Crystal’s parents had agreed to watch Ariel during their daughter’s vacation. With her flight to Ireland booked the morning after Warren’s thirty-third birthday, Crystal checked herself into a nearby airport hotel. She had wrapped an expensive Montblanc pen and silk pajamas, along with a small birthday cake, and invited Warren to meet her alone for an intimate birthday and bon voyage dinner. He showed up hours late, too drunk to drive and claiming that the limo outside was waiting for him—as was Bianca Jagger back at the Chateau Marmont.
Crystal flew to Dublin the next morning, convinced that it was over.
Before she left for Ireland, Crystal had made a single phone call to put her own mind at ease over Warren’s condition. With so many of Warren’s family and friends still burned-out by the intervention, coupled with the knowledge that he hadn’t been sticking to the promises he’d made that day, local guardian angels were now in short supply. She instead turned to the one friend who, thanks to both geographical distance and an intuitive compassion, had yet to let her down: Paul Nelson.
“I can’t help him, Paul,” she had confided over the phone. “I’ve tried, but now he’s got to help himself.” Nelson confirmed that he understood and hung up.
Taking his “blood brother” status to heart, Nelson had been planning to fly out to Santa Barbara almost immediately following Warren’s intervention. The rehabilitation took time, however, and the commute from New York on a journalist’s salary wasn’t cheap. Warren remained unaware that Crystal had had to pay for Nelson’s airfare to attend the intervention. This time around, Nelson had haggled with his bosses and saved every penny; he wanted to be there for Warren in his time of need.
With him, Nelson had taken an early cassette of Neil Young’s yet-to-be-released Rust Never Sleeps. When he got to the album’s centerpiece, the haunting ballad “Powderfinger,” Young’s narrative of a man describing his own death, Nelson couldn’t help but hear the brooding eulogy beneath the words. He thought of his friend and the intervention, fearful of what awaited him in Los Angeles.
“Perhaps I was being overly melodramatic,” Nelson said later, “yet I had a terrible premonition of what I might find there.”
Although Warren had checked into the Chateau Marmont under the pretense of woodshedding the songs for his next album, no one was fooled by his decision to “vacation” right on the Sunset Strip—least of all himself. Having brought both his mobile recording gear and Fear and Loathing–esque cache of substances, the easier path of temptation instantly proved too great. As Nelson would later describe it, Warren “ran amok in Los Angeles for a month.” It was an understatement. At the time, Nelson could never have guessed the extent of the debaucheries that had taken place before his plane even touched down at LAX.
Immediately following Crystal’s departure for Dublin, Warren initiated what David Landau described as a “three-day binge,” starting with a phone call to Jorge Calderón. Warren’s extended relapse had alienated him from his loved ones, yet again, and one by one, the participants in Warren’s intervention had fallen off his radar. The naturally compassionate Calderón was an exception. The two had already begun writing a new song together for Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, “Downtown LA,” which Warren continued to tinker with while secluded at the hotel. When Calderón accepted an invitation to work on the tune at the Chateau Marmont, he arrived to find Warren already inebriated. Unwilling to open the door more than a quarter of the way, Warren spouted two brief lines that he had written for the song, then quickly shut the door in Calderón’s face. As an angered Calderón turned to leave, he caught a glimpse of another room door partially cracked. Bianca Jagger was peering out of her room, watching for him to leave.
The binge didn’t end until three days later when the police were called to have Warren’s gun taken away. He’d been shooting at a billboard of Richard Pryor out his room window.
Nelson arrived in Los Angeles that week and the two met for dinner. By Nelson’s own account, Warren was shaky, attempting to hide the recent binge-drinking by ordering a Coke with his meal. Any masquerade of false sobriety was immediately cast aside when they returned to the Chateau Marmont and Nelson got a look at Warren’s room. “There were empty bottles everywhere,” he later recalled. “Full ones, too. Neither of us knew what to say about it, so we didn’t say anything. To me, the room reeked of death.”
Although Nelson kept the thought to himself, the sight before him brought to his mind Van Gogh’s own description of his Night Café: “I tried to show a place where a man can ruin himself, go mad, commit a crime.” Again, Nelson didn’t know how right he was, but the tumblers of straight vodka that Warren continuously drank in front of him gave a hint. For three days as his guest, Nelson watched as Warren vocally debated the necessity to return to Pinecrest, convincing himself more than Nelson that he could drink now because he was already cured.
With the help of a Pinecrest outpatient and Good Samaritan limousine driver, Nelson was able to subdue the mostly incoherent Warren to check himself back into the hospital.
By the time they arrived at the Montecito house for Warren to pack a few things, he was already changing his mind and becoming argumentative. “I’ve got this nice house,” he told Nelson. “Why can’t I stay here and enjoy it?”
Reaching the end of his seemingly endless rope, Nelson finally became furious. “Because you don’t enjoy it!” he screamed at Warren. “And you never will enjoy it unless you quit drinking!”
For the second time under duress, the sheer logic of Warren’s blood brother had won out. “You’re right,” Warren finally said. “I don’t enjoy it. Give me a drink and we’ll go.”
He was released three days later, and Nelson hung around for a few extra days to keep watch. Realizing that his improvisational logic would only go so far in keeping Warren at bay until Crystal returned from Ireland the following week, Nelson organized a grand gesture in the hopes that it would shake Warren out of his emotional apathy. During another shaky afternoon of watching television and listening to records to keep the demons silent, Warren answered the doorbell to find Ken Millar standing in front of him. Shocked, he knew that Nelson had clearly pulled out all the stops to get their mutual literary idol to make a house call. Nelson tactfully put on his running shoes and left Warren alone with their hero.
Warren later remembered his encounter with the great writer to Tom Nolan, Millar’s own biographer: “So I was sitting in my palatial shithouse in Montecito, in terrible Valium pain, with instructions not to miss therapy the next day. I was in really bad shape… Ken was wearing some kind of plaid fedora, like a private eye… Everything he said was informed by a tremendous amount of compassion.”
“We writers are overcompensated in this society,” Millar had said, sitting across from Warren. “In this house, at your age, you feel guilty.”
Being addressed as a fellow writer by one of his own profound influences had proven the jolt Warren had needed. He admitted he understood the guilt Millar had described, subconsciously believing that he was justly punishing himself for all sins rendered with the self-abuse of drugs and drink. During a pause in their conversation, Millar spotted on the coffee table a large biography of Igor Stravinsky, Warren’s earliest creative influence. Warren pointed the book out to Millar. “Here’s a guy who lived to be eighty-eight. Worked up to his last day, never had a problem with alcohol and drugs.”
Millar had looked at him. “Lucky,” he said.
Warren later claimed, “Of course, that word stayed with me all my life.”
“The scariest part about alcoholism,” Warren told Nelson later of the revelation Millar had provoked, “about any addiction for that matter—is that you credit the booze for all your accomplishments… Ken Millar made me realize that I wrote my songs despite the fact that I was a drunk, not because of it.”
When Warren soberly began composing on the piano that night, Nelson believed it was safe to return to New York before he lost his job.
While Cryst
al was due back in Santa Barbara the next week, her trip had proven a positive experience, both creatively as a writer and liberating as an individual. While in Dublin, her writing had earned an opportunity to travel to Belfast with a friend from the Irish Times. Worried about Warren, she was conflicted over extending the length of her trip—although being viewed as an individual rather than solely as “Mrs. Warren Zevon” had made the offer tempting. When he got her on the phone, it only confused her further. He told her about returning to Pinecrest of his own volition and how Ken Millar had sat and counseled him, helping Warren dump out the remaining bottles of liquor. If she returned to Montecito with Ariel, he promised, she would find him clean and sober upon her return.
She kept her plans and flew home.
Had Crystal seen Warren’s condition during that week’s wait, it might have swayed her decision to return.
As soon as he knew his wife and child would be returning to their Santa Barbara home, every doubt and demon that had drawn him to the Chateau Marmont seemed to claw at Warren at once. Even with genuine attempts to crank out work at the piano, the nights were plagued with the nightmares and terrors associated with withdrawal and the earliest stages of sobriety. No longer shooting at anonymous drivers, Warren would now hurl himself against the wall to shake from fevered bouts of sleep paralysis—escaping screaming fits that only resounded in his own head, and fluttering images of Paul Nelson dragging his filthy body out of a slimy construction pit amid a sea of laughing, maggot-ridden hags. With sleep offering no respite, Warren ran mad throughout the house during the daylight hours, gorging himself on sugary candy and ranting at photos of himself.
“You’re not a fucking boy and you’re not a fucking werewolf,” he told his image. “You’re a fucking man, and it’s about time you acted like it.”
With only days before Crystal’s return, Warren’s true resilience was put to the ultimate test when an old drug buddy rang him up. Working furiously to keep his focus on the upcoming recording sessions, Warren desperately explained his need to stay clean and keep the productivity going.
“So why don’t I come there with a bunch of cheeseburgers, a bottle, and an ounce of blow?” Warren heard from the receiver. “A little vodka, a little cocaine, and you’ll be fine in no time.”
It took a moment, but he hung up the phone.
“If ever I believed that there was a God and a Devil—and that they were just guys, you know,” he later told Nelson, “one with the tail and the other with a long white beard—it was at that moment. It was just a satanic temptation.”
He had looked temptation in the face and bested it. That night, Warren sat and opened Four Quartets. He wanted to read about the fire and the rose.
Warren picked Crystal and Ariel up from the airport. Under his arm was a huge bouquet of roses and throughout the house, he had left little hidden notes of affection for Crystal to find. “You’ll always be mine and I’ll always be yours,” one read, and was signed, “Your loving husband.” At Ken Millar’s suggestion, Warren had booked for them a surprise return to Hawaii. Under the pretense of celebrating both Crystal’s return and his own successful second stint in Pinecrest by returning to Hawaii, Warren also hoped that the destination would inspire the completion of Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School once and for all.
On this trip, however, inspiration proved harder to attain. Warren spent much of the trip complaining and telling Crystal how badly he needed drugs. He began getting snippy with Ariel, and when they finally flew home, Warren announced that he simply wouldn’t be able to focus while living in the Montecito house any longer. And with the recording for the new album beginning in only a few weeks, the commute to Los Angeles would be unbearable. He explained that Karla Bonoff, the folk singer-songwriter who had made guest appearances on his two Elektra/Asylum releases, was moving out of her house on Mulholland Drive and it was available for rent. Without providing Crystal with all the gory details regarding why the Chateau Marmont was no longer an option, he pushed for Bonoff’s house.
It was only with cautious optimism that Crystal went along with it, well aware of the temptations that Los Angeles offered—especially to one of its favorite sons.
As recording for Bad Luck Streak began, once again at the Sound Factory in Hollywood, Warren’s return trips to Montecito became less and less frequent. If she wanted to see him, Crystal would usually travel into Los Angeles on the weekends, bringing along Ariel and their au pair. At first, the distance seemed to keep the peace, along with Warren’s absence and seemingly shifted focus on his album’s production.
Weeks into the recording, however, he called her in Montecito and asked that she visit that weekend alone, suggesting they spend the weekend shopping for curtains and new stereo equipment for the Santa Barbara home. Interpreting this as a sign of Warren’s reaffirmed dedication to their marriage, Crystal was shocked when she arrived and found Warren already irritable and anxious. When they headed out shopping, he drove distractedly, running red lights until she pleaded for him to let her out of the car. After Warren apologized, they continued their errands and headed to Robaire’s for dinner.
Over the meal, Warren took on a serious tone. “You know, we’ve just put so much into this relationship, and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted,” he said. It was a sobriety and sincerity she hadn’t heard in a long time. “I don’t know what happens to me when I go off in other directions, but I don’t want other women. So, let’s just make that commitment and not have to worry about it if we have a fight. It doesn’t mean we’re going to split up.”
Confused, Crystal agreed. The two had a romantic evening at the Los Angeles house. They made love and watched The Tonight Show. Afterward, she helped Warren come up with comical names for a novelty song he was tinkering with about a riot in women’s prison. So far, he’d gotten as far as plotting the inmates’ ransom demands, including the lyric, “We’ll give you the prison doctor back with his balls sewn shut in his mouth.” They giggled before falling asleep.
The following morning, she came home from picking out fabric samples to find that Warren had downed a bottle of cooking sherry accidentally left behind in Bonoff’s move. Immediately, Crystal could see that it was a different Warren than the one she’d spent the previous evening beside. “I looked in his eyes, and I knew immediately,” she later told Paul Nelson. “There was a rage there that was like when he was drinking.”
Before she knew what had hit her, Warren threw his coffee cup through a window, snatching the fabric from Crystal’s hands and berating her with accusations of destroying a great artist, attempting to “turn Dylan Thomas into Robert Young.” For the second time, he told her to leave—but this time, not to come back. His parting words to Crystal as she walked out the door was a reminder that he would never be her father. She spent the day wandering aimlessly, confused as to what could possibly have happened to Warren’s willpower and love for her overnight. She had left him before but had always returned.
As she continued to walk and assess her conflicted emotions, Crystal stumbled upon a group of women gathered beside a burger stand, each discussing their own husbands’ battles with addiction. She quietly interrupted and told them about Warren, about how she didn’t know if she would walk back through the door, only to leave again. Would today be the last time she walked out of it?
This time, she decided it would be.
The most important people in Warren’s life had orchestrated and participated in his gut-wrenching intervention. Within a year, almost all were out of his life. The emotional experience of that mass confession had not deepened their bonds with him, but rather had become a source of their undoing. Still in the throes of his addictions, and now in a greater state of denial, Warren had effectively turned his back on nearly all those who had been in attendance.
Outside of the disintegration of his marriage to Crystal, Warren’s gradual excommunication of Paul Nelson became, perhaps, the most tragic and callous example of this new era of severing ties. While N
elson had nearly lost his job for dropping his responsibilities to be by Warren’s side during both the intervention and first major relapse, when Warren discovered through a credit card bill that Crystal had paid for Nelson’s ticket to be in attendance, he became enraged, and an alcohol-influenced resentment was harbored. “He felt if Paul was really a friend he should have paid for his own ticket,” Crystal later said.
Although they would speak on and off for the next few years, culminating in the masterpiece feature profile on Warren that would lead to Nelson’s own departure from Rolling Stone, the “blood brothers” would see less and less of each other. A few years later, Nelson would explain to a curious Clint Eastwood, “Everybody who was at that intervention and helped him, he’s cut us off totally. I feel sorry for him. He’s pretty alone… I’m afraid he’s falling apart, but he won’t even talk to me, so I can’t find out.”
Out of this dark period, however, at least one truly profound relationship would be fostered.
Warren had first been introduced to George Gruel in July 1978 by Warren’s then manager, Howard Burke, during the I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead Tour. At that time, Warren was booked for a show at the Berkeley Community Theater. Burke knew Gruel from his years as a photographer and roadie for numerous rock acts, and as a knowledgeable staple at the famed Westwood Musical Instruments in Los Angeles. Knowing that Warren would need a seasoned veteran on his crew for his first major tour, he had invited Gruel down to make an introduction. As a familiar face around the local music scene, Gruel was well aware of Warren’s reputation on the road. Apprehensive, Gruel agreed, and worked his first gig for Warren at the Berkeley show. “It was just pure rock and roll, and instant camaraderie,” Gruel later remembered. “We were friends instantly.”
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