I work with young women who have been brutally abused. Some come from cults whose families would threaten to kill them if they didn’t do what they were told. “Don’t talk. Don’t talk.” The young women say, “I can’t talk about that.” They are used to a kind of abuse where they don’t see and verbalize it. I was taught that nothing I did counted. You get sober—you’ve got to because this mythology you received isn’t working anymore. You burst out and show your candle, not keep it under a barrel, really show it. And you know the only way you can do that is to stop anesthetizing any of that stuff and look at it, as terrifying as it may be. How do you walk away from this kind of family mythology, when that’s what you know? Instead, you begin to abuse yourself and do shameful things because you can’t win. It’s taken me years to uncover these scars.
It’s funny, I hear so many people say they loved drinking, they just loved it. I never loved drinking. I always knew that I was betraying some promise that I wouldn’t drink, which is what ultimately got me into recovery. I was never a falling-down drunk, although when I drank by myself after my dad’s death, I was in a vortex towards hell that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was never fun for me. It was a necessity on some level, but unconsciously I knew that I was somehow obeying a family myth again. That was the way to anesthetize pain. I watched it happen in my family ever since I was born, so I chose to swim in that sea.
Not happily though, never happily. I was never one of those “rah, rah, yea, yea, let’s go out and get drunk” people because I had too much shame about it. I was more of a closet drinker. I never went to bars; it was not my style. To be alone was the only way for me.
I was involved in a hideously brutal marriage, which to this day I’ve never totally understood. It was like going from the frying pan into the fire, in the sense that I had lived in an extremely permissive household, and what this man promised me was that I would gain morality. My boyfriend in high school didn’t marry me, and this man said he would. He picked me up, and presto, in three weeks we were married. I was nineteen years old. It was a marriage full of domestic violence and excruciating brutality. I was drinking as much as I could to get away from the pain.
I was working all during this time. I came out to Hollywood and did Sam Peckinpah’s first film, Guns in the Afternoon, in 1962. That was the beginning of a realization that I had to get a divorce. I was so terrified of my first husband because he was such a frightening man. Finally my parents came out to be with me, and we three lived together in a little apartment in Brentwood.
It was a house full of guns. We had guns everyplace in the house, we always did. My dad was a hunter. He was a farm boy from Missouri. My mother’s father was a very famous behavioral psychologist, a man named John B. Watson, who believed that children should not be touched or held. They should be kissed lightly on the forehead before saying good night, if anything. My grandfather thought boys were basically raised to be homosexuals and girls were basically raised, because of pajama parties and things, to be lesbians. There was an extraordinary kind of sexualizing in my family. My mother, how can I say this, she was deeply in love with her father. She doted on him. It was very much like the father of the professor’s wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Her father represented everything that my father wasn’t, and his presence was in the eaves of our family house. My grandfather was a huge cloud to whom my father was compared constantly. I was too when I wanted to nurse my children, which was revolting to my mother. And a lot of that was because my grandfather kept saying, “It’s going to destroy your breasts, Polly. I won’t let it happen.” He lived right around the corner from us too, so we were constantly visiting him. He was a pretty terrific grandfather until he French-kissed me one night when I was twelve. Needless to say, it was a very confusing family.
So my dad brought whatever guns he could in the car. He must have shipped some out to Los Angeles, but he was going deeper and deeper into his depression, until he became catatonic and I would get down on my knees and beg him to seek help.
I was working with Mary Astor at the time, who was in recovery, and she said, “Try to get him drunk and get him into a rehab.” Well, we all got drunk and tried to get my father into rehab, and that didn’t work. The very next day, Mom and I were having breakfast when we heard the gunshot. We went to his room and Dad had shot himself. The next six or seven hours were just life-changing. Absolutely life-changing. I didn’t know how life-changing until months later. The last I saw of him was in a brown paper bag, in bloody pajamas. I remember going through one of his pockets, and he had left us a $5,000 life-insurance policy.
I think the real horror to me was that in the ashes of my father, I was eventually brought back to life. Did I need that kind of drama? Did it take that kind of explosion to burst through to me? I’m not proud of it. I didn’t know I needed that. I’d been kind of suicidal until then, and when I saw my dad wheeled out, I thought, “Oh my God, this really works!”
I don’t mean I got well, because I lived in a death house. My drinking got much worse. My mother was perpetually committing suicide; my father finally completed it. When she attempted it again, I saved her life. Same hospital, same L.A. emergency, and it went on and on. There was a part of me stuck in that morass. I was living by myself then, which made the drinking worse. I had nobody to drink with or at. I found myself living in my little apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, and I had no bounds.
I went back to school, studying psychology and philosophy, and having attention deficit disorder, I was terrified of the tests. I would drink a case of beer on the weekend by myself, and eat. An eater and a drinker. Then I was bulimic, so I could eat and drink some more. I gained thirty pounds and was like my dad: a mushy, falling asleep drunk. My mother had the violent rages.
I’d fall on the floor dancing, and be carried home, and wake up in a pool of the evening’s remains. I would wake up with this extraordinary headache. My hangovers were hideous, which helped push me to stop. As people say, it’s a progressive disease. For me, that means I would drink less and wake up with worse hangovers. My body became so allergic to it. The last, the second time I stopped, all it took was four beers after a show—Foster’s, so that’s more than four—and I’d wake and could hardly move.
Then I got into therapy and was able to make the emotional break from my mother, which was extraordinarily difficult because there was total enmeshment. Now they call it codependency. It was a very difficult relationship to pull myself away from. I finally said, “This is ridiculous. What’s the point?” Even though the alcohol had kind of freed me and released me. That’s what happens to women alcoholics. We lose our sense of self, and we end up places where we may be in danger of rape and so on, and have absolutely no idea how we got there.
I went into recovery in 1966, and went into it full force. I knew that my agent’s wife was in a recovery program, and I always knew that there were other people, maybe, not drinking. I couldn’t do it alone. Just couldn’t. You know, I’d start at eight o’clock in the morning with the idea “Today I’m not going to drink. Today I’m not going to drink. Tonight I’m not going to drink. Oh, but there’s that party tonight. Yeah, but that’s okay, I’ll very easily say, ‘I’m not drinking today. I’m on the wagon.’” What is “on the wagon” anyway? “Do not fall off the wagon.” That’s what we used to hear from our parents. Or “I’m on the wagon.” This conversation would go on every ten or fifteen minutes in my head. You know, “I’m a pretty smart person. I can think of other things,” but I couldn’t when I was in the middle of the obsession with drinking. Once it hit me, there was just no way that I could not do it.
I would go up and knock on the door. The hostess would open the door and say, “Hi, Mariette! Gee you look great! What would you like to drink?” And I’d say with no hesitation, “I’d like a very cold, very dry martini.” As if none of those thoughts of stopping had happened!
Anyway, so I knew that Beverly, my agent’s wife, was sober, and she took me to a meeting
, and it was awful. It was wall-to-wall smiles. Yet I saw something behind their eyes. They had what I wanted, and I knew I was willing to go to any lengths to get it. … I thought …
About six years later, I had not been able to work out any of the stuff, any of the trauma with my father. My shame and rage were intact. I still felt the young startlet and an outsider. Sobriety wasn’t working for me. I had piled the recovery on top of my problems. I was the good daughter again in the support group, giving myself away and not filling myself up with what I needed. It’s interesting because I work with survivors now. This has been the great gift of his death. I’m deeply involved with the survivor movement. I co-founded an organization called the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in the eighties, and it’s been an amazing journey.
If I could have written my life, as I sat in the Fine Arts Theater in Westport, Connecticut, all I wanted to be was Ingrid Bergman or Norma Shearer. I’m sure they didn’t want to be themselves either! My vision of what my life should have become is so limited compared to what it has become, and everything that it has become has been a result of tragedy. Of having tragedy transmute itself into a gift.
When the Vietnam veterans came back, many of them had post-traumatic stress disorder, as my father had it from his ships being sunk in World War II. The servicemen had doubts about our presence there. They saw atrocities you wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s such an odd thing to describe to those who haven’t experienced that kind of violence—what it’s like to see a body blown apart and then to clean it up afterwards, which is what I did at the age of twenty-three. It’s an experience that is almost indescribable. To come back from the UCLA Medical Center with a paper bag in my hand, and my mother and I then saw what was on the walls and on the rug, and we had to clean up my father’s brains. That’s what happened.
What do you do with those pictures? What do you do with that moment in your life? What do you make of it? Where do you take it? In those days, I didn’t even know if there were any survivor groups. There was only one in Los Angeles: the Los Angeles Family Group I started in 1963, which is when my dad died. I learned how hard it is to survive a suicide of someone close. Harder than any other bereavement, without making it sound like “we’re so different and aren’t we great?” It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the stigma and the shame and the blame—society’s view of it. Religion’s vision of it. For hundreds and hundreds of years, we’re left with the idea of sin. Sin washes over you even if you’re not religious, so not only can you not grieve, you are constantly defending yourself.
That was completely true with the Vietnam veterans. They fought that war they wanted not to fight. Saw those atrocities, came home, tried to talk about it, and nobody wanted to hear them. Many ended up in mental institutions and on the streets. So what post-traumatic stress work did was begin to rehabilitate them by changing the workings of the brain. The actual trauma began to be exposed and reversed. I finally surrendered to my need to do that in 1988, because I had started drinking again.
My family was wonderful. I had my two beautiful children, and I don’t know why I started again. Everybody will say, “It’s ’cause you wanted to.” People are very tough on that. Probably somewhere in my brain, I saw myself as a normal drinker, but I don’t know any normal drinker that goes out to prove they can drink like a normal drinker. Clearly the disease had taken over on some level, because I’ll tell you that I was in an emotional blackout. It’s inexplicable. I got caught in that place where it’s said “Suddenly you have no defense.” I was so full of shame that I might as well be killed for a sheep as for a lamb, and I couldn’t find my way into the rooms of recovery. Just couldn’t. I had married a man who didn’t think I had a problem. He was French and loved champagne and wine, and what the hell difference did it make? And I was functioning, totally functioning. When I did the CBS Morning Program, I had stopped drinking but started drinking near-beer. I could drink three or four of those, and look so forward to that at the end of the day. That interlude I could look forward to.
But when I was in Jamaica doing a movie in 1988, I realized that my drinking could escalate back to where it was. I called it Fuck Me in Paradise because I always rename my movies. I did another about Jackie Cochran that was so hideous, about Charlie’s Angels gone World War II, which I called Chopper Pussies. Anyway, the real name of this one was Passion and Paradise, and it was a Harry Oakes story with a good cast. But I started drinking with the crew and cast and by myself. I lived on Red Stripe, and I could barely make it back to the house before I’d pass out or black out. By now my marriage wasn’t working. I had the feeling I was going to be alone again, and then I knew I would be in trouble. So I started in recovery in Jamaica, which was extraordinarily anonymous. That was just what I needed.
When I came back from Jamaica, I began to see a wonderful therapist. He was the first person ever to take me into that room with my dad, and scream the scream and sob the sobs that needed to be sobbed, fully and deeply and primally. Without the journey back, I was going to stay stuck there. It was around this time that a group of people came to me and asked if I would be part of this suicide-prevention organization, and I said “Wow!” Up until this point, I had been sworn to secrecy about my dad’s death. My mother had absolutely forbidden me to talk, and I was a good daughter, you know, I would have died with my secret. I had finally met other survivors, people who had lost loved ones but were in the movement, and they begged me because of my visibility at that point.
I was very visible because of the Polaroid commercials and some marvelous movies-of-the-week I’d been doing on television. Movies like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Silence of the Heart. I was the movie-of-the-week queen. When people urged me please, please to come out about it, I said, “Over my dead body!” I really believed that’s what would have happened had I spoken out. As anyone in such a situation knows, the exact opposite happens. As I shared my story, I began to heal.
It was very difficult for my mother, however. She found my act indulgent, shameful, and reprehensible—totally unnecessary. These were her words. I couldn’t communicate with her much until she lay dying, but by then, our relationship had healed. She ultimately died in my arms in 1990, just after my book, Breaking the Silence, came out.
Sobriety has been sixteen years of an extraordinary life. I’ve lived through my mother’s death. I’ve lived through a terrible, terrible divorce where I was walking a battlefield, picking up body parts, and trying to put them on my daughter, my son, and myself—and not having much anatomy left.
But thank God for people in recovery! I recall a moment when I was in New York, and I was sobbing. I had lost control. I didn’t realize how powerful a force this family that I’d created was. How much it meant to me. My daughter is gorgeous. My son is equally gorgeous. And they are wonderful souls and terrific human beings. And they talk! They’ve talked since they were babies! And I nursed them until they were three and four years old. I joke that it wasn’t that I tried to overcompensate for my grandfather’s theories, but I think Shawn was sixteen and got his driver’s license when I said, “Okay, kid, I think it’s time for you to be weaned!” For me and my children, it’s been a long, nurturing relationship on both sides. The moments I would rock in that rocking chair and nurse those kids—oh my God! That’s when I learned about meditation.
So when the family cracked, I begged my husband, “I don’t care what you and I have done. Can we work on this relationship? These kids are my life. This unit is what we’ve created.” He said, “I don’t want to do any more work.” And if I’d been really bitchy, I would have said, “I don’t remember your ever doing any.” But I didn’t! I had supported this man for eighteen years, and he was French and he loved his wine and champagne. Call it an ideal relationship. He didn’t believe I was an alcoholic, and when I stopped drinking, things completely changed. He was threatened. He scoffed because he believed in moderation, and I said, “Can’t do it. Don’t know how.”
> I remember speaking to a group once and crying so hard I kept saying, “I’m trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel, and not have it be the train.” And this wonderful woman, I don’t know who she was, one of those angels that often appear, said, “You know, we always look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Look around you. Every single person in this room holds a candle.” That thought has stayed with me. The wisdom of angels in recovery, these messengers. Sobriety has been a powerful, very eclectic journey for me.
We recognize the whole emotional life of an alcoholic or someone who depends on alcohol, but there is an absolute physical, genetic allergy too. Once I started drinking, once the weakening and opening to it began, the preoccupation with it would take over—what we call the obsession or compulsion. And we can use anything to lose ourselves in. With the familial arms around me, I’d kind of pushed through my dependency the first time I got sober. Then when I found myself completely alone, that was when I began realizing my huge, profound biochemical disorder. I see this constantly: underneath how many people were depressed since they were kids, though they didn’t look like it, and drink to balance their extremes, whether shopping until you go crazy or becoming hypersexual, and then dropping into suicidal depression. I remember when I was doing a comedy, Sylvia, at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1994, standing … sober … on the top of the Zeckendorf Towers. And I looked down and said, “Wow, what an interesting drop.” And then I saw my kids’ faces in front of me and thought, “They can’t pick up the pieces as I did.”
So there was sanity but a realization that I needed others’ help. As we say, often when we go into those depths is when we hit the walls of old defenses that don’t work anymore, old ways of dealing with our problems. I think that’s the power of recovery when you hit those invisible walls and suddenly say, “What is that?” And you’re able to talk to people or write it out, or perhaps go to a doctor and say, “What is this?” And you get an answer, because we are born now. We can get the answers now. I found that most of my stuff was answered with the support of suicide survivors. I like the idea we survivors are literally soldered together by our common experience.
The Harder They Fall Page 17
