Hollywood Requiem

Our writer mourns talent agent Jay Moloney, his friend and fellow addict

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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.

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