The doctor told me that the surgery was still new, a laser technique that had had both good and not-so-good results, but he said I really had no choice. He believed that the operation would give me perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of being able to sing again. I had no choice but to surrender and pray for the best. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to me if I couldn’t sing.
I drank late into the night at the hospital before the surgery, putting away more than a quart of vodka. A few friends—the few I had left—joined me. At six in the morning the next day, the nurses came in and sniffed around the hospital room, where I had a half-gallon bottle of vodka, nearly empty, in the bedside table. They said it smelled like booze. Had they known how drunk I had been the night before, they would not have operated when they did—anesthetics and alcohol are a deadly combination.
The surgery was a success, but my life, I thought by now, was a complete failure. I was nearing my bottom, and by 1978, I knew I hadn’t far to go. I had had so much success in my career, and yet I had only one request—that I should be allowed to drink myself to death.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Drinking Decades
This life … feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.
—WILLIAM JAMES, “Is Life Worth Living?”
BY 1978 I had been drinking for twenty-three years. For the last four years I had been drinking round the clock. I could not stop for family, for fame, or for the future. I could not stop for my son, for my voice, or for my work. I couldn’t stop for God or for my soul. I had come to the end—the end of love, I was sure, and the end of the bright road that had been my life. The road was gone, the lovers were gone, the music was gone—for me, the poetry, the charm, the hope, the beauty, all seemed gone from the world. Alcoholism was bred in my bones. Drinking was my birthright, like my smile. It was in my history, in my family, and in my heart, and by the time I was twenty, it was part of my body chemistry. The smell of its deep stain seeped out through my body. I felt in my alcohol-soaked heart that it was there for good.
From the beginning, I knew I was in trouble with booze. By the time I was fifteen I had taken my first drink. Very soon, by the time I was in my late teens, the drinking was in charge, and I knew, from the compulsion I felt to have more, that the enemy—the one that had my father by the throat—was at my own neck. It was never going to let go. Even then, I knew that if it had its way, it would kill me.
I had thought about killing myself during the years that I drank. I would have hanged myself if I had had the courage. If I had owned a gun, had more pills, or lived on a higher floor, perhaps I would not be here. Like so many of my peers, I did not know what was wrong with me. I thought it was the world, the politics, the way things did not go in ways I preferred.
The darkness in my life was something most people knew nothing about. They thought of me as successful, and I appeared to be well balanced. I got to work on time, I maintained a career touring, recording, doing television. When I was interviewed, I spoke as though I had something to say, something to share. When I look into the eyes of my old self on some of the YouTube videos, I see the beast behind my pale, quiet face.
Successful? I was succeeding in spite of my illness, as my father had done for so long. Oh, I didn’t have mansions or dozens of cars or jewelry, which were not my thing. But I had something much more valuable to me: a career in which I could be creative and make a living at what I loved. Many of my records had become hits, some of them around the world. I sang in some of the most famous concert halls in the world.
Nothing stopped me—not the despair, not the sickness, not the disgrace. I was utterly serious about drinking. I had many love affairs, but if the truth were known, the affair with alcohol was the one that counted.
Many of the people I had known in the music business had died of the disease of alcoholism by then, or from some other, equally merciless addiction. The road was hard, the life was hard, but if you are an alcoholic, some part of you still thinks you can beat it.
I read every self-help book I could get my hands on. Not one of them said anything about alcoholism being an illness. I spoke to my therapists about being an alcoholic, but I was always assured that if we got to the bottom of my problems, I wouldn’t have to drink anymore.
At times I would have a drink during a therapy session. After fifteen years of Sullivanians, I tried new therapists. One said I would not be a candidate for AA, since it was low-class—they had those men in raincoats at the meetings. Another doctor told me she knew about AA, but for me, a one-on-one approach would probably be the best alternative. That gave me comfort, for I knew that somewhere in the course of AA I would have to stop drinking. I would do the one-on-one thing, whatever that was.
I had always worked hard at controlling my drinking; it was a matter of honor. Hell, it was a matter of making a living. I knew I was more miserable than I should have been, and all the pills I could get—those for sleeping, those for waking up, for slowing down, for losing weight—were scheduled around the times of the day when I would have to drink to keep up the level of alcohol in my body.
Where had the time gone? Where were the beautiful promises of my childhood, of my career, of my parents? It looked very much as though Sweet Judy Blue Eyes was down for the count. There had been a time when the dream was bright. My memory, strangely undamaged, told me the story, over and over again, like the recollection of some far-off place, some fabled paradise to which I yearned to return.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Resurrection
“We are lost.”
“No, it will turn out well.”
“How will it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”
—MARC NORMAN and TOM STOPPARD,
Shakespeare in Love
IT was April 1978, and in New York the spring was lush and bright with forsythia, its branches flowing over the old stone bridges in Central Park.
I wound a silk scarf around my head, hiding as best I could behind sunglasses and wearing a long dark coat that was too warm for the weather. I took a cab across the park, past bright patches of Japanese plum trees, but I was unmoved by all that color, feeling nothing of the promise of spring. I was on my way to an appointment with yet another doctor—a last resort, I thought. If this one didn’t know how to help me, I would go home to another of the long, dark, harrowing blackouts I had been having day after day, night after night.
I had called my beloved sister, Holly Ann, to come to New York to help me get through whatever it was I was going through. She brought her young son, Kalen, whose bright ten-month-old face, smiling at me over the cereal-spattered table of his high chair, was the only thing I could look at that made me want to go on living. In a few days I would turn thirty-eight.
That day I had an appointment with Dr. Stanley Gitlow, who had been suggested to me by a man I will call Joe, a well-known actor and well-loved man about town. This felt like the last stop on the line. I had known Joe by reputation—a few times a year he would be in a highly public brawl somewhere in a bar, and instead of seeing his startlingly handsome face shining out of the pages of the New York Post or the Daily News, I’d see a different Joe, a man full of rage, beaten about the eyes, fists out, clamoring for more of his opponent’s blood. Or at least that was the way I viewed it, and it gave me courage, made me feel I was not alone in this struggle.
I was never photographed knocking someone over, but I felt a kind of unholy bond with Joe. He was doing what I wished I could do, acting out on impulses I understood. He was showing them, getting even, and, like me, probably not even remembering where he had been until he was told the next day. My own rampages didn’t make it into the gossip pages, even when they were very public, like the time I slugged a New York City police officer at Madison Square Garden. The cop hadn’t wanted to let me back into the VIP seats at a 1977 Dylan concert, and I took offense
.
I had called Joe in Los Angeles, where he was working on a movie. On his dime, he called me back, and we talked for about forty minutes. I was half or more in the bag, moving toward my afternoon blackout, and I wrote down everything he said in a big drunken scrawl. He told me where to go and what to do and whom to call. He said there were answers, and that they involved people who were doing what I needed to do—not drink. He said I must see Stanley Gitlow, and that Stanley would know what to do.
I heard the truth in Joe’s voice. He told me how sick he had been, and how desperate. He talked about the miracle, as he described it, that had come into his life.
The flowers in the boxes in front of Stanley Gitlow’s office on Fifth Avenue, tulips in deep purple and red, were nodding. I walked into his office, where he sat behind his desk, a handsome and dapper-looking man in his fifties. The thought occurred to me that I could have been dating him. I nearly turned around and walked out. He looked too good to be true in his white coat, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He smiled at me, a bright, wonderfully winsome smile.
His smile was the only hopeful thing in the room, as I began to tell him what I was feeling, what I thought was my problem. I discussed the years of therapy and the years of drinking. I told him who I thought I was—an artist, a singer, a mother, a lover. By the time I told him my lover had left me, I was sobbing, lost in my melodrama. I said I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I said I knew I was dying, some days quickly, sometimes slowly. I said I plowed miserably from day to day, pulling myself from one blackout, one despairing morning, to the next. I told Stanley that despite all the success, I felt my life might as well be over. I contemplated suicide every day, I said, and if I were capable of pulling a trigger, I would have.
“Stop!” he said, interrupting my soap opera. He was smiling, as though I had just told him an amusing anecdote instead of the beginning of the end of my life. “Don’t say another word. I know what is wrong with you, and I know what you can do about it!” He kept smiling.
I froze. No one had ever told me he knew what was wrong with me and that there was something I could do about it. Of all the doctors and shrinks I had seen in the twenty-three years since I had started drinking, not one had ever said these words to me.
“You have an illness,” Gitlow said, “and it is going to kill you. But there is a solution.” No one had ever spoken to me about an “illness.”
“Of course,” Gitlow continued, “you can keep drinking, wait a couple of years, and check yourself into an institution with your wet brain and throw away the key.” I didn’t say a thing. This particular option was already on my to-do list, anyway.
“Or,” Gitlow went on—and here his kind eyes sparkled and he leaned closer to me and looked me in the eyes—“since you seem to be a bright girl under all those tears, you could check yourself into rehab and start to get your life back.”
The strange thing is that I absolutely knew I was hearing the truth. For some reason, after all the high-priced doctors who prescribed pills, or who told me we would work on the psychological problems and then the drinking would solve itself; after all the god-awful hangovers and the promises to myself not to let my life deteriorate into an endless stream of blackouts; after finally deciding I was never going to stop drinking of my own free will, the window of hope opened in that office. I was going to get a chance to have the life I had been missing out on for years.
Early on the morning of April 19 I flew to Reading, Pennsylvania. My assistant, Janet Matorin, and my accountant, Saul Schneider, were with me on the plane, two of the last people who were still able to deal with me. I did not know where Clark was. We had not talked for a few days, and he was on his own dark, troubled road, doing drugs, dealing heroin, sleeping with a gun under his pillow. He might have weighed 130 pounds, ten pounds less than what I weighed. The money I was giving him for school had been spent on drugs. He was nineteen. I was thirty-eight.
When we landed in Reading, a tall young man who, to my surprise, recognized me immediately met us. I said I had to use the restroom and hurried off to drink the large jelly jar full of vodka that I had stuffed into my huge shoulder bag before I left my apartment that morning. I was already quite drunk, and the ten ounces of vodka put me in a happy, giddy, joyful mood that would last all of about ten minutes while they drove me up to Chit Chat Rehabilitation Center for Alcoholics (now called the Caron Foundation).
The young man let me off with my luggage at the door of a pretty white house at the top of a hill. A drunk farm—this was where I had landed. Me, the hope of my family, the hippie gone silver and platinum, was bloated and sweating, even in the cool air of the Pennsylvania morning. I could not walk, talk, think, or function without a quart of vodka in my system. And there I was in the springtime of my life, with my suitcase full of books, my typewriter, my up and down pills for getting me through the day.
In the pale green trees the birds were singing and the sun was bright on the flowers around the farmhouse. Residents smiled at me from the white-painted rocking chairs on the porch and in the reception rooms. When I reached my room in the detox section the kind nurse told me she would take the vitamins, the sleeping pills, the books, the typewriter, the empty jelly jar. She showed me where I might shower, and where I would sleep. And then she said, softly, tenderly, “Now, why don’t you let us drive?”
On April 19, 1978, I took my last drink, God willing. In the Valium-aided withdrawal that followed, I felt I could hear tulips pushing through the dark earth.
For the first few nights I woke up in the night to the screaming, open mouths of my demons, howling through the quiet hills around me. The faces of my friends, my son, my sister and brothers hung over me, shining like beacons during the few hours I slept. Between daily meditation meetings we listened to Father Martin talk about the disease of alcoholism in his film Chalk Talk as we detoxed, sweated, hurt. I ached as I listened to Joni Mitchell sing, over and over again, the songs from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Most days I sobbed my eyes out, seeing flowers and hearing music as though for the first time, weeping over my own sad, broken drinking story. But the sounds that were most real came from the stories of other alcoholics.
From the time I was two or three, I yearned to know how everyone else did it—how they smiled when they wanted to cry, how they went on when they wanted to stop and fall to their knees and say, “I give up.” In my childhood, politics and debate and music were as much a part of our upbringing as booze. (We were privately convinced that people who did not drink must be illiterate!) But now, in Pennsylvania, I listened, and I began to learn. And though the details were often different, the feelings and the sorrow were the same.
One morning a few days after my arrival at the drunk farm in the hills of Pennsylvania, I walked past the mirror and for the first time in years looked into my own eyes without flinching.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Miracles and Menaces
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE (translated by Stephen Mitchell), The Sonnets to Orpheus
MY life began again when I got sober, as though I had been reborn, as though all the years before had been a warm-up for the real thing. I could think, act, be present, and feel joy as well as pain. The deep fear and all the bitter resentments began to lift, and as the big change sank in, a myriad of other remarkable results began to follow. The constancy of habit—training, showing up, doing my work in spite of what might have been going on in my life—began to bring me the kind of joy and satisfaction that had always eluded me on the deepest levels.
The hemangioma surgery I’d had earlier had been successful, a near miracle. A tiny white scar was all that was left of the trouble, though it took me a couple of years to get back
the full strength of my voice.
Three days before I had my last drink, in April 1978, I had been asked to go on a blind date with a man recommended to me by a friend of mine. Jeanne was dating his business partner and thought he was so wonderful she had to introduce me. I told her I was not in the mood, having been jilted by Jerry Oster, but she insisted, and I agreed to meet him at a fund-raiser, at Patrick O’Neal’s restaurant, the Ginger Man (which he had renamed the Ginger Person for that evening’s gathering in support of the Equal Rights Amendment).
I walked in, trying to look sober. This was going to be my final party before going off to the drunk farm to get clean. I was going to try to get in as much drinking as was humanly possible before I landed at Chit Chat.
A pair of blue eyes looked across at me in the restaurant. Louis Nelson greeted me and smiled. He was handsome, calm, and smart, with an open spirit. Not a singer, not an actor. I was drunk, but I was dazzled.
I knew only a little about Louis. He was an established and successful designer, having put the color in Head skis—the rainbow colors that took over from all the black in the 1960s. Because the color had drained out of my life, this seemed like a sign to me.
Louis pulled my chair out for me. I was shocked. I thought, “What does he want?”
Stephen Sondheim was there, as were Gloria Steinem and Patrick O’Neal. The night was festive. We were all hopeful that a women’s rights bill might be passed in Congress.
At the end of the evening Louis hailed a cab for me, then got in after me. I was pleased and surprised. Louis took me home, walked me to my door, and kissed me on the cheek.
Then he left.
I called him the next day, and he called me, and then I called him again. I wanted to tell him where I was headed, but instead I hemmed and hawed. I was going away, I said. I was sick, I said, and I was right.
Judy Collins Page 29
