After Nick Reiner entered his first drug-treatment programme at about age 15, his turbulent life veered between rehab and homelessness, sobriety efforts and relapse.
At times, it appeared as if he had achieved more stability in adulthood. But any semblance of equilibrium was shattered when Reiner’s parents, Hollywood director Rob Reiner (78) and Michele Singer Reiner (70), were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday.
Nick Reiner (32) was arrested on suspicion of murder and is being held without bail.
For many years, Rob Reiner, creator of beloved movies such as When Harry Met Sally ... and The Princess Bride, was contending with a child in crisis. The family struggle was largely kept private when Nick Reiner was young, but as an adult he openly discussed his battles with heroin and cocaine in interviews and podcasts. He once estimated he had been in drug treatment 18 times during his teenage years.
READ MORE
In the public interviews, Nick Reiner told anecdotes about his crises and his volatile behaviour. Once, awake for days on cocaine in his parents’ guest house, he “started punching out different things”, including a television and a lamp, he recalled on the podcast Dopey in 2018. “Everything in the guest house got wrecked,” he said.
Another time, he said, he had a heart attack on a plane because of cocaine use and woke up in a hospital.
And he once threw a rock through a window at a treatment centre to convince officials that he needed medication, he said on another podcast about addiction in 2016.
“I was so lost – I didn’t know anything about myself or the world,” Nick Reiner said on the podcast. “And that’s all I knew as a coping mechanism.”
Alan Horn, a former Disney studio chairman and a close friend and long-time collaborator with Rob Reiner, said that family friends had known about Nick Reiner’s history of substance abuse problems but that the Reiners had largely kept the details private.
He recalled that Michele Reiner had said a few years ago of her son’s struggles: “We’ve tried everything. We don’t know what else to do.”
When Nick Reiner was first sent to rehab as a teenager, he recalled in the 2016 podcast, he was put in a room with a heroin addict. Though he told himself at the time that he would never try the drug, he eventually did.
“I’ve noticed that when you’re surrounded by people that are so willing to go out and ruin everything just for this one thing,” he said, “you get desensitised to these really hard-core things.”
When he refused to stay in rehab as an older teenager, he would sometimes end up on the streets and in shelters, telling People magazine in 2016 that he had been homeless at times in Maine, New Jersey and Texas.
“When I was out there, I could’ve died,” he told the magazine. “It’s all luck. You roll the dice and you hope you make it.”
Born in 1993, Nick Reiner grew up with two siblings, Jake and Romy. By the time they were born, their father was a Hollywood hitmaker who had got his acting start on the sitcom All in the Family. Their grandfather Carl Reiner, who created The Dick Van Dyke Show, was a giant of 20th-century television.
Nick Reiner eventually entered the entertainment industry himself.
At one drug-treatment centre more than a decade ago, he started writing a television script with another resident, Matt Elisofon, pulling from their experiences in rehab. Unable to spend much time on the computer, they wrote it longhand.
After getting his GED – General Educational Development, also known as the high school equivalency development or general equivalency diploma – Reiner had planned to go to college in North Carolina but decided against it.
After reconnecting with Elisofon in New York, they committed to realising their script. With the backing of Reiner’s father, the idea became a feature-length movie centred on the tensions between an actor-turned-politician and a drug-addicted son.
The release of the movie, Being Charlie, which was directed by Rob Reiner and loosely based on his relationship with his son, included a round of interviews in which the Reiners laid bare the difficulties they had faced.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2015, Rob Reiner expressed some level of regret about how he had handled his son’s unravelling.
When his son told his parents that a drug-treatment programme was not working for him, Reiner said: “we wouldn’t listen.”
“We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son,” he added in the interview.
After years distancing himself from his family, Nick Reiner eventually moved back to Los Angeles. He and his father said making the movie had helped repair their fractured relationship.
Barry Markowitz, who met the Reiners as cinematographer on Being Charlie, said that although Nick Reiner had seemed inclined to stay under the radar, his parents and siblings had encouraged him to do what he loved, and he had funnelled his love for writing into a movie about his life.
“It was some feat that after what Nick went through, that he can pull together and write a script about his experience,” he said.
After the movie was finished, Markowitz found himself embraced by the family, which he described as a tight-knit, warm household. Whenever Markowitz was in Los Angeles, Rob and Michele Reiner insisted he stay with them. “Whenever I went to LA, the door was open,” he said. “They wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The children regularly ate dinner with their parents at the home in Brentwood, Markowitz said. A common scene was the entire family sitting in the livingroom watching a basketball game or the news – with the whole group often yelling at the TV at the same time.
Markowitz described Michele Reiner with the Yiddish word “balaboosta,” a mother who runs the show. “There’s nothing they wouldn’t do for the kids,” he said of the couple.
But tensions in the family remained.
The night before the Reiners were found dead, Rob and Nick Reiner had attended a holiday party at the home of comedian Conan O’Brien, according to three attendees who asked not to be identified to maintain relationships.
Rob and Nick Reiner got into a shouting match at the party, said one of the attendees, who recalled Rob Reiner as saying that his son was behaving inappropriately. The attendee said that it was unclear what the argument had been about but that Nick Reiner’s past struggles were commonly known.
Nick Reiner was arrested on Sunday night and remains in a jail in Los Angeles County. It is unclear whether he has a lawyer.
Geoffrey Mark, a comedian, knew Rob Reiner for about 30 years, seeing him at group dinners and other events. He said his friend had never been explicit about the challenges he was facing at home, but he noticed that Reiner would sometimes use a joking – but pointed – expression when asked how he was doing: “Go have children.”
“It’s a humorous way of sharing with someone that there are troubles that they don’t really want to go into,” Mark said, “but that they’re there.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
