Twice now, Todd Bridges has reached out to fellow former child stars-turned-addicts to try to get them to stop destroying their own lives. And both times his efforts were in vain.
The former star of “Diff’rent Strokes” told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Monday in New York that about a year ago, he talked to Corey Haim about his drug use.
“I had tried to get Corey to stop taking prescription drugs and take care of his life,” Bridges said. “I tried to get him to understand that there was a different way out.”
Haim died last Wednesday at the age of 38. His death was attributed to heart failure associated with his drug use.
“He wasn’t ready to stop,” Bridges said of Haim. “The thing about drug addiction is, sometimes people are ready to stop and sometimes they’re not. You have to have it in your mind that you’re ready to stop.”
Sex and drugs
The previous time Bridges went unheeded was in 1999, when he called his old co-star on “Diff’rent Strokes,” Dana Plato, who had played the natural daughter of Philip Drummond, a rich New Yorker who adopted Willis (Bridges) and Arnold Jackson (played by Gary Coleman), two poor black kids from Harlem.
Plato was two years older than Bridges, who was almost 13 when “Diff’rent Strokes” debuted in 1978. A precocious girl, Plato introduced Bridges to heterosexual sex as well as marijuana and alcohol.
That story is retold in Bridges’ book, “Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted,” detailing his own harrowing descent into addictions to cocaine, crack and methamphetamines.
The drug use was his response to feelings of worthlessness, Bridges said. His father had been an unloving alcoholic who abused him and his mother mentally and physically. But his father’s worst sin, according to Bridges, was refusing to believe his own son when Bridges was sexually molested by a man who was acting as his publicist.
The molestation left Bridges with feelings of doubt about his own sexuality — doubts that Plato dispelled when she initiated a sexual affair that began when Bridges was about 14 and continued for the run of the show, which ended in 1986.
