Hollywood HIGH

I can pinpoint the instant I became fascinated with Hollywood's denial of its drug problems. The week of the publication of a magazine piece in which I had profiled a gifted, tumultuous young star--who sounded justifiably proud of his hard-won sobriety--I spotted the same actor, all alone, snorting coke in the corner of a theater lobby at a glittering opening night performance.

I know a dentist who can tell from the color and condition of an actor's gums onscreen whether or not he does cocaine. But you don't need a Harvard medical degree to notice celebrity presenters on award shows betraying odd, telltale symptoms--glittery eyes, constricted ("pinned") or dilated pupils, unusual speech rhythms and delayed reaction times--that suggest they may be flying high. And it doesn't take a brilliant psychologist to decode why certain actors sound scrambled and erratic in interviews, or why certain stars repeatedly drop out of major movies. A producer of a recent big-budget debacle confesses privately that the cocaine-friendly shenanigans of his stars may have added as much as $5 million to the budget.

Yes, Hollywood may loudly proclaim itself on the wagon, but rumors steadily build that as many as a dozen of its more promising young players snort, smoke or shoot heroin. That is, when they're not shooting "speedballs," that delirious combination of coke and heroin that killed John Belushi. "The industry is in massive denial," says a private psychotherapist who specializes in celebrity dependence and codependence. "When a coworker on a movie is addicted to coke, for instance, it's obvious to anybody who wants to see and to hear. People in this business must stop covering up for each other when it comes to the adolescent angst and societal pressure that fuel drug abuse, because addiction can be cured."

Movie kids are not different from other teens. If anything, their dice are twice as loaded. I've seen the terror in many young performers' eyes when they allude to people in their lives who depend on their income. One has an erratic, scared-of-growing-old mom who keeps getting dumped by pretty-boy model types. Another is trying to help his brother avoid a fifth jailing. More than one have reclusive half siblings who need to ease the pain of the overwhelmingly obvious fact that they were born less pretty and less talented. Meanwhile, some are burdened with fathers whose treatment for depression they pay for. "Kids practically kill themselves to make it in this business," observes an agent to the young and the hot. "Some who do make it attract unheard-of salaries, hordes of fans, and entourages who fawn over them, hangers-on who marvel at their every word. Say they do a movie. Then, the pressure kicks in: 'Will I be good in it? Will I be so good the leading man will have me cut out of it? Will the studio promote it or dump it? Will critics like it but audiences avoid it like the plague--or vice versa?' And so on. Meanwhile, they're still kids with raging hormones, family issues, relationship problems, insecurities. At night, they often find themselves alone and questioning whether anyone wants them for themselves. The pressure and pain from all that can become intolerable." Enter the help-me-make-it-through-the-night stuff.

In Hollywood, drugs have always been plentiful, but they began a spectacular ascent during the let-it-all-hangout '60s and crested during the disco-till-you-drop '70s. During all of it, few major league Hollywood bashes failed to offer an open bar and complimentary smorgasbord of pot, coke, speed, downers. The late '70s and early '80s added to this array such "designer" drugs as ecstasy, that amphetamine and mescaline laboratory concoction known as "the hug drug." "This 'Just Say No' stuff helps people forget or disassociate themselves from just how pervasive drug use was at that time," says Lili Fini Zanuck, who directed the '70s-era horror story/homage, Rush. "We sang about drugs: 'Don't Bogart That Joint,' 'One Toke Over the Line,' 'Cocaine.' You'd smoke a joint and have sex with strangers you'd meet at a concert. If you were in the men's room and somebody was getting high, you didn't go running to call a cop. Today, people try to portray it as though only other people, from dysfunctional families or something, did drugs. But when a majority of a generation was doing something, that's not dysfunction, that's a part of the era." The tragic drug overdose that killed John Belushi in 1982 brought the binge to a halt. It was Hollywood's morning after.

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