Leif Garrett Reveals All In New Book ‘Idol Truth- Shares Candid Insights With ‘Glide’ (INTERVIEW)

During our lifetime, most of us will wear many hats as we go through different phases. For former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett, he’s had more than his share of labels: actor, singer, superstar, junkie, has-been, inmate, boyfriend, best friend and now author. Idol Truth, Garrett’s recently released memoir, is an attention-grabbing quick read through his life and times as all of the above. His shiny happy pretty boy looks graced many a teenager’s wall back in the seventies when his star was shining bright. A child actor, he started his career off in movies starring the likes of Natalie Wood and Jack Palance; and on such TV shows as Family Affair, The Odd Couple, Chips, Family and Wonder Woman. He was good at being the kid and the teenager. But something happened that swung him in another direction from serious movie star: Managers.

Unbeknownst to us teenyboppers growing up in the seventies, Garrett was not as squeaky clean as some of us imagined. His image with the invisible halo above his head was somewhat a mirage. Always known for being a nice guy, the kid was suddenly walking with the adults – drinking in bars, smoking pot in the desert, having sex with older beauties – and his management wanted to keep that dimpled image untarnished. A lover of rock & roll since he heard a catchy tune by Billy Joe Royal at seven years old, when he learned he was going to make a record, Garrett was ecstatic. He loved Zeppelin and Elton John and here was his chance to be like them – on a stage singing cool rock songs to thousands of people. Alas, he instead was turned into a bubblegum pop machine with songs he had no control on. He lip-synched during concerts and television appearances while fans swooned and screamed out his name. It was not what he wanted to be.

Garrett whose life has been fodder for tabloids for years, tells just about all in Idol Truth. He talks honestly about being misled in his career, being tempted into hell via heroin, working with genius director Francis Ford Coppola, his struggles with professional identity, loving Nicollette Sheridan, being stalked, being isolated in hotel rooms while fans swarmed below his window, watching John Belushi and Robert Downey Jr being overtaken by drugs, traveling the world and attempting to deal with a father not in his life to guide him. It’s all there in the book, although Garrett has chosen not to wallow in the dirty details. He tells his story in short bursts and moves on. He just wants you to know what happened.

At fifty-eight, Garrett has not lost his people-pleasing, genuinely nice inner soul. When he learns that I have spent the better part of this year in chemo, you hear in his voice the honest concern about my health and his encouragement to stay positive. He talks about his pets with the same affection he would about a biological child – “They’re my babies.” He wants to see people happy, he wants the world to be a better place, he wants to be the person he originally started out as. And that takes discipline and courage and desire, all of which Garrett now has. 

Glide spoke with Garrett last week about his book, certain events in his life and who he wants to be in the future. 

Leif, you sound healthy, you sound happy. That’s a good sign.

I should hope so because sounding miserable and unhappy is certainly no way to be (laughs).

You mention in your book about coming to New Orleans in 1978 for the Muhammad Ali/Leon Spinks fight. That must have been very cool.

Yeah, I got to actually go jogging with Ali, or rather running with him, for his training. I was friends with Judge Eddie Sapir and he’s the one who brought me to New Orleans and I stayed with him and he’s a really great guy. I had a Leif Garrett Day, I got a key to the city and all that sort of stuff. I love New Orleans but I’ve never been there in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras.

You’re not getting any younger so you better come

I know, thanks for reminding me (laughs)

I remember when you were a teen idol but I was into Led Zeppelin and The Beatles and the Stones, all that stuff. Then you came along and I bought the 45 single you did [“I Was Made For Dancing”] and I was sidetracked for a millisecond. I call that my rock & roll hiccup, no offense.

(laughs) That’s cool! And you know what, just the fact that you even had that mixed in with all the stuff you were listening to, thank you very much. That’s a compliment.

Your love for rock & roll, your love for music, really stands out in your book and you mention that it started when you were seven years old with Billy Joe Royal.

That’s right, “Cherry Hill Park.” That was the very first song I heard that got me interested in the genre of music, of rock & roll.

Why? What about it caught your ear?

It was the hook and the song was just a well-crafted, well-produced song.

After discovering that, what was the next song or artist you obsessed over?

Elton John was a big one for me right away. His music and Bernie Taupin, I love lyrics. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of it, but lyrics to me are very important and Bernie Taupin is the best, if not my most favorite. Matt Johnson from the band The The would be right up there too. After that, I mean, obviously Zeppelin and the Stones and I liked Aerosmith from the beginning.

That’s great music and you probably still are listening to this music

Absolutely. There is a lot of good music today but I do still listen to all that stuff from back in the day. And I’ve started rediscovering some stuff such as some old Pink Floyd and there’s so many Beatles records, like everything during the psychedelic period of The Beatles when they started experimenting, if you will, those are my favorites. I like “Love Me Do,” it’s catchy, it’s fun, but it’s not the same as Rubber Soul or Revolver, the stuff that really affected me, made me think. You know, music has the ability to help you remember places and times as well as feel emotionally certain things.

I find that some music will go into a deeper part of your brain and it expands everything

It does! Absolutely! It’s a drug. I have a theory about that so check this out: I believe that when these artists, such as people we just spoke about, were experimenting with substances and things like that, that it translated through the music to somebody else. So in other words, you’re getting almost the high that they were feeling or what they felt when they were high from listening to it, you know what I mean. It’s euphoric. 

How do you feel about being a singer and musician today? You write about feeling like a fraud all those years. 

I think I was a good performer from the get-go but I wish they had offered me singing lessons before ever making a record and doing the typical punching in a sentence here or there or words or whatever. There’s a particular track [“I Was Looking For Someone To Love”] that doesn’t even sound like me at all. I would even possibly say I wasn’t even on that track. And to me, that IS fraud. That’s like a Milli Vanilli situation, the difference being, of course, mine was blended many times with myself and somebody else. But I became a decent singer. I think that I am a decent singer and I think I’m a decent songwriter. I wouldn’t have continued in it if I thought I didn’t have talent. Even as much as I love it, I wouldn’t continue on if I didn’t think that I had something to offer.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

That’s interesting. You know, the very first person that I remember meeting who was a full-blown big rock musician, and he wasn’t necessarily known outside of people who were very into music, was Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. He’s a very famous session person who played with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. So I met him on PSA Airlines, Pacific Southwest Airlines, back in the day when I was flying from LA to San Francisco. That was the very first person that I remember ever meeting who I was like, wow! I got his autograph and everything. I did the whole fan thing, man. I was young, like ten or eleven, something like that.

How do you see your book?

It’s an easy ready, comes from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old, a memoir of me at that time. I’d really like to, and I’m going to, release one of the more mature Leif for people to get to know me better, cause this talks about then and what I went through then, you know, and I kind of want people to know who I am now, cause a lot of people, the image was so strong and it made such an impact people still think of me as this sixteen-year-old, kind of androgynous-looking young guy and that’s just not me anymore. And I like me. I’m not an egotistical maniac, I don’t think. I think some friends of mine might tell me differently sometimes but I try to keep people around me who are willing to tell me when I’m being an asshole.

There are a lot of messages and a lot of lessons learned that you talk about in this book. How important was it to emphasize those consequences of your actions or non-actions?

It could be detrimental to your life and your career, if nothing else, if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on with, let’s say, your handlers – management and things like that. You know, don’t be afraid to ask the questions and look out, obviously, for those who aren’t, that want something other than to use your talents for something, having adult men come wanting to get to know me in a sense that I didn’t want to get to know them. So you’ve got to keep your eyes open, your ears open and don’t be afraid to enjoy life.

Would you think that was one of the biggest lessons you learned about the music business?

Absolutely. The music business is the only business where the artist made the least amount of money. By the time all the percentages and things like that, people taking all the publishing, the deals made, it was kind of a cliché in a way how I was taken advantage of money-wise. You know, for him [Tony Scotti] to say that I never generated any money for the company – wow, really? Okay, so the gold and platinum records didn’t generate any money? Is that why you took me off of Atlantic Records to start your own label? Come on. My mom was just very naive and she only had the tools she had and that’s okay. I was rather young and plus I was so busy and so overwhelmed at times I wasn’t thinking how come I don’t have this in the bank, and where is this and this. Because whenever I wanted something or needed something, it would just be there. I had no idea also that I would ultimately end up being responsible for it, having to pay for it.

And you’re not the only one. There are so many stories like this in the music business.

Peter Frampton got ripped off badly by his manager. Billy Joel is another one. And these are people that had even bigger careers than myself. I like the fact that nowadays people like Justin Bieber and Timberlake and Britney Spears, they had people who got involved with people who had some integrity and they made a lot of money and they’ve got it and that’s good, I’m happy for them. 

You write about being out of control with the partying when The Outsiders came into your life yet your performance showed a maturity and depth that wasn’t really there before. How did you pull that off and did you feel that you had achieved something really special in your acting?

Well thank you for that. I appreciate that compliment. You know, I think a lot of it has to do with working with somebody as amazing as Francis Coppola, as well as the other actors that I was working with. You almost can’t help but feed off of that and as you know, everybody in that film, if they weren’t already known and successful, they became known and successful. That’s the visionary ability of Mr Coppola, who is an absolute genius.

I don’t remember if this is in the book or not but when we did The Outsiders, Francis did something really, really smart – and it wasn’t with Francis there, it was his son Gian-Carlo who did this. But we went to all the locations that we were going to use that were already secured and we basically did like one-takes and we did it on video, just sort of a quick go-to to just get a feel for doing the dialogue and the scenes in those places. When we did the principal filming with the camera, he had his video camera mounted on top of the film camera. So he was actually editing as he went along with this video while we were doing it all on film. How smart is that. 

He had the Silverfish, which was an Airstream mobile home with, I think, twelve monitors or ten video monitors all in a row – and a redwood hot tub, a gourmet kitchen and all of his red wines before he started making them public. He would just sometimes sit inside this Silverfish and say, “Action!” and it’d be like the voice of God talking and directing this scene (laughs). He was no dummy. He was sitting in the warm Airstream while, you know, during my death scene I heard, “Hey Leif, we need to do one more but can you please try not to shake so much?” (laughs) I was soaking wet and it’s 3:00 in the morning on the cement ground in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when it’s like forty degrees out and he’s asking me to not shake so much cause I’m supposed to look like I’m dead (laughs).

Did you bond really well with some of the other actors?

Absolutely. I became friends with Darren Dalton, who was the other Soc. Tom Cruise was a workout fanatic then, as he probably still is now, and we used to go running and after running we’d come back to the hotel and in the foyer area there were four elevators in this hotel, two on each side. He had boxing gloves so we’d put on the gloves and somebody would arrive at that floor, which would be the bell, and we’d start boxing. We wouldn’t stop until another elevator car showed up and rang the bell one more time and that would be the end of the round. The rounds would vary in length, obviously, some being very short and some being way too long (laughs). But we bonded and I got along really well with him. Patrick Swayze was another one.

How about Emilio Estevez cause he seems to have this really fun sense of humor?

It’s funny because Emilio, oddly enough, I think I probably spent the least amount of time with. But we used to have rumbles in the hotel lobby, seriously. And another great thing that Francis did to sort of create the animosity between the Socs and the greasers is he gave the two Socs, me and Darren, and Diane Lane and Michelle Meyrink, sort of like suites and we got more per diem; the greasers got standard rooms with a little less per diem – just to create that animosity.

You mention the TV show Family but very briefly. I remember that episode and it wasn’t teenybopperish as one may expect. Of course, the show itself dealt with more serious situations than most at the time. 

Yeah, it was a very good show and it was probably the first of that type of melodrama that was dealing with sensitive subjects like cancer and chemo and stuff. I actually did a couple of them where I played Kristy McNichol’s boyfriend but the episode that we did was about being approached by her boyfriend, me, and wanting to take the relationship to the next step, so to speak, about having sex at that age. We were portraying people of that age, being sixteen years old and stuff, and how to deal with sex and stuff. Now I personally was already having a lot of sex (laughs) but Kristy, I don’t know if she had or hadn’t, I don’t think she had, but it really dealt with things properly and it really dealt with that situation really well. It was fun to do.

You don’t see Kristy in the public eye anymore

She had a little nervous breakdown thing and that happens and it’s all okay. A lot of people think that celebrities are different from everybody else and the only way they can ever be considered different from everybody else is because of a talent that they might have or they are working in an industry where that talent is used. But we’re just human beings and to be human is to err so it’s okay. The celebrity worship has gotten out of control and it blows things up to a crazy proportion, like let’s say there was an argument in a restaurant and [in the media] it becomes a throw-down fistfight between so-and-so in the restaurant. It’s tough sometimes living your life in the public eye.

While writing this book, what was something you realized about yourself that surprised you?

I think that I was more out of control than I thought I was. I could have used more, and I wished I had more, discipline in the parental area of my life. I really could have benefited from that.

But that was kind of out of your hands though

Sort of but yes it was, of course it was, because I was being treated like an adult in an adult world at sixteen with a gold American Express, going into bars when people knew who I was and knew how old I was and yet they were still serving me drinks, and the ritual became habitual and then it took over. I think that’s what surprised me the most, that I really thought I had it all together. Well, I didn’t. If I had it all together I would have asked more questions and instead of turning away from it and trying to numb the pain rather than dealing with it head on.

Would you say that the car wreck in 1979 where your friend Roland ended up being paralyzed was the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?

Absolutely. That and having the motorcycle cop wanting to befriend me. That scared me more and his writing, “Dear Beautiful Boy, I was close enough today to touch you but I was scared, like a little child.” It was like, oh my God.

But you were pretty isolated from your fans

Well, when I was on the road, not necessarily just doing concert tours but when I was on the road doing promotions and stuff, it was like I was in a gilded cage. I’d have big hotel suites and stereos and listen to music and had any books I wanted to read and things like that. But I was confined to that area because I could not go out without a security team and that’s just impossible to have that all the time. It’s very suffocating and scary and there were times when I cried myself to sleep, missing home, just wanting to be home.

Would you say that heroin is the angel of death?

That’s interesting. It wants you to believe it’s an angel but it IS the angel of death. You’re walking dead as it becomes your everything. You don’t want to get up in the morning unless you have something to make you well again, and by well, to the state of not feeling like you want to die, because kicking is just about the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. If I’d known what I know now, I would have never ever even entertained the thought.

Now that you’ve written this book, who is Leif Garrett now and who does he still want to be?

I am who I am, literally, and who I want to be is somebody who will always be open to growing and learning because the minute you think you know everything and you don’t want to learn anymore, you stagnate and die. I would like to be somebody who is able to offer up positiveness to a cynical world and somebody who can be a champion for animals.

When I was reading your book and you were talking about when they wanted to do the intervention and you were with your dogs and then you went out the window, I was like, oh my God, what’s going to happen to the dogs!

(laughs) I came home! Those were my babies.

Do you have fur babies now?

For the first time ever, I have a cat (laughs). I’m not turning into cat boy, I just learned a great deal of respect for cats. I never really understood cats. I’ve always liked every animal and I liked cats too but I found them to be a little more, I thought, standoffish and finicky. But they’re just more cautious. Once you get to know them, the idiosyncrasies and stuff, like my cat, he’s more like a dog. He’s a great animal and this is all just by chance that this happened. It wasn’t like I went out and got a cat, because he was originally my father’s and he passed away and I adopted him, even before my dad passed away. I’m probably going to be going next week to a shelter and pick up some dogs. I miss having dogs.

You know, I’ve been fortunate with women and with animals and they have both helped me so much in my life. I’ve had times when I’ve not been the greatest person to them, and I mean that in the sense that I never beat anybody, I never hit or laid a hand on anyone, that’s not me, but emotionally I have been unavailable and I regret those times more than anything in the world. But it’s okay that sometimes you get depressed, you just can’t wallow or drown in it. You have to stay positive.