy moments. He had begun doing cocaine about six months before, and in a pattern familiar to most addicts had gradually been increasing his consumption until he was ingesting nearly fatal doses. Desperate to stop, he had had elective heart surgery, reasoning that nobody would be insane enough to do cocaine while recovering from heart surgery. Jay was doing blow within two weeks of his operation.

You get very close to the other patients in treatment. Your weaknesses are on display, and you trust the others not to attack you where you are soft. It's how the place works; you're all supposed to get better together. We gathered twice a day for two-hour sessions to process issues of grief, relapse prevention, fears, depression, abuse and insecurity. We were supposed to acquire greater awareness of, and healthy respect for, the disease of addiction by identifying with other addicts, the theory being that it's easier to recognize the manipulations and dissemblings in another person than in yourself.

Jay wasn't gifted with vast self-knowledge. He had become successful so very young--dropping out of the University of Southern California to become an intern at CAA while still a teenager, becoming a full agent by the time he was 21 and a millionaire by his mid-20s--that he never had a chance to figure out who he was, beneath all the trappings of worldly success. He spoke eagerly, with a midrange, clipped California accent, his voice filling the room with vague blandishments about how eager he was to stay sober and how grateful he was to his fellow agents who had intervened to send him here and how he was looking forward to getting back to work.

Maybe it was the black BMW 735 parked outside, or the fact that his agency was still sending videotapes of the latest daily rushes to him by courier, or just that he was so very successful, but Jay never really appeared vulnerable. He talked about being unsure of who he was and what he was doing, and he cried when he was supposed to. But Jay was doing what we called rehabbin', giving the counselors what they wanted, just as in another arena he had got movie stars and directors what they wanted. The only time I really believed him was when he said, over and over again, in the middle of eating a bowl of cereal or rewinding a video, "God, I'd love some coke."

He was an expert at making other people feel special. And of course, during his years at CAA, he had perfected that uncanny knack for taking charge. One weekend Jay persuaded our case managers to allow a sober field trip. He had his assistant at CAA arrange beach houses on the shore for some of us rehabbers. When we arrived at the luxurious quarters, Jay welcomed us from behind a dining table he had converted to a reception desk, where he passed out T shirts reading AWOL FROM A TREATMENT CENTER. That night, at the beach, while dozens of us addicts were on a carnival ride called the Tilt-a-Whirl, I caught a glimpse of Jay in the car behind me. He was smiling, his arm around a cute brunet, obviously pleased with the way things had worked out. This was when he was in his element. We were his clients, and he had put together a terrific package.

Jay and I were discharged--gonged out, we called it--within days of each other. Back in L.A., he called me, and we went out to lunch and talked about what we were going to do now that we were home and sober. I was hoping to get my book back on track. Jay was re-ensconced in his offices at CAA, where he was negotiating feverishly to keep a famous director from defecting to another agency. He was thrilled to be back in the game. And from where I was sitting, he looked like a guy who had got it all together. He had every reason to stay sober.

We met every Tuesday evening for sandwiches at a movie producer's office. Jay, always the dealmaker, had put together a support group of a few of his friends--three writers, a musician and the producer. The point of the gathering was to talk about the challenges of staying sober and to broach topics we couldn't discuss with civilians.

Then Jay missed a few meetings. He stood me up at a breakfast appointment. And when Jay, known as an agent who always returned calls, didn't return mine, I knew he'd slipped. He showed up sheepishly the next Tuesday and recounted his latest run, which included trading his blue Ferrari GTO to a dealer for drugs. Once again I noticed that only when he spoke about the dark excitement of that coke jag could I tell he really believed what he was saying.

Now that Jay is gone, I want to look back and say I could tell he wouldn't make it, that he didn't try hard enough or have sufficient will. But that's all nonsense. Drug and alcohol addiction is a chronic disease that, like diabetes, requires ongoing treatment, according to the American Medical Association. What frightens me is the random nature of this disease. I am in my fourth year of sobriety, but I can think of no real reason why I am sober--or in remission--and Jay is dead. Jay tried harder than anyone I know to beat his habit: four rehabs, a stay on an Israeli kibbutz, a summer picking bananas on an island in the Caribbean, anything to get away from drugs. The last time I saw him, he was just back from the Caribbean, looking tan and fit. We met in New York City, while he was putting together another management company. However, within a few weeks he had slipped again.

Addiction is the only disease in the world that convinces the afflicted he does not have it. Jay used to say he knew he suffered from a virulent strain of addiction, but I wonder if he knew himself well enough to believe it.