THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 67 AUGUST 21, 2019
Watch Busey’s best impression of former Celebrity Apprentice boss Donald Trump at THR.COM/VIDEOWind producer David O. Selznick,
a talent manager who “believed
in me and saw what I could do.”
She arranged a meeting with the
producers, Hollywood outsid-
ers from Philadelphia who had
never made a movie. Busey, who
was working on his own Buddy
Holly biopic with Jay Ellison,
Holly’s drummer, had intimate
knowledge of the subject — he
even corrected the producers on
some inaccuracies in the script.
The next day, they asked Busey to
come to a recording studio, where
he laid down a few Holly tracks —
“It’s Always Raining in My Heart”
and “Heartbeat” — as 30 people
looked on from the control room,
“jammed in like sardines.” They
offered him the part on the spot.
When I ask how Holly’s fam-
ily responded to the film, Busey
pulls out a guitar and launches
into Holly’s 1957 hit “Maybe
Baby” (Holly’s mother, who loved
the film, gifted him the origi-
nal handwritten lyrics). In that
90-second turn, Hollywood’s
long-running inside joke disap-
pears, replaced by the man his
son describes as “one of the most
talented people I’ve ever known.”
Busey didn’t win the Oscar for
Holly — it went to Jon Voight for
the post-Vietnam War drama
Coming Home — but that did little
to diminish the heat that came off
his performance. Jake recalls the
dining table covered in stacks of
screenplays 10 deep. Busey turned
them all down. “I need to write
music,” he’d say. “Kurt Russell,
Henry Winkler, there was a whole
list of guys who would step in,”
says Jake. “That was frustrating
for my mom and me.”
The day of the accident is still
burned into Jake’s psyche. Busey
has no memory of the event but
frequently retells it — three times
during our afternoon together.
Pieced together from various
accounts, it goes something like
this: On Dec. 4, 1988, Busey was
riding his Harley-Davidson —
without a helmet — when, at
the intersection of Washington
and Robertson boulevards, it
fishtailed. He hit the front brake,
flipping the bike back over front
and sending Busey headfirst into
the curb. “It split my skull open,”
he says. “Left a hole in it.”
In what Busey calls “angelic
intervention,” paramedics
were nearby eating a burger,
and a police car was passing by
to scout the route for the L.A.
Marathon the following day.
Rushed to Cedars-Sinai, Busey
was diagnosed with a subdermal
hematoma and operated on for
several hours. He describes a mys-
tical experience on the operating
table. “Don’t call it death. There
is no death. Death just stands for
‘Don’t expect a tragedy here,’ ” he
says, citing one of his “Buseyism”
acronyms (he published a whole
book of them in 2018).
“I was a little over a foot long
and a quarter of an inch wide,” he
recalls. “That’s your essence and
that is your soul. It’s housed in the
column of your spine. I was sur-
rounded by balls of light ... gold,
magenta, amber, mother-of-pearl,
all around me. More than you
could count. Three lights moved
up to me. The mother-of-pearl one
spoke to me in an androgynous
voice. It went, and I’m paraphras-
ing, ‘Gary, you’re going in a good
direction. But it’s time for you
to look for help in the spiritual
realm. You may come with us now
or you may return to your body
and continue your destiny.’ ”
He chose to return, but it was a
long journey. “He was a vegetable
in a wheelchair staring at the
wall,” recalls Jake. “At 17, I had to
teach him with my mom to talk,to eat, to feed himself. To walk
again. To write. That was very
difficult for me at that age.” (Jake
is now weathering another family
health storm: His wife is battling
breast cancer and recently had
a double mastectomy.) Busey’s
frontal lobe damage, which made
him more impulsive and prone
to anger and delusions of gran-
deur, also impacted his creative
mastery — his ability to compose
music. Stripped of his self-gov-
erning impulses, he descended
deeper into what had once been
a casual cocaine habit. That led
to a series of overdoses (in this
period he married his second
wife, a stripper from Dallas)
and rehab stints. Asked how the
drug changed his already manic
personality, Busey replies, “It did
nothing. My personality was the
same. ... Well, it does give you C.D.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Cocaine dick.”
The most public of Busey’s
attempts at rehab was in 2008
on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab With
Dr. Drew. Busey, who signed up
for the show because he was low
on money, insists he was sober
then, but according to host Drew
Pinsky, he was still sporadically
using. “He got a lot better,” Pinsky
concedes. “He responded to cogni-
tion therapy, to mood stabilizers,
he responded to social interven-
tion and teaching. We loved Gary.He’s a phenomenally rich human
being. But he has this sort of qual-
ity that people make fun of him
— and I don’t know if he’s in on
the joke.”
Reality TV allowed Busey to
cash in on that easy-to-mock
rep. In 2013, he made it seven
weeks into the fourth season of
NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, earn-
ing $40,000 for his charity, The
Center for Head Injury Services.
He still calls Donald Trump “one
of my best friends. I knew him
long before Celebrity Apprentice.
Me, my good friend Keith
Carradine and him would drive
around New York in a sedan and
talk loud about art and fascina-
tions about women.”
Today, a few months out from
his New York theater bow — his
first other than a two-week stint
in 2016 with the off-Broadway play
Perfect Crime — Busey is trim and
looks, well, probably in his best
form in decades. He lives with
his partner of 12 years, Steffanie
Sampson Busey — “If it wasn’t
for her, he’d be in an old folks
home,” says Jake — and together
they raise a 9-year-old son, Luke,
a sweet and relaxed kid. With his
platinum blond hair and toothy
smile, he looks almost identical to
childhood photos of Jake and Gary
lining the walls.
When Busey speaks of his life
now, you’re never quite sure which
one he’s referring to — or how
many there are. “I’ve been a Native
American in my past lifetimes,”
he notes. “I was on Atlantis,
connecting people to stars with
crystals to heal them. I’ve been a
pirate.” If Jake could put a number
on it, it would be nine, “like a cat.
He may be on the ninth one now.”
Busey tends to wax on the meta-
physical side of philosophical and
puts his unflappable optimism
this way: “We’re all great. We’re
all fantastic. We’re all children of
God. Don’t take things personal.
It’s bad to take things personal. It
doesn’t matter. It’s not even there.
Tell you a joke?” he adds, in one of
many whiplash subject changes.
“Sure,” I respond.
“I’ve got one for you. What
do you call an anorexic with a
yeast infection?”
“What?”
“A quarter pounder with
cheese.”1 Busey earned an Oscar nomination for his lead turn in 1978’s The
Buddy Holly Story. 2 He played an FBI agent opposite Keanu Reeves
(right) in 1991’s Point Break. 3 Busey competed on NBC’s Celebrity
Apprentice in 2013 and still considers Donald Trump a friend.Top: Busey and wife Judy at the ’79 Oscars.
Bottom, from left: Jake, Luke, Gary
and Steffanie Sampson Busey in January.23