David Manheim believed Nick Reiner could control his drug addiction. It’s the reason he invited him to his conversational podcast about substance abuse and recovery.
“I just saw potential, and I wanted him to do it,” Manheim told The Washington Post. “I wanted to be a part of his potential.”
Nick first appeared on “Dopey” in September 2016, and came back again and again. His frank stories resonated with listeners despite his apparent privilege as the son of renowned Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner. He became such a popular guest among fans that many hoped he would be promoted to co-host.
In 2018, Manheim made the same suggestion to Nick, offering to discuss a hosting job if he could get clean from weed, Adderall and other drugs.
He recalled Nick’s response: “My act’s clean.” And his own reaction: “Give me a break.”
The two fell out of touch shortly afterward. Manheim could never have predicted where Nick’s path would lead him. The onetime friend whose recovery he so wholeheartedly rooted for now faces life in prison, or even the death penalty, if convicted of killing his father, 78, and his mother Michele Singer Reiner, 70, on Sunday afternoon.
By their own accounts, told in podcasts and interviews over the years, the Reiners’ family history is one of constant upheaval and reconciliation. One of Nick’s final arguments with his parents reportedly began to brew earlier in the weekend, when he and Rob were overheard arguing at a holiday party hosted by Conan O’Brien. Nick had been behaving strangely all night, according to a person with knowledge of the party, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. Nick approached celebrities including comedian Bill Hader, whom his father had introduced him to minutes before, the person said. He demanded the partygoers’ last names and asked whether they were famous. When Hader and his friends asked Nick to leave them alone, he glared at them.
The Los Angeles Fire Department found the couple’s stabbed bodies in their Brentwood home less than 24 hours after that party. But the trouble between Nick and his parents goes back decades.
Nick grew up with one brother, Jake, and a sister, Romy — both actors. Rob was also the adoptive father of Tracy Reiner, the daughter of his ex-wife, actress and director Penny Marshall.
Personal tributes from Hollywood’s A-list uniformly describe the slain couple as devoted parents. Jamie Lee Curtis, whose husband, Christopher Guest, co-wrote and starred in both “Spinal Tap” films, wrote on Instagram that she “will always remember them as they lived. Passionate. Political. Surrounded by family and friends.” Demi Moore, who appeared in “A Few Good Men,” noted that her daughters grew up alongside the Reiners’ kids. She called the couple “amazing people and wonderful parents who gave [all] of themselves to make the world a better place.”
Maria Shriver, who said she counted the Reiners “among my closest friends,” reminisced about raising their similarly aged children together “from mommy and me on up.”
“They loved their kids so much,” Shriver wrote, “and they never stopped trying to be really good parents.”
Nick’s addiction developed early in life, according to stories he shared on “Dopey.” At around age 14, he stole $200 from his parents and lost his virginity to someone he paid for sex through a Craigslist ad. A year later, he told listeners, he went to rehab in the first of what would become more than 15 stints in similar treatment. At 16, he smoked crack at an Alcoholics Anonymous conference in Atlanta.
The Reiners’ efforts to support their son through his struggles included “Being Charlie,” the 2015 film loosely based on Nick’s experiences. Rob directed the family drama, while Nick, who was 22 and believed to be sober at the time of its release, co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Elisofon, a friend from rehab. It follows a Hollywood celebrity (Cary Elwes) who decides to run for governor as his son (Nick Robinson) abuses drugs.
While shifting uncomfortably in his chair during a 2016 interview for an AOL series, Nick said the project helped him grow closer to a father he had struggled to bond with as a child. Rob, sitting next to his son with evident pride, mentioned they had argued a few times during production. But ultimately, the elder Reiner concluded, it was “the most satisfying creative experience I’ve ever had.”
“It did make me understand him a lot more, and I think it made me a better father,” Rob added. “Hopefully it did.”
“If your kid is going through rough times … the parent, your main job is to keep your child safe,” he continued. “I would do anything.” But he acknowledged he and Michele might have misunderstood Nick at times, as they tried to free him from addiction with “tough love.”
The reckoning between father and son played out in script changes. “As Nick learned that I wasn’t evil, the father character changed to become much less of a one-dimensional asshole,” Rob told the New Yorker in 2016. “We rewrote their scene at the end over and over and over, until Nick finally came up with Charlie’s perfect line: ‘I don’t hate you.’ He didn’t say, ‘I love you,’ but he did say, ‘I don’t hate you.’”
The dynamic between the Reiners was tumultuous, but Nick expressed empathy toward his parents on “Dopey.” Asked whether his mother blamed herself, he said, “You know, we always talk about that. And I don’t think that they should.”
They differed on approach: While the Reiners thought it best to send their son to various rehabilitation centers — a plot point in “Being Charlie” — Nick seemed to believe they did more harm than good.
He said on the podcast he was “tricked” into treatment the first time, after someone he had confided in about abusing prescription pills forced him to call Michele.
“My mother, being a hysterical Jewish woman, rushed me to the hospital,” he said. He spent weeks sharing a room with a heroin addict. Before rehab, Nick said, he had smoked weed and dropped acid. “When I hear for 126 days how good shooting up heroin is every single night, you’re going to tell me I’m not going to go out and try f—ing heroin?”
At 18, Nick shared on the show, he accompanied an addict he had met at a Utah wilderness rehab to Skid Row in Los Angeles. They bought heroin together.
Nick has told journalists that he sometimes felt like the black sheep of his family. He said in the AOL interview that his brother, Jake, seemed to fit in more easily. On “Dopey,” Nick referred to himself as a paradox “who makes everyone unhappy,” and said he “never wanted to identify with my father, the money or being judged on any of that stuff — ”
But he interrupted himself: “I’ve got to be careful here. It’s never done it for me to brag about that kind of stuff. It makes me uncomfortable.”
Ethan Beck and Jada Yuan contributed to this report.
The post Nick Reiner struggled with addiction and with his parents appeared first on Washington Post.
