Star Treatment

THOUSAND OAKS — When the phone rings in the Chatoff kitchen, it could be a credit-card pitch--or it could be a well-known actress with emotional problems less well-known to her fans.

“Trust the process,” Steven Chatoff counsels in a firm, soothing voice. “Trust it.”

Translation: Take your medication. The problem right now isn’t the business. The problem is you.

From his Thousand Oaks home, Chatoff routinely delivers such messages to entertainment figures--particularly rock musicians--on both coasts.

He talked to grunge rocker Kurt Cobain in the weeks before his death and tried to persuade comedian Chris Farley to deal with his compulsions before his overdose in December.

Chatoff helped Aerosmith resolve a personality dispute that threatened to split up the rock band and assisted a Megadeth guitarist in his recovery from multiple addictions.

Until recently the director of a residential treatment center in Port Hueneme, Chatoff has gone into business on his own, setting up treatment programs for stars battling booze, drugs and the emotional pressures of celebrity.

“Several record labels wanted me as their in-house ‘Captain Recovery’ but I didn’t want to do that,” said Chatoff, 49, a burly ex-New Yorker. “I didn’t want to be a recovery cop.”

He isn’t. He is one of a handful of addiction specialists who are called in when the lead guitarist falls off the wagon or the sound man is flirting with heroin or the entire band is foundering, split by the private need to be sane and the public demand to be crazy.

When internal dissension nearly broke up the venerable rock group Aerosmith in 1996, they consulted Chatoff. At the time, he was a director of Anacapa by the Sea--Steps, a Port Hueneme rehabilitation center where a number of entertainers have touched down.

Already out of the drug scene, Aerosmith flew in from Boston not for treatment but for “conflict resolution,” those associated with the group are careful to point out.

In Aerosmith’s memoir, “Walk This Way,” lead guitarist Joe Perry tells the story:

“They convinced us to stay there to stay focused, and besides it would be a good example for the thirty-day people who were there trying to get sober. So we decided it was cool. We complained about the coffee, and they took us over to Starbucks so we could buy a couple of pounds of our own.”

After two weeks of tumultuous, sometimes painful sessions run by Chatoff, group members concluded their longtime manager had been tearing them apart.

“At least there would have been some chance of reconciliation if Tim had checked in, did the psychological testing, worked with us to find out where he was at . . .,” Perry writes.

In his new business, Chatoff is on retainer to a few bands. He charges others $175 an hour for services as varied as finding a therapist for a singer in crisis to building a drug-free environment for a band on the road.

“I treat the entire system--the roadies, the managers, everyone,” he said. “I get calls about the guy on the lighting crew who’s relapsed.”

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Chatoff doesn’t do therapy himself but arranges for therapy to be done. He also offers privacy--an especially valued commodity in an industry sensitive to highly publicized incidents of tragic excess.

“In a lot of cases, these people won’t go to a facility because they don’t want to see it end up on Page 1 of the tabloids,” he said. “They need a private treatment system, in their home or in a retreat somewhere.”

Chatoff won’t disclose the names of clients, but he says he has “over 100 success stories” drawn from his years running recovery programs.

One of them is Dave Mustaine, guitarist and singer for the heavy-metal group Megadeth, according to the band’s former manager, Ron Laffitte.

Hooked on heroin, cocaine, booze and Valium, Mustaine spent 10 weeks at The Meadows, a rehabilitation center Chatoff ran in Wickenburg, Ariz.

“Steve embraced Dave in a way, supported him in a way that was pretty rare,” said Laffitte, who now is general manager of Electra Records’ West Coast operations.

“Dave was a very difficult case, and Steve knew how to communicate with him in a way that few others in his profession who I’ve encountered could. He has an amazing ability to understand the nature of the beast and to communicate with the beast,” Laffitte said.

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Sometimes, the beast wins.

Not long after his treatment at Steps in 1995, Shannon Hoon, guitarist for the alternative rock group Blind Melon, was found in the group’s tour bus in New Orleans, dead from a cocaine overdose.

“He was such a nice kid,” Chatoff recalled. “I remember walking up and down the Port Hueneme pier with him, talking about recovery, talking about his newborn child . . . .”

Chatoff said he and another drug counselor warned the group’s managers not to take Hoon out on a nationwide tour.

“I told them he wasn’t ready. But he had a new album out and it had to be supported. He was dead within a few weeks due to the demands of the road.”

Then there are the industry luminaries he never got to help.

In the weeks before Kurt Cobain fatally shot himself, Chatoff was put in touch with him by the rocker’s wife, Courtney Love.

“He was so loaded on heroin it was like I was talking to someone in a stupor,” Chatoff said. “Most of my conversations were with Courtney, in an effort to get him out of the house in Seattle, where he was nodding out all day. I thought I had him coming in for treatment.”

Instead, Cobain was taken to a chemical dependency center where he received what Chatoff scornfully refers to as “a buff-and-shine detox.”

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Cobain--something of a hero to millions of Generation Xers--took a dim view of rehab efforts. In 1992, he spent just four days at Exodus, a Los Angeles facility that Chatoff had co-founded but recently left. More recently, the 300-pound comedian Chris Farley was taken to Chatoff’s program in Port Hueneme but wouldn’t sign on.

“He would have been easily treatable,” said Chatoff, who also has struggled with compulsive overeating.

But the comic, who overdosed on cocaine and morphine two weeks after his brief visit to Steps in December, kept therapy at arm’s length when he needed it most.

“We were trying to persuade him to check in for a good period of time to deal with drugs, with alcohol, with overeating,” said Bob Timmins, one of Farley’s counselors. “But all his business people were saying, ‘You’ve got to go here, you’ve got to go there, you’ve got to go on “Saturday Night Live.” You’ve got to make this movie!’ It’s difficult for a Chris Farley to say, ‘Oh gee, I think I’ll take 90 days off and do recovery.’ ”

Timmins works with stars in trouble, including such notable enfants terribles as actors Christian Slater and Robert Downey Jr. Over the years, he frequently has referred them to programs run by Chatoff.

“He’s probably one of the best people I’ve ever known in terms of building treatment teams,” said Timmins, who is also a consultant on addiction to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

“Steven’s been good at addressing what a lot of treatment centers don’t--things like sexual addiction,” he said. “Your lead singer may have stopped using coke six months ago, but while he’s 300 miles away from his pregnant wife, he’s using sex like a drug, acting out with every groupie around. Then there’s the guilt call at 2 a.m., and the shame and remorse trigger a relapse.”

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Chatoff understands such cycles all too well.

Like many others in the recovery field, Chatoff is going through a lifelong recovery himself. By the time he was 16, he was commuting from New York’s affluent Westchester County to Harlem for his daily shot of heroin.

In 1976, he graduated from the New York Institute of Technology with a nursing degree and a 3.8 average. “I didn’t spend one sober moment in the classroom,” he said.

A registered nurse, Chatoff worked at psychiatric hospitals in New York and then moved west, ultimately becoming nursing administrator at Saint Johns Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. All the while, he was addicted to everything from ice cream to methadone.

“Booze and cocaine had me crawling on the floor like a psychotic animal by the time I was 30,” he said.

A friend finally hauled him to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-step program took hold; Chatoff points out he has been clean for 15 years.

In the meantime, his career took off. He helped start the well-known Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles, directed The Meadows’ rehabilitation program in Arizona and then headed the Steps program for four years.

He straightened out his private life too. He married Shannae Rickard, who holds a PhD in clinical psychology. He trimmed down from a high of 375 pounds to 222. The couple have a 3-month-old son named Alexander and live in a spacious new house in a gated community.

Lounging in a patio chair beside his pool, he seems every inch the prosperous suburbanite--a far cry from the hopeless young man who once woke up after a two-day blackout with a needle still stuck in his arm.

That background helps him, Chatoff says. “It makes me more patient than some other clinicians. I’m more respectful of how bad it can get. I’ve cut down people who were hanging; I’ve seen people cut their throats.”

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He said his work often goes deeper than detox, focusing on psychological issues in addition to addiction.

“A lot of classical chemical dependency people say someone should be three to five years sober before doing family-of-origin work,” he said. “That’s true for some--we can flood people to the point where they’re emotionally overwhelmed and start drinking again--but I’ve buried others. It takes a good clinician to know when to offer therapy and when not to.”

After a long run of drug fatalities, the music industry is starting to change its tune about addiction, Chatoff said.

The expectation of a quick cure is fading, he said, adding that record companies are starting to realize that the deep-seated problems emerging as addictions might require longer-term treatments.

“It’s not about making good records,” Chatoff said. “It’s about people dying.”

Whatever the treatment method, the rock scene has been fertile ground for therapists of all sorts.

The business draws more than its fair share of people with personality and bipolar disorders, Chatoff said. Treatment can be difficult because pathology and passion are so intertwined in the minds of some artists.

“There’s that fear for some that they won’t be able to perform or write songs or be on stage any more,” Chatoff said. “My job is to help people process and navigate through those fears.”

Success compounds the problem.

“When you’ve made $6 million so far this year and you’re on the cover of People magazine,” Timmins said, “it’s hard to believe everything’s horrible.”

The paid entourage around entertainers doesn’t help. Because they are surrounded by people all too willing to tell them what they want to hear, many stars never see themselves as hitting bottom--the classic turnaround point for so many alcoholics and drug addicts.

“It’s tough for me to be on the road with all the girls and drugs and traveling and fans and stuff,” Megadeth’s Mustaine once told an interviewer. “I mean, face it, you have thousands of people every day telling you what a fabulous blah-blah-blah you are and after a while you start believing it.”

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Not Chatoff.

“I can’t play into the narcissistic entitlement they get from everyone else,” he said. “I get in their face a little, give them a reality check.”

At the same time, Chatoff gets a reality check of his own. The lavish, drug-infused world he works in is anything but seductive, he said.

“To the contrary, it makes me grateful to be out of it. Life on the road is not glamorous. It’s a spiritual graveyard. My work is the best relapse preventative I know.”