HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 4— There was the Christmas morning in
1996 that he spent, pretty much at the end of his rope, awkwardly trying to
steal crack cocaine from a curbside dealer who pulled a gun on him. But that
was not enough to get him out of the junkie’s life. Nor was the time a dealer
working out of an abandoned elevator shaft on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
put a knife to his throat. Not even when a 300-pound fellow inmate strung out
on PCP chased him around a Manhattan holding pen singing the theme from “I Love
Lucy.”
Not until a strange, dark kind of miracle occurred in
July 1997, said Stephen Gaghan, did he finally hit the wall and realize that he
had to change his life or die.
“Over one long, five-day
weekend, I had three separate heroin dealers get arrested,” Mr. Gaghan said. “My dealer, my
backup dealer and my backup-backup dealer. I was
left alone, and I just hit that place, that total incomprehensible
demoralization. That was the end of it; up five days straight, locked in the
bathroom, convinced there was nowhere else to go, I had to kill myself, I’m
going to kill myself. I just couldn’t take another minute of it.”
Mr. Gaghan, who said he won
his Emmy in 1997 (as one of the writers for an episode of “N.Y.P.D. Blue”)
while in the thick of heroin and cocaine addiction, and who is now considered likely to get an Oscar
nomination for “Traffic,” said he had been cleaned up for three and a half
years. But now, he said, it is time to come clean about his past.
“There was one person I knew who had stopped doing
drugs, and his life seemed to be getting so much better,” Mr. Gaghan said. “So
at the end of that five-day weekend I just picked up the phone and called him.
And he helped me.” Mr. Gaghan has made references in interviews (and in his
Golden Globes acceptance speech) to friends and acquaintances he made in the
drug world. But until now he has kept quiet about his own two-decade odyssey
with drugs, a long slow spiral that he said started at a fancy private school
in Louisville, Ky., and included several arrests, squandered opportunities and accelerating
bleakness until he found help to make his way back.
Edward Zwick, the film
director and television producer, said that he first met Mr. Gaghan four or
five years ago, when the young writer was on the steepest slope of his descent,
and that he could tell Mr. Gaghan was “in a slippery place.” But he said
he didn’t know quite how slippery or quite how steep until, while working with
him on the “Traffic” script (Mr. Zwick is one of the film’s producers), it
gradually became clear that actual experiences were being drawn upon.
“You know, you sort of intuit things before you
actually know them,” Mr. Zwick said. “I’ve known a lot of other people in
recovery, so it’s not as if it’s mysterious to me. My father was an alcoholic,
and I went through that with him. I’ve been out here longer than Stephen, and I’ve
watched several people not make it. I doubt he’s smug about it, but the real
triumph of Steve’s life has nothing to do with his screenplay or its reception.
It has to do with putting his life back together.”
It started, Mr. Gaghan said, as it often does for
young people, with alcohol and marijuana.
“I remember, when I was writing ‘Traffic,’ talking to
top federal drug-enforcement officials and having them say they read it and
found it very good and believable, except the scene where the girl describes
her résumé,” Mr. Gaghan said. It is the scene in which a prep-school student
arrested for drug possession, ticks off her academic and athletic achievements
to a disbelieving social worker.
“They said to me, there is no
way this girl could be achieving at the level you have her achieving at and be
using cocaine,” Mr. Gaghan said. “I didn’t say to them -- maybe I should have
-- that the résumé I had the girl reciting was my résumé exactly, at a time
when I was drinking, every day, and smoking marijuana and taking cocaine. The
only thing I changed is that, in reality, I had also been on the all-state
soccer team in Kentucky. I just had her on the school volleyball team.”
The point, he said, is that drug addiction can attack
anyone, even a high-achieving private-school student from a solid, middle-class
family in Kentucky.
“It starts out, you’re running around with all your
friends -- hurrah, you know. If you said to me, you’re going to end up locked
in your bathroom thinking that police were spying from helicopters through the
skylight, I’d have said, no way. I’m going to an Ivy League college, and I’m
taking over the world.”
“It was always just a point of trying to take it a
little bit further than everybody else,” he said. “You always end up finding
lower and lower companions. People fall out, and you end up with people who are
just right on the edge of criminals, people who can procure for you the various
things you need.”
He was thrown out of school
on the last day of his senior year, eventually got his equivalency diploma and
went to a small business college in Massachusetts. There he hooked up
with some Boston venture capitalists and started a catalog company, Fallen Empire Inc., hoping
to make enough money to support his writing career and provide enough money for
booze and drugs.
One of his stories, “The Year
With No Winter,” was published in the Iowa Review in 1990. But the business was
a disaster. And when he had lost everyone’s money, he said, he simply ran away
to New York: “I’d get in trouble in one place, so I’d just flee to someplace
else.”
And the whole time, he was using drugs: sometimes
more regularly than at other times, two or three times kicking the habit for a
short while. His shift was steadily toward cocaine and eventually the sniffable
heroin that became popular among young people in the early 90’s.
“Everybody was doing it,” he said. “It was just the
thing to do. You’d walk around the East Village in your hipster boots,
listening to grunge music and being the prototypes of heroin chic. I don’t
know, it’s so embarrassing.”
Though he didn’t know it, Mr. Gaghan said, he was by
this time a full-blown drug addict. “I thought I was just having this literary
adventure, that I was really fine,” he said.
The dependence was getting worse. There were
seizures, bouts of incontinence, a long, slow steady descent into mental and
physical squalor. The amazing thing, he said, is that outside of his drug
friends he was able to keep it a secret from others in his life.
“I worked very hard on the mask,” he said. “The one
thing that I couldn’t disguise was that I was getting arrested all the time.”
“I used to buy drugs from these 14-year-old kids who
ran their operation out of an apartment on Eighth Avenue and 15th Street in
Manhattan,” he said. “I went over there one day in late 1992. I had maybe $4
worth of heroin in my pocket, and I wanted to buy a half-gram of cocaine.”
He bought the cocaine, left the building, walked
around the corner to Seventh Avenue and was caught in a police sting operation.
This was no small misdemeanor; this was heroin and cocaine. Mr. Gaghan borrowed
money from friends, used all of his own savings and hired a good lawyer. (He
kept it secret from his mother and stepfather in Kentucky.)
Records of his Manhattan case show that he was
arrested on Oct. 10, 1992, on felony drug charges and less than a month later
pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of drug possession and was sentenced to
a conditional discharge.
Mr. Gaghan reacted the way he always did when backed into a
corner in those days, he said. He fled, this time to Los Angeles.
It was 1993, and the
worst of his decline was yet to come, he said. He worked for a while answering
phones and reading books for a production company. Then he stalked off on his
own, hoping to make it as a movie or television writer.
“I got 10,000 rejections. I was rejected on the phone
by ‘Baywatch Nights.’ “ Still, it meant he had plenty of time for his other
life, the one filled with cocaine and heroin. He lived the West Hollywood life
of a struggling writer, getting odd jobs here and there, up all night much of
the time, high or strung out.
“It starts out that you have a bunch of people around
you, living the same drug life, and then people start to drop off,” Mr. Gaghan
said. “They die. They go into rehab. They disappear. Until finally you’re down
to a real hard core, the iron men. And then after a while they’re gone, too.
And it’s just you, locked in the bathroom. I honestly believe that out of the
last 10 years, I spent 3 of them locked in the bathroom.”
There is a scene in “Traffic” in which Michael
Douglas, playing the young addict’s father, breaks into the bathroom where she
has locked herself and her drugs. Mr. Gaghan said he knew that bathroom had to
be in the movie, because it was in his life.
By the mid-90’s, despite the drug use, he began to
get work. He had jobs on various movie lots, wrote some television shows, even
shared an Emmy. But he was a drug addict the whole
time, he said. “I smoked crack in my office on the Universal lot, always
with some heroin to even it out,” he said. “I smoked crack in my office on the
Fox lot. Oh God, what are people going to think when they read this? I will
never work in this town again.”
Mr. Gaghan said that at this point he was spending
much of his money on drugs. When he ran out, he tried to make do. Sometimes he
could. Sometimes he just sat in the locked bathroom, wondering if anyone was
noticing.
And then came the day he hit that wall -- in July
1997 -- and the helping hand that led him to therapists, substance-abuse
programs and what he hopes will be a whole new life.
Mr. Gaghan declined to give the name of the person
who saved his life. It is a fellow writer and actor, he said, who is well known
and deserves his anonymity. He met a woman in
recovery, a photographer named Michael McCraine, and now they have a 9-month-old son named Gardner. It’s been 43 months
since he hit that wall and found the way out, he said.
As Mr. Gaghan finished his lunch one day last week on
the terrace at the Chateau Marmont Hotel above the Sunset Strip, a bright-blue
tropical bird fluttered out of the foliage onto the table’s edge. Mr. Gaghan
gently laid out a French fry. The bird cocked its head, bent forward, snatched
the fry and whizzed back up into the trees.
“That was just insanely beautiful,” he said. “I have
this life now where I am noticing all of these beautiful things around me.”
[shit.]
Photos: Michael Douglas, with binoculars, as a newly
appointed drug czar and the father of a drug-addicted teenage daughter in the
film “Traffic.” (Bob Marshak/USA Films)(pg. E3); Erika Christensen as a preppy
with a drug problem and Topher Grace in “Traffic”; Stephen Gaghan, the film’s
screenwriter, left. (Bob Marshak/USA Films); (Misha Erwitt for The New York
Times)(pg. E1)
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