Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  Stephen: Which, of course, is God. The word I use is the Divinity or the Divine. What is God but the Divine?

  Richard Dreyfuss

  I met Richard Dreyfuss in the summer of 1974, while he was filming Jaws on Cape Cod, and when he was on a break, he came to a clambake on the beach in front of my grandparents’ house. I remember lobsters, daiquiris, and Hollywood gossip, but not much else.

  Jaws made something of a splash, and Richard went on to star in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl. At the age of twentynine, he won an Oscar for his role in The Goodbye Girl—the youngest Best Actor winner ever. (His record stood until 2003, when Adrien Brody won at age twenty- seven.) He also had a spectacular drug- related flameout, when he wrecked his car and nearly wrecked his career. But he got sober and went on to star in more great movies, including Stand By Me, Tin Men, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

  Thirty years after I met Richard, we worked together on a miniseries for PBS titled Cop Shop. I remember everything about those three weeks. The man is relentless. His interests go way beyond acting—metaphysics, the right to privacy, shamanism, First Amendment rights, mental health, and, oh yeah, recovery, to name a few. When I asked him to participate in this book, he said yes immediately. He completely understood what I was trying to do and he was eager to help.

  I

  used to say that before I was twelve, I was the generic any-boy like everyone else and then when I turned twelve, I became me. I began to be more and more eccentric, I developed these passions, for acting

  and for civil rights, and I became one of two guys at my high school who smoked dope. I never went a day without it and I smoked it every day, in school and out of school, every day until 1969, when I’d been out of school about four years. I was in New York and I was rehearsing a play and I was in this really seedy hotel room and I had enough pot with me to last the whole time I would be there. I was smoking dope in my hotel room and the phone rang, and a voice said, “Hey, I’d like to buy some shit from you.”

  I said, “What?”

  He said, “I want to buy some shit from you.”

  I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” hung up the phone,

  and I got so paranoid I put towels underneath the doors while I smoked my marijuana. And I remained paranoid. After that, every time I smoked marijuana I got paranoid. After a year I stopped. Then I proceeded to discover all kinds of things, uppers and downers and sidewaysers, psychedelics.

  I have lived my whole life with drugs. I said to my sister once, not that long ago, “I wonder what I would have been like had I never taken drugs.”

  She said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Well, when I was a kid, I was normal.” She said, “No you weren’t. Don’t kid yourself. You were nuts before you took drugs, and if anything, they helped you.” So the drugs were not the cause of my eccentricities.

  A psychopharmacologist at UCLA once said to me that the moment man invented fire and gathered into groups, the next thing they did was to try to alter their minds. That was a spiritual experience for five hundred thousand years. The shaman would take the young away from the fire and give them mushrooms or whatever and offer them the opportunity to see the face of God. As a friend of mine, a doctor, once said, “Fifty people who have to take a painkiller will spit it out. Forty of the next fifty will take it because they have to. That last ten percent will put a bumper sticker on their car that says I Found It!” I am one of those 10 percent people.

  Drugs have given me certain experiences that I really couldn’t explain. One of them was, after two years of serious study, I took acid for the first time and it changed me. I sat on this rock in Malibu and I watched everything simplify. My image was of Einstein, trying to get down to the quantum theory. I was getting everything down to one simple statement, and that statement was “No more war.” So I went to the draft board, tore up my student deferment, and filed as a conscientious objector.

  That led to me working at the L.A. County Hospital. I was a file clerk in the basement, because this was my alternate service. I quickly sussed out that I was the one white guy among about thirty-five black guys, most of whom were working two jobs and raising families. I volunteered immediately for permanent night and weekend duty, which gave them a chance to be with their families and me a chance to be alone.

  My job during the week was to set up the next day’s appointments for the clinics, getting these huge files and putting them in carts and taking them underneath the L.A. County. That’s what I did every night, except for Friday and Saturday. Those days, there were no clinical appointments the next day and I would go to the library. Until then I had never read outside of my discipline. I never read a book which I didn’t already know I would enjoy. At the hospital, I used to go to the library and just take a whole shelf of books. Then I’d go back and get a coffee, put my feet up, and read. I read things I never thought I would read, like this book called The Firmament of Time. It was all a search for what was wrong with me, because I always knew something was wrong with me.

  One night I was working the midnight shift and someone came in and said, “Anyone need anything to stay up?” and I said, “What?” He said, “Do you need this pill to stay up?” and I said, “Well, yeah.” I took this little mini Benzedrine tablet and went back to work, and about twenty minutes later I went “BONG!” I just stood straight up in the air, because for the first time in my life, all sixteen of my personalities had become one. It was a spiritual experience, and no one was going to tell me otherwise. It allowed me to see something that otherwise I couldn’t see, like a myth turned into reality.

  At first I was taking one Benzedrine a day and then two and then four and then six, and by 1971 I was twenty-one years old and I was appearing with Henry Fonda at the Kennedy Center in a play, and I was taking thirty-two minibennies a day and drinking. I had never had a drink when I was a teenager, never wanted to. In my family the little liquor cabinet had cobwebs on it and the only alcohol that was served was on New Year’s Day at the champagne party that my parents threw every year. But I was way into drinking by now, and into my bennies, and I remember making a very vivid entrance in front of thirteen hundred people.

  I felt my sanity go flying right out of my arms, and I could hear me but I couldn’t hear anyone else, and I had tunnel vision, and the other actors were all looming in front of me. I decided if at the end of the act they come and take me away, I’ll know that I’m crazy. If at the end of the act they don’t come and take me away, I’ll just know I’m giving the worst performance in history. So when the play ended, which felt like a year later, I shuffled offstage. I was afraid to take my feet off the earth and so I shuffled out of the theater, through the Watergate Hotel, up to the Howard Johnson’s, up to my room, and I took the bottle of minibennies that I had and I flushed them down the toilet. That was on a Sunday night and Monday was off, so the next performance was Tuesday. I cold-turkeyed in my room and showed up on Tuesday like everything was fine and then discovered that on Sunday I had given the worst performance in history.

  That didn’t stop me. I just decided bennies were no good and asked myself, “What else should I take?”

  By 1982, I had won an Academy Award and there had been times when I was sober those years, but mostly I wasn’t. By November of that year, I may not have been the found er but I was certainly a board member and probably chairman of admissions for the Assholes Center. I remember going to the home of Sherry Lansing, who ran Paramount, and I was yelling at her, I mean I was yelling in her face, and I left her home at about ten thirty or eleven o’clock. I was drunk, I was loaded, I was enraged, and everyone was an asshole. I got into my little convertible Mercedes and roared down the street. Never put a safety belt on. Why do I need one?

  The next thing I knew the car was on top of me. The whole car was on top of me, and I was in my seat strapped in by a safety belt I don’t remember putting on. It was intensely quiet. My head was on the pavement and my
body was dangling upside down, and it was very, very quiet. I knew that my life had changed, but I didn’t know exactly how. I knew that I was either dead or about to die or I was permanently injured. At the very least I was looking at a DUI and an arrest for possession because I had a great deal of drugs in that car and on my person.

  Finally a guy came up to the car—tap, tap, tap—put his head down, and according to him I said, “My name is Richard Dreyfuss. I’m a movie star.” I always tell that version first because I don’t remember saying it. Then I do remember saying, “Please help me.”

  So then there is a jumble of noise and I was taken to the hospital. I remember being at the emergency ward and having my dick stuck with a catheter, which as you know is the most painful thing in the world, while the police were going, “DO YOU KNOW YOUR NAME? DO YOU KNOW YOUR NAME? YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT? DO YOU?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Who’s the governor of California?”

  “AHHHH!”

  I woke up the next day in my hospital room knowing that downstairs

  there would be chaos. Of course the first phone call I made was to my dealer. My doctor came, my brother came, my dealer came. He was telling me that the news was all over the country, don’t turn on the television. As we were talking in this private room I began to be aware of an image in my mind, an image of a little girl. I couldn’t shake this image. I didn’t know who she was. She was about eight years old. That’s all I knew about her.

  So the next day I woke up in the same room and I had the same little girl sitting there waiting for me, and this time I could see her a little bit more clearly and she was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and she had a pink- and-white dress on, and no matter what I said or thought about during that day she was there.

  Of course when the lawyers started to come in I had to go down to the Beverly Hills Court—that was a zoo—and be arrested for DUI and for possession, possession of three or five Percodan tablets and less than a quarter of a gram of coke. So after I left the police and the court, I went to my lawyer’s office and I said, “I have to tell you some bad news,” and they said, “Oh, really?”

  “The police are holding out on us.”

  “What do you mean? They have no reason to hold out on you.” I said, “I had just bought that day a transparent tube container of five

  hundred or a thousand Percodan. It was this big, and you could see through it. It was in my car.”

  They all looked at one another like “Oh, fuck,” because they knew that had I been arrested for that—totally different ball game. They tried to talk amongst themselves as to why they wouldn’t have been notified of this, but they couldn’t figure it out.

  I then embarked on about ten days of absolute denial. The only part of reality that I did check in with was I didn’t drive. I hired a driver, but I tried to really drown myself in drugs and alcohol and behavior as much as I could because I knew everything was going to come out and I was going to bad places with bad people.

  One of the first of God’s little great subtle moments was that first day, after the hospital, I got into a limo to go to a party and realized that the driver was an actor I’d competed with and who was now reduced to driving a limo as opposed to costarring with me. I was in the back loaded, and he was driving the car.

  Then I’m on my way to an orgy, and then I’m on my way to another one, and that’s all I did for ten days in November 1982. And the little girl never left. Every day she was there, and every day I knew a little more about her. First she was just eight, then she was eight with glasses, then she was eight in a pink- and-white dress, then she was dressed in a pink- and-white dress with a crinoline and patent leather shoes, and I’m still thinking to myself there was no girl in my life. There was no little girl, I wasn’t married, had no kids.

  Meanwhile, one of my friends, Mandy Patinkin, had walked up Amsterdam Avenue in New York and seen from half a block away the New York Post headline that said, “Dreyfuss Busted,” and puked. God only knows what my parents were thinking.

  On the tenth day after the arrest I got into this limo in L.A. and I went out to Malibu to an orgy, to a coke night, with about three or four guys and five or six girls. To me, cocaine was demonic. It was like, “What shall I do today? I’ll be anxious and insecure and hateful and disgusting—I’ll take some cocaine.” It just didn’t make any sense, and I did it anyway.

  Anyway, I’m at this orgy, and these girls were all beautiful, they were all laughing, and I saw in the eyes of one girl this glimpse of how desperately she didn’t want to be there. I’d been around people like this for years. We all knew this game. We all knew that they were there for coke, they were coke whores, and they would do anything for that experience. There was still this little girl in the back of my head, just sitting there, and I looked at that girl at the orgy, and all of a sudden I just left. I was filled with such self-loathing and such revulsion for myself that I walked out that door, to the driveway, where my driver was standing.

  As I got into the backseat of the car, I knew that little girl very simply was either the little girl that I didn’t kill that night I completely lost control of my car, or she was the girl, the daughter I hadn’t had yet. I knew that as a certain fact. And the moment I figured out who she was, she disappeared.

  I went home that night and ritualistically poured everything out, and I went the next night to my first serious recovery meeting. During those ten days I had gone to a couple of meetings at Cedars- Sinai, loaded out of my head. This time I went and I was sober and that was the end.

  I sobered up on November 19, 1982. My daughter was born November 19, 1983. My daughter wears horn-rimmed glasses. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a pink dress, but it was my daughter, and the older she gets the more I see it.

  But that’s not the end of the story.

  After I ended up in my car upside down, I said to my doctor, “You’ve got to test me, because there is something wrong here.” The end result was that I was diagnosed as manic-depressive, and I went to therapists and I went to meetings. But I am Richard, and that means that if I’m going to be a drug addict, I want to know everything there is to know about drug addiction.

  I just read my brains out, and then I began to look at the doctors I was dealing with, and I realized that there was only one thing they could successfully, confidently predict about what they would be saying about these things fifty years from now, which was “Boy, were we stupid fifty years ago.” That’s the history of medicine, all medicine about anything. I realized they didn’t understand addiction any more than I did, and I was still an addict.

  Then one day I ran into a psychiatrist in the Valley and I was telling him about how I hadn’t been without drugs since I’m sixteen, and he said to me, “Richard, there is a faucet in your brain that is dripping either too slowly or too quickly, and we can help you.” It was as if this weight lifted off my shoulders. I mean it was the first time anyone had ever empathized with my situation. So we embarked on a journey to find the right chemical balance, and that chemical balance includes everything. I don’t make any distinction. When people say, “You know, you’re still using. You should go to recovery meetings,” I say, “You are a jerk.” We are all here for one thing, and that is the attempt to alter our heads. One group does it this way, one group does it that way, but the end result, the goal, is the same.

  I have a chemical formula. I take them every morning and sometimes during the day, and I am the nicest guy in the world. I am the nicest husband, I am the best father, I have the temperament of a prince. I am a pro. I spend the effort making sure that when you work on a movie, you are surrounded by creativity and relaxation and fun, and if there is any brouhaha on the movie, it’s taken care of right away. Because life is too short, and I know that because when I got divorced and my wife kicked me out, I got so depressed. I was on a plane, and I picked up this magazine article all about depression amongst CEOs. It had a list: “If you have four of any of the
next eleven or the next fourteen things, you are depressed.” I had them all, I had every single one of them. I got off the plane and I called my doctor from the L.A. airport and I said, “Okay, we have to take this seriously. If you can’t help me within a given amount of time, there is no reason on earth for me to live.” And so what had been a kind of on- again, off-again attempt became a real search. “Let’s try this . . . Okay, that doesn’t work, so let’s try that.”

  I was looking for what everyone looks for and no one ever finds. I was looking for inner harmony and contentment and an absence of anxiety and I was looking for what Buddha got.

  Since then, I’ve found out a lot about it, and I’ve had moments of it. I don’t know a lot of people who really are able to look at their own lives, their own mistakes, their own victories and defeats, their own pro cesses, and learn from all that. I do. I’m a better person now than I was then. I realized a long time ago that the pursuit of my goal is far more fun than the achievement of that goal. The night I won the Academy Award, I took the award and turned it around and just stared at it. I had just won the Best Actor Award at age twenty-nine and I did not know or give a shit about anyone in that audience, and I was alone. I’m not alone like that anymore.

  David James Elliott

  David dropped out of high school to be a rock star, but he soon wised up, got his diploma, and went on to Ryerson University in Toronto. That’s where he got the acting bug, and after graduation he moved to L.A. He got roles in lots of movies and TV series, including Street Legal, Knots Landing, and Melrose Place. I met him around this time, showing up for casting calls. He ended up getting the lead role on JAG, which ran for ten years, while I got . . . well, not that. At some point I noticed that he’d become part of the recovery community and I got to know him a little better. Even so, when I asked him to take part in this book, I thought of him as a long shot. Instead, he said yes instantly.