Daniel Stern recalls his ‘Home’ and ‘Wonder’ years
Sorry Harry, the other half of the Wet Bandits is singing like a canary.
Daniel Stern, who played every Millennial’s favorite bumbling burglar in “Home Alone” and its sequel, has chronicled his decades-spanning career in his memoir “Home and Alone,” out now. Stern’s debut tome will be considered “silver tuna” for fans of the actor, who also starred in “City Slickers,” “Diner” and narrated “The Wonder Years.”
Stern, 66, writes of struggling with dyslexia and dropping out of high school at 17. When he moved to New York to pursue acting, the Bethesda, Maryland-native slept on a mattress salvaged from a brothel/drug den shoved into a closet that he rented for $70 per month. He relives scuffles with his co-stars Mickey Rourke and Patrick Dempsey and explains why he agreed to “City Slickers II,” which currently has an audience score of 31% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“By the time I finished reading the script, I was having real doubts about whether I should do it,” Stern writes. “Then my agent called and said they would pay me two point one million dollars. I immediately shut off my brain and said yes. What am I, stupid?”
Put your crowbars up and clink to the biggest revelations from “Home and Alone.”
Being ‘almost killed’ while snorting real cocaine in ‘Freeway’
Stern remembers while playing a drug dealer on “Honky Tonk Freeway,” that “the main source of entertainment on the set was cocaine.”
“This was 1980, and cocaine was rampant,” Stern writes. “I had never tried it because I could never afford it, but on this movie, everyone was doing it – the director (John Schlesinger), producers, actors, prop guys, drivers – carrying around little vials with tiny spoons attached, filled with white powder, and whiffing it up all day long.”
Stern recalls Schlesinger being “abusive,” “working the rare water-skiing white rhino to death. … And he almost killed me too.”
Though the actors used ground B-12 vitamins as cocaine in scenes, Stern says when Schlesinger couldn’t get some fast enough, he handed Stern his personal stash of cocaine.
“At first, I thought, ‘Cool,’ ” Stern admits, excited about Method acting and free drugs. “But I almost didn’t make it home,” because they couldn’t get the filming of the scene right. “We did take after take, each time John getting more pissed, and each time me taking a big whiff of cocaine,” Stern writes. “I finished his first vial, so he gave me his backup. I must have done fifteen hits, one after another, and my heart started racing like it never had before. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t want John to yell at me.” After the scene wrapped, Stern says he “smoked a pack of cigarettes and didn’t sleep for two days.”
Stern felt ‘really bad’ for Culkin amid ‘adult pressure’
When Stern read John Hughes’ comedy about a family who forgets their child during a holiday trip, it was the first time he’d “read a script that made me laugh so hard that I got stomach cramps.”
Soon Stern would be stomping on Christmas lights made of sugar and being smacked in the face with a foam iron. His gravest injury in real life was a bloody nose, spurred by hitting his schnoz twice on the McCallisters’ doggy door.
Stern remembers his young co-star Macaulay Culkin being “as sweet a kid as he appears” in the first film. While
shooting the 1992 sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” Stern picked Culkin up for a playdate in the park with his own children and felt a pang of sadness.
“He was a sweet kid but had lived a very different life than my kids,” Stern writes of the child actor, now 43. “He didn’t know how to play tag or throw the ball around. He was more of an indoor kid and had a lot of adult pressure on him from show business and parents and such.
“We realized he had formed a friendship with Michael Jackson, because when we picked him up, his hotel room was stacked, literally from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, with toys,” Stern continues. “Every conceivable toy, as if someone went through Toys ‘R’ Us, took one of each, and dropped them in his room. All a gift from Michael Jackson. It made all of us feel really bad for Mac. My kids had experienced a taste of the distortions that fame can bring, but seeing what Mac’s life was like put things in a different perspective.”
Running up a $7,000+ bar tab on ‘nothing personality’ Donald Trump
Before Donald Trump leveraged his reality TV status all the way to the Oval Office, he made a cameo in “Home Alone 2.” At the time of filming, Trump owned New York’s famed Plaza hotel, the backdrop for much of Kevin’s Big Apple mischief.
Stern says when the two met, the future president Trump lacked conversation skills and was “kind of a nothing personality.” Stern writes that he saw Trump again while at the hotel’s bar The Oak Room, with the film’s stuntmen Leon Delaney and Troy Brown.
“Donald spotted us and proclaimed so everyone could hear that he would be picking up the tab at our table,” Stern writes. “We all raised a glass to him in thanks and he left the bar, feeling like the host-withthe-most. We drank until there was no more booze left in that bar. We stayed until four in the morning, closing time in New York, and bought round after round of drinks for the entire bar. To this day, Leon and I dispute how much the final tab was, but it was at least seven thousand dollars. We still feel really good about that.”