There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
—JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
When you follow the flow and don’t resist, life takes you on the most interesting journey. I wasn’t looking for another career to add to all I was already doing. I was quite happy with where I was and where we were.
It was 1988, and we had been married for eleven years. Each day more and more fulfilling than the last. The kids were all doing so well. Bruce had graduated from Berkeley and was about to start the graduate program at UCLA film school. Leslie was hand-painting jeans and selling them out of her house. Eventually a pair ended up on the cover of People magazine, worn by Madonna, the hottest star of the moment. That really put Leslie on the map. We were so happy for her. Stephen was going to Parsons in Paris and starting a life in France, where he would reside for the next ten years and eventually marry a wonderful French woman.
When you follow the flow and don’t resist, life takes you on the most interesting journey.
When your kids are doing well you can relax. There’s a saying that as parents, we are as happy as our least happy child. We had happy children at this point, so we felt comfortable in the life we had created together.
Alan and I love taking long driving trips; we load up the car with water and our luggage and take off. Often we head toward New Mexico, usually Santa Fe. I think it’s one of the most interesting cities in America. We’ve explored Santa Fe bit by bit over the years, but this time I wanted to go deep into the past and feel real Native America up close. I had always been drawn to the Native American culture. From prior experience, we knew that the drive from L.A. to Santa Fe is world class, hours of desolate and beautiful highways; these are hot, windows-open, feet-hanging-out-the-window kind of trips, sometimes with music, sometimes in silence. We’re comfortable being alone and silent together.
When your kids are doing well you can relax. There’s a saying that as parents, we are as happy as our least happy child.
These are the times when the mind lets down its guard. You can relax. You think about things differently, and in 1988 there was no such thing as a cell phone, so no office interruptions. Phones can intrude on these special times if you let them; today we’re all so used to being connected, it’s hard to conceive of not being able to take a peek to see if something is going on. On this trip, our only connection to the outside world was the radio—not even GPS. We used a map. Imagine!
Over the years, I’d made friends with Forrest Fenn, and he was now one of my dearest buddies; I jokingly referred to him as my boyfriend. He has been one of my great teachers in the art and archaeology world. He is the unofficial mayor of Santa Fe. These days he is especially known for the buried treasure he has put in the ground—somewhere, for some lucky and adventurous person to discover and keep. He says the treasure consists of a few million dollars’ worth of gold, silver, jewels, diamonds, rare coins, and other artifacts that he collected in his lifetime. Over the years, I have personally seen him fill this treasure chest many times; I can tell you for a fact it contains a fortune. But he is the real national treasure, the Will Rogers of our time.
Whenever Alan and I visit Santa Fe, Forrest is always our tour guide, introducing us to shop and gallery owners, plus restaurants that only the locals know about. Santa Fe has a way of life most Americans don’t know exists. It’s the land of Tom Ford, who grew up there and keeps his roots. Ali MacGraw makes Santa Fe her home. Val Kilmer, Gene Hackman, and Shirley MacLaine all live or lived there. You get the picture. It’s a very special place.
We’re comfortable being alone and silent together.
On this crisp autumn morning, I wanted to wander around the Anasazi ruins and the famous ancient cliff dwellings of Bandelier. We made our way out to this historic place, where whole lives and cultures once abounded, with structure, moral codes, and attention to beauty and nature. The cliff homes or “condos,” as I call them, are enchanting. You are aware, even in the stillness, that people were here. The evidence is everywhere, in the petroglyphs at the backs of their caves and the fire marks on the walls, indicating their need for light and warmth.
As Alan roamed the cliffs above me, I settled into one cave and was struck by the energy inside. I imagined four or five people had slept here, but people were smaller then, so maybe more than that. There was a ledge outside overlooking a vista that hadn’t been touched for thousands of years, and there I sat, all morning, with the warm sun beating down on me.
I was mesmerized.
That night around three a.m., I awakened from a deep sleep, sat up, and leaned over the bed to grab a yellow legal tablet I had brought with me and a pen. I’d never done this before. I started writing…and writing…and writing. Around eight a.m., Alan woke up and said, “What are you doing?”
I answered quietly, “I don’t know.”
And then I read it back to him. And I sobbed.
I didn’t realize it, but I had written what would become the first sixty pages of my book Keeping Secrets. Mrs. Kilgore had opened the door, and clearly I was now ready to understand, feel, and remember all of it. I thought with my success I was finished with this story; I thought I had left behind that little girl in the closet. But to finally understand the perfection of life and the gifts inherent in the negatives, there was something else I needed to do. I needed to tell my story and use my celebrity, my louder voice, to help others. I wanted to pull someone else out of their own personal closet, whatever that meant in their lives. I didn’t know this was my motivation then, only that I needed to tell my story.
We learn when we are ready.
To do so, I had to go back, all the way back. I opened my emotions and wrote and wrote. It was like a movie running before my mind, the terror, the violence, the shame, the fear. Overwhelming fear. I could hear it, smell it, feel it. I was terrorized once again just by the thoughts. Alan had known, but he had never really known. Like his terrible injury as a child, we tend to repress pain. It’s a survival mechanism, until we are ready to learn from it. Yes, I had dealt with my low self-esteem with Mrs. Kilgore but that was just one aspect of healing. The real story had remained locked inside me until this moment.
As I read aloud to Alan he was very moved and held me tight. “You must keep writing. This is important.” And I did. I wrote nonstop for the next year. By hand. I was literally cutting and pasting, scratching out, using Wite-Out to delete. This is so antiquated from the way I write today. But it was good because the process of writing longhand is slow, and I had the chance to truly feel and embrace all of it. Also I had enough acquired wisdom to see it from a perspective I would never have had as a child or a young woman. We learn when we are ready.
As a child, my life had been all about fear and powerlessness. As an adult with life experience, I could see it through different eyes. And it was sad. So sad. My poor, shy, sweet mother tried so hard to keep us looking normal to the outside world. We were all so good at keeping secrets, but I had learned that this was not the path to health in any facet of life: We are as sick as our secrets.
As a family, we made up stories to protect ourselves from others knowing the real truth. This was where I learned to put on a happy face and pretend to the outside world that all was good or great. Man, what awful training for living and surviving. This was training for learning to be unrealistic, to pretend, to lie. When we got the courage to call the police, my father would answer the door and explain it away as “overemotional children.” He could be a charmer when he wanted to be.
But I also saw my father from a place of great compassion. He was a merchant marine loading bombs in the bowels of a ship. He often said if they got hit, he knew there was no way out for him. He was in Nagasaki when the unthinkable happened. When he came home in 1946, I was conceived to prove he had made it. But by then the demons were such that only booze could take them away. All his pent-up emotions came out as anger and violence. He couldn’t have a couple of drinks. He drank alcoholically; he drank to get drunk. It’s not normal to get drunk. Most people realize when they’ve had enough or had too much. For an alcoholic like my father, no amount was too much. He drank till it was gone or he was gone.
We are as sick as our secrets.
That he quit after all those decades of drunkenness is commendable. It’s one thing to give up the substance; it’s another to emerge from the fog having your emotions laid out bare naked, to be forced (as a sober person) to feel all the feelings he tried so hard to shut out. That takes real strength and courage, and I have deep admiration for him for doing this. He was forced to remember the pain he inflicted on himself and his family; he had to live with the fact that we didn’t like him much at that point (which changed, by the way). I realized I was writing the book to find forgiveness, both for him and for me, to let us both off the hook. Forgiveness is key to happiness. And the choices we make matter.
Forgiveness is a process. It takes time. Page by page, I saw it all more clearly. I saw why my sister and then my brother and finally my younger brother and myself all found our individual ways to take the pain away.
WHAT I KNOW NOW
We all do the best we can. My father did the best he could. I accept that he had a terrible disease over which he was powerless. I’ve learned in life that no one can judge another. No one is better than another. We all make mistakes. We all make bad choices. We all succeed and fail, and we each have our own solitary individual journey. The journey is the gift. Who can cast the first stone?
Before you start pointing fingers…make sure your hands are clean!
—BOB MARLEY
One day I was finished. It took me a year and a half, but I finished the book. I sat on the floor of my hotel suite and looked at the thousand handwritten pages I had been dragging around with me all these months. The relief, the feeling of accomplishment, the growth, the freedom I felt at having faced it, felt it, looked at it honestly, and forgiven it, him, everything—these were all swirling around inside me. If there is such a thing as an evolutionary scale, I was moved up a couple of notches. I had grown as a person writing this book. I would never be the same. I understood another level of myself and felt good with it. I also felt true love for my father. I got it. I got him. I understood. It was all going to be okay. And I would never again hold anything against him. He had made it out of a living hell. I admired him.
I was now working at the MGM Grand Hotel in Reno. I had taken a residency, much as I had at the Las Vegas Hilton when starring in The Moulin Rouge. A residency is a contract for full-time work and to do an agreed-upon number of shows. I had signed on for a year. I was the star of Hello Hollywood, Hello. It was a perfect setup for me: I would write my book all day and then go onstage at night in a big extravaganza, with feathers and beautiful girls.
Forgiveness is key to happiness. And the choices we make matter.
Afterward, when Alan and I returned to our hotel room, we were greeted by our cat, Chrissy Snow, a beautiful white long-haired Persian. When you live in a hotel room, having a pet is a big deal. It’s the only thing that says home, and it is extremely comforting. I’d take a bath while Alan sat with me, and Chrissy sat on the sink and stared at both of us. (What do cats think about?) Alan lit candles and put on soft music. Sometimes we’d have a glass of wine. Then we’d get into bed, and I would read to him that day’s work. Alan was so supportive of me and the project (and every project). I had done this at his urging, and every night he was left aghast realizing what had happened to me and my family growing up. I was grateful we had found each other, that life had turned out so sweet.
I sold the manuscript to Warner Books. My new publisher was Larry Kirshbaum, and my editor was Nancy Neiman. We were a great team, and they were very excited about this book. No celebrity at that time had ever written such a raw and honest account of herself. It’s not easy writing your own story because the people involved never see the story quite the same as you do. It causes tension. My shy mother was upset with me for “airing the dirty family laundry.” We had tense flare-ups about it. I said heatedly one day, “That’s what you’ve always done—pretend what’s happening isn’t happening!”
I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I also hadn’t planned to write this story. It wrote itself, including the first sixty pages, which were like automatic writing. What possessed me to wake up and grab a legal tablet and write? I felt directed.
Keeping Secrets came out and shot to number one. It stayed on the bestseller list for weeks. We licensed it to ABC as a movie.
And my life as an author began. It was 1989.
The concept of the “adult child of an alcoholic” was just starting to be recognized, and my book had a lot to do with it. Millions who, like me, had never drunk alcoholically, were finding in adulthood that their emotions just weren’t right. Destructive behaviors, like shopping and spending money you didn’t have to take away pain you didn’t know you had, and being a pleaser, were getting in the way of living happily. These destructive traits were part of the disease. You’d do anything to take the pain away (for the moment).
Before therapy, I had unknowingly needed to re-create the heart-pounding crisis of fear and tension of those violent nights because I had become addicted to the craziness. I didn’t feel complete without it. Exhaustion and sadness from the events of the previous night were a part of who I was, who we all were. The nondrinking child of an alcoholic gets kudos: “Everyone in your family is drunk but not you.” Right, I didn’t drink, but I was just as sick. Crisis creating was my form of alcoholism; I just didn’t use alcohol as the catalyst.
When I moved out of my father’s home and no longer experienced the nightly violence, I felt an empty hole inside me that needed filling. I filled it by doing stupid things like spending the rent money. I had to have constant crisis. Whenever I could say those magic words, “I’ll take it!” I felt happy, and the pain was gone. But then, of course, it would be followed by another deeper panic of How do I pay for it? This is the sick merry-go-round of screwed-up emotions of the adult child of the alcoholic. We look okay, but we aren’t.
To survive you do what you have to do to make yourself feel well: alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or food. Take your pick. They are all the same thing. They all lead to destruction, which is the point. You feel worthless, and this is how you prove it to yourself.
I went on every talk show. It was hard not to get emotional on each show. There were a lot of tears.
And then letters started pouring in: “You wrote my story.” “I finally figured out what has been wrong with me all my life.” “I had the same father.” “I finally feel free.” I wrote it for me, but it was turning out to be for them also.
Two TV shows asked my family to be on as a family. The first was Oprah—she treated us so well. The second was The Phil Donahue Show. His show was very popular and prestigious. I was very nervous. I knew Phil from having appeared on his show several times before. Before the taping, I took him aside and said seriously, “Phil, this is my family.”
To survive you do what you have to do to make yourself feel well: alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or food. Take your pick. They are all the same thing. They all lead to destruction, which is the point. You feel worthless, and this is how you prove it to yourself.
He said, “I know.”
“No, you don’t. This is my family.” I looked at him sternly, like, Don’t screw with them. It took great courage for my mother, father, sister Maureen, brother Dan, brother Michael, and me to sit down before America.
Then Phil Donahue opened his show with “Well, this family had a major drinking problem. Meet the Mahoneys.”
I died inside. Maureen and Dan had been sober for several years. My sister looked glowing and beautiful, and Dan was ready with his twinkling eyes and quick humor. Michael was still drinking and using; little did we know that in a few years, it would take his life. But today he showed up, nervous and unable to really speak, but he showed up. My mother was beautiful but once again so nervous being on TV. This time she memorized what she was going to say, and she pulled it off with her sweetness. She was endearing.
Phil Donahue opened the questioning by going directly to my father: “So, your name being Mahoney might have something to do with your drinking problem, right?” Without skipping a beat, my father shot back, “Yeah, and my grandmother’s name was Donahue!” The audience roared with laughter, and the show got off to a great start. He won their hearts.
The show was an unabashed success. It was an important one. It brought the secret out and into the light. Others related. So many people to this day tell me how this book freed them and unlocked their demons. Afterward Alan and I and the whole family went out for lunch at Tavern on the Green in Central Park and had a celebration. We had made it as a family, and our story was now going to help so many others.
Having a bestselling book had a major ripple effect. Requests for lectures came in, from large groups and small groups. A new career as a lecturer emerged for me, thanks to Alan’s creativity, one I had never entertained. Ironically, he had said something to me years before, the first time I ever did my Vegas act. That night we were lying in bed recounting the evening, and he said prophetically: “I see a day when all you will do is speak.” I sat up and looked at him as if he were crazy, yet here we were today on the lecture circuit.
Now he got to work booking me. There is no prep for lecturing, no “lecture school.” You are either good at it or you aren’t. You succeed and fail in front of people.
My very first lecture was before an audience of approximately eight hundred people and was funded by a recovery house program. I came equipped with a memorized script and a stack of index cards. Halfway through, I saw people leaving, people uninterested, coughing, frankly…bored. After it was over, I wanted to go home and never speak again. But Alan had already booked several dates, and I couldn’t renege.
The next lecture I decided to go it without notes. After all, in nightclubs I was used to speaking off the cuff. I treated all audiences as though we were having a telephone chat, as if the whole audience were one person.
What a difference. I spoke from my heart; I spoke my truth.
Speaking is a privilege; a whole lot of people give up their time to come hear what you will say. They hope they will walk away with a better understanding of the subject and themselves. My job was to make sure I inspired with a clear cohesive message.
Alan soon had me set up as the national spokeswoman for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA). He booked lectures; I spoke to adults and children alike, including young children at Alatot meetings.
One group of children asked me to come speak to them. Afterward there was a reception line where they could hug me or touch me or tell me something. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little boy who kept moving to the back of the line.
Finally everyone was gone except him. He shyly looked at the floor. “Do you want to talk to me?” I asked.
He shuffled his feet and looked away and finally, quietly, shyly, said, “I wish I could hit my father over the head with a tennis racket like you did.”
I knelt and put my arms around him. I said softly, “You are lucky because you are here. You have someone to talk to and other friends who are going through the same thing. And because of that, you won’t ever have to do something as awful as I did.”
Alan and I locked eyes. Poor little boy. I never forgot him. If I wrote the book only for him, it was worthwhile.
As the national spokesperson of Adult Children of Alcoholics, I could be a voice for all those who had never been heard. I also sat on the board of the American Psychiatric Association, the first layperson to do so.
This was an important time in my life. But as with all of life’s breakthroughs, after I had explored, dissected, found forgiveness, and gratitude, I wanted to move on.
What was next?