The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall

“The strength of these always honest and affecting anecdotes is, in fact, their variety of paths to recovery; the diversity should help this excellent volume appeal to a wide audience.”

—
P
UBLISHERS
W
EEKLY

“Addiction to alcohol and other drugs is a complex medical problem. However, one of our major obstacles to effective treatment and recovery is stigma.
The Harder They Fall
provides us with stories of courage, passion, commitment, and triumph. Each depicts their own struggle with a debilitating disease and their ultimate decision to choose life over death. These stories are very inspirational and will serve to provide help and hope to those who may still be suffering, as well as put a face on recovery. It is an excellent read for all of us who have been affected by addiction.”

—S
TACIA
M
URPHY
, President, National Council
on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc.

“Read this book! Here are the
real
winners in life. The best and the brightest with devastating illnesses, living clean, sober, confident, happy lives. If you want to know about alcoholism and addiction and how to get ‘weller than well,’ read this book!”

—C
APTAIN
R
ONALD
E. S
MITH
, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, National Naval Medical Center, and for twelve years the Psychiatric Consultant to Congress

“These compelling and intimate narratives provide an illuminating look at celebrity … the addiction, the loss, and the recovery process.”

—H
AROLD
O
WENS
, Director, Addiction
Recovery Services, MusiCares Foundation

“Here are the stories of twenty-one celebrities who had everything until their abusive chemicals showed them that, at the bottom, they had nothing at all. These pioneers in the modern drug abuse epidemic eventually each found their way into recovery, even redemption. They tell of the joy of finding a way of being that is more precious than fame and fortune.”

—R
OBERT
L. D
U
P
ONT
, M.D., White House Drug Czar
for President Richard Nixon
and President Gerald Ford (1973–1977)
and author of
The Selfish Brain

The Harder They Fall

Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories
of Addiction and Recovery

Gary Stromberg
Jane Merrill

H
aze
LD
e
N

Hazelden
Center City, Minnesota 55012-0176

1-800-328-0094
1-651-213-4590 (fax)
www.hazelden.org

©2005 by Gary Stromberg and Jane Merrill
All rights reserved.
Published 2005
Paperback edition published 2007 with the addition of photographs and two profiles (Glenn Beck and Hugh Masekela)
Printed in the United States of America
No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any manner
without the written permission of the publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stromberg, Gary, 1942-
     The harder they fall: celebrities tell their real-life stories of addiction and recovery / Gary Stromberg, Jane Merrill.
        p. cm.
     ISBN 978-1-59285-156-0 (hardcover)
     ISBN 978-1-59285-476-9 (paperback)
     Ebook ISBN 978-1-59285-976-4
        1. Celebrities--Drug use. I. Merrill, Jane. II. Title

HV5824.C42S87 2005
616.86’092’2--dc22                                                                                         2004060938

Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors and interviewees, and are not necessarily endorsed by Hazelden.

11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1

Jacket design by Theresa Gedig
Interior design by David Spohn
Typesetting by Tursso Companies

To David and Emily, and in memory of Fred E.

—G
ARY
S
TROMBERG

To my four stars—Emma, Burton, Julie, and Rosalind

—J
ANE
M
ERRILL

Foreword by Lewis Lapham

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Stephen Davis

Introduction by Gary Stromberg

Paul Williams (singer, songwriter)

Jim Ramstad (U.S. congressman)

Dock Ellis (baseball player)

Anne Lamott (writer)

Mac (Dr. John) Rebennack (musician)

Pete Hamill (writer)

Gerry Cooney (boxer)

Richard Pryor (comedian)

Malachy McCourt (writer, actor, entrepreneur)

Chuck Negron (musician)

Mariette Hartley (actor)

Dick Beardsley (long-distance runner)

Alice Cooper (musician)

Pat Day (jockey)

Richard Lewis (comedian)

Steve Earle (musician)

Malcolm McDowell (actor)

Franz Wright (poet)

Grace Slick (musician)

Destry Forgette (rodeo cowboy)

Nile Rodgers (musician)

Glenn Beck (broadcaster)

Hugh Masekela (world music pioneer)

About the Celebrities

About the Authors

by Lewis Lapham

A
BOUT THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IMPULSES NATIVE
to the Age of Aquarius nobody was better informed than the late Terry Southern. As a writer, he favored the darker shades of comedy (the screenplay for
Dr. Strangelove
, the preposterously pornographic novel
Candy
); as a pilgrim on the many roads to expanded consciousness, he experimented with every form of substance abuse rooted in an ancient religion or known to modern science. His satirical pieces occasionally appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
, and late at night in one or another of the uptown bars that catered to the New York literary trade, I sometimes came upon the author himself, contemplating what was left of the ice in a glass of gin, remarking on the number of his talented acquaintances—actors, authors, film directors, action painters, stand-up comics, lead guitarists—who had gone missing in the forests of addiction. He attributed the casualty rate to the heavy prices paid for the promise of transcendence, and in a season marked by a sharp upturn in the bad news incoming from the American dream of military grandeur in Vietnam, I remember him saying to the assembled company at a table in Elaine’s, “There is no power on earth that can loosen a man’s grip on his own throat.”

I don’t know whether the lyric was his own, or whether he borrowed it from a California Zen master or a Bob Dylan song, but by 1969 the point was not one that provoked an argument. The social revolutions of what was proving to be a not-so-joyous decade had rallied to the cry of freedom, in all its tenses and declensions—freedom for and freedom from, freedom then and now. The word appeared on everybody’s tie-dyed shirt or sign, went well with protest movements and psychedelic dope, marched south for civil rights, drifted west with the surfboards and the sun. And yet, as had been noticed by both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway during a previous age of American exploration in the wilderness of the self, freedom had its faults, seldom turned out to match the commercial advertising copy, went more or less directly south.

As an editor often exposed in the early 1970s to writers newly arrived on the heights of commercial celebrity or literary reputation, I noticed that their fear of failure was surpassed by their fear of success. So also but more obviously, similar states of anxiety descended upon the movie stars and the musicians. Becoming suddenly famous, they were granted license to say and do as they pleased, to ask and have and send the bill to Zurich. Being American, they had been born in the assurance of their certain virtue and perfect innocence. The money and the television cameras taught them otherwise. At liberty to discover in themselves traits of character of which they had no prior knowledge—also criminal tendencies, monstrous wishes, perverse desires, a comprehensive repertoire of antisocial behaviors—some of the most observant members of the troupe turned away in horror from what they saw in Medusa’s mirror. Terrified by the freedom to play any role or tune that might come fantastically to mind, they looked for ways to turn to stone—acquired inhibitions, developed a capacity for the self-inflicted wound, applied for early admission to the nearest cage. A drug or alcohol addiction served the purposes of the prison cell, which, by the fashionable standards of the day, established one’s credentials as an enemy of the system or the state but offered the further advantage of remaining silent while seeming cool.

The twenty-three traveler’s tales collected in this book at hand prove the exceptions to Southern’s heavy rule of thumb. Each individual speaks to his or her own experience of wrestling with what they mistook for a muse of fire or an angel of deliverance. They testify not only to their own particular courage and strength of will but also to the truth of Sigmund Freud’s general theory of
Civilization and Its Discontents
, predicated on the recognition of never-ending war between the instinct toward life and the instinct toward death, Eros and Thanatos, contending for “the evolution of civilization” and “for the life of the human species … this battle of the giants that our nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.”