The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  By the time I made the next record, at the end of the Dylan tour, I tried to kick using methadone. I got completely clean for the first time in two years. I lasted about four days, and then I started using heroin again. Shortly after that I got married again. My wife didn’t use, but she was a pretty efficient codependent. She didn’t mean to be, but she was. We never mean to be. I had a house in L.A. because my wife was in the music business, and a house in Nashville. Around that time, she became concerned enough about my substance abuse that she and a friend of mine put together an intervention. I slipped the net on it. I kind of ran away from home. The intervention made me so angry that I left the love of my life. But we ended up getting back together.

  Around this time, I made another record in really bad shape. It’s a pretty good record but kind of dark and scary. The next tour, though, was a nightmare. I played a lot of shows really sick, and I was having to take drugs before I went on stage for the first time. I had never sunk to that before. I waited until after the show. I had a habit, but I started getting sick at ten o’clock at night. We were playing mostly theaters and arenas by that time, so the shows were earlier. By ten o’clock, my body wanted to know where the dope was.

  A lot of other stuff happened along the way. I got arrested for assaulting a police officer, which was one of the times I was absolutely innocent. I was trying to get a drunken crew member of mine into a cab after a New Year’s Eve gig in Dallas, and this cop decided we were doing something we shouldn’t be doing. He came up behind me with his nightstick and choked me unconscious, and realizing he had fucked up, he charged me with assaulting him. It cost me $100,000 and a jury trial, but finally, cooler heads prevailed and I pleaded no contest to resisting arrest, or something, and that was the end of it.

  I was very open about my drug use. My denial was subtle. Opiates allowed people like me to stare into the darkness without blinking.

  In L.A., my cottons were famous. [Drugs are drawn through cotton before injecting.] People wanted my cottons because I did such big, huge shots, and I started speedballing. A friend of mine walked in one morning and he had a little bag of coke. It was like Green Stamps. The dealer was giving away twenty dollars worth of coke if you bought a hundred dollars worth of dope. The dealer knew what he was doing. My friend put about a match head of coke in my spoon after I cooked up my shot. It lit me up like a pinball machine. And then I got into this speedballing thing, which increased the number of injections I did instantly. I also smoked crack a couple of times. I didn’t really like cocaine, but the combination of cocaine and heroin I loved.

  I was trying to preserve my marriage, but once I started to shoot dope, Theresa really freaked out. So I tried to quit a couple of times. I went on methadone again. Then while I was out in L.A., I started smoking crack again. So things really got bad, really fast. Theresa wanted to leave me. She had just lost her job in L.A., so she loaded me up in her car and drove me back to Texas. I had no will of my own at all. I didn’t want to leave L.A., but I couldn’t not leave. I had to go wherever she went. I really wasn’t working anymore. I was trying to write music. I had taken an advance from the record company, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with it.

  I had a film soundtrack that I was supposed to write but never wrote a note. I was becoming unable to work. All the shit that happened to all those other junkies was happening to me. Theresa took me back to Nashville and then she left me, because I was going into south Nashville and buying crack. I hung out there in the daytime ’cause I wasn’t working, and she got sick of it and left.

  During this time, I wrecked a couple of cars, one of which didn’t belong to me. A lot of bad stuff happened. A rumor went around that there was some heroin in Nashville, which there almost never was. This is an area known for cocaine. I wanted to check it out, so I went down to south Nashville and bought some from a guy. I didn’t even go home to try it. I got pulled over and the cops searched my car. They found a syringe so they kept looking, and then they found the dope. The cop wrote me a ticket and didn’t even take me downtown. Simple possession—first offense. He knew who I was and he was kind of a fan so he wrote me a ticket, which rarely happens in Tennessee but they can do it.

  To show you where I was at, I kind of conveniently forgot my sentencing hearing and didn’t show up. I woke up one day and read on the front page of the newspaper that I had been sentenced to eleven months and twenty-nine days. By this time I was married again to a woman I’d been married to before: Theresa. I was married a lot!

  Finally I decided, after a whole series of events, to turn myself in. I drove to a neighborhood where I had been buying crack the last few years, ’cause I wanted to get me one more rock. I saw this kid I had known since he was eight or nine. Now he was fourteen or fifteen. His mother was an addict and lived in that neighborhood. I pulled up and he was standing on the street selling. Or at least I thought he was selling, but what he was doing was robbing. He threw a pistol up in my face, so I rolled his arms up in the power window of my car, and I drug him up about a half a block, and then hit the window button and dropped him. Then I went around the corner and bought another rock from another kid. I went and smoked it in the parking lot of my lawyer’s office. Then we went across the street and turned me in. Great idea! “Let’s smoke this rock, get paranoid, and go to jail!” So I started to serve my sentence.

  The only thing that got me out of there for a while was that they decided to let me get into treatment. They sent me to a place called Buffalo Valley, a bare-bones Twelve Step treatment center. They had no medical facility, so I did my detox in the county hospital, which I paid for myself. Which was a plus because it wasn’t costing the state any of their money for the program.

  I didn’t go to treatment to get clean. I went to get out of an orange suit. And I thought the food was better there, but it wasn’t. But something happened while I was in that treatment center. I remember the guy that drove me to the treatment center from jail. His name was Chuck. That’s what he did at Buffalo Valley. He’d been in jail, so they sent him down to pick people up. We stopped to eat at the Waffle House. I could barely eat. I was still pretty sick.

  I thought, “Okay, I’m through the medical part. I’ll go through this treatment, but I’m going to use as soon as I get out of here.” But around two weeks later, I ran into Chuck and he said, “How you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m not in jail.” And he said, “You know what? You don’t have to be, ever again.” I realized that I never wanted to be in jail again, and for some reason, I took full responsibility for why I was in jail. I wasn’t a victim anymore. I started listening to people. They had all the people in the treatment center together this one time, and I looked around the room. I knew all the counselors by then, and I knew how much clean time they had. I counted 135 years of clean time that I knew of. It occurred to me that maybe I should listen to them.

  After I finished my twenty-eight days of treatment, I had to go back to jail. You know there’s dope in jail, so I was faced with it in my unit three days after I returned. I just pretended that there wasn’t any dope in jail, ’cause there’s not supposed to be. I went to meetings—whatever meetings were available to me. Then I got out. They released me at midnight with the smelly clothes I went to jail in, four-and-a-half months later. My clothes had been marinating in there, and I reached in my jeans and there was forty dollars in my pocket, and I was in downtown Nashville. All I had to do was walk four blocks. Instead I made a phone call and didn’t even leave the lobby of the Criminal Justice Center. And now I go to meetings every day when I’m in Nashville, and to meetings on the road.

  They breathe truth that breathe their

  words in pain.

  —William Shakespeare, King Richard II

  Malcolm McDowell

  (actor)

  * * *

  SPARKS FLY OFF OF Malcolm McDowell when he performs—a surreal glittery sense of danger and complexity beneath his British good manners. Directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Robert Alt
man, have cast him in some of their most challenging roles. Like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, and Albert Finney in Tom Jones, McDowell projects daring and unpredictability.

  So many landmark films in the sixties and seventies were about breaking free of conventions and finding life’s meaning. The stars were often iconic. Seeing them, we wondered where our intoxication with youth would lead us. Partly because we only saw a film once, or, if we admired it a great deal, twice, our suspension of disbelief was greater than that of today’s viewers.

  Malcolm is a natively gifted actor whose own problems with drugs came some years after he made it in the movies. In his first two great roles, A Clockwork Orange and O Lucky Man!, he came across as one scary mother. Searing as a sociopathic kid of the working class, he probably weighed on us the hardest of all. His angry and psychotic gang go to a futuristic “milk bar” for a chemical cocktail before heading out to cruel, violent rape and rampage.

  Jane and I asked a friend of ours for an opinion of Malcolm’s work in A Clockwork Orange. She told us that she was “bowled over” by it and has not yet recovered. “The graphic, gratuitous, joyful violence, so well depicted in the film, made a serious and lasting impression on me. Once I told my husband that a piazza, which I crossed in the late evening when leaving my work, was strikingly empty. He told me I shouldn’t be there alone in the dark. I said that was ridiculous. He said, ‘You don’t understand. They’ll cut you up for the fun of it. Just think of Clockwork Orange.’ From that time forth, I never again walked to my car alone at night in New Haven.”

  I suppose I was a successful actor with too much per diem. That’s basically what my Hollywood experience was like. I was invited out to do the film Look Back in Anger after the big success I had with the play in New York in 1980. I had been doing a bit of cocaine. Not when I was working on the play—that was too difficult. You know, a little recreationally here and there, and when I stopped doing the play and moved to Hollywood to do the film, it started to spiral out of control.

  I was brought up in a pub, a bar, and I hated the smell of booze and I hated what it did to people. My father was an alcoholic, so I never really drank much. I kept away from it, but I didn’t realize that cocaine was really the same thing. Alcohol eventually started getting a little out of control, but in the form of “fine wine.” That was my excuse. The truth is, if you buy an expensive bottle of wine at dinner and drink every single bit of it—I would never leave a drop—that should tell you that there is a problem, shouldn’t it? Even if I opened one at lunch, I would drink it all and then go sleep it off. But I didn’t see this as a problem. I would say that we do this every day in Europe—it’s how we are. You Americans are too uptight about drinking wine; it’s like water in Italy and France. That was my excuse. So I didn’t consider wine a problem, but cocaine was a problem, and that got out of hand quite fast. It had a very bad effect on my marriage. The lies and deceit and everything that goes with addiction.

  I went from snorting it occasionally to now smoking it, doing freebase. Doing as much as I could. Finish a batch at four in the morning. Driving around the San Fernando Valley looking for more of it. Driving while completely stoned, of course. How I was never in an accident, I just don’t know. I had a Porsche, and one night I was so paranoid that I actually stopped on the freeway, pulled the car over to the side, because I was convinced there was somebody in the back. Now, you know, the back of a Porsche is an engine, but I had convinced myself that they had moved the engine to the front. I was in such a grip of paranoia. I was obviously totally fucked up!

  It was when my second child, my son, was born that I knew I had to get sober. My wife, Mary, put it to me that if I didn’t clean up, I’d never see my son. This brought it home to me. But I know that when you are in the throes of addiction, you’ll do or say anything to keep it going. Anyway, that was kind of it for me. That was 1981. A friend of mine drove me down to the desert, and I checked into a large rehab.

  As a rule, when I was working, I didn’t use. Only once I was caught at doing that. It was on the film Cat People. I was told, “Great, you are finished for the day.” At that I rushed to my trailer, having already called the dealer and left him a drive-on pass to come on onto the lot, and as I walked in he handed me the pipe. I threw the costume off. I felt pleased with myself: I’d done good work, was very happy, time for a little celebration. I took a big hit, was sittin’ there in a daze, and a bang sounded on the door, and of course the director needed me to do the take again.

  I had to get dressed again. It was unbelievable! I went down to the set and couldn’t do the short scene for love or money. Could not! And I had to take the director aside and say, “I do apologize. I thought we’d finished and I took a hit of coke, and now I’m stoned.” And so he talked to the cameraman and probably went, “Okay, we’ll use what he did before.” But it was embarrassing. It was pathetic. I did have a handle on that. If I was working, the getting high didn’t mix. I managed to keep the drugs separate from the work. But it’s different for an actor than a musician or someone else, say, because often I just wouldn’t do the film. Did the drugs affect the work? Yes! It affected the work in that I had to say no, I didn’t want to do a film. My agent supposed it was for art reasons, whereas I just wanted to stay high. … I’d be on a run. The run would last a few days. If anything came up during that time, I wouldn’t even answer the phone. They could never even get ahold of me.

  The paranoia that went with it was a very big part for me. I sort of enjoyed it, weirdly enough—had a very masochistic view of it. In reality it’s not enjoyable, but during my addiction when I stayed up nights, I used to get into hallucination. I loved that. That was really fabulous! Just embraced it. Where I used to live up in the Hollywood Hills, it was like the houses were floating like moons. Often I was alone. Once, though, I had a friend of mine there and I tormented him, saying, “There’s somebody up that tree, I know it! Ghosts in that tree!” Scared the poor guy. And all that—crazy!

  I was a naughty boy. Such a loser with my wife. I didn’t care. In fact, I’m surprised Mary put up with me as long as she did. For a year or two, and into my recovery. But once the love had gone, it had gone; it was too late. Often you’ll find with addicted people: They hold their marriages together, yet when sober, they split up. It’s the strain that tells. Also, when you’re in this situation of one addicted person in a couple, there is this other side of it. From the other point of view, somebody may have to play the enabler, or whatever position they take. Somehow that’s also a comforting part of the dynamic of the relationship. So when that dynamic is removed ’cause that other person is on the road to recovery, and the dynamic changes completely—it didn’t work for us. We tried and went on for another three years after I got clean.

  The using ended because I went down to the Betty Ford Center. The friends who took me down there put me in a hotel, and I had one last binge before I had to check in the next morning at nine o’clock. I smoked everything that I had, and at the end of it, I threw the pipe in this ornamental lake. It was like the ceremonial sinking of a ship. Down it went, and in my mind, it was the end of that period of my life. Thank God. Thank God!

  I didn’t thank God at the time, however. I felt I’d lost a great friend or mistress, that I’d lost the one thing that I could totally trust—all that bullshit! It wasn’t until I started to work on myself at Betty Ford, which is a wonderful place as is anyplace that gets you sober. Treatment for cocaine addiction was quite new in those days. I don’t think they’d had any freebasers in there, or very few. Had mostly alcoholics and a few heroin addicts. It was a twenty-eight-day program, and they keep you longer if they don’t think you’re gonna make it. That was twenty-two years ago. I had an incredible experience.

  When I went there, I was put with a cocaine dealer. We bunked together. The first few weeks, we were planning a big scam. He was a huge dealer who had a couple of kilos stashed in a place by a lake where he used to
go and party. We planned—O Lord!—we were going to have the greatest boat ride on this lake. (He was in treatment because a court required it.) I remember thinking, “Two kilos, that’s more than I ever imagined” as he told me his exploits, and how his father drove the cocaine across state lines. After two weeks of our plotting to do this, I came back from a group session, just looked at him and said, “You know, Gary, I’m going to give sobriety a try. Your plan sounds great, beautiful, but I’m going to give this a try.” He goes, “Are you serious? You’re crazy!” I went, “You know what? I’m just going to hang in here with these people and give it a try.”

  Then the big issue was the wine. I told them, “I’ve an excellent wine cellar in my house.” (Ten thousand dollars worth of wine, which is like a hundred grand’s worth today.) And there was a girl in our group of five, who was a checkout clerk in a supermarket, who looked at me. When I said, “What am I supposed to do with this wine collection?” there was a little hrummph and she looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just stick it up your ass?” I went, “I get it. Okay, right. What the fuck am I wincing on about? You’re so right. I’ll just get rid of it.”

  After all that, I remained unconvinced about the drinking though. I thought it was a load of bollocks. I thought I could drink and keep it under control once I had stopped using the coke. But two days before I was to leave, it was arranged for me to meet with a chaplain. I wasn’t particularly religious, but I went to have my hour’s meeting with him. He was very easy for me to talk to. I was relating this problem to him: “I don’t get it. Why should I not have a glass of wine? It’s part of my culture.” Blah blah blah—the excuses came. He looked at me and he goes, “Malcolm, why take the chance? Do you want to do all this work and then have a glass of wine? For what? It may, just may, lead you back to cocaine. Why take the chance? It’s just more sensible not to do it.” And a penny dropped for some reason. I guessed he was right. I thought, “Why? Is it really worth the risk? It’s no big deal.” So I never did it again.