Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  I go to a lot of sober musicians’ first concerts, and they’re monsters. Of course they’re nervous. Why would they not be? When I went onstage sober the first time, after all those years of drinking, I did not have a great set. I had a Letterman show six days after I got sober, and I was not going to cancel. I did not have a great show. He said to me, “Are you okay?” And for the first time I was okay because I was sober, but I was off that night because I was shaking like a leaf and I thought I’d never get it back again. I immediately asked my publicist to book me again. Immediately. They booked me six weeks later and I had one of the greatest shows in my life, because I needed it. But I’m still proud of that show, six days sober, clueless, frightened out of my mind.

  I was addicted to everything: food, sugar, women, sex. Actually, my therapist called me an affection junkie. I needed people to love me. I didn’t have that woman to have sex; I wanted her to love me, which is a big difference, a huge difference. I used to do dates from hell until I realized that I was the date from hell, which opened up a Pandora’s box, a billion hours of material, when I finally took responsibility for my actions. I met a woman a few years ago, who’s a friend of mine now. I went out with her for four months while I was drinking and I had no recollection of her being a girlfriend.

  It reminded me of looking in the mirror many times. I’d be bloated and I’ve ruined the eve ning and it was humiliating, and I’d say “Look at you . . . you’ve got to stop this.” But I had no intention of stopping. I had no tools for stopping. I just knew that my life was going to end eventually. I would lose my career, lose all my money, and lose the woman I was with. I didn’t go as far as I’d be homeless, but I was heading that way. So I decided, I am not going to kill myself with a disease that I could stop. I asked people to help me, and I got help.

  I knew I was a drunk, but I couldn’t imagine not drinking. My therapist—I was a therapy junkie for almost three decades—told me later, she knew I was a drunk but she also knew I had to realize that myself. She asked me to keep a diary, and one good thing about this therapist was, she’s the most ethical person I’ve known in the profession, and I trusted her. I’d been seeing this therapist for thirteen years and she said, “When you’re drinking, just write down what you’re thinking about and how much you’re drinking. Just make a chart, and then when you come see me next week, we can look at the chart and see what happened.” And I stopped seeing her. I had told her literally everything that made me feel uncomfortable, all of my secrets, and they weren’t brutal, like “I dressed up like a pirate” or “I tried to rape someone.” It wasn’t that kind of stuff, but it was stuff that made me feel like crap. When she told me to keep a diary, I stopped calling her, after thirteen years.

  That was the first real crack, the first real epiphany for me. It wasn’t the headlines in the entertainment section—“Lewis Carried Out of a Restaurant” or “Lewis Breaks into Springsteen’s Band Meeting” or whatever. It was when I stopped therapy completely after almost thirty years. See, I had always told her the truth. When I was afraid to go in there and say, “I had four bottles of Cristal before the Tod ay show,” when I would have been ashamed and humiliated to own up to that—that was when I knew I was a drunk. I knew it, but I kept drinking for another year and a half because I got angry when I realized that I had to stop. I could not imagine living my life without a drink.

  I remember going to the doctor—I was scratching a lot—and he says, “You have a yeast infection.” What does that mean? I don’t have a vagina. He said, “No, it’s in your penis. I’m going to give you a pill called Flagyl. It means you can’t drink for five days.” I was about to go to New York and I remember thinking, “My whole trip is ruined. Here I am, going to do the Letterman show and I can’t drink on the plane.” It took away the joy. There was no joy in being one of the most frequent guests of all time on Letterman. All I thought was “I’m going to be in Manhattan and I won’t be able to go to the St. Regis, to one of the most beautiful bars, the King Cole Bar, because I can’t drink. Why even go? Why even get on the plane? Why do I have a career when I can’t drink?”

  I didn’t see it then, how insane that was. I drank more and I got more into drugs than ever before because I knew I had to get sober or I was going to lose everything, and I did not want to get sober. I decided I was going to go out on my own terms, even if it meant dying.

  This is how much I didn’t care about my life. I ate at a restaurant in Hollywood and I got hepatitis A food poisoning and I had to go to the hospital. This was when I was shooting Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and I had one scene left. I never felt sicker in my life. I go to my doctor and I am jaundiced and he puts me right into the hospital. Mel Brooks calls me and he wants me to finish this last scene. Mel kept calling me in my room at the hospital. He says, “Richard, we’re going to pick you up on a stretcher, we’re going to paint you so you’re not yellow, and we’re going to lean you up against the wall. You’ll do your two lines and we’ll take you right back on a stretcher.” I hung up on him. He knows I have hepatitis and a fever of 106, and I think I’m dying. The phone kept ringing and ringing. “We’re going to paint you! You’re going to look so pretty!” So finally I told my doctor, “You got to call Mel and say I can’t do it,” so they did the scene without me. Mel Brooks is one of the funniest human beings of all time and I’d work on anything with him as long as I didn’t have hepatitis.

  Anyway, when I got out of the hospital my doctor, my internist of twenty-five years, he says I can’t drink for a year. If I drink, it could kill me. Because of the damage to my liver, I could develop hepatitis C. I was scared, so I went cold turkey. I was not going to go to any alcohol programs or any kind of self-help group. I didn’t need that. So after about six months into not drinking, I go to get my teeth cleaned. This is the longest I’ve gone without drinking for about twenty years. I told the guy who was cleaning my teeth, “I’m healthy now so don’t worry, but six months ago I got hepatitis A.” We’re talking about it and I said, “Yeah, I can’t even have a glass of wine for a year.” He said, “Really? My doctor said six months.” I said, “You’re kidding.” No, he’d had hepatitis A, and his doctor had said after six months you could do whatever you want.

  He could have been wrong, he could have lied, it could have been whatever it was, but I risked my life on a dental hygienist over my physician of twenty-five years. I went to a bar and I drank. That’s how important alcohol was. It was absolutely the center of my universe.

  When I think about that now, it makes me sad. It makes me sad that I was willing to die for a drink.

  One day I called a guy I knew who used to do a lot of drugs who had stopped. A famous guy, a real great musician. He lived about five minutes from my house and he zoomed over and—you have to understand, my house is like a museum. I have all these photographs of people I admire, including a lot of musicians, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis. So this guy came over and he said, “This is it for you, man. You got to get help, because it is over.”

  Later that day he faxed me a note, which I still have. He said, “You know, I’m looking around the walls of your house. You really have wonderful rock art, and most of these people inspired me.” And the line that stuck out was this: “A lot of those guys left the set too soon. You don’t have to.” It was true. All the people that I have photographs of, 80 percent of them checked out in their twenties or thirties. I mean, Lenny Bruce was forty when he died. That was it, that was the night.

  I called someone else I knew who had a lot of sobriety and I said, “You have to help me.” He came over in ten minutes. He says, “I’m here to help you. Here’s the deal. You’re going to listen to everything I tell you. If you take a Benadryl after I tell you not to, I am putting you away. I don’t care what gigs you have, I don’t care if you’re in a show. I do not care.” And this guy was historically one of the most legendary junkies that ever lived. He had seven years sobriety at that point, and now he’s got over twenty years. For almost a year, al
l I did was listen to this guy and do everything imaginable to learn about sobriety.

  I’m not articulate enough to describe exactly what the psychic change was. All I can say is, for the first time there was something other than me that mattered. Because up until that point, practically everything I did, even on my nice days, everything always seemed to filter back to Richard. Richard did that, Richard helped him, Richard did this, Richard had intercourse with that famous woman. Whatever it was, even if I worked for charities or whatever, it had nothing to do with anything other than myself. A spiritual entity came to me that day. It almost felt like there was an aura around me, and that aura was not me anymore, and that aura was something that was going to keep me alive as long as I believed in it.

  I am not a perfect person now. I am not a perfect husband, I am not a perfect friend, and no one is. But I didn’t get sober to remain full of all the defects and all the fears and phobias that pushed me into covering up all this shit with booze and drugs. I do work on it, but some things are always there. There are certain things I am going to blurt out because I’m crazy. Not crazy in a way that I have to be sent away, but crazy as in, I’m an alcoholic and I think a lot of bad thoughts and I also want to screw up. I have to really fight hard not to shoot myself in the foot, and it’s murder. It’s murder, and the best way I’ve learned how to not do that is to help other people.

  One of the things that has kept me sober when I’m on the road is when I get a phone call from some musician or some comedian who’s in trouble. I drop everything. Nothing is more important than talking to this person. Then if you see them later and they say, “Boy, thanks for talking to me”—I mean, what’s better than that? I could go to that refrigerator ten feet away and have a couple of vodkas, or I could have the luxury of helping that person.

  It is such a gift to be able to help somebody other than just yourself. People did this for me. Who knows what was going on in their life, and they dropped everything. “Stop the presses, someone’s going to die!” That’s how I live my life now, and it’s the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

  When things aren’t going my way, I think really long and hard, “What is my part in the deal?” Never did that before. Never cared about it. I was the victim, so I’d just give in to that dark side of every addict that goes “You deserved it” or “You’re going to screw it up so just go ahead and get it over with.” A few years after I got married, I was unhappy and I remember walking around with this guy with a lot of time in recovery. He’s been married a long time, and he just listened to me like a wise sober person. I’m saying, “I got married late in life and I don’t know if I should have, I don’t know if I’m staying or not.” I’m talking about every possible aspect of everything that’s bothering me, and he doesn’t say a word until finally: “Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re discussing things that are bothering you, as opposed to going out and doing things that could really ruin your life. Do you know what kind of progress that is?”

  That was a great epiphany for me. I used to do a joke when I first got sober—now that I had so much clarity, I despised myself even more. In a lot of ways it’s true, but what it really means is, because I don’t medicate these problems, I see them. When things happen to me, they’re like spears that go right through me, and since I can’t smoke a joint and have a couple of cocktails, I’m living with this stuff. Do I get irritable sometimes? Yes. Do I ruin my life? No.

  It was murder the first three or four months. I hardly got out of bed. I was afraid to do almost anything. I talked to a lot of people on the phone, but I was afraid to leave my house. I was afraid to drive. I was petrified. I didn’t know who I was. I was sober for four or five days, I felt like a baby. It took me a good seven or eight months to feel like Richard Lewis, but he turned out to be a totally different man than before. And I wasn’t sure if I liked him, because obviously, I never really liked myself enough to help myself. That’s when you really need to talk to people who have been at that exact place. I do not recommend isolating during that time. By nature, I am sort of a recluse, and being a recluse in early sobriety is just not healthy. Not a good idea.

  But it’s difficult for everybody. It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, and there are still many things that I want to change. I was speaking to a good friend of mine. He’s going to be eighty-two years old and the guy hasn’t had a drink for forty-nine years. This guy is spectacular. He’s the funniest man I ever met, without a question. I go to his house, we sit and talk, and it’s just too good to be true. We talked about alcoholism, and he stopped drinking when he was thirty-two and so he has an interesting take, because at eighty-one he’s very honest. He talks about his family, his parents, his life in sobriety, and has no tolerance now for people that don’t treat him with respect. He will not be treated poorly by anybody. And that’s a part of sobriety. I don’t have patience with people who, out of the blue, are selfish and are rude to me. I try to get away from it. That’s hard, because most of the population is pretty whacked. It’s true.

  I’m seeing things now and I’m hearing things now, and I can listen to people. I have never been a better friend. I have never been better at my craft, and I have never been a nicer person. If I can just live out my life doing my best work—that’s important to me. I do foolishly expect applause sometimes for being a better person after fourteen years of sobriety. I’m no longer quite as self-centered or as selfish as I was, but that’s not totally where it’s at.

  I was born a Jew, so I went to Hebrew school and I remember one line, “God is everywhere.” I believe the philosopher Spinoza said that. I sense that God has touched everything in some way. When I go onstage, whether it’s a concert or in a club, I tell the audience, “If it is only about the Shecky Greene tossed salads you’re eating and my hour and ten minutes onstage, let’s just drink the Kool-Aid and call it a lifetime.” Why not just believe in something greater than ourselves? I mean, there’s got to be more than just spinning around the universe. There’s something bigger, bigger and better. That’s God, bigger and better.

  Katey Sagal

  Katey comes from a show- biz family. Her father directed episodes for lots of TV series, including The Twilight Zone, and her mother was a film producer. Katey started out as a singer (including a tour as one of Bette Midler’s backup singers), but she’s best known for her starring roles in Married . . . with Children and 8 Simple Rules. I’ve always admired her work; she’s got a great sense of comic timing, and I figured she’d be fun to talk to. I was right. We had a great conversation, about everything from parenting teenagers to how great she looks, but it wasn’t until we were deep in the interview that I realized we had a good friend in common. This guy had been one of my friends in recovery, a role model and inspiration for hundreds of people, and he ended up dying of a drug overdose, alone in his house. That’s one thing none of us can forget: anybody in this book, anybody in recovery could be gone tomorrow.

  I

  got sober twice, and the first time was very different than the second time. The first time I was in the middle of the love-of-my-life romance. I was pursuing my chosen profession: rock star. I played the

  piano and wrote songs, smoked my cigarettes and ate my amphetamines. I wore all black and I had this big hairdo, all ratted out, and black eye makeup. My boyfriend and I were complete drug and alcohol partners. I was just crazy about him. He would run off for days and I’d go screaming through Hollywood in my car, trying to find him. I had this red El Dorado 1969 convertible, and I’d drive around with the top down, half out of my mind.

  For a couple of years, I knew I needed to get sober. I would use daily in a moderate way, and then I would go on these long binges, and after every one of those binges, I would tell myself, “Okay. You are not going to do this anymore. You just cannot do this anymore.” Then time and time again, there I would be. Once I would start, I couldn’t stop. It would be four or five days, and then I would stop because I’d just pass out. I was
working. Rock stardom eluding me, I was on a television series, God knows how. The star of the series, I’ll never forget her telling me on the set, “I’m sober.” I looked at her and I said, “Me too.” I was completely lying, totally lying. In hindsight, she was one of those little angels.

  Anyway, my boyfriend’s name was Spyder, and Spyder was in a band. All the people in the band were sober except for Spyder and me, and we were like these ghost people. Like night crawlers. Then he ran off with this speed freak dealer girl. I went to my first meeting looking for him because I thought his friends would be there so maybe he’d go there. I think that was my cry for help. I just knew that drugs and alcohol and him and everything . . . it was all just too much.

  I go to this mutual support group, and there were all these people I knew there. I just cried and talked about Spider. But I stopped drinking and using that first time. Then I went off to New York, doing this workshop of a play, and I knew nobody there. I was in New York for three months and then I started using again. I remember at that time thinking, “Well, I need this. Nobody will know.” The denial pro cess. “This won’t be a big deal. I can control this and it’ll just be for tonight.” As usual, it was never just for tonight. As usual, I was just lying through my teeth to everybody around me and somehow showing up for work. I mean I was like a little chemist. I could get myself to sleep and get myself awake and get myself to work.

  When I got back from New York, the boyfriend was gone. I came back to my house—God knows how, but I had a house—I was standing in my living room, and I really understood the meaning of powerlessness. There were other people there, carrying on doing what we always had done, and it was so boring. The same conversations would happen. The same paraphernalia was going to get spread across the coffee table. The same alcohol was going to get spilled. The same music would get played. You put up with a lot of shit when you’re loaded. Boring!