A Former Child Star's Grown-Up Reward

"It took me years and years and years to get where I am," he says. Haley speaks clearly and holds your eye. Eating his own pizza now. Full circle. He doesn't appear to want sympathy (his story has a happy ending); rather, he tries to make you understand what it was like to be him.

"When you're a child actor and you're a celebrity," he says, "your identity gets attached to that. Unwittingly. When that stopped, I had an identity crisis. And I didn't even know what that was. An identity crisis. My self-esteem got attached to this thing that wasn't real, and when that stopped, you're stuck with an identity that doesn't exist. That's a deep hole to climb out of."

He continues. "I mean years, trying to deal with that emotionally, to uncover it, to look at it, to try to grow from it, to accept it, to move on, and look forward with hope instead of looking backward with -- "

Whatever?

"No, with sorrow and loss and -- "

You keep interrupting him. Because you're afraid he's going to start crying in a Cheesecake Factory. Because his force field is down, and you feel like you want to be careful. But Haley just keeps talking. He's not at all embarrassed to be letting it all hang out there, his private disappointments, in a crowded restaurant. He'll tell his story. "Some people have a tendency to go off on the deep end. Luckily, I don't know how or why, instead of going off the end, I chose to reach out and get help," he says.

So you shrinked your way out?

"It was a combination," Haley says, "of everything. Some therapy, some friends, people who have been there. Books. Like anything I could grab onto, like 'I'm OK, You're OK.' "

His mother saved him. When he was a kid, she sang like Rosemary Clooney, he says, and recorded a handful of albums, but stopped when, as Haley puts, "she started to plunk out kids." She took up painting, doing oils of beaches and barns. "I think she did it out of necessity. She got a van and put the paintings in the van and would show up at art fairs and run around selling to make ends meet. My dad was struggling."

His father, Bud Haley, was a radio disc jockey who jumped ship into acting. He didn't make it to shore. One of his father's golf buddies was looking for a kid to voice Dennis the Menace.

"I remember going into the den and my dad had this little reel-to-reel and my dad got out this little mike and had a script. He'd read a line and I'd say it back, just like he read it. He'd read a line, I'd say a line. Back and forth. I guess I got the part because we went to a recording studio and did it again." Haley was 5.

"Then my dad got the idea I should get an agent. I was 7. I started going around to auditions, doing commercials and cartoons. My dad was taking me. It was him teaching me. That's how it started. It was really my dad deciding."