Nick Reiner: Self-Made Monster Part 1 - Five Words From His Roommate

Tony Brueski (0:00)

It is a little after 10 at night in Malibu, California, in the summer of 2009, and the lights have just gone out in a bedroom that costs more per month than most Americans earn in a year. Two boys, 15 years old, both of them. Patients at a private treatment center up the coast from Los Angeles, the kind with an ocean view and a waiting list. One of them is there because his mother staged an intervention over a shopping addiction. The other is there for drugs. The staff has finished its rounds. The hallway is quiet. And one of the boys begins to talk. He did this every night, the other boy would say. After lights out, the kid in the next bed would go on and on about his parents, his mother, his father especially. How much he hated him. How every bad night and every locked door was their fault, their fame, their money, their name. The boy listening was Danny Svilar. He owns a restaurant in Wyoming now, and when he told his story to a reporter, the word he kept using was chilling. He says his roommate went after another kid in the program. He says that one night, the roommate went after him. The roommate was Nick Reiner. His father had directed The Princess Bride. His grandfather had created The Dick Van Dyke Show. And the room where he lay in the dark, cataloging his grievances against the people paying for it, ran, by Svilar's account, about $60,000 a month. Svilar remembered something else. The parents came. Rob and Michele Reiner, he said, were there for every single family group. What he remembered about their son was a boy with no sense of gratitude whatsoever. A pompous little punk, in his words, with Rob Reiner for a father.

Seventeen years later, those two parents would be found dead in their bedroom in Brentwood, and Danny Svilar would say five words. I knew exactly who it was. When the news broke, he texted old friends from the program. Everybody, he says, knew. Nick Reiner has pleaded not guilty. He has not been convicted of anything. It is a courtesy he rarely extended anyone else. Because this isn't a story about a disease. Plenty of people carry the disease. Plenty of families bury it quietly. This is a story about a bill, 32 years long, and the people who paid it.

The name came first. Nick would say so himself. Carl Reiner came out of the Bronx in Sid Caesar's television shows, and in 1961 he created The Dick Van Dyke Show, a comedy about a comedy writer with a beautiful wife and a house in New Rochelle. It ran five seasons and never left the air again. His wife, Estelle, would eventually deliver the most quoted line in her son's most quoted movie. I'll have what she's having.

The son was Rob, born 1947, famous in his 20s as Michael Stivic, the son-in-law Archie Bunker called Meathead, on a show Rob would remind you was number one in America five years running.

Then he walked away from acting and did what almost nobody manages. He made movies people love. This is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, Misery, A Few Good Men. There was a stretch in this country, if you were alive for it, when every third movie you'd quoted a party had his name on it.

Late in his life, Rob would say it took Stand By Me, his fourth movie, before he felt separate and apart from his own father.

His son would spend his whole life trying for the same thing, and he would say so.

In 1988, on the set of the one that became When Harry Met Sally, he met the woman taking the still photographs, Michele Singer, Manhattan, 1955

Her mother had survived Auschwitz. A year earlier, Michele had shot the cover of a bestseller called The Art of the Deal, a credit she later called Regrettable.

The cinematographer introduced them, and the director changed the ending of his own movie. Originally, Rob would say, Harry and Sally didn't get together. Then he met Michele. They married in 1989 Jake came in 1991, and on September 14, 1993, in Los Angeles, a second son, Nicholas.

Before that first Christmas, Rob and Michele had signed the papers on something called the Nick Reiner Children's Trust. They set up his money before he could hold up his own head. The document would outlive them both.

Romy arrived in 1997 Tracy, Rob's daughter from his first marriage, rounded out the family. The house was in Brentwood, on Chadbourne Avenue, behind a gate, in a zip code where the pool guys have pool guys. The record on Nick's early years is thin. What's there? Rhymes. In 1998, Rob described his five-year-old to a reporter. Floppy, always moving. The doctor, he said, had called him a squirmy one. The boy went to Wildwood, a private school on the west side. He would say later that he and his father didn't bond much growing up. Dad liked baseball. Nick liked basketball. A yoga instructor who worked with the family for years remembered a boy who barged into the sessions. And people who knew the household have told reporters that the operating rule was simple. Give him what he wants.