Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  Sue was possibly the only person I could have asked at that time to help me. At a bad time in my life, she was very helpful to me. She helped a lot of people. We occasionally see each other, more rarely these days, maybe at a benefit. “How you doing, Rog?” she asks, smiling, and we know what she means.

  An AA meeting usually begins with a recovering alcoholic telling his “drunkalog,” the story of his drinking days and how he eventually hit bottom. What’s said in the room stays in the room. You may be wondering, in fact, why I’m violating the AA policy of anonymity and outing myself. AA is anonymous not because of shame but because of prudence; people who go public with their newly found sobriety have an alarming tendency to relapse. Consider those pathetic celebrities who check into rehab and hold a press conference. Anonymity encourages humility. People who tell everyone they’ve gone two weeks without a drink are on thin ice. When I decided to out myself as a recovering alcoholic, I hadn’t taken a drink for thirty-one years, and since my first AA meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I haven’t been able to drink at all, or eat or speak. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my G-tube, I believe I’m reasonably safe.

  I have seen that AA works. It is free, everywhere, and has no one in charge. It consists of the people gathered in that room at that time, many often unknown to one another. The rooms are arranged by volunteers. I have attended meetings in church basements, schoolrooms, a courtroom, a hospital, a jail, banks, beaches, living rooms, the back rooms of restaurants, and on board the Queen Elizabeth II. There’s usually coffee. Sometimes someone brings cookies. We sit around, we hear the speaker, and then those who want to comment do. Nobody has to speak. Rules are, you don’t interrupt anyone, and you don’t look for arguments. We say, “Don’t take someone else’s inventory.” There are some who have problems with Alcoholics Anonymous. They don’t like the spiritual side, or they think it’s a “cult,” or feel they’ll do fine on their own, thank you very much. The last thing I want to do is start an argument about AA. I tell people, don’t go if you don’t want to. It’s there if you need it. In most cities, there’s a meeting starting in an hour fairly close to you. It works for me. That’s all I know. I don’t want to argue about it.

  What a good doctor and good man Jakub Schlichter was. He was in one of those classic office buildings in the Loop, filled with dentists and jewelers. He was a gifted general practitioner. An appointment lasted an hour. The first half hour was devoted to conversation. He had a thick Physicians’ Desk Reference on his desk and liked to pat it. “There are twelve drugs in there,” he said, “that we know work for sure. The best one is aspirin.” One day, after a month of sobriety, I went to see him because I feared I had grown too elated with the realization that I need not drink again. I had started needing only a few hours of sleep a night, began to see coincidences everywhere, started to find hidden AA messages in Johnny Cash songs. I was continually in heat.

  “Maybe I’m manic-depressive,” I told him. “Maybe I need lithium.”

  “Alcohol is a depressant,” he told me. “When you hold the balloon under the water and suddenly release it, it is eager to pop up quickly.” I nodded.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m too excited. I’m in constant motion. I’d give anything just to feel a little bored.”

  “Lois, will you be so kind as to come in here?” he called to his wife. She appeared, an elegant Jewish mother.

  “Lois, I want you to open a little can of grapefruit segments for Roger. I know you have a bowl and a spoon.” His wife came back with the grapefruit. I ate the segments. He watched me closely. “You still have your appetite,” he said. “When you feel restless, take a good walk in the park. Call me if it doesn’t work.” It worked. I knew walking was a treatment for depression, but I didn’t know it also worked the other way.

  That was the beginning of a long adventure. I came to love the program and the friends I was making through meetings, some of whom are close friends to this day. I made friends at meetings in London, Edinburgh, Paris, New York, Cannes, Park City, Telluride, Cape Town, and Los Angeles. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. What I hadn’t expected was that AA was virtual theater. As we went around the room with our comments, I was able to see into lives I had never glimpsed before. The Mustard Seed, the lower floor of a two-flat near Rush Street, had meetings from seven a.m. to ten p.m., and all-nighters on Christmas and New Years’ eves. There I met people from every walk of life, and we all talked easily with one another because we were all there for the same reason, and that cut through the bullshit. One was Humble Howard, who liked to perform a dramatic reading from his driver’s license—name, address, age, color of hair and eyes. He explained, “That’s because I didn’t have an address for five years.”

  When I mention Humble Howard, you’re possibly thinking you wouldn’t be caught dead at a meeting where someone did dramatic readings from his driver’s license. He was as funny as a stand-up comedian. I realized that I’d tended to avoid people because of superficial judgments about who they were and what they would have to say. AA members who looked like bag ladies would relate what their lives used to be like, what happened, and what they were like now. Such people were often more eloquent than slick young professionals. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me. The program was bottom-line democracy.

  Yes, I heard some amazing drunkalogs. A native American who crawled out from under an abandoned car one morning after years on the street, and without premeditation walked up to a cop and asked where he could find an AA meeting. And the cop said, “Follow those people going in over there?” A 1960s hippie whose VW van broke down on a remote road in Alaska. She started walking down a frozen riverbed, thought she heard bells ringing, and sat down to freeze to death. The bells were on a sleigh. The couple on the sleigh took her home with them, and then to an AA meeting. A priest who eavesdropped on his first meeting by hiding in the janitor’s closet of his own church hall. Lots of people who had come to AA after rehab. Lots who just walked in through the door. No one who had been “sent by the judge,” because in Chicago, AA didn’t play that game: “If you don’t want to be here, don’t come.”

  Funny things happened. In those days I was the movie critic for a 10:00 p.m. newscast on one of the local stations. The anchor was an AA member. So was one of the reporters. After we got off work, we went to the 11:00 p.m. meeting at the Mustard Seed. There were maybe a dozen others there. The anchor took the chair and asked if anyone was attending his or her first meeting. A guy said, “I am. But instead I should be in a psych ward. I was just watching the news, and right now I’m hallucinating that two of those people are in this room.”

  AA has “open meetings” to which you can bring friends or relatives, but most meetings are closed: “Who you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here.” By closed, I mean closed. I told Eppie Lederer that I was now in the program. She said, “I haven’t been to one of those meetings in a long time. I want you to take me to one.” Her limousine picked me up at home, and we were driven to the Old Town meeting, a closed meeting. I went in first, to ask permission to bring in Ann Landers. I was voted down. I went back to the limo and broke the news to her.

  “Now I’ve heard everything!” Eppie said. “Ann Landers can’t get into an AA meeting!”

  Alcoholism is a family disease. My father had a drinking problem before I was born, and my mother began to drink for the first time in her life during her marriage to George Michael. I was by then living in Chicago and drinking too much myself, and at times I welcomed this, because we drank together. This led to conversations of unprecedented frankness and occasional recriminations. Whatever was said, she simply dismissed it the next day. I came to dread her visits to Chicago. I didn’t want her to see me drunk, although she did.

  After joining AA, I understand alcoholism better and realize that my father was an alcoholic who stopped before I was born, my mother was a
fter he died, and I was from the time I took my first drink. The disease caused deep wounds, driving me into a personal life of evasion, denial, and concealment, and keeping me unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?

  27 BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

  CHAZ AND I have lived for twenty years in a commodious Chicago town house. This house is not empty. Chaz and I have added, I dunno, maybe three or four thousand books, untold numbers of movies and albums, lots of art, rows of photographs, rooms full of comfortable furniture, a Buddha from Thailand, exercise equipment, carved elephants from India, African chairs and statues, and who knows what else. Of course I cannot do without a single one of these possessions, including more or else every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn. I still have all the Penrod books, and every time I look at them, I’m reminded of Tarkington’s inventory of the contents of Penrod’s pants pockets. After reading it a third time, as a boy, I jammed my pockets with a pocketknife, a Yo-Yo, marbles, a compass, a stapler, an oddly shaped rock, a hardball, a ball of rubber bands, and three jawbreakers. These, in an ostensible search for a nickel, I emptied out on the counter of Harry Rusk’s grocery, so that Harry Rusk could see that I was a Real Boy.

  My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs, and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may need to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, forty-seven novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best seller by James Gould Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was fourteen, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.

  I cannot throw out these books. Some are enchanted because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word. They’re shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most were used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady bookstore on the Left Bank in 1965 (two dollars, today ninety-one). The Shaw plays from Cranford’s on Long Street in Cape Town, where Irving Freeman claimed he had half a million books. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used bookstore. Other books I can’t throw away because, well, they’re books, and you can’t throw away a book. Not even a cookbook from which we have prepared only a single recipe, for it is a meal preserved, in printed form. The very sight of Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth H. C. Lo quickens my pulse. Its pages are stained by broth, sherry, soy sauce, and chicken fat, and so thoroughly did I master it that I once sought out Ken Lo’s Memories of China on Ebury Street in London and laid eyes on the great man himself, dining alone in a little room near the entrance. A book like that, you’re not gonna throw away.

  I can’t throw out anything. I possibly don’t require half the shirts I have ever owned. But look at this faded chamois cloth shirt from L. L. Bean, purchased through the mail in about 1973 from a two-inch ad in the back of the New Yorker: The longer you wear it, the more it feels like chamois! I’ve been wearing it a long, long time. I can’t say it feels like chamois, but I want to work on it some more. I also need this tea mug from Keats House in Hampstead, even though its handle is broken off. I need it to hold these ball-point pens I had printed with the words No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough. They were one hundred for thirty-nine dollars, I think. The ink has dried up over the years, but I still need them in order to provide a purpose for the mug.

  And here are my thick reference books. Not only the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but the small tiny-type edition of the complete OED, which came with its own magnifying glass. And Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, a hardbound London A to Z from 1975, and two dozen books on the occult, including the I Ching and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, who was a flywheel but surely wrote one of the best of Edwardian autobiographies (Crowley explained that he invented modern British mountain climbing in the Himalayas after his predecessors “had themselves carried up by Sherpas”). In idle hours I like to leaf through my well-worn leather-bound 1970 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which offers entries not to be found elsewhere:

  Giotto’s O. The old story goes that the Pope, wishing to employ artists from all over Italy, sent a messenger to collect specimen of their work. When the man approached Giotto (c. 1267–1337), the artist paused for a moment from the picture he was working on and with his brush drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper. In surprise the man returned to the Pope, who, appreciating the perfection of Giotto’s artistry and skill by his unerring circle, employed Giotto forthwith.

  October Club. In the reign of Queen Anne, a group of High Tory MPs who met at tavern near Parliament to drink October Ale and abuse the Whigs.

  Now here is the Penguin paperback of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, the story of his agonizing trek through the darkness of the Antarctic winter to investigate the eggs of the penguin. The book is as long as the walk. I may not read it a second time. Do I require two later editions? Of course I do. You just never know. And both the second and third editions of the Columbia Encyclopedia? You bet.

  Chaz gave me this facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Will I ever read it? Not with that spelling and typography. But I will always treasure it. I look at it and wonder at the genius of the man. Do I need, for that matter, all of my other editions of Shakespeare? The little blue volumes of the Yale Shakespeare, and the editions by Oxford, the Easton Press, and the Folio Society? Handsome books, finely made. But I read only my battered and underlined old Riverside Shakespeare from college, because it was edited by G. Blakemore Evans, and he was my professor, you see.

  My possessions are getting away from me. We have an agreement. My office is my office. Chaz has her own book-filled office and takes care that the rest of the house is clean and orderly. My office has a glass door with this gilt lettering:

  The Ebert Company, Ltd.

  Fine Film Criticism since 1967

  I have not been able to get into the storage closet of my office for four years. What? You expect me to throw out my first Tandy 100? And there’s a forty-year run of Sight and Sound in there somewhere. I have a book named Rodinsky’s Room, by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, about a mysterious London cabalistic scholar named David Rodinsky who in 1969 disappeared from his attic above a synagogue on Princelet Street in the East End. His flat was strangely left undisturbed for years, and when it was opened all was exactly as he left it—his books, papers, possessions, even a pot of porridge on the stove.

  That’s what I should do. Just turn the key and walk away, and move into 150 square feet. Get me a little electric coil to boil the coffee water. Just my Shakespeare, some Henry James, and of course Willa Cather, Colette, and Simenon. Two hundred books, tops. But no, there wouldn’t be room for Chaz, and I would miss her terribly. That I could never abide.

  28 RUSS MEYER

  A MOVIE NAMED The Immoral Mr. Teas opened in 1959 at the little Illini Theater, across from the Illinois Central station and the News-Gazette, wedged in between Vriner’s and a pool hall. It ran for something like two years and became a rite of passage for the Illinois students, particularly popular during exam weeks. In 1961 I parked my car in the News-Gazette lot and, exact admission counted out in my hand, hurried across the street hoping to slip in unwitnessed. Similar figures materialized out of the shadows of Main Street. Once inside, guys in groups joked nervously and the rest of us sat very still, intent on the screen, avoiding eye contact.

  The plot was not complex. A delivery man for false teeth pedals a bicycle
on his rounds. This unassuming man finds himself encountering voluptuous women, who appear completely nude in his daydreams. There is no physical contact, they seem unaware they’re naked, and Mr. Teas seems primarily puzzled. A narrator comments on his dilemma and the sound track evokes bucolic wonderments. The film’s sixty-one-minute running time allowed the Illini to schedule as many as ten screenings in a day, and students rotated in and out.

  I’d never seen anything like it, certainly not in nudist camp “documentaries,” which centered largely on the difficulties of playing volleyball with the ball constantly shielding the genitals. Meyer’s women looked healthy and wholesome, unlike the carnal strippers in such films as French Peep Show, which I had also attended while “studying at the library.” In the glossy Show magazine, no less than Leslie Fiedler described Mr. Teas as “the best American comedy of the 1950s.”

  One day in the spring of 1967, I noticed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! playing at the Biograph on Lincoln Avenue. The posters displayed improbably buxom women, and I was inside in a flash. That was when it first registered that there was a filmmaker named Russ Meyer, and he was the same man who made The Immoral Mr. Teas. I’d never seen anything like this black-and-white film. Pussycat was photographed in a jazzy style, all tilt shots and oblique angles, with intercuts of incongruous close-ups. The story was told inside a hermetic world. Nothing existed except three buxom hellions in fetishwear, the hero and his family in an isolated cabin, and the desire of the women to exploit the situation. The dialogue was ornate parody, the narration was strangely disconnected, the images popped out of the screen; the effect was surreal. Here, I felt, was a filmmaker. A couple of years later Meyer had a breakthrough hit with Vixen!, which cost $26,500 and grossed more than $6 million. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article headlined “King of the Nudies,” observing that was a 40-to-1 return, allegedly second in film history only to Gone With the Wind. I wrote a letter to the editor, I received a letter from Russ Meyer, and one of the great friendships of my life began.