The kid had an acute sense of self-awareness. “I know I’m a mess, Bob,” he said. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Getting high won’t help that,” I said.
“It’s the only thing I’m good at,” he said, and it was heartbreaking.
I was still thinking about him when I arrived home. He needed rehabilitation and he was at the right place. I hoped he would stay and complete the work, but I wasn’t sure. I felt a sense of relief when the key to my front door slid into the lock. I just wanted to unwind and catch my breath. I tossed my keys on the coffee table and turned on the television. I flopped down on the couch just in time to catch Jay Leno as he delivered his monologue. All the news of the day, told in Leno’s nasal whine and given the humor treatment, only it didn’t make me laugh. It made me angry. Rehab, addicts, and troubled celebrities were fertile territory for the funnyman, and it was a trend I had started to see filter into the popular culture. Rehab and recovery had become jokes.
Celebrities and their troubled relationships with the bottle and drugs had long been fodder for the supermarket tabloids. Actors like Robert Downey Jr., Drew Barrymore, and Shannen Doherty and their doped or drunken public antics provided splashy, breathless front-page stories for outlets like the National Enquirer. These kinds of stories gained even more traction with the advent of the Internet and its countless sites devoted to celebrity gossip. Just look at what happened with Britney Spears. She had, for nearly a decade, been America’s pop princess, and she had come a long way from her days on Disney’s rebooted version of The Mickey Mouse Club. After she broke through to the pop market and cemented her image as a teenage entertainer who walked the razor edge between sultry and innocent, she was constantly in the public eye. To get where she was—and it makes no difference whether you like her music or not—she had put in a lot of hard work. But in February of 2007, some major cracks started to show through her carefully crafted public persona. She checked in to—and then almost immediately out of—a drug-rehabilitation center on the island of Antigua, and now, back home in Los Angeles, she had been followed by the paparazzi vampire squad and caught in a very public meltdown. She walked into a Tarzana, California, hair salon and grabbed a pair of clippers and gave herself a number-0 buzz cut that was a throwback to Sinead O’Connor’s. Following that, she attacked a photographer’s SUV with a large umbrella. She checked into Promises Malibu treatment center, a sort of posh country club for celebrities in recovery. Again, she didn’t stay long. Everything she did was captured on film and written about. And, given the nature of the Internet and the gossip press’s hunger for celebrity scandal, she became an overnight laughingstock. Britney’s troubles peaked when she was eventually taken out of her home on a stretcher and carted off in an ambulance for another rehab stint while news copters whirled overhead and photographers on the ground snapped pictures. And there was Leno, who got a big laugh when he said, “Apparently, Guantánamo Bay has the same success rate as the Promises rehab center in Malibu.”
The work we all did at Las Encinas was trivialized by the media and the glare of celebrity. I talked to Drew about Leno’s show the next day. “This is bullshit, Drew!” I said. “We really should do a TV show about what we actually do here.” Drew was in agreement.
About a year earlier at Las Encinas, I had met a dapper TV producer who liked to wear sweaters and ties. Very avuncular and personable. His name was Damian Sullivan. He was there to visit someone close to him who was in treatment. The rehab world was alien to him. I sensed he didn’t know what to make of it, so I started to talk to him. I think he must have had the same perception of rehab that everybody else did: It was a joke. One hundred percent pure snake oil. I started to tell him the true story of what happens behind the walls of Las Encinas. There’s real work that goes on there, and peoples’ lives can be profoundly changed. I continued to see Damien when he’d visit and every time we talked, I brought up the idea of a doing a TV show at Las Encinas. Damian started to get interested and eventually thought that maybe a show about rehab would be worth doing. It wasn’t an easy sell. Damian took it to fifteen different networks and they all said, “No way.”
And then Britney’s public meltdown happened.
I laugh now when I talk to Damian. “We owe everything to Britney Spears,” I say. Once she was wheeled out of her house, the networks were suddenly interested. Celebrities admitted into rehab were hot news and VH1 jumped at the chance to do a show.
The idea we had was to show that when it came to treatment, celebrities were no different from anyone else despite what the media might portray. We pushed for doing a show that mixed celebrities with everyday people. VH1 thought about that for about two seconds before they said, “No.”
Damian and I started to push and pull to shape this thing. It had never been done. The lifted
