Leif Garrett turns 65 on Sunday, November 8. He was born Leif Per Nervik that day in 1961 in Hollywood, and by the time he was 17, his face was taped inside school lockers all over America. He had grown up on screen in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and the Walking Tall films, played Kristy McNichol’s boyfriend Zack on Family, and in early 1979 “I Was Made for Dancin'” climbed to No. 10 in the U.S. and No. 4 in Britain.
Then, five days before his 18th birthday, everything changed on a dark road in Los Angeles.
A young man named Roland Winkler was riding in the passenger seat that night, and he never walked again. Garrett has spent most of his adult life carrying that night with him. It took two decades, and a television crew, before he heard what Winkler really thought of him.
What Happened On The Night Of November 3, 1979?
Garrett was behind the wheel of a Porsche 914 that had been leased to his mother, coming from a late party with Winkler beside him. Neither of them wore a seatbelt. The car left the road and went down a hillside, and Winkler was left paralyzed at 19. Garrett’s blood alcohol level was about three times the legal limit, and ABC News later reported that he was high on quaaludes as well.
The detail that still stings came out decades later. “It’s ironic, Roland was supposed to drive but I stopped him,” Garrett told Fox News in 2020. He called the crash “a horrible lesson.”
Because he was still 17, Garrett was tried as a juvenile on the drunk-driving charge, and the Los Angeles Times reported that his license was suspended for a year and he was put on probation. Winkler sued in January 1980. When a Los Angeles jury finally ruled at the end of 1984, it set his damages at about $4.2 million but trimmed the award by 8 percent, because Winkler had agreed to ride with a driver he knew had been drinking. Jurors also ordered Garrett to pay $15,000 in punitive damages himself, according to UPI. In 1987, Winkler settled for another $6 million with the insurer of the company that had leased the car.
The lawsuit ended there. The guilt did not, and Garrett has been honest about where it took him next.
How The Crash Shadowed Leif Garrett For Decades
Garrett has said he started using drugs at 14, and he has blamed part of it on touring as a teenager with too little supervision. “You don’t allow a 14 or 15-year-old kid to go on the road without parental guidance,” he told ABC News in 2010. That interview traced his heroin addiction back to the crash.
Asked whether that night still haunted him, he answered plainly: “I have really hardcore nightmares and sleep issues.”
He kept working in between. Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Bob Sheldon, the rich Soc who is killed in the park, in The Outsiders in 1983, and he turned up in Shaker Run two years later. But the arrests piled up over the next 25 years. In June 1999, he was picked up in MacArthur Park after police said he tried to buy heroin and cocaine from undercover officers. A cocaine arrest followed in 2004. In 2006, officers stopped him on a Los Angeles Metro platform for not having a ticket and found heroin, and he was sentenced to 90 days in jail. In 2010 he admitted to police that he had black tar heroin hidden in his shoe, and he pleaded no contest and went into court-ordered rehab. That same year viewers watched him detox on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.
“I was a monster,” he told ABC News that fall. “I’m sorry that actions that I’ve done have hurt people.” He later called the jail stretch “the worst thing I ever went through,” in a 2019 interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine.
By then he had told his whole story in the 2019 memoir Idol Truth, written with Chris Epting. “It took a long time to get to a point where I don’t have to self-medicate myself to escape the pain,” he told Fox News in 2020, and then he put it more bluntly: “I’m not in jail and I’m not in rehab.” He still sings the old hits, too. Last year he played the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard on November 8, his 64th birthday. If you read our earlier look at Leif Garrett’s life after teen stardom, you know how far that is from where he once was.
Yet the moment that changed how he saw himself happened years before any of that, in a park in Los Angeles.
What Roland Winkler Told Him 20 Years Later
In 1999, VH1’s Behind the Music was building an episode on Garrett when executive producer Paul Gallagher learned about the crash. “They had been very, very good friends,” Gallagher told the Los Angeles Times in 2021. “Roland didn’t have any animosity at all.” Gallagher arranged for the two men to meet on camera in Griffith Park, and the Times called it one of the most poignant moments in the show’s history. Winkler told Garrett how the accident had changed his life, and he summed up that night simply: “We were young and drunk and stupid.”
Garrett had no warning. “It really was that Behind the Music show in 1999 when they set up the meeting between us without telling me,” he told Smashing Interviews. “I had no idea that I was going to be seeing Roland and that he would tell me that he did not hold me responsible.” Winkler, he said, saw it as a matter of chance, that “it could’ve been me or him and that it was just the luck of the draw.” Garrett has never let himself off that easily. “I held myself responsible bigtime for that and deservingly so,” he said.
Winkler lived another 18 years after that meeting. He died on May 25, 2017, in Palmdale, California, at 57, after decades of health problems from his injuries. His memorial page says he spent those years helping other paraplegics and sponsoring men and women trying to get sober, the same fight his old friend was still having. “Roland has passed away,” Garrett told Fox News in 2020.
The man who once couldn’t sleep through the night has found a kind of peace since. “I’m at the point where I am happy with who I am,” he told Smashing Interviews just after his 58th birthday. A few weeks later he gave Fox News the simplest version of it: “I’m just taking things one day at a time.”
