Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.
—Emily Dickinson, No. 1788
Paul Williams
(singer, songwriter)
* * *
PAUL WILLIAMS AND I MET in the hotel restaurant at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westwood, California, on a bright, robust Sunday afternoon, two hours before we were to attend a memorial service for our mutual friend Buddy Arnold. Buddy called himself “the world’s oldest Jewish junkie.” He had more than twenty-two years of sobriety and cofounded, along with his wife, Carole Fields, the Musicians’ Assistance Program (MAP), which has helped more than 1,500 addicted musicians find their way to rehab.
Paul showed up in a natty outfit consisting of a tailored black suit, black dress shirt, and snazzy black-and-lavender patterned tie. I was feeling underdressed in my customary jeans, black polo shirt, and dark blue blazer. We checked each other out and decided that each was dressed appropriately, although Paul removed his tie before entering the memorial service.
After an initial exchange of hugs and small talk, we got down to business. I soon was marveling at Paul’s uncanny ability to quickly reach that intimate place where sharing becomes extraordinarily personal. As he started telling me his story, his face took on an assured look of one who has traveled this road before. Paul loves talking about sobriety and how it changed his life. Because we have this in common and have been friends for more than thirty years, there is a tremendous ease in our exchanges. Paul speaks with authority and impressive insight these days, having explored at depth his own road to recovery. He still has the wonder and excitement of a newcomer, though.
A couple of times during the telling of his story, we were locked eye-to-eye, our heads only a foot or so apart. I noticed he began to tear up, which caused the same response in me, and we instinctively locked hands, as if to assure each other that each of us understands.
As has happened many times over the years, we ended our conversation with words of how much we love each other, and how we appreciate having each other in our lives. I’m one lucky dude to have a friend like Paul.
I was raised in a household where alcohol was a reward for a good day’s work. My consciousness was that alcohol was a payoff. Dad came home to a drink, his wife, and his kids. As I look back on it, it was really in that order. He walked in the house, got the drink, and he probably had one in the bar on the way home. My father spoke about the fact that he never missed a day’s work because of drink, so he must have had some misgivings—the old “methinks he doth protest too much.”
Alcohol was a reward for being a grown-up. He went to work, he did the job, and came home and drank. I picture my father with his friends around him, and how they talked about the same things again and again and again. And argued about the same things again and again too. They lived their lives in a revolving door of mini-dramas.
My dad would come home and say, “There are three things we’re not going to talk about tonight, guys: politics, religion, or the goddamn job. Because when we talk about them, we fight.” So that would be the decision. And then they would have a couple of drinks and the conversation always led to three things: politics, religion, and the goddamn job. And he and his friends fought. And then he got angry, and then he’d cry, and all the emotions came out. My dad was a pretty emotional man when he drank. He would get me up in the middle of the night and sit me on his lap to sing for him. And he would cry when I sang: “Listen to my son, listen to my son.”
My mother says that I was four or five when she was in a department store and all of a sudden I was gone. She turned around and couldn’t find me. She found me on a counter with a fistful of money, singing. Music was a part of me. It was in my DNA to make music, evidently. So this was from infancy to thirteen. But after my dad died, it felt like all that went away. I was thirteen when my father was killed in an alcohol-related car wreck, a single-car accident. His death stopped the music in me. My mother was suddenly a widow in her forties with no money. My dad left not a penny of insurance. He left not a dollar in the savings account. So my mother went out to work, and I was told essentially she could afford one child, and that was my little brother.
I was then manipulated out of the household by an aunt and uncle. They more or less stole me, and I was shipped off to live with them in Long Beach, California. In a way, I lost both parents.
The important element of my childhood that I look back on now is that my dad was in construction and we moved all the time. By the time I was in the ninth grade, I’d been to nine different schools. I was always the new kid in school. I was always the littlest kid in school. The kid with the slow body clock. I looked as though I was five grades behind everybody else. The way I deal with the world—reduced to a defensive craft—was born then. You know, I’ll walk on stage and do a short joke. Reduce yourself to a cultural stereotype if it makes the world safer! And that’s an element of my own life that I deal with today. I mean that I walk on stage and make jokes about people grabbing me in Ireland and saying, “Where’d you hide the gold, you little bastard?” It’s the same thing in a way as me being in the third grade and being the new kid who looks like he belongs in kindergarten making a joke about myself.
Because we recognize these elements of our personality doesn’t mean we can discard them. Or necessarily that we need to. That’s something I’m coming to understand—that my joking about looking like a leprechaun in Ireland gives pleasure to some people. They relax when I’m on stage and then we can enjoy the music and each other’s company.
I was raised in a household whose location was constantly changing. And yet there were certain kinds of people that traveled with us. We were kind of gypsies … construction brats … construction gypsies. And the way we lived changed from location to location. If we went to Denver for a year, there were great places to live and we’d have a nice house. Go to Lucasville, Ohio, and there’s nothing but a trailer to rent. There were four people in a twenty-four-foot trailer when my dad was killed. My dad died two days short of his sixtieth birthday. So when I turned sixty, and every day since, has had special significance. From the time I’ve been sober, I’ve always said that every day is a gift. It’s all a gift. But this has double meaning for me now—the fact I’m living days my father never lived.
So, at thirteen, my father dead, I was shipped off to live with an aunt and uncle who were black belt alcoholics. She would wait up and taunt him into a physical confrontation. I remember lying in bed and hearing the knife drawer slam open and sounds of the hysteria. They had a lot of money and he would spend it. He was a second husband after the first died, and there was great drunkenness in the house. My aunt was my dad’s half-sister. But I never fit in that house. And all of a sudden I’m a new kid in the ninth grade, in high school, but with the slow body clock and not fitting in at all.
Even when my dad was alive, I’d have a glass of beer at picnics or at the table, which was not a big deal. I remember drinking with other kids and the ritual of “let’s get drunk and throw up and be somebody.” It made me feel like one of the boys. I hit puberty after I left high school, where I was still a little boy. My physical maturity came extremely late. What happened was I was very small—I used to be short! When I was nine, my mom and dad were worried about me being small, so we went to the doctor and they did an experiment. I was given male hormones—what you have in your system when you hit puberty. What this did was it gave me an erection and my voice lowered and the whole deal. It also stops your bones from growing. So the reason that I am five-two instead of six-foot like my brother is they gave me male hormones. If they had left me alone, I would have been whatever I was going to be. So it kind of screwed up my whole physiology, and I matured a lot slower.
I’m now in my sixties and there’s still a thirty-three-year-old lurking within me. I was thirty-four at fifteen, and I’m thirty-four today. But during those high school years, in a way, I became very go
od at coping with that. I avoided the showers. I avoided gym. I got through.
Losing my father and the dislocation from family ended my singing for a while. During my teenage years, I was a James Dean wannabe. I wanted to be an actor. I was actually able, with that tunnel vision of “won’t take no for an answer,” to make a living at it for a lot of years. Eventually to the point where I was broke and not making a living. I got so bored I started writing songs—that classic case of when God slams one door shut, another one opens.
In a lot of ways, I behaved like an alcoholic long before I began drinking like one. I think there were elements of alcoholism in the way I acted. The fact that I was nineteen or twenty with no prospects, and absolutely convinced that I was going to make it as an actor. Came out here, lived on somebody’s couch, let them pay the bills, kept track of it so I could pay them back. And always managed to get a job. They’d maybe be a year apart, but I was the only one who kept getting a job. Shot a commercial for Parsons’ Ammonia, did a movie called The Loved One with Jonathan Winters—worked three months on that. Slept on a couch. Paid the guy I’d been living with the back money I owed him. Got another movie two years later. My faith was immense. I believed I was born to be on the silver screen, completely ignoring the fact that I simply didn’t fit into any casting mold. The second movie I was cast in was The Chase with Marlon Brando and Robert Redford. I made enough money to bring my mom to the coast to take care of her. At least that was the plan. By the time The Chase was released, I had about four or five lines in it. I was practically an extra in the film. Hardly a star-maker.
It wound up that I did bring my mother out to California, ostensibly to take care of her, and then I wound up living on her couch. Living with her going to work and paying the bills. And me a twenty-seven-year-old all of a sudden sitting up all night with a guitar, doodling, writing songs for my own amusement. And out of that writing songs for my own amusement I thought, “You know what? Maybe I can do this.” I went to Lee Leseef who had White Whale Records and played him all my songs, and he signed me to a contract as a writer and an artist. And six weeks after I had signed the contract, Lee called me into his office and let me go. He said, tearing up the piece of paper, “I don’t think you have a future in music. Your stuff is … I don’t know what to do with it.” So I went home going, “Wow, he’s wrong! … I hope he’s wrong!”
In the meantime, I had written some songs with Biff Rose. He was a brilliant young writer, and when he was given a publishing deal at A & M Records, I rode his coattails in the door. They liked his songs, including some that I’d written. I went over and said, “Where’s my part of this? I get an advance too.” And Chuck Kaye, the publisher at A & M, looked at the songs I’d written the lyrics to and said, “You wrote those words?” He turned me on to an amazing composer named Roger Nichols. “We’re looking for a lyricist for him. We think you’re it.”
Again, an element of my life that helped to create my basic spiritual philosophy is that “no” can be a gift. I wanted to be an actor; that was it, the whole thing. That door was slammed in my face and locked. And because I couldn’t get out that one, I opened another and found my life. Found my life’s work. Found something that I just loved doing and that was easy for me. It was always easy to write lyrics. I don’t know where it came from. I still don’t.
Roger and I immediately found success. Album cuts and B-sides for the most part. But we weren’t getting the big hit singles. I remember being very frustrated. The impatience of youth. Looking back, I see it as all happening very quickly.
After three years, I traveled to Europe to write lyrics for Michel Colombier’s pop cantata Wings. The work was commissioned and produced by Herb Alpert. It was my first European trip, and when I returned, I had two songs in the Top 10: “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters and “Out in the Country” recorded by Three Dog Night. Suddenly I found what I was put here to do.
We were the love generation—the sixties. I went to San Francisco with flowers in my hair like everybody else did. I think the first drugs that I really abused were amphetamines and diet pills. I found out I was over the height minimum to get into the Army. I had been cast playing a little boy in a show, Critics’ Choice, up in Central Valley, California. I’d been given a notice for my physical. This was in 1962 or 1963. And they finally found me, because I’d been all around doing my movie things and all, and it was right in the middle of this play. So I called for a postponement. The last little moment on the phone with the guy I said, “By the way, I’m sure I’m under the height minimum. What’s the height/weight minimum?” “Five-foot and a hundred pounds.” And I went, “Oh shit! I’m tall enough to get into the Army. I need to get under a hundred pounds.” So I started living on dried apricots and amphetamines. And I got down to ninety-six pounds to stay out of the Army. And I surely gained that weight back to a normal weight, but I loved what amphetamines did for me. I loved the buzz. That was my first real addiction, and to deal with it, to keep from coming out of my skin, I drank. That’s where it started.
My first toot of cocaine was probably in ’65, maybe ’66. I know it was like ten or fifteen bucks, certainly fifteen was the maximum in those days. It wasn’t a hundred dollars a gram. Cocaine went up a lot in the seventies. Maybe twenty bucks. And it was fabulous. I used to joke that I walked into a bar a pony and came out a mustang. But the real confidence-builder for me was that sense of well-being that I got from cocaine. I think it’s the element of spiritual well-being and faith that is the major component actually of my recovery today. Today my faith in my recovery gives me that.
I don’t know when I crossed the line from use to abuse to addiction, but from my early twenties for sure, I was out of control with amphetamines. It was more amphetamines than anything else at that point, with alcohol and uppers running partner. Alcohol provided a calm and a sense of well-being while uppers provided the false sense of confidence. Things got nasty when I graduated to cocaine. If alcohol made me feel big enough to take on the rest of the world, then cocaine made me feel big enough to play basketball for money. I thrilled to that strange combination of grandiosity and terror. I suspect some element of being alcoholic is we look at the rest of the world and think that everybody knows something that we don’t: They are sharing a joke about me. Some place in the back of our brains or corner of our souls wants to separate from our fellows. That’s the “ism.”
Being around other people in recovery, in a minute I reclaimed some sense of well-being I missed in my teen years. At the start of my abuse, what kicked in with the drug was a sense of connectedness and belonging. Just as the reward as a teenager wasn’t what the substance did chemically. The reward was within the ritual—a rite of passage and earning my stripes as one of the gang.
I remember how I’d feel when I’d score. You’ve probably heard me tell this story before, but it’s important. You’d been up two or three days and nights, you’re a wreck, you’re falling apart. You’re calling the dealer, the dealer’s not home, not home. And all of a sudden the dealer’s home! And the moment she answers the phone, you know by the way she says hi, something’s going on. And you begin to feel better. And I ask her, “Hi honey.” And instead of “You bitch” it’s “Hi honey, anything happening?” And she goes, “Yeah, want me to come over? Want to come by? Whatever.” I’m experiencing a change, a total change. I even look better. I’d remember how it felt to open up an eight ball and look at this amazing white powder flashing and how great I felt. And I’d chop it up, and I’d get out the grinder and get it ready, and I’d have that first toot and feel magnificent. I was bright. I was handsome. I wasn’t handsome, I was pretty! I was fuckin’ pretty. And I could do anything and I was sexy. And I was already starting to have that little tumescent response, the little edge of a woody. I’m feeling great here.
However, as soon as I begin using this crap, it all falls apart. When I had it in my hand and hadn’t used it yet, I was feeling magnificent. What was I experiencing? What I wa
s experiencing was faith, faith in this poison. That this crap that doesn’t work anymore is going to fix me. But the faith is so immense, so powerful, that I look better, feel better. I’m brighter, I’m more patient, I’m creative. And it’s just faith. The only thing that will work at that point is faith. And if faith in this poison doesn’t work anymore, imagine what a faith in this true loving God’s going to do for me. What was a big breakthrough for me was when I was in rehab, I read that the spiritual life is not a theory—we have to live it. So I have to have a spiritual life. Okay, how am I going to do this? And that’s what happened. I was able to transfer that faith in something that didn’t work anymore into something that works every time.
But we’ve skipped over the time when it did work. There was an accident of parallel beginnings that were lined up. It was either fortuitous or … you decide. I was at the beginnings of my career and at the beginnings of my addiction. And so what was pouring out of me as a writer, as a creative spirit discovering his abilities, developing his craft, experiencing his success and having that success compounded by other successes, was happening the same time as my drug addiction. So that’s an accident. They’re not connected. At the time I’m having the success, I believed they were. God stacked the cards. And this card, stacked exactly this way, makes Paul Williams.
My talent is a wonderful gift, but I transferred that gift that was a gift from the universe and credited it to this little bottle of white powder. I see that now. I see that thirteen years later. If I had discovered cocaine today, I might have come to a conclusion that this crap has got me on a downward spiral. But I don’t think so. It was so easy to make creativity and cocaine into Siamese twins. I think it takes what it takes.
The Harder They Fall Page 3