Vic Perillo

Former child star Gary Coleman's life these days is reading like a script. It is a complicated and emotional story line in which the principal players on both sides are making allegations which would keep any soap opera in material for months: sidelined careers, failing mental health, parental greed, questionable friendships, stolen money.

Former child star Gary Coleman's life these days is reading like a script. It is a complicated and emotional story line in which the principal players on both sides are making allegations which would keep any soap opera in material for months: sidelined careers, failing mental health, parental greed, questionable friendships, stolen money.

THEY WERE a family whose good fortune was nice to see. Natives of the rural Deep South, the parents once mopped floors and washed laundry for a living. They were hard-working poor, reaching for modest middle-class comfort in suburban Zion, Ill., when, storybook style, Hollywood accidentally discovered their cute, cuddlesome little boy on a Chicago bank commercial and turned him almost overnight into the highest paid child star in history. As precocious Arnold Jackson on the NBC-TV comedy series "Diff'rent Strokes," Gary Coleman charmed a nation and made his parents rich.