Back home in Sherman Oaks after the big summer tour, I tried to settle down and catch my breath a bit. There were still a few shows I had lined up in the fall, but it wasn’t a full-scale tour, just a few one-off gigs here and there. For the most part, I was home getting ready to go back to the Far East in late November. But leading up to that, I was spending a lot of time with friends and reconnecting. The tour had taken a lot out of me, and I did sort of miss the nightlife in Los Angeles.
The evening of November 3, 1979, started at Flipper’s roller disco, at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. In the late ’70s, at the height of the roller boogie craze, Flipper’s tried to be a sort of Studio 54 for those on wheels, complete with velvet ropes, VIP booths, and celebrity guest lists. While it may have lacked the mystique of Studio 54 (which I was by then well familiar with), it more than made up for it with cocaine, Quaaludes, and plenty of sexual liaisons in the private rooms upstairs. When I was home in LA, not on the road for once, many nights started there. Some ended there as well. It was a scene I enjoyed, so why not? I was at the peak of my international jet-set playboy persona, and I was treated like a god there, pretty much like wherever else I showed up. Dope, booze, women—whatever I wanted was laid right out for me. I rarely had to lift a finger. Being a pop star, pinup, and teen idol had its perks, and I was taking full advantage of all of them. That I was totally spiraling out of control toward an almost certain early death didn’t even enter the discussion.
One night, I was cruising around with a guy named Roland Winkler. I’d met him through friends a month or so earlier. He was a little older than me, twenty-one, and like many in my circle, had both time and money to burn. His family had bought him a souped-up, nitrous-fueled Mustang that he raced (and occasionally crashed) along Mulholland Drive, the infamous snake of a road that curves along the rim of the Santa Monica Mountains. I knew something about racing my black Porsche 914 along that same treacherous road, but I’d never had an accident. That night, we were hitting it hard at Flipper’s. I wasn’t even of legal age to drink yet (in California it’s twenty-one), so Roland was buying the beer—and he also had the Quaaludes that night. Sometime near dawn, I drove us up to Kelli Campbell’s house on Mulholland. She’s Glen Campbell’s daughter, and since her family was out of town, she was having a party at her house. Roland and I crashed there for a couple of hours, then woke up later in the morning and picked up right where we had left off. The rest of the day was spent swimming, drinking, and taking more Quaaludes. It was a typical blur. About fifteen of us, all rich and beautiful, were hanging out.
As day bled into night at the Campbell house, it became clear to everybody in attendance that we needed some cocaine to get us back up from all the booze and ludes. Our dealer, Mario, refused to come to the house, but said he would meet us instead at a little putt-putt golf place out in North Hollywood. Roland and I were chosen as the sacrificial lambs who were designated to go make the score. Fateful decision right there. Originally, Roland was going to drive his souped-up Mustang. He lived next door to the Campbells and went to get his car, but I stopped him. I knew how he drove, and I wasn’t getting into a car with him. As high as I was, I still wasn’t getting into a car with Roland behind the wheel. At least I had some presence of mind. So we climbed into my Porsche and headed down the hill, with me driving, into the night.
We hit the 170 Freeway toward Golfland, but thanks to our chemically altered state, we couldn’t remember which exit it was. Victory? Sherman Way? We were so confused. I thought we had missed our exit, so we got off the freeway and doubled back in the other direction. It would have been the next exit, had I continued driving. I had no idea we hadn’t gone far enough. I started getting agitated. Where was this place? Where was Mario? We needed blow! I’d seen the place a hundred times, and now Golfland seemed to have been wiped from the map. I looked over to my right to ask Roland about it, and he looked as if he had died. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and he wasn’t answering me. He was totally unresponsive. Little did I know that he occasionally slept with his eyes open. With my right hand, I began jostling him to try to get a reaction. With my left hand on the wheel, I clipped the car in front of us. Then all hell broke loose.
We started to spin, and in trying to pull the car back, I overcompensated on the wheel and we ended up turned around 180 degrees, facing the traffic coming up behind us. We then hit the shoulder curb, flipped over, and began tumbling down an eighty-foot embankment. This is it, I thought. We are dead. The Targa top flew off, and the windshield caved in. But somehow, when the car finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, I was still awake and aware. I had blood rushing out of my head from the wound I had received. But otherwise I felt intact, conscious, and suddenly, very sobered up.
After several sickening moments, Roland started saying to me, “Straighten my legs, straighten my legs!” Right there I began to suspect the worst, but I knew I had to get him help. The smell of gasoline was overwhelming, and I had no idea if the car was about to blow up. Either way, I had to get out and get help. With Roland now yelling at me, “Get me out, get me out!” I carefully climbed from the wreckage and began working my way, crab-like, up the hill. It was a cool, dewy night, and the hillside was slick and awkward to navigate. I struggled, trying to grab hold of the thick overgrowth on the steep embankment to get some traction, but I kept losing my footing. Holding on to the plants, I continued to hoist myself up, steadily pushing upward, nails digging into the moist earth, continuing my slow ascent. Two steps up, one step back. The higher I got, eerily, the more distant Roland’s cries for help became.
I was aware that at the top of the embankment there were two parents and their child. The adults were yelling something down at me, and I couldn’t figure it out. Once I finally reached the top of the hill, muddy, dazed, and confused, and pulled myself up, it all became clear. These were the people whose car I had clipped just before we rolled down the hill. They were furious. The father got right in my face, screaming, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The mom was yelling at me, too, as their child of maybe six or seven watched. I knew I had hit their car, but right then and there, there was something more pressing at hand. “My friend is down there trapped in the car and he needs help,” I said. “He can’t move his legs and we need to get an ambulance.”
They ignored what I said and kept getting in my face. I understood that I had scared them, but Jesus, couldn’t they have at least tried to help us?
With the two of them droning on, yelling and cursing at me, I knew had to get away from them and call for help. I limped about thirty yards down the freeway to the roadside emergency call box. I picked up the phone and explained to the dispatcher, as calmly as I could, what had happened—that we desperately needed help. Within minutes, an ambulance, red lights flashing and sirens screaming, pulled up on the freeway shoulder and rushed down to rescue Roland. Once they reached him and eased him from the mangled Porsche, my mom arrived out of nowhere. The cops had called her, and she went with me to the hospital. While there, I saw Roland’s mom and I tried to express my sorry and let her know I would help take care of him for the rest of my life. She told me that this was inevitable; that Roland had been in so many crashes already. She said it wasn’t my fault.
In many ways, this was the beginning of the end for me. Just seven months earlier, I had been parading around at the Astrodome to thirty-five thousand screaming fans. I would now measure my life on either side of this tragic night. If I could mark the start of my descent into hell on a calendar, I’d scrawl a blood-red “X” on November 3, 1979.
In just five days I would turn eighteen years old.
I’ve never overcome the guilt and anguish from that night. That accident and its legal aftermath, coupled with my dysfunctional upbringing and stress from trying to get out from under the make-believe world the Scotti brothers had created, all worked in tandem and wound up taking their toll on me. I never knew what a house of cards my life had become, but the accident triggered a descent that would spiral for decades. Both my flesh and the fantasy that my existence had become received more than just a wake-up call that November night: It was a droning siren of death. Soon, the headlines would tell the story about this accident. It would have been much worse in the internet age, but regardless, it still got a lot of attention.
Immediately after the accident, my mom and I weren’t quite sure what it all meant. I slept for literally almost three straight days after the accident without waking up, and then my mom finally rousted me out of my stupor. I never wanted to wake up, but there was no escaping what had happened. We both sat there in my room, and my mom told me that someone from the office had called her. “We’re going to take care of all this. Don’t worry,” the person told my mom. “We know how to handle this, and it’s going to be okay. It’s terrible what happened, but we have a good lawyer and we’ll take care of everything. You don’t have to worry.”
This was the wire report the day after the accident:
Drunken driving charges have been filed against teen-age rock idol Leif Garrett, who was involved in a collision that destroyed his sports car and left a friend in serious condition. Garrett, 17, was arrested Saturday night after his Porsche smashed into the rear of another car on the Hollywood freeway off ramp, the California Highway Patrol said. Rowland [sic] Winkler, 19, a passenger in Garrett’s car, suffered a broken neck and deep facial cuts. He was reported in serious condition at Northridge Hospital, and a spokesman said he may be permanently crippled. Garrett escaped with only a bump on the head and minor cuts. CHIP investigators said Garrett “showed symptoms” of being under the influence of alcohol. He was given a blood test at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, but the results of the tests have not been released. Garrett, who will be 18 Thursday, was released in the custody of his mother.
Two days later, this was part of the information the Scotti brothers put out to the press. Note the differences in the reporting:
Marsa Hightower, Garrett’s spokeswoman with Scotti Brothers Management, said the rock star insists he hadn’t been drinking. Winkler, she said, suffered an injured seventh cervical vertebra. “He is not paralyzed. There is nerve damage, but chances are he will recover.”
Roland would be a paraplegic for the rest of his life.