Nick Reiner’s struggles with drugs left his parents ‘desperate’

LOS ANGELES – After Nick Reiner entered his first drug treatment programme around 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 Dec 14.

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.

In the public interviews, Nick Reiner told anecdotes about his crises and his volatile behaviour.

Once, awake for days on cocaine in his parents’ guesthouse, he “started punching out different things”, including a television and a lamp, he recalled on the podcast “Dopey” in 2018.

“Everything in the guesthouse 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,” Reiner said on the podcast. “And that’s all I knew as a coping mechanism.”

Mr Alan Horn, a former Disney studio chair and a close friend and longtime collaborator of Rob Reiner, said family friends had known about Nick Reiner’s history of substance abuse problems but that the Reiners largely kept the details private.

He recalled that Michele Reiner 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 gotten 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, Mr Matt Elisofon, pulling from their experiences in rehab. Unable to spend much time on the computer, they wrote it longhand.

After getting his GED, Reiner planned to go to college in North Carolina but decided against it.

After reconnecting with Mr 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 faced.

‘We wouldn’t listen’

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 helped repair their fractured relationship.

But tensions in the family remained.

The night before the Reiners were found dead, Rob and Nick Reiner 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 late on Dec 14 and remains in a jail in Los Angeles County. It is unclear whether he has a lawyer. NYTIMES