by Blake Bailey
6 Anyone who wonders what this apartment looked like should watch the movie The Lost Weekend, for which Billy Wilder asked Jackson to draw a floor plan from memory. The subsequent set design, said Jackson, “was absolute perfection in every detail”: “My god if they didn’t actually select one of the very same pictures with which I had decorated my 55th Street flat more than ten years ago: the drawing of Brahms playing the piano.”
7 Legend has it that Jackson was a great patron of P. J. Clarke’s on 55th and Third (the model for the bar in the movie), though in fact, as he wrote a friend, “my favorite joint (and the one described in The Lost Weekend) was Gus’s, between 55th and 56th on Second.”
8 Osborn is best known for his 1939 comedy, Morning’s at Seven, which was successfully revived on Broadway in 1980 and 2002. He also wrote the screen adaptations for South Pacific, East of Eden, and other movies, and was one of Charlie’s neighbors in Newtown, Connecticut, during the 1950s.
9 “I thought they were all gay,” said Margot Morrow Wilkie of the Brattleboro men, citing Becker, director Paul Stephenson, and the Jackson brothers (perhaps forgetting Mel Ferrer’s vaunted heterosexuality). In 1934, Charlie wrote this provocative couplet “To Johnnie Becker”: “Public Enemy No. 69 / Will you be my Valentine?” Be that as it may, both men eventually married, and when I asked Haidee Becker Kenedy about her father’s orientation, she replied that he likely had “homosexual leanings during his youth,” but was always “evasive” on the subject.
10 Not his real name, which I changed at the request of his son.
11 Spofford gave one of these to Denby (his best friend and his son’s namesake), who later sold it and used the proceeds to buy a house.
12 With one difference: in the novel, the agreement is dated “April 13th 1936”—roughly six months before the lost weekend in question—whereas the actual agreement is dated April 13th 1935.
13 The typescript of Native Moment ends with that long conversation between Phil and Dr. Monroe, but Jackson’s notes suggest that he’d once had a far more dramatic ending in mind: “Night scene, Professor and stadium” is followed by “Scene XIV—Return dejection, suicide letter, walk downtown at night, book in window [my italics], sees Johnnie [sic], is run over.” Thus a piquant irony: the suicidal Phil sees the “book in window”—Tales of the Jazz Age, no doubt, as in The Lost Weekend (and real life?)—and is duly cheered up, only to be distracted by Johnny and killed by a passing car.
14 Thor Lyngholm and his fiancée, Alice—twenty-two years his senior—were on their way to Bermuda, a development that will be discussed in the next chapter.
Chapter Six
Sweet River
In the 1930s, most doctors believed that alcoholics (“dipsomaniacs”) were hopeless cases. Maybe a handful had the willpower to quit on their own, and as for the rest—“once a drunkard, always a drunkard.” Jackson, however, thought he might get the help he needed from “an exceptionally intuitive man” who could understand how the alcoholic felt inside—from a man, better still, who was himself an alcoholic—and so on November 12, 1936, he met with an intuitive alcoholic named William Wynne Wister.
Bill or “Bud” Wister was an eccentric, gesticulating redhead who practiced (unlicensed) as a “psychotherapist in alcoholism,” and would later boast that he’d cured 294 out of 300 patients—including the author of The Lost Weekend. Born into an affluent family in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (one of the “Philadelphia Main Line Wisters,” as he liked to say, and nephew of the great Western novelist Owen Wister), Bud would always assert that his plush upbringing was primarily to blame for his disastrous twenty-year drinking career. After graduating from The Hill School in nearby Pottstown and serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Great War, he became a consummate Jazz Age wastrel: racing to speakeasies in his Stutz Blackhawk four-seater, a tipsy flapper at his side, he could always count on his wealthy parents (an overprotective mother in particular) to get him out of jams. Even the private sanatoria they chose for him only pandered to his habit: since doctors figured their patients were hopeless anyway, they fed them one drink an hour to keep them happy, while their families went on shelling out $150 a week.
Wister hit bottom in the fall of 1934, when he woke up in yet another seedy, anonymous, sickishly spinning hotel room, “one hundred per cent licked.” Wondering where else to turn, he remembered a book he’d skimmed several months before (planted at his bedside by the overprotective mother): The Common Sense of Drinking, by Richard Peabody, who, according to the New York directory, was then living on Gramercy Park South. A lay therapist, Peabody would have anticipated the depth of Wister’s misery—as he’d written in his book, “No action may result until some particularly depressing series of events has brought vividly home to [the alcoholic] the futility of trying to continue drinking and the apparent impossibility of giving it up unaided.” Such ideas—and some of the catchier phrases with which he conveyed them—would later be appropriated by Bill Wilson for his “Big Book,” Alcoholics Anonymous, whose famous admonition in favor of total abstinence (“Half measures availed us nothing”) was first expressed by Peabody as “Halfway measures are of no avail,” as was “Once a drunkard, always a drunkard.” (Peabody was fond of italics: “A fairly exhaustive inquiry has elicited no exceptions to this rule,” he said of the second phrase.)
Wister figured that Peabody had also been a drinker, but their affinity went further. Peabody, too, was from an illustrious family, a graduate of Groton School (where his uncle, Dr. Endicott Peabody, was headmaster) and Harvard; moreover he’d served in the Great War as an infantry captain, which left him with a keen sense of how alcoholism was, to some extent, a byproduct of the zeitgeist. “In the twentieth century,” his book begins, “with its high-pressure demands on nervous systems which have not yet become adapted to big business, mass production, telephones, automobile, high economic standards—in fact, bigger, faster, and noisier living conditions—alcohol has come to play an ever-increasing part as a narcotic, rather than a mere social stimulant.” Above all, there was the sheer nihilism of those who’d survived the war’s mechanized carnage, and who thus found it hard to cope with the noisy vacuous boredom of the peacetime world. Apart from drinking, Peabody had but a single passion after the war—chasing fire engines—to which end he’d installed a special alarm in his house, and would hastily don helmet, hip boots, and rubber coat whenever the call came. Finally, after the usual alcoholic mishaps, Peabody had gotten sober with the help of the so-called Emmanuel Movement (though he went on with his fire hobby), whose more practical methods he eventually refined into a program all his own—minus the emphasis on fellowship and spirituality that would later become the bases of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Peabody prided himself on a purely “scientific” approach (“common sense and sound psychological principles”): “He never mentioned the moral aspects of drinking,” Wister observed. “He spoke objectively, as though he were discussing the proper treatment for a broken leg.” The first thing Peabody explained to his new patient was that he could never drink again; also, the patient had to get sober for his own benefit—nobody else was to blame if things went awry. Given the alcoholic’s long habit of petty deceptions, honesty in all things was now key, and hence Peabody (and later AA) would instruct patients to make amends toward people they’d hurt, and notify creditors that they planned to repay them. Perhaps the most essential aspect of the Peabody Method, especially in the early stages of treatment, was keeping a routine: each night, before retiring, the patient was to make a careful schedule accounting for every fugitive minute, if possible, of the following day—shaving, dressing, eating breakfast, looking for a job, reading improving books, and making allowance for a bit of chaste, well-earned diversion in the evening. Such a routine, said Peabody, accomplished “three very important results: (a) The individual is continuously occupied; (b) he is conscious that he is doing something concrete about his problem (in contrast to mere intellectualizing); (c) he trains him
self constantly in minor ways to obey his own commands.” The last was crucial to Peabody’s notion of “thought control”: restoring reason to its throne, as it were, and putting one’s emotional self in its place. The latter, of course, wanted to keep drinking—to remember the music and fellowship of the tavern, to feel petulant about old grievances, to succumb to childish nostalgia for a more romantic life. One must learn to detect the siren song of the emotional self in all its insidious variations, and quash it as a matter of reflex.
In April 1936, Peabody declared that Wister no longer needed his services; indeed, he’d been so successful a patient, said Peabody, that he might consider taking up psychotherapy himself—ever vigilant withal, lest he deceive himself about being “irrevocably cured.” Three weeks later the forty-three-year-old Peabody died of a “heart attack,” according to The New York Times (he “attended all large fires in the city and was well known to many Fire Department officials”), and Wister was desolate: “A truly great man had left the scene.” He called Peabody’s widow, who told him that Dick had been feeling run-down lately; he’d been resting at their house in Vermont when a bad cold developed into pneumonia and he died suddenly in his sleep. So Wister reported in a “biographical novel,” The Glass Crutch (1945)—though a friend and colleague of Peabody, Samuel Crocker, claimed that the man had actually died drunk. As Bill Wilson wrote in his copy of The Common Sense of Drinking, “Dr. Peabody was as far as it is known the first authority to state, ‘once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic [sic],’ and he proved it by returning to drinking and by dying of alcoholism—proving to us that the condition is incurable.”
Whatever the case, Wister picked up a fallen standard, renting a studio near his master’s on Gramercy Park and arranging to see patients who’d been “cleared up physically” and referred by doctors. Jackson was among the first,1 and felt immediately at ease with the practical, no-nonsense nature of the Peabody Method. Unlike “the foolish psychiatrist,” Wister never asked him to make promises he couldn’t keep, never reproached or patronized him, and therefore gave him no reason to be anything other than absolutely honest: “We regard each other as two average normal individuals with sufficient intelligence to regulate our lives in orderly and profitable fashion without benefit of Freud,” Jackson wrote in a progress report (prescribed by Peabody) after the first month:
Constantly cropping up now (as they have been for years) are my misdemeanors of the past: times when I made a fool of myself, the night I did this-or-that, the week I disappeared, the grief I caused So-and-so, the damage I did when, etc. etc. etc.—nightmare experiences, all of them, especially when heightened by the light of sober reality. But since I have given up drinking I can look back upon all these unflinchingly now, with the knowledge that I was truly not responsible then. As opposed to this, however, is the real responsibility I have lately acquired, a sound responsibility based on sobriety and my true self.
Another thing Jackson liked about the program was its “sustaining power,” the way it gave him something to think about between sessions—a good thing, because he had a lot of time to think, the more positively the better. For a while Jackson hardly stirred from his dingy little room except to see Wister; the rest of his (carefully scheduled) free time was mostly given over to reading Shakespeare.2 Despite the upbeat tone of his progress report, Jackson’s first months of sobriety were grim: withdrawal had left him enervated and suicidally depressed, and it didn’t help that his days were passed in almost total, shabby solitude. He tried taking a mindless job at an electrical equipment plant (inspired by his time at the jigsaw factory, perhaps), but the eleven-hour workdays were more than his shattered nerves could stand.
At any rate he made it. Eight months after saying goodbye at the Taft Hotel, Charlie announced to Boom, Rhoda, and others that he was through drinking forever. Wister agreed: “I consider that you are cured,” he wrote, warning however that Charlie should be careful about his tendency to procrastinate (“It would be dangerous for you”), and urging him to “develope [sic] the habit of giving out … get your mind off yourself”—even suggesting that he support an orphan (“Perhaps you have one of your own tucked away in NY or Syracuse,” Wister quipped). He concluded as Peabody had taught: “Don’t ever forget one drink could wipe away all you possess so respect it—perhaps fear it as I do.”
Wister was right to fear it. A few years later he moved to Los Angeles in the hope of attracting a wide clientele of film-business alcoholics, until a “big slug psychiatrist” threatened to expose him for practicing without a license. Next he took an engineering job (though he wasn’t an engineer) at Douglas Aircraft, and had a disastrous relapse once he’d been fired—at one point smashing off the neck of a whiskey bottle because his hands were too palsied to unscrew the cap. Returning sober (if not quite chastened) to New York, Wister took a job in advertising and married a long-suffering girlfriend—his second wife—who, he vowed, would be “neither nurse nor servant” but “an equal partner.” And though he’d sworn off psychotherapy, he continued to regard himself as a leading authority on alcoholism. Jackson, for one, found him a little tiresome on the subject: “Oh well, I guess I’ve outgrown Bill Wister,” he wrote a mutual friend in 1943, “and maybe a good thing too. But of course, if I should say such a thing out loud, Bill would be bound to get the idea that I was cocky, over-confident, and in a ‘dangerous state.’ ”
The two fell out for good over a controversy involving their respective novels. Rather unfairly, Jackson accused Wister of undervaluing The Lost Weekend when he first read it: “[It] was simply beyond your comprehension,” he wrote, adding that Wister’s eventual appreciation was prompted by the good reviews. In fact, Wister had found an early portion of the manuscript “splendid”—though he (like many readers) hoped that Birnam would reform in the end—and finally provided a clumsy but glowing blurb: “Mr. Jackson’s unusual ability to vividly portray the gamut of emotions and subsequent behavior so characteristic of the alcohol addict—makes the work a masterpiece.” But soon Jackson heard a rumor that Wister had been working on his own book, with a chapter on Jackson, no less. Ironically it was none other than Roger Straus—later Charlie’s best friend—who played midwife to this curious project, approaching an editor at Collier’s, Jim Bishop, to write Wister’s story.3 “The smiler turned out to be strange,” Bishop remembered of his quasi-affable subject. “He seemed convinced that I was a stenographer, taking down his recollections word by word.” Detecting the man’s “inner irritation,” Bishop asked why he was so determined to write such a painful book in the first place. “That’s easy,” said Wister, explaining that one of his old patients was also writing a potentially groundbreaking work about alcoholism—but happily the man was a procrastinator: “Charlie Jackson is very slow. Besides, he’s writing a novel.… We’re writing the facts.”
Jackson beat him to the punch by more than a year, whereupon someone at Doubleday (Wister’s publisher) saw an opportunity to capitalize on The Lost Weekend, informing the columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen that a book titled The Glass Crutch was forthcoming from “the man who cured Charles Jackson.” Wister (who “had a habit,” said Bishop, “of bandaging his wounds in venomous letters to friends”) heard that Jackson was considering a lawsuit, and hence let him know, among other things, and in somewhat opprobrious terms, that Jackson wasn’t mentioned even once in The Glass Crutch. But actually Charlie had no intention of suing, and had even offered to blurb the book for old times’ sake. “I thought your letter one of the most outrageous I have ever received,” he replied.
You ought to be ashamed of it. I do not know what you are talking about when you talk of me “suing.” … What I do object to more strongly, however, is the ridiculous statement in your letter: “If you are going to pretend you have never been an alcoholic, you are headed for trouble later.” In the first place, I do not think you are a very good one to talk of “trouble later”; and in the second place, you are not showing very much sense in
saying I am pretending I have never been an alcoholic. If I had pretended any such thing, would I have been fool enough to write such a book as The Lost Weekend? Really, Bill, use your head.
As it happened, The Glass Crutch would indeed be associated with Jackson in the public mind, though not in the way Wister might have liked. In a gleefully vicious notice for the Times Book Review, Wolcott Gibbs blamed Jackson (“who wrote that excellent book called ‘The Lost Weekend’ ”) for having obliquely inspired—that is, by inaugurating the genre—a ghastly “tract” such as The Glass Crutch, which Gibbs described as the story of a reformed drunk who went on to become “a lay witch-doctor … and one of the great bores of our time.” Nor could Charlie himself resist a bit of ambivalent schadenfreude: “By the way,” he wrote a friend, “did you happen to read that unconsciously screamingly-funny life of William Wynne Wister of the Philadelphia Main-Line Wisters? I was embarrassed for him throughout: [Bishop] couldn’t have played a dirtier trick on poor Bill if he had tried, though god knows he thought he was doing an honest job of hero-worship.”
It was the beginning of a last, brisk decline for the man who cured Charles Jackson. Fed up with his pompous bickering, Wister’s wife and friends left him in toto, and finally he lost his job too. “Alone and lonely,” as Bishop later described him—without, that is, the kind of support system that AA was meant to provide—Wister began drinking again. One day in January 1947, a maid let herself into his Tudor City apartment and found him standing in the living room, unsteadily, strings of blood dangling from his open mouth. Once again he’d smashed off the neck of a whiskey bottle, but this time he’d swallowed some of the broken glass. He bled to death within a few hours (or rather died “after a brief illness,” according to the Times).