Resurrection
“We are lost.”
“No, it will turn out well.”
“How will it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”
—MARC NORMAN and TOM STOPPARD,
Shakespeare in Love
IT was April 1978, and in New York the spring was lush and bright with forsythia, its branches flowing over the old stone bridges in Central Park.
I wound a silk scarf around my head, hiding as best I could behind sunglasses and wearing a long dark coat that was too warm for the weather. I took a cab across the park, past bright patches of Japanese plum trees, but I was unmoved by all that color, feeling nothing of the promise of spring. I was on my way to an appointment with yet another doctor—a last resort, I thought. If this one didn’t know how to help me, I would go home to another of the long, dark, harrowing blackouts I had been having day after day, night after night.
I had called my beloved sister, Holly Ann, to come to New York to help me get through whatever it was I was going through. She brought her young son, Kalen, whose bright ten-month-old face, smiling at me over the cereal-spattered table of his high chair, was the only thing I could look at that made me want to go on living. In a few days I would turn thirty-eight.
That day I had an appointment with Dr. Stanley Gitlow, who had been suggested to me by a man I will call Joe, a well-known actor and well-loved man about town. This felt like the last stop on the line. I had known Joe by reputation—a few times a year he would be in a highly public brawl somewhere in a bar, and instead of seeing his startlingly handsome face shining out of the pages of the New York Post or the Daily News, I’d see a different Joe, a man full of rage, beaten about the eyes, fists out, clamoring for more of his opponent’s blood. Or at least that was the way I viewed it, and it gave me courage, made me feel I was not alone in this struggle.
I was never photographed knocking someone over, but I felt a kind of unholy bond with Joe. He was doing what I wished I could do, acting out on impulses I understood. He was showing them, getting even, and, like me, probably not even remembering where he had been until he was told the next day. My own rampages didn’t make it into the gossip pages, even when they were very public, like the time I slugged a New York City police officer at Madison Square Garden. The cop hadn’t wanted to let me back into the VIP seats at a 1977 Dylan concert, and I took offense.
I had called Joe in Los Angeles, where he was working on a movie. On his dime, he called me back, and we talked for about forty minutes. I was half or more in the bag, moving toward my afternoon blackout, and I wrote down everything he said in a big drunken scrawl. He told me where to go and what to do and whom to call. He said there were answers, and that they involved people who were doing what I needed to do—not drink. He said I must see Stanley Gitlow, and that Stanley would know what to do.
I heard the truth in Joe’s voice. He told me how sick he had been, and how desperate. He talked about the miracle, as he described it, that had come into his life.
The flowers in the boxes in front of Stanley Gitlow’s office on Fifth Avenue, tulips in deep purple and red, were nodding. I walked into his office, where he sat behind his desk, a handsome and dapper-looking man in his fifties. The thought occurred to me that I could have been dating him. I nearly turned around and walked out. He looked too good to be true in his white coat, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He smiled at me, a bright, wonderfully winsome smile.
His smile was the only hopeful thing in the room, as I began to tell him what I was feeling, what I thought was my problem. I discussed the years of therapy and the years of drinking. I told him who I thought I was—an artist, a singer, a mother, a lover. By the time I told him my lover had left me, I was sobbing, lost in my melodrama. I said I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I said I knew I was dying, some days quickly, sometimes slowly. I said I plowed miserably from day to day, pulling myself from one blackout, one despairing morning, to the next. I told Stanley that despite all the success, I felt my life might as well be over. I contemplated suicide every day, I said, and if I were capable of pulling a trigger, I would have.
“Stop!” he said, interrupting my soap opera. He was smiling, as though I had just told him an amusing anecdote instead of the beginning of the end of my life. “Don’t say another word. I know what is wrong with you, and I know what you can do about it!” He kept smiling.
I froze. No one had ever told me he knew what was wrong with me and that there was something I could do about it. Of all the doctors and shrinks I had seen in the twenty-three years since I had started drinking, not one had ever said these words to me.
“You have an illness,” Gitlow said, “and it is going to kill you. But there is a solution.” No one had ever spoken to me about an “illness.”
“Of course,” Gitlow continued, “you can keep drinking, wait a couple of years, and check yourself into an institution with your wet brain and throw away the key.” I didn’t say a thing. This particular option was already on my to-do list, anyway.
“Or,” Gitlow went on—and here his kind eyes sparkled and he leaned closer to me and looked me in the eyes—“since you seem to be a bright girl under all those tears, you could check yourself into rehab and start to get your life back.”
The strange thing is that I absolutely knew I was hearing the truth. For some reason, after all the high-priced doctors who prescribed pills, or who told me we would work on the psychological problems and then the drinking would solve itself; after all the god-awful hangovers and the promises to myself not to let my life deteriorate into an endless stream of blackouts; after finally deciding I was never going to stop drinking of my own free will, the window of hope opened in that office. I was going to get a chance to have the life I had been missing out on for years.
Early on the morning of April 19 I flew to Reading, Pennsylvania. My assistant, Janet Matorin, and my accountant, Saul Schneider, were with me on the plane, two of the last people who were still able to deal with me. I did not know where Clark was. We had not talked for a few days, and he was on his own dark, troubled road, doing drugs, dealing heroin, sleeping with a gun under his pillow. He might have weighed 130 pounds, ten pounds less than what I weighed. The money I was giving him for school had been spent on drugs. He was nineteen. I was thirty-eight.
When we landed in Reading, a tall young man who, to my surprise, recognized me immediately met us. I said I had to use the restroom and hurried off to drink the large jelly jar full of vodka that I had stuffed into my huge shoulder bag before I left my apartment that morning. I was already quite drunk, and the ten ounces of vodka put me in a happy, giddy, joyful mood that would last all of about ten minutes while they drove me up to Chit Chat Rehabilitation Center for Alcoholics (now called the Caron Foundation).
The young man let me off with my luggage at the door of a pretty white house at the top of a hill. A drunk farm—this was where I had landed. Me, the hope of my family, the hippie gone silver and platinum, was bloated and sweating, even in the cool air of the Pennsylvania morning. I could not walk, talk, think, or function without a quart of vodka in my system. And there I was in the springtime of my life, with my suitcase full of books, my typewriter, my up and down pills for getting me through the day.
In the pale green trees the birds were singing and the sun was bright on the flowers around the farmhouse. Residents smiled at me from the white-painted rocking chairs on the porch and in the reception rooms. When I reached my room in the detox section the kind nurse told me she would take the vitamins, the sleeping pills, the books, the typewriter, the empty jelly jar. She showed me where I might shower, and where I would sleep. And then she said, softly, tenderly, “Now, why don’t you let us drive?”
On April 19, 1978, I took my last drink, God willing. In the Valium-aided withdrawal that followed, I felt I could hear tulips pushing through the dark earth.
For the first few nights I woke up in the night to the screaming, open mouths of my demons, howling through the quiet hills around me. The faces of my friends, my son, my sister and brothers hung over me, shining like beacons during the few hours I slept. Between daily meditation meetings we listened to Father Martin talk about the disease of alcoholism in his film Chalk Talk as we detoxed, sweated, hurt. I ached as I listened to Joni Mitchell sing, over and over again, the songs from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Most days I sobbed my eyes out, seeing flowers and hearing music as though for the first time, weeping over my own sad, broken drinking story. But the sounds that were most real came from the stories of other alcoholics.
From the time I was two or three, I yearned to know how everyone else did it—how they smiled when they wanted to cry, how they went on when they wanted to stop and fall to their knees and say, “I give up.” In my childhood, politics and debate and music were as much a part of our upbringing as booze. (We were privately convinced that people who did not drink must be illiterate!) But now, in Pennsylvania, I listened, and I began to learn. And though the details were often different, the feelings and the sorrow were the same.
One morning a few days after my arrival at the drunk farm in the hills of Pennsylvania, I walked past the mirror and for the first time in years looked into my own eyes without flinching.