by Lorna Luft
I didn’t become a drug addict, though—not right away. I wasn’t interested in smoking another joint. The marijuana had barely affected me, and I’ve never been attracted to the sedative effect pot can offer. I like a buzz, a good high, and for that you need a stimulant. When the seventies came along, they brought the “ultimate high,” a little pile of white powder called cocaine. It was the party drug of the decade: expensive, chic, and plentiful. Everywhere you went, the A-crowd was doing cocaine. Not one to be left out of a good party, I happily joined in. After all, everyone else was doing it. What harm could it do?
I did my first line of cocaine when I was about nineteen. I was living in New York then, and I spent every spare minute in the local clubs. The club scene was full of cocaine by 1970, and one night at a restaurant called the Brasserie, a friend of mine named King Curtis offered me a line of coke. King was a brilliant musician, a saxophone player, and we’d gone to the club with friends after a late night to have “breakfast.” King offered me some coke, and I really didn’t know what it was. Somebody at the table told me how to lay out the powder, roll up a dollar bill, and snort it. I thought, “Oh, okay. Why not? I’ll try some.” I gave it about as much thought as I would have if someone had said, “Try the curly fries.” I took it into the bathroom, laid it out on the sink the way they’d told me, rolled up the dollar bill, and snorted it. I got almost as much on me as in me that first time, so it didn’t really affect me much. It made me more dizzy than high. I thought, “Hmmm, this is weird,” and that was about it—kind of interesting, but not exactly a life-changing experience.
I’d do a line with friends every now and then after that, but not often in the beginning. Not long afterward I took my sister into the bathroom at the same restaurant and introduced her to this interesting new experience. Liza likes to remind me that it was her baby sister who first introduced her to coke, not the other way around. She’s right. Needless to say, I was clueless about the implications of what I was doing.
It wasn’t until I moved to California in 1975 to live with Liza and Jack Haley, Jr., that I really got involved with cocaine, though. It started shortly after I arrived, at Sammy Davis’s house. Sammy was an old family friend; he was also one of the most extraordinary performers I’ve ever known. Next to my mother, few people could match Sammy’s talent as an actor, a singer, and a dancer. He had succeeded in show business against all the odds, overcoming racism and a physical handicap to do it. I used to tell him that since he was black, Jewish, and had only one eye, he should have succumbed to the three-strikes-and-you’re-out baseball rule years before. He would laugh when I said it. Sammy’s talent and humanity were so enormous that they transcended every obstacle he encountered. He was an extraordinary man.
Sammy had coke parties at his house every night in those days; it almost seemed as if cocaine were coming out of the air conditioners. That sounds shocking now, but everybody in Hollywood was using in the seventies, and no one thought there was anything wrong with it. Sammy would never have harmed me intentionally. He was just doing what all his friends were doing. I started going to Sammy’s house every night to party, and when Liza and Jack were in town, they’d go, too. There would always be a crowd there—Sammy, his wife, Altovise, and a whole host of managers, agents, and assorted Hollywood types. Most of us would be up all night doing cocaine and partying our brains out. I loved it.
By then I’d learned how to snort coke “properly,” and I loved the rush that came along with it. As they say: once you experience that pure, powerful rush, you spend the rest of your life trying to duplicate it. Only you never really do after the first time. But you keep trying, and after a while, I was hooked on the stuff. I couldn’t get enough of it. Sammy’s house became my home away from home. When he was working out of town, Sammy would often fly his friends down to wherever he was playing so we could party there. A sort of moveable feast. Soon my life was nothing but one long A-list drug party. Career? What career? I was having too much fun to worry about a little thing like that.
Not that I didn’t try to maintain the illusion of a career. Every now and then I’d do a club gig or audition for a part, but it’s hard to get much done when you can’t make it out of bed until two in the afternoon. I had no real incentive to work that year: living with Liza and Jack, I had no rent to pay, and even the cocaine was free at Sammy’s. At twenty-three my life was one long party. I worked once in a while, chiefly to keep my dad off my back and to convince myself I wasn’t totally wasting my time. Dad was in New York with Patti and Joe during that time, and I wasn’t about to tell him I spent all my time snorting cocaine and partying. As far as he was concerned, I was in California auditioning for parts in movies and television. I didn’t want to hear what he might say if he knew otherwise. I was an adult; why should I have to put up with my dad’s complaints about my life?
Besides, Sid had criticized me too much already as my manager. He’d become my manager in 1973 or 1974. Before that I had been with Liza’s manager, Marty Bregman. When Liza fired him, I left too, and dad took over my career. Dad tried to make me into my mother. He wanted me to sing her songs, and even look like her. But it was too painful, and I didn’t want to look as if I were cashing in on her death. So Sid put together a nightclub act for me and brought in a wonderful woman named Miriam Nelson (who had married Gene Nelson, the great dancer) to help me with the show. Sammy Cahn wrote some of the material for us.
We did a big vaudeville piece as part of the act. I would come out as a series of different people in a Broadway-review format. I would go behind a screen, change costume, and come out as a new character. For one of the vignettes, I danced with a dummy. The dummy was attired in a tuxedo and had a skirt fastened to its waist. The skirt was designed so that I could walk into it, zip it up, put my arms around the dummy, and dance. The dummy and I looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
The Fred and Ginger piece gave Miriam an idea, and one day she called a special-effects guy she knew in Burbank, California. Juggling was a tradition in vaudeville. Miriam wanted to know if he could come up with some sort of high-tech prop with dummies that could be used for a juggling act. The dummies would be attached, somehow, to a costume I would wear. She was talking to the guy on a telephone in a hallway when I heard her howling with laughter. I walked into the hallway and asked her, “What’s going on?” She said, “I’ve got a guy on the phone who says he can make a belt that we can put on you, and as you come out onstage, you can pull down on some tabs and four dummies will inflate out of the belt. There’s only one problem. It’ll knock you about twelve feet back into the orchestra!” We were crying with laughter.
One night after we finished the act, the stage manager told me that I shouldn’t leave the Fred Astaire dummy backstage. The manager was afraid it might get stolen, so we had to take it with us upstairs to the hotel. Miriam and I took “Fred” up the elevator, in his tuxedo, to Miriam’s room. Miriam and I were hungry, and she said to me, “You want to get room service?” I said, “Sure.” So we decided to put “Fred” in the bed. When the room service waiter came into the room and saw two women with what looked like a blow-up doll under the covers, God knows what he thought!
I had a great time doing the show and it was a big success, but I was still chafing under my dad’s management. He told me what to wear, what to sing, what color to dye my hair. I once told him at a rehearsal that if it were up to him, I’d be sitting on the edge of the stage in a black wig, singing “Over the Rainbow.” He told me, “It couldn’t hurt.” In defiance I dyed my hair platinum and headed for the next party.
I did get a tiny wake-up call during that period—ironically, when I was working with Sammy Davis, Jr. Sammy was playing Reno a few days before my birthday that year, and he gave me the opportunity to open for him. Instead of thinking, “What a great career opportunity,” I thought, “Oh, I’ll just throw a few of my old numbers together,” and headed north with Sammy. Unlike many at the time, Sammy was too much of a professional
to do coke when he was performing; he was always clean during his engagements. I, however, thought, “Cool! I don’t even have to stop partying.” I did drugs and played around for days before my performance and went onstage less than prepared. My performance showed it. One night as I was singing, a woman from the audience yelled out, “Hey! We came to hear Sammy Davis, Jr., not you!” There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to do; I’d never been heckled before, and it really hit me hard. Hotel security took the heckler out (the woman was too drunk to stand) and I decided not to say anything to the audience, just to do my next number.
When I finished, Sammy came onstage and said to the audience with his usual kindness, “You know, I want to thank my opening act for being so terrific.” That was all. Everyone applauded. I felt better knowing the audience was on my side. Afterward Sammy just came backstage and said, “That asshole,” referring to the woman who’d heckled me. Sammy never said a word of blame to me. He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, and a dear friend to me. He loved my family, and he loved me. I still miss him.
In spite of Sammy’s support, the whole incident made me think about what I was doing. I knew I hadn’t been giving my best performance. It crossed my mind that I might be partying too much, that maybe I should think about what I was doing. Unfortunately, the thought didn’t stick. I was already in way over my head.
It was only a week later when Burt Reynolds dumped me and that whole dismal saga began. Shortly afterward I flew to Italy to be with Liza, but the change of scene did nothing to change my habit. There was at least as much cocaine in Italy as there was in California, and besides, it was the same old crowd, just relocated. Everywhere I went, someone was doing coke. A guy in Rome named Gil Cagney was organizing parties for the entertainment elite. Cagney didn’t provide the cocaine, but I had no trouble finding a source. Liza’s film was constantly being shut down because of a strike, so we had plenty of time on our hands. The Italians strike almost as often as they eat pasta, and Rome was forever shutting down because of some labor dispute. My life, however, was a nonstop party: shopping all afternoon, going to parties Gil had organized at Jackie-O’s every night, partying our brains out with coke till dawn, sleeping in until two P.M. the next day, nursing a hangover, and then starting all over again. For my sister and me, life had become a pleasant, endless haze.
It seemed as if everyone we knew was perennially high. Jackie-O’s was always crowded with celebrities who were either drunk or high or both. Marcello Mastroianni was one of the drunkest, or at least one of the most obnoxious. The drunker he got, the ruder he got. One night he started picking on my sister, saying all sorts of nasty things to her, until she lost her temper. Marcello had recently had an affair with Faye Dunaway and been dumped, so Liza finally got up out of her chair and said as loudly as she could, “I have only two words to say to you: Faye Dunaway!” And she stalked out, with everyone in the room laughing at Marcello’s expense. When we got back to the hotel, we rolled around on the bed screaming with laughter because it was so funny. It had been worth it all just to see Marcello’s face when Liza yelled at him.
By then Liza was drinking, too. Jack was worse than Liza; even in my hazy frame of mind, I recognized that Jack seemed to have a serious problem with alcohol. That had been apparent from the day I’d moved in with him and Liza in California, even though Jack never acted drunk. Sometimes in the morning he would pour himself a big mug of vodka and mix in a little Coca-Cola. He’d leave for the office with that big mug of vodka in his hand. I wondered whether the drinking continued during the day; I know it usually started again when he got home. In Rome it got worse. By that time Jack had left Twentieth Century-Fox, though I didn’t know it yet. I also failed to realize that Liza and Jack’s marriage was in serious trouble. Liza never talked about it, but how could a marriage survive those kinds of pressures? Not long after, when Liza had left the show Chicago, the marriage was starting to unravel.
As for me, I hadn’t started drinking yet—that would come later. In those days I was “just” doing coke. In fact I was having so much fun “just doing it” that when I got a call from Los Angeles to fly back and do The Tonight Show, I considered it more of an inconvenience than an opportunity. I did the show, but a part of me resented having to leave the party to do it. Shortly afterward I got a chance to open for Eddie Fisher at the London Palladium, and I did have the common sense to sober up before I went onstage this time. The show was still a disaster, because Eddie Fisher was in considerably worse shape than I was by then. Sobering up for the Palladium barely made a dent in my habit, though, much less my career. Not that I cared, of course.
Meanwhile Jake had entered my life and suggested I move in with him. Since moving in with Jake meant not going home to my family, it had a lot of appeal for me. Liza was gone by then, and I had run out of excuses to stay in Europe. My father still had no idea I was using drugs, but it was clear to him that I was out of control. Every time we talked he’d end up yelling at me: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? What are you doing with your career? With your life?” He worried constantly that I was ruining my life, and jerk that I was at that age, I resented his interference. I decided to deal with the problem by avoiding my family altogether. Instead, I married Jake. Yes indeed, another brilliant decision. If you’re a drug user anxious to get away from home, the obvious solution is to marry an alcoholic.
In a sense, Jake and I were the perfect couple in those days. My cocaine never interfered with his drinking, and his drinking never came between me and my coke. I was soon aware that Jake had a drinking problem—when he vomited on me after two bottles of champagne plus vodka and orange juice during our first night in London, I got a hint—and every now and then I’d say to him, “Jake, I think you have a drinking problem.” Of course, I was usually high when I said it. In retrospect, the whole situation was like a moment from the theater of the absurd, but at the time, I was oblivious to the irony.
By the time Jake and I got married, I’d been using cocaine regularly for over a year, starting at Sammy’s house and continuing at the party scene in Europe. It wasn’t until I began living in London, though, that things got really out of control. Until then I’d used coke simply because it was there, and because it was fun, but it wasn’t until 1976 that cocaine became an obsession for me. It was no longer just a way to have fun at a party; it became my life. I had to have it. I didn’t realize it yet, but I had become an addict.
By then I rarely woke up before four in the afternoon, and the first thing on my mind when I did was getting my hands on some coke. I would feel really terrible when I first got up, but then I’d take a shower and eat something, and as soon as I did, I’d take my first hit of coke. Then it was party time—get together with your friends at somebody’s house and get high. Find a place to go for dinner, go back to the party, and do coke all night. At eight or nine the next morning, go home and go to bed. I’d always lay out a line of cocaine on the bedside table before I went to sleep, so it would be ready for me as soon as I woke up. There was nothing in my life by then but my party friends and that white powder. It was all I wanted.
There was a big celebrity coke group in London in those days, and I knew them all. I’d become really good friends with Bill Wyman, the bass player for the Rolling Stones, and his longtime friend and live-in fiancée, Astrid. Whenever the Stones were in town, I was over at Bill and Astrid’s house. Bill later wrote about those years in his book, Stone Alone. We were all out of control in those days.
Bill never did drugs, but Astrid did a lot of coke. She could function, though, so if you didn’t see her do a line, you might not realize she was stoned. Bill and Astrid were the sane ones in the group I parried with, but the rest were barely clinging to reality much of the time.
I thought running around London with people like the Stones and the Who was great fun, and Jake was more than happy to run around with me. He wasn’t as hooked on cocaine as I was, but he liked it, and if it was around, he’d
use it like everyone else. Most of us were musicians, but that wasn’t what held us together. Our common bond was cocaine. Our lives centered on how to get it and where to use it. The minute we woke up in the late afternoon, we’d start calling each other. Who’s got some? Where do you want to meet? It was an endless cycle. Every now and then we’d try something else; I used heroin once, but luckily for me, I didn’t like the feeling, and I got sick. So for me, it was usually just coke. Never once in any of this did I stop to think about what I was doing, and I certainly never made the connection between my mother’s addiction and my own. I didn’t have an addiction; I was just having fun.
It was Bill Wyman who first pointed out that what I was doing wasn’t just “fun.” What I was doing had consequences, serious consequences. Bill had a son named Steven, and Bill knew that if he were ever caught doing drugs, he’d lose custody of Steven. He wasn’t willing to take that risk, so in the middle of the insanity around him, Bill stayed cold sober. He was the only one of us who was.
The summer after Jake and I got married, there was a charity event in Cannes, France, at the Yacht Club that was hosted by Grace Robbins, the wife of Harold Robbins. Bill was involved with the event, and I was invited to perform. I went onstage that night stoned out of my mind. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever performed while I was completely stoned. I don’t think the audience knew it, but Bill did. He was livid. Afterward he came backstage, slammed me against a wall, and said, “What the hell are you doing to yourself?” He shouted right in my face, “I’ve been around people like you all my life, and I can’t stand by and watch you do this to yourself. You’re going to come to my house with me, now, and you’re going to stay there! I’m not even going to discuss this with you. You’re doing it.” I started crying. I guess you could say I was shocked sober that night. Bill was as good as his word. He and Astrid put me in a car and took me to their house in the south of France. He kept me there for two weeks. And for two weeks, he refused to speak to me.
