The City of Toronto is not so gallant after all. Today, actor Corey Haim - star of Lucas, The Lost Boys and License to Drive - who died last Wednesday, is being buried here, in the city where he was born. (A larger, public memorial is being planned to take place in Los Angeles, in two weeks' time.)
And, because he died penniless, and his cancer-stricken mother isn't able to fully fund his funeral, it was rumoured, until Monday, that Toronto was picking up the tab.
Happily, Haim's generous fans rounded up enough donations for this private event, the celebrity memorabilia site Startifacts claims to be paying for the tombstone and a few other little items, while the funeral home itself has also ponied up.
Still, I feel remiss that Toronto did not make this strange, extravagant gesture. I, a citizen of Hollywood North, like to know that my taxes may have helped, a little bit, toward putting this wild, sad soul to rest.
I far prefer this plan to scavenging for his personal belongings on eBay, a wan collection that, until recently, included an "Italian suit jacket." That wretched auction recalls Sean Penn's cavalier listing of his washed-up, dead brother Chris's cheap end tables and other crap on Craigslist in 2006. It recalls - at least here in this city where a colossal Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, is currently holding court outside the Art Gallery of Ontario's King Tut exhibition - the morbid and wrenching nature of personal effects, when the person in question had already lost so much.
Haim, while living, held two auctions. In 2007, he listed several items - with preposterous price tags - on eBay, including an "Original Firstborn jacket," worn by the star and running for $20,000.00 (U.S.) For that kind of money, in 2007, I could have demanded, and got, his first born.
In 2001, he posed in his dreary bedroom with a bag of his hair and a bloody, extracted tooth for his first stab at eBay sales. In the picture, he looks dirty and wasted; in the background, a fat man in a checkered shirt appears to be tossing Haim's drawers for more goods. The room is a shambles, the hair and tooth listings were pulled. Disaster.
These, and so many other details compose the portrait of yet another young star's ruin; of yet another actor losing control over his life as he struggled with dependency on prescription meds.
Haim died of pulmonary congestion and, like Brittany Murphy, apparently had a bad cold or flu the day he died. Yet the 38-year-old - whose history of addiction is legendary - was, perhaps erroneously, thought to have been using again.
Why was there so much gossip? Because his death sparked some renewed, if mild, interest, in the eighties star - not even close to say, the mass excitement around Lady Gaga's and Beyoncé's new queersploitation video, Telephone, but something.
And Haim's old friend Corey Feldman has been making the rounds, of course. He took up his familiar perch at Larry King's table last Wednesday. (He was also the go-to guy after Michael Jackson's death; dressed, insanely, in M.J. glasses and hat, he expiated long and hard about a star who got bored of him decades ago.) There, Feldman said Haim had been doing well, and cautioned against speculating about a nefarious end.
"I'd just been getting him out more, recently," Feldman, who was decked out in a black suit and blazing, buxom white tie, told King, evoking the unfortunate image of a golden retriever panting in the backseat of a car.
Feldman said he had brought him to the Super Bowl party at the Playboy mansion, and hooked him up with reality starlet Daisy de la Hoya, who has since said she had hoped for a "happy ending" with him.
She talked quite fetchingly about having wanted to help him, for the "loneliness" she saw in his eyes; because of - and this has always been actors' code for dope - his "demons."
Then Feldman blasted us all. Haim was "not a joke," the diminutive star raged, apropos of nothing. He followed that up with this declaration: "In this entertainment industry, in Hollywood, we build people up as children, we put them on pedestals, and then, when we decide they're not marketable any more, we walk away from them. Then we taunt them and we tease them. … It's okay for society as a whole to poke fun at, to point fingers at, us as human beings. Why is it okay to kick somebody when they're down? I don't think it should be tolerated any more."
Now, who is this "we"? Because the last time I checked, Feldman was the other star of The Two Coreys, a quasi-reality show about the two old friends and colleagues that aired a few years back. On it, Feldman, whose career has hardly been resuscitated either, and his insufferable (now separated) wife, Susie Sprague, kicked Haim all the time!
On each episode, they smugly treated his mildly disruptive behaviour as an affront to their exquisite marriage - MC Hammer married them on The Surreal Life - and, at the end of the show, Feldman publicly declared he would not speak to Haim again until he cleaned up his act.
The show was hard to watch, a demented version of The Odd Couple in which the tightly wound Felix, urged on by a whip, actually pulls rank on loveable slob Oscar.
Haim was so loveable on the show.
I had hated him in the eighties, and, knowing that, a friend who was partying with him back then at the Toronto film festival, called me and put him on the phone.
"S'up girlie?" he yelled, cheerfully. "Me and my boy are just maxin' and relaxin'!" I was appalled, but amused, and it would not be until I saw him, that shambolic, big-smiling, sweet wreck, on The Two Coreys that I would like him, very much.
I liked him for taking his crash from fame so hard and so well, for having difficult feelings, and hope and joy and guts.
I am thinking of you today so warmly, Corey. May you max and relax in peace, forever.