Just a few months before his death from a heroin overdose, Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was blackmailed by a news website, which threatened to expose his most intimate drug abuse secrets.
In his new book Feh (a Yiddish word that means ‘yuck’), Shalom Auslander reveals the outlet had bought secretly recorded tapes of Hoffman talking frankly about his addictions, and planned to publish them unless he gave an exclusive interview.
Hoffman said he couldn’t bear the thought of his children – Cooper, who was 10 at the time, and daughters Tallulah and Willa, seven and five – hearing him talk about his habits. The thought that they’d be mocked or shamed at school about their ‘pathetic father’ was horrifying to him.
So, reluctantly, he agreed to the interview.
Auslander and Hoffman became dear friends after the actor had expressed an interest in adapting Auslander’s novel Hope: A Tragedy. They bonded over their similar upbringings and the traumas left in their wake – describing that shared sense of guilt and self-loathing as ‘feh’.
HAPPYish was Hoffman’s last filmed role, playing a depressed, middle-aged creative director
Hoffman’s partner Mimi O’Donnell with their children Willa, Tallulah and Cooper attend his funeral
And what began as a working relationship became a close friendship. Hoffman also came on board for the pilot of Auslander’s TV series HAPPYish, playing the lead Thom Payne, a depressed, middle-aged creative director at a New York ad agency.
It was while working on the pilot in 2013 that Auslander received an unexpected phone call from Hoffman in the middle of the night.
‘I was in a half-sleep daze, trying to make sense of what he was saying, of what I was hearing, trying to put the pieces of the story together,’ he writes.
‘He was supposed to be on vacation, our goal to start filming the pilot when he returned.’
Hoffman apologized profusely to Auslander, explaining that the reason for his absence was not that he had been on vacation – but that he’d been in rehab.
While attending group therapy sessions there, another patient had secretly taped him, and sold the recordings to a news website.
‘Phil explained that this was not an uncommon occurrence,’ writes Auslander. ‘People, to use the term loosely, sign into rehab centers in the hopes of secretly recording celebrities and selling the recordings to gossip magazines and websites.’
After coming out of rehab, he filmed the pilot as planned. But he was difficult on set, recalls Auslander: ‘Belligerent, moody. His body was detoxing, which caused nausea, swelling, pain.
‘I was in full guilt mode, chastising myself for not having recognized the signs of drug abuse all along – the sleepiness, the canceled meetings, the late-night unintelligible texts.
‘Still, over the next weeks and months, John [Cameron Mitchell, the director] somehow managed to film something special, something dark and funny and moving about the struggle for true happiness in a shallow, materialistic world.’
Celebrating his Best Actor Oscar for Capote alongside Reese Witherspoon, who won for Walk The Line in 2006
Watching the NY Knicks with his son Cooper courtside at Madison Square Garden in 2013
Shalom Auslander and Philip Seymour Hoffman on the set of the Happyish pilot
Rehearsals with (left to right) Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Kathryn Hahn, and John Cameron Mitchell
A few days after the final cut, Auslander – who grew up in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, in New York – met Hoffman for dinner in Manhattan. ‘He seemed better. He had lost weight,’ he noticed.
They discussed schedules, should the show get green-lit, and planned to meet again to go over scripts.
As they went their separate ways, he recalls hugging him and saying, ‘for some reason: “Don’t die on me”.’
Hoffman threw back his head and laughed: ‘That laugh caused the shop signs to swing, and it set off car alarms, and it filled the streets of SoHo, and it traveled up to Midtown and it shook the windows of the buildings there, and it shook the city, and it shook the world, and I was sure that if I could laugh like that, even once in my life, I might never cry again.’
The show received the green light the next day. Two days after that, Auslander received the call that his friend was dead.
The book doesn’t specify the timeline, but Hoffman had been sober for 23 years before relapsing in around 2012/2013. He attended rehab twice – coming out for the final time in November 2013.
He was found dead in his New York apartment on February 2, 2014.
Auslander said at the time: ‘This planet is no damned place to have a heart, and Phil had the biggest, brokenest heart of anyone I have ever met. He was a beautiful person in a hideous world. Great actor, too.’
In the book, he then describes an unnerving, supernatural experience the night Hoffman died, after he and his wife Orli had celebrated the series being picked up.
‘I felt someone’s hand pat my shoulder – a heavy hand, a warm hand, a thick hand,’ he writes. ‘I yelped, jumped around – but nobody was there.
‘“You OK?” Orli had asked.
‘This was around 2am, roughly the time, I would find out the next morning, that Phil passed away.
Auslander and his wife Orli were celebrating the series being picked up on the night his friend died
He had been in the process of making The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, and his final scenes were rewritten and given to other actors
The series of HAPPYish was later recast and ran for 10 episodes, starring Steve Coogan and Kathryn Hahn
‘It’s ridiculous, I know. It’s superstitious, it’s malarkey, it’s hocus-pocus… but I haven’t been able to shake it off. I know what I felt, and I felt it before I knew he had died.’
Thinking back to that feeling, he tries to imagine what kind of message that pat was trying to convey. Was it apologetic? Remorseful?
‘And at those times when the darkness engulfs me, when I can’t take another minute of the judgment and the judging, I remember his hand, and I feel it still patting my shoulder, and this is what I imagine it says:
‘“Hang in there, my fellow Feh, hang in there.”’
HAPPYish was Hoffman’s last filmed role. He had been in the process of making The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 before he died, and his final scenes were rewritten and given to other actors.
The pilot of HAPPYish also starred Kathryn Hahn and Rhys Ifans, but never aired. However, John Cameron Mitchell made it briefly available for viewing in 2020, before CBS/Showtime removed it.
The role of Payne was later recast with Steve Coogan and HAPPYish ran for 10 episodes.
Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander is published by Riverhead Books
