Narcissists and the single-mindedly ambitious thrive in Hollywood for the same reason that successful actors and filmmakers are disproportionately neglectful, if not often outright abusive, in their personal lives. From vaudeville impresario Ethel Milne’s relentless “momaging” of Judy Garland — professionally dazzling, personally ruinous — to today’s alleged deadbeat A-list parents, such as Brad Pitt, the entertainment industry is full of extraordinary talent and cautionary tales of family dysfunction.
By all available accounts, film director Rob Reiner was not one of these nightmare parents, nor was his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. The comedy legend famously met the photographer who became his wife while he was directing When Harry Met Sally, with Rob Reiner falling so quickly and transformatively in love that he changed the ending so the titular characters got a happily ever after. The couple spent 39 years of faithful marriage collaborating on films, philanthropy, and having three children while co-parenting Rob Reiner’s older adoptive daughter from his first marriage. The Reiners seemed neither to force their children into the Hollywood spotlight nor neglect them in favor of a blind passion for their work.
They were ultimately repaid by being stabbed to death in their sleep, a first-degree murder for which law enforcement charged their 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner.
The day after bringing their uninvited son to a Christmas party hosted by fellow comedian Conan O’Brien, their daughter Romy Reiner found her parents’ corpses and called the police, reportedly warning that her brother was likely the murderer.
She had good reason to suspect that her brother had escalated from the erratic and combative behavior that got him ejected from O’Brien’s party the night before to committing murder just hours later. At the age of 11, Nick Reiner regularly threw tantrums and screamed so severely that his parents hired a family yoga instructor to teach him how to calm down.
At the age of 14, Nick Reiner stole $200 from his parents to lose his virginity to a prostitute, and a year later, his drug abuse prompted his parents to send him to the first of at least 18 stints in rehab. He later confessed that he engaged in violence while on drugs, with friends maintaining he continued to pose a physical threat to his family. Despite Nick Reiner publicly saying he had cleaned up enough to co-write a semi-biographical bildungsroman with his father in 2015, his parents reportedly only brought their son to O’Brien’s party because they were scared to leave him alone for the night, as he was living in his parents’ guesthouse.
During the promotional tour for the 2015 film Being Charlie, Rob Reiner oscillated between praising his son and effectively apologizing to him for his past attempts to get him into rehab.
“The program works for some people, but it can’t work for everybody. When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate,” he said during an interview with the LA Times. “And because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
But, as addiction specialists have countered and as is much more evident in hindsight, the reverse is likely true. The Reiners clearly did not neglect their son, but while blinded by love for him, they were likely left with few great options to prevent the obvious.
As governor of California, Ronald Reagan dramatically limited the ability to legally commit the mentally ill to long-term state hospitals, replacing preemptive mental health care with, well, nothing. While acute cases of suicidality can trigger a short-term involuntary hold, parents with children such as Nick Reiner, who abuse drugs and engage in lower-level violence, are left with only two extreme options: to try and get them outright incarcerated or to do nothing and hope for the best.
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Other states quickly followed suit in a nationwide policy shift that was in large part responsible for the same conundrum of cities being forced to choose between either putting mentally ill homeless vagabonds in prison or leaving them to monopolize public spaces. But the extreme consequence of these policies, known as deinstitutionalization, has been the personal tragedies of loving parents such as the Reiners or my friend, Renee Baldwin, being allegedly murdered by their sons after they spent a lifetime terrorizing their parents with verbal, physical, and substance abuse.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to encourage reinstitutionalization, but ultimately, a legally binding policy change that balances due process with the public safety threats of walking red flags requires the states to act. When pressing criminal charges is parents’ only option to deal with an unstable child, all too many will choose to do nothing and hold out hope until it is too late. If parents as proactive as the Reiners had an alternative, not only would they be alive, but Nick Reiner would not be facing the death penalty.