Booze, Revisited

Meanwhile, here is where you can find that errant column and its wonderful reader comments.

Some wrote movingly of their recovery after “years of hell,” and frequently of how the drinker ruins not only himself but his family, and of despised parents who embarrassed them horribly and destroyed childhoods. (“My dad died too late. I never visit his grave.”)

Another reader, un-cured, addressing that one, says he fears that’s how he is right now to his estranged teenage daughters. One of those expressing gratitude for the column hoped that it just might help with a losing-the-game relative.

I urge you to read as many of the comments as you can take. There are some chillers.

From your emails and from other in-person comments, it seems to be a rare thing not to have been touched by problem drinking somewhere among family or friends or business associates.

Websites on alcohol and drinking statistics abound. Numbers vary but clearly millions are suffering the tortures of the damned. No less an authority than Don Imus, sober for long years with the day-at-a-time method and having read the last column, imparts the sad news that “rehab works for one out of four.” Every bit as disturbing is the statement of a highway patrolman I know that one out of five drivers heading toward you — or your kids — in the oncoming lane on Friday and Saturday nights is over the intoxication limit. Or, less politely, drunk. One Saturday night, traveling east on Long Island, my car became the fifth in a line of cars to peel off into the right-hand ditch rhythmically, one after the other like Rockettes, as a speeding oncomer decided he preferred our lane.

One website puts the number of people deeply suffering at 15 million. Keep that in mind when those weekend cars come at you.

I all but forgot that years ago, in my early days on ABC, I did a two-part show on alcoholism. Standing out most clearly in memory is an attractive, intelligent, well-spoken mother of three who survived shooting herself in the forehead while drunk.

Readers made the point that “too smart to be a drunk” cuts no — pardon the expression — ice.

It’s a shame that such a heavy price is paid by both the drinker and his victim for a substance that is so wonderful in its good ways: a lubricator of conversation, a steadier of nerves, a remover of that little edge of nervousness, an uninhibitor of the lover. And the lovee. In movies, anyway, a steadier of the trembling hand of the drunken doctor, usually played by Thomas Mitchell.

(Though of course loss of inhibition, pushed too far, can release the inner rapist as well.)

I wish I’d discovered earlier that, with my weak head, a mere tablespoon’s worth of wine before going on took away that annoying little edge of performance nerves.

For a while I felt guilty about this, or about recommending it. Would that make me an enabler? The greats don’t need a drink, I thought. (I was very young.)

Then one night, backstage at “The Tonight Show,” I saw Jack Benny — yes, Jack Benny — seemingly the calmest, most assured and relaxed man in all of show business, quite casually call for and down a couple of inches of Scotch, with one ice cube, before sauntering with that wonderful walk calmly onto the set with Johnny. I stared in disbelief.

I appeared on the old “Kraft Music Hall” with George Burns. Just before airtime I was nervous as hell. George came to my dressing room and offered me a snort from his hip flask as if that were traditional. Brace yourself: I held it in my mouth, nodding thanks, and as he left I spat it into the dressing room sink, terrified that I would come reeling onto the stage. Dressing room sinks, time out of mind, have served multiple purposes.

(Remember George Gobel’s rationale for taking a stiff drink before going on? “You don’t expect me to go out there alone do you?”)

The world of showbiz has always had a heavy population of drunks. Fine actors like Jason Robards, Bogey, Maureen Stapleton, Trevor Howard, most Barrymores, Veronica Lake (drunk on my show), Robert Newton, Dana Andrews (reportedly needing to have his head held in a brace for close-ups) Dick and Liz, Peter O’Toole and Robert Mitchum represent a tiny percentage of the showfolk apparently plagued with “the cup that cheers.” And how did I leave out the great Spencer Tracy, who suffered alcohol seizures, bellowing and hurling furniture and glassware and having to be needled by a doctor into unconsciousness?

Burton’s vivid eloquence on my PBS show on what it is to be the slave of alcohol was recalled by readers, some of whom found it on YouTube, I think. Obviously people vary in their capacities. Mitchum explained, in one of two wonderful shows I did with him, that he could drink large quantities of alcohol with no apparent effect of any kind. Hardly a blessing, liver-wise, I should think.

I told an A.A. friend of mine that by just lightly licking the surface of a martini — not even taking a sip — I can feel it down to my toes. He paled, saying, “My God, I had to drink three to feel anything!”