The country was feeling good about itself, and rightly so. After all, hadn’t its doughboys brought to a successful conclusion “the war to end all wars?” Not only was the economy growing, but voters had seen the end of the scandal-ridden administration of Warren G. Harding, the nation’s twenty-ninth president. While free from corruption himself, Harding had imprudently appointed at the behest of his unscrupulous political supporters an interior secretary who was close to “Big Oil.” Accused of taking bribes for transferring large government mineral reserves to private interests, the interior secretary and his president found themselves in the spring of 1923 caught up in what was called the Teapot Dome scandal, named after the oil fields in question.
The betrayal of his cabinet officer and the never-ending scandal headlines broke President Harding’s spirit. Already in poor health, this was said to have led to his untimely death only months later. His vice president, the taciturn John Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in as the thirtieth president of the United States in August of that year. Coolidge happened to be a Green Mountain man himself, born in Plymouth, Vermont, only a short distance from Bill Wilson’s clan.
Plain in appearance and unimpressive in speech, Coolidge was an enigmatic man who slowly gained back the trust of the American people through his honesty, his openness, his quiet political skills, and his practical Yankee common sense. As a result, he was re-elected to his own four-year term in 1924 by a large plurality.
Calvin Coolidge believed that the backbone of America was its moral, hardworking men and women, not the get-rich-quick schemers and the loose-moral types. He told his cabinet officers: “Let men in public office enjoy the light that comes from burning the midnight oil, not the limelight.”
While ridding the nation of scandal and demanding a lily-white administration, Coolidge oversaw a peaceful land and an expanding economy. But in the end, he made one gigantic blunder. He turned both a blind eye and a deaf ear to the inordinate speculative boom in the stock market which, less than a year after Coolidge left office in 1928, would have enormous repercussions on the nation.
One dramatic example of the stock market’s extreme inflation was the fact that a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 sold for $625,000, while only ten years later that same seat sold for just $17,000.
In the midst of all this exuberance, Bill Wilson, in spite of his continued heavy drinking, was swept along with the tide and perhaps, like so many other wide-eyed optimists and fellow inebriates at the time, thought the financial orgy would never end.
But Lois Wilson, even with the little knowledge she had garnered about the workings of the stock market, grew more wary and more concerned by the day. Her Clark Burnham genes were telling her that life was not a free lunch, and those butterflies still in her stomach were whispering that one day soon, someone would have to pay the piper.1
Meanwhile, at Tobey & Kirk Investment Partners, one of the “Waspier” firms on the Street and quite protective of its impeccable reputation, Frank Shaw was trying to keep Bill on a tight leash. It wasn’t long, however, before several partners began hearing stories about this Bill Wilson fellow and started warning Shaw not to let his escapades affect the firm or its prestigious clients.
Much to Lois’s chagrin, her husband was also becoming an unwelcome guest in her own family. Once the lovable jokester and the life of the party, he was now often the pin that took all the air out of the balloon.
One particular evening, he showed up late and tipsy at a concert in which his mother-in-law was performing with the well-known Woodman Choral Club of New York. While squeezing into his seat, he stepped on Rogers’s toes, apologized loudly and profusely, then sat down and proceeded to fall asleep and snore. Fortunately, Dr. Burnham was working late at the hospital. In the lobby, after the concert, while Bill was in the men’s room, Rogers took Lois aside. He told her as kindly as he could that Bill’s behavior had become embarrassing. He said she should think twice about bringing Bill to family affairs if he was drinking.2
When they arrived home that night, Lois lost her temper once again. She berated her husband for constantly causing her such humiliation, especially in front of her family and friends. She screamed and sobbed as he swayed before her, his eyes half-closed and his mind somewhere in oblivion. As Lois later shared so many times with the wives of other alcoholics, yelling at a drunk when he’s drunk is like the sound of that proverbial tree falling in the forest. It’s never heard.
While Lois and Bill continued to prosper financially, their relationship continued to deteriorate. There were more and more unhappy scenes in their luxurious apartment in Brooklyn Heights, more and more embarrassing moments with Lois’s family, friends, and business associates, and more and more of Bill’s empty promises to reform his ways.
So now Lois was beginning to isolate herself. She preferred staying home, reading, sewing, or on occasion visiting a museum by herself. But there were times she was forced to attend a luncheon or dinner with Bill and his clients or a gathering of their spouses.3
At one such reluctant luncheon of Wall Street wives, the waiter came by to take their drink order. One well-preened lady requested her usual Manhattan cocktail, another a very dry martini, and the other a pink lady. When Lois simply ordered tonic water, it immediately prompted comments from the others about whether they should be drinking so early in the day.
Lois recalled a flush-faced, rather heavyset woman questioning herself about her love for dry martinis and her husband’s opinion that they made her talk too much and too loosely about their private affairs. Another lady prided herself on never drinking before noon and never having more than three cocktails in a single day—or perhaps four. “They make me too flirtatious,” she giggled.
But the third lady grew quite serious when she told about her Irish neighbor who drank so much she finally had to take “a pledge.”
“That’s sort of an Irish thing,” she remarked. “They do it with a priest.”
“Does it work?” Lois asked very cautiously, always fearing to give away any possible hint that a drinking problem might exist in her own household. Later she learned that her husband’s boozing was common gossip among most of these Wall Street matriarchs.
“I guess it does,” the lady replied. “At least I haven’t seen her staggering around her garden lately—or kicking the cat.”
Despite the laughter from her luncheon companions, Lois latched on to this interesting bit of information and brought it home with her, trying to figure out how she could best use it with Bill.4
A few mornings later, as her husband sat on the edge of their bed with his head in his hands, trying to recover from another drinking bout, Lois came in and sat beside him. She was holding her family Bible. While Bill was not a churchgoer, Lois did attend services at the Swedenborgian church and had strong spiritual convictions at this time in her life. She told Bill she knew how badly he wanted to stop drinking, how hard he had been struggling, how ashamed he was for all the things he was doing. Perhaps, she said, simply promising himself and her that he would do it was not enough. Maybe he needed to promise Almighty God Himself. She gently placed the Bible into her husband’s trembling hands and asked him to write a pledge in it.
Her remarks struck Bill’s cobwebbed brain like an all-too-familiar headline from yesterday’s newspaper. His wife had no idea how many times he had tried to reach out for help to the God she was talking about—to a God he really didn’t believe had any personal concern for him anymore, if He ever had. She had no idea how many times he had tried to pray as she did, and when that didn’t work, how he tried to beg, to plead, to grovel, all to no avail.
At this moment in his life, Bill Wilson had lost whatever connection he once may have had to God. And he knew exactly when it began—that day in the chapel at Burr and Burton Academy when the headmaster announced Bertha Banford had died. He remembered telling God to “go to hell.” When he
met Lois, he tried to grab on to her faith, her deep spiritual convictions. But when you start to lose faith in yourself, as he did each time he came off another binge, why, he thought, should a God, a Supreme Being, have any use for a drunken bum like him?
But this very morning, as he sat on the edge of the bed next to Lois and saw the love and faith in the eyes of his devoted and supportive wife, he was moved. He was touched. He could not refuse her request. It was October 20, 1928, and he wrote in that Bible—in what Lois always said was the most sacred place she knew—these words: “To my beloved wife that has endured so much, let this stand as evidence of my pledge to you that I have finished with drink forever.”
He was drunk before the end of the week.
On Thanksgiving Day, only a month later, he wrote in her Bible again, “My strength is renewed a thousandfold in my love for you.”5
Then he set off the next day on another toot. In January of 1929, he scrawled in the Bible for a third and final time. His handwriting was barely legible. “To tell you once more that I am finished with it!”
Deep in his heart, Bill knew even these sincerest of “pledges” were useless in the face of his intense craving for booze. His pain and despair were evident in the following note he wrote to Lois in the spring of 1929:
“I have failed again this day. That I should continue to even try to do right in the grand manner is perhaps a great foolishness. Righteousness simply does not seem to be in me. Nobody wishes it more than I. Yet no one flouts it more often.” As he had told Lois earlier, “I’m halfway to hell now and going strong.”6
Some years later, after founding Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill would describe such remarks as “a big fat bout of self-pity.”7
Lois, however, could tell from notes like this that her husband desperately wanted to stop, and she continued to seek all kinds of ways to help him. Randolph, the night doorman at their luxury apartment building, was one of those many ways. He was a warm-hearted Rosicrucian from the West Indies. When Bill came staggering home in the wee hours, Randolph would always help him into the elevator and up to their apartment.
Lois grew comfortable with the doorman’s quiet way of caring, and especially his way of keeping it all to himself. They became good friends and she soon found she was not the least embarrassed talking to this kind gentleman about her husband’s problem since Randolph had told her: “I have the same problem with several in my own family. It’s the Devil’s curse.” She would smile, since that’s what her mother always used to say.
At Lois’s request, Randolph kept tabs on Bill, discovering what speakeasies he frequented in the neighborhood and, when he was late coming home, he would actually leave his post, search the bars, find Bill, and drag him home to Lois.
Bill himself was also touched by Randolph’s concern. When he and Lois learned his daughter was taking piano lessons, they gave the doorman a check for $2,500 to buy her a piano. Randolph remained a good friend of the Wilsons for many years.
In the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, one often hears mention of something called the “invisible line.” This refers to the point at which a heavy drinker becomes an alcoholic, when his desire for a drink turns into a craving or an addiction. He or she then has a constant mental obsession for alcohol, which becomes a physical compulsion once the drink is taken. If there is such a line, Bill Wilson crossed it early in 1929.
The young Wall Street wizard began to imbibe as he never had before—straight shots with no chasers. Often the shots were doubles. He needed it now to “clear the vision,” to fuel his fading dreams. With just enough in him, he could imagine himself the chairman of J.P. Morgan, a director of Standard Oil, an advisor to John D. Rockefeller himself. With a few more, he fell into oblivion—into a blackout from which he sometimes emerged in strange and unusual places—in doorways, on park benches, in grassy fields, or at the bar in another speakeasy far removed from the one in which he started out. At other times he’d come to in Randolph’s arms, on his bathroom floor, or in his own bed with Lois placing an ice pack on his throbbing head.
He would often say to himself, so what if I enjoy boozing? I’m healthy, wealthy, good at my job, and I have the support of a devoted wife. This was the story he would tell himself the night before. It was always a different story the morning after.
By now, Lois clearly recognized her husband’s drinking was completely out of control, yet she remained totally committed to helping him in any way she could. In her later years, she once shared some of her most intimate feelings with a very close friend: “I tried so hard to let him know how much I loved him and that I would always be there for him. I know now that was wrong. I did love him, but I was enabling him to drink because there were no consequences with me and he knew it.
“As Bill drank more and more, he was often impotent. We wouldn’t make love for months at a time. Then I’d manage to coax him to take a few weeks off. I’d get him back out into the country, up to Emerald Lake, into the Green Mountains he so loved. We’d camp near a running brook and make love under the stars. These jaunts into the countryside became like a series of honeymoons—with hell in between. Then, after a while, these brief series of honeymoons stopped and there was nothing left but hell.”8
It was while Lois was packing for another of those brief “honeymoons” in Vermont that Ebby Thacher phoned. He had been in Albany, New York, for almost a year trying to save the family business. While Lois never voiced it to Bill, Ebby’s absence from the scene pleased her greatly since it meant one less drinking buddy to contend with.
Bill, on the other hand, missed his boyhood chum, so when he returned Ebby’s call and learned his help was needed, there was no way he could turn him down. The Thacher family’s cast-iron woodstove business was under heated competition from those new-fangled gas stoves. Ebby told Bill the company needed an influx of new capital to survive.
“There’s been one too many boozers trying to run this damn place for too many years,” Lois recalled Bill’s friend saying.9
Bill had to chuckle, wondering if Ebby was including himself among the group. But he kept his thoughts to himself. Like most alcoholics, both Bill and Ebby could recognize a drinking problem in others long before they could see it in themselves.
Lois was disturbed when her husband told her the story and concluded that he had to try to help his good friend. She put her foot down. Lois insisted he come to Emerald Lake and let Ebby find some other way to solve his dilemma. It was the first real argument they had had in a long time when Bill was not in his cups.
In the end, they reached a compromise, which Lois reluctantly accepted—as if she had a choice. They would take the train together but Bill would get off in Albany and she would continue on to East Dorset. He swore he wouldn’t take more than forty-eight hours to wrap things up and then would hop the next train and join her at the lake. It sounded very reasonable except, based on her past experiences, forty-eight hours could mean a week or two once he and his pal started drinking. Bill tried to convince her once again that it was all going to be strictly business. He put on that silly grin, crossed his heart and hoped to die, and she half-bought it as usual.
Bill and Ebby met at a speakeasy in downtown Albany. Where else? They tied one on but managed to sober up long enough to tour the cast-iron stove plant the next afternoon. Even before leaving New York, the experienced analyst knew in his heart this would be a hopeless venture. Once he saw the factory, he was convinced of it. Why would anyone keep making buggy whips, he thought, after Henry Ford created the auto assembly line? Why make woodstoves in the new age of natural gas?
But he put up a good front for his boyhood pal, saying he’d do whatever was possible. Ebby was no fool, however. He could tell from his best friend’s demeanor there would be no influx of new capital for the failing family business.
That night they both got roaring drunk. They were joined in the speakeasy
by several of Ebby’s friends from the Albany airfield, barnstormers who called themselves Flyers Incorporated. When they heard Bill had to hurry to East Dorset, Vermont, in order to stay out of his wife’s doghouse, one of the heavy-drinking pilots—a Ted Burke by name—offered to fly him there the next morning for a small fee. Ebby said he’d like to come along to see Lois and some other old friends in Manchester.
So they partied all night and were flying higher than kites long before they took off from the Albany airfield the next morning.
It just so happened that the town of Manchester had recently completed its brand-new airport and was holding ceremonies to dedicate it the very day Bill, Ebby, and their pilot were due to arrive. Lois, having received a phone call from her husband the night before, was at the airport to pick him up. She was surprised by the crowd on hand, which included the mayor, the town band, and a delegation of excited citizens awaiting the arrival of the first official plane to touch down on the brand spanking new runway. To be sure, it was not the plane flown by a drunken barnstormer carrying two drunken passengers.
When Bill shared his experiences later on in Alcoholics Anonymous, he loved to tell the hilarious story of what happened next, although he always did it with some deference to Lois, who at the time saw no humor in it at all.
“We circled the field. But meantime, all three of us had been pulling at a bottle. Somehow, we lit on a pretty bumpy meadow. The delegation charged forward. It was up to Ebby and me to do something, but we could do absolutely nothing. We somehow slid out of the cockpit, fell on the ground, and there we lay, immobile. Such was the history-making episode of the first airplane to light at Manchester, Vermont.”10
For Lois, it was simply another shameful and embarrassing episode. Several of her friends were part of the delegation, and others there were close to her parents. She ran off sobbing, hoping Bill wouldn’t follow. But he did, and in spite of his apologies to the mayor and other leading citizens, Lois refused to accept his remorseful pleadings. They returned to New York the following week without a brief “honeymoon” and with only the expectancy of more hell to follow. And it did.
The Lois Wilson Story Page 14
