Dick Cavett on Booze

Booze, Revisited
JAN. 10, 2014


Dick Cavett


Dear Readers: Some of you had trouble finding my most recent column, on alcoholism. Since the latest entries are no longer part of Opinionator, the best way to locate my pieces is simply to search for my name in the Times’s search engine or go directly to my columnist page. I’ve always looked forward to reading your comments, even though the queue sometimes got so busy they had to be turned off — particularly unfortunate in this case since the 100 that were allowed were erudite and touching. Please keep your notes coming, as much as you can! I have a very busy year ahead, but I will be back to you as often as possible, even though it won’t be on a regular schedule. You can think of me as a little occasional surprise. Here’s to a productive and healthy 2014. — Dick

Meanwhile, here is where you can find that errant column and its wonderful reader comments.

Some wrote movingly of their recovery after “years of hell,” and frequently of how the drinker ruins not only himself but his family, and of despised parents who embarrassed them horribly and destroyed childhoods. (“My dad died too late. I never visit his grave.”)

Another reader, un-cured, addressing that one, says he fears that’s how he is right now to his estranged teenage daughters. One of those expressing gratitude for the column hoped that it just might help with a losing-the-game relative.

I urge you to read as many of the comments as you can take. There are some chillers.

From your emails and from other in-person comments, it seems to be a rare thing not to have been touched by problem drinking somewhere among family or friends or business associates.

Websites on alcohol and drinking statistics abound. Numbers vary but clearly millions are suffering the tortures of the damned. No less an authority than Don Imus, sober for long years with the day-at-a-time method and having read the last column, imparts the sad news that “rehab works for one out of four.” Every bit as disturbing is the statement of a highway patrolman I know that one out of five drivers heading toward you — or your kids — in the oncoming lane on Friday and Saturday nights is over the intoxication limit. Or, less politely, drunk. One Saturday night, traveling east on Long Island, my car became the fifth in a line of cars to peel off into the right-hand ditch rhythmically, one after the other like Rockettes, as a speeding oncomer decided he preferred our lane.

One website puts the number of people deeply suffering at 15 million. Keep that in mind when those weekend cars come at you.

I all ubt forgot that years ago, in my early days on ABC, I did a two-part show on alcoholism. Standing out most clearly in memory is an attractive, intelligent, well-spoken mother of three who survived shooting herself in the forehead while drunk.

Readers made the point that “too smart to be a drunk” cuts no — pardon the expression — ice.

It’s a shame that such a heavy price is paid by both the drinker and his victim for a substance that is so wonderful in its good ways: a lubricator of conversation, a steadier of nerves, a remover of that little edge of nervousness, an uninhibitor of the lover. And the lovee. In movies, anyway, a steadier of the trembling hand of the drunken doctor, usually played by Thomas Mitchell.

(Though of course loss of inhibition, pushed too far, can release the inner rapist as well.)

I wish I’d discovered earlier that, with my weak head, a mere tablespoon’s worth of wine before going on took away that annoying little edge of performance nerves.

For a while I felt guilty about this, or about recommending it. Would that make me an enabler? The greats don’t need a drink, I thought. (I was very young.)

Then one night, backstage at “The Tonight Show,” I saw Jack Benny — yes,Jack Benny — seemingly the calmest, most assured and relaxed man in all of show business, quite casually call for and down a couple of inches of Scotch, with one ice cube, before sauntering with that wonderful walk calmly onto the set with Johnny. I stared in disbelief.

I appeared on the old “Kraft Music Hall” with George Burns. Just before airtime I was nervous as hell. George came to my dressing room and offered me a snort from his hip flask as if that were traditional. Brace yourself: I held it in my mouth, nodding thanks, and as he left I spat it into the dressing room sink, terrified that I would come reeling onto the stage. Dressing room sinks, time out of mind, have served multiple purposes.

(Remember George Gobel’s rationale for taking a stiff drink before going on? “You don’t expect me to go out there alone do you?”)

The world of showbiz has always had a heavy population of drunks. Fine actors like Jason Robards, Bogie, Maureen Stapleton, Trevor Howard, most Barrymores, Veronica Lake (drunk on my show), Robert Newton, Dana Andrews (reportedly needing to have his head held in a brace for close-ups) Dick and Liz, Peter O’Toole and Robert Mitchum represent a tiny percentage of the showfolk apparently plagued with “the cup that cheers.” And how did I leave out the great Spencer Tracy, who suffered alcoholseizures, bellowing and hurling furniture and glassware and having to be needled by a doctor into unconsciousness?

Burton’s vivid eloquence on my PBS show on what it is to be the slave of alcohol was recalled by readers, some of whom found it on YouTube, I think. Obviously people vary in their capacities. Mitchum explained, in one of two wonderful shows I did with him, that he could drink large quantities of alcohol with no apparent effect of any kind. Hardly a blessing, liver-wise, I should think.

I told an A.A. friend of mine that by just lightly licking the surface of a martini — not even taking a sip — I can feel it down to my toes. He paled, saying, “My God, I had to drink three to feel anything!”

He’s the same one who told me a profound thing that sticks with me, certainly in relation to Tom of my “Tough Way to Lose a Friend” column. He said, “An alcoholic is so devious, he will even quit drinking to prove he’s not an alcoholic.”

We needn’t recite the list of famous alcoholic writers that usually starts with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner.

John Cheever said he could drink anywhere, anytime, except when working. I’d asked, “Does drink help writing?” His negative reply was wonderful: “I can detect a sip of sherry in a paragraph.”

Tom (of the previous column) had worked on many television shows and I’m not sure if my producer was the first or even the last to have to can him — as Tom himself had requested when coming aboard, if he tumbled from the wagon. My producer needed a bit of a nip after performing the hateful deed.

Tom was affable, wittily funny and a hilarious storyteller. One day he came to work lamenting, once again, the gentrification of his beloved Columbus Avenue. He complained that he had just seen a new funeral parlor named “Death ‘n’ Things.”

Strangely, I saw myself as an exception to the apparent rule that everyone has a drunk somewhere in their life. At first I could think of none. Then, in an eerie procession, they began to file into consciousness, coming into focus like ghosts in a story.

Here came Aunt Betty, a gorgeous blonde on my stepmother’s side who made a total mess of her life and family. My somewhat saintly stepmother somehow collared all of Betty’s bewildered grade-school-age kids, brought them to Lincoln from St. Louis while their mom was particularly bad and gave them a birthday party. They’d never had one.

When she inevitably lost the kids, and kicked the booze well after her divorce, she got by on two other addictions. Chain-smoking and crappy television jewelry, which she ordered incessantly, saying, “I need this. It keeps coming in, making every day a birthday.” Not all of her wits survived the booze. When she died, from smoking, all the drawers of her desk were found stuffed with the shiny junk frippery. Most of it unopened.


Smoking, sadly, seems to be the favored other addiction of the alcoholic. Before being recognizable, I was sneaked into an A.A. meeting with a friend. You could barely see the walls for the cigarette smoke, with coffee consumed by the gallon.

Speaking of writers, I once drove the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jean Stafford (the former Mrs. Robert Lowell and also the former Mrs. A. J. Liebling, as well as my late wife’s and my great friend) to her home in East Hampton. She was asleep, drunk, in the passenger seat. Suddenly she stirred and in her beautiful, almost baritone voice said, “I hate it. I hate alcohol. It is my seducer. And my enemy.” And went back to sleep.


I’m at a loss for how to close on this unclosable subject. I think I’ll let one of the readers have the honor. From   “geomurshiva of copperstown, ny”:


“Being a critical care nurse for a long time , I have seen what alcohol can do to anyone one of us. We think most often of the long term drinker and the liver failure and the disorientation and the sad last days of coma and the family at the bedside crying so sadly for the loss of another life to booze. Thanks ,Mr.Cavet for the good read. … But, for most of us serving the sick we cry more for the younger ones who got drunk at a college party and then went driving only to die in a car crash or sustains brain injury and paralysis … These victims of alcohol are forgotten all too soon . They become statistics only. Alas.”




source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/opinion/booze-revisited.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0