Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  In a way it was as though Henry and Mary X had reunited only this time our hideous baby was alcoholism.

  I had cut off contact with my family, with nearly everyone I knew. They would all try to make me feel guilty for drinking. They’d remind me of the world outside of the boozy sinkhole I was in. Who needed that pressure? My agent didn’t know where I was, so of course I wasn’t getting any calls about work. Somewhere inside I knew that things weren’t going well. Everything I’d worked for was slipping away. Everything I had once loved was a memory.

  I was getting thinner, weaker, and sicker. But I was doing exactly what I wanted. No one was telling me when to get up, to learn lines, to put on a happy face, or that I was drinking too much. I had graduated now to smoking crack — the form of cocaine that you smoke instead of snort. Crack was cheaper and wildly successful at helping to keep the hatch open for even more vodka.

  Who knows how long this would have lasted, one dim, blurred day giving way to another.

  The morning of August 16, 1984, though, something snapped. Jack woke up at 7 a.m. with wild hair and a dangerous, crazy look in his eyes and he growled at me, “You better leave, Charlotte, or we’re going to go out into the desert and kill each other.”

  In a strange way I knew what he meant. He wasn’t a violent person but Jack did own a gun and something in his voice said that the game had changed.

  I was scared and felt sick. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded that I understood and I walked out of the apartment with the sense that everything was collapsing in around me.

  I had no money.

  No place to live.

  I was ill.

  I was hung over.

  I had run out of people.

  I returned to the apartment at Ken Rose’s house and just stared at the walls for a while. Numb. Then without really thinking or making a conscious decision, I reached for the phone and called my doctor. Dr. Paul Cohart had been my GP since the days I was married to Tim and I don’t think he’d ever realized the level of my drinking. If anything even close had ever come up in that regard, I had lied to him. In fact, I realized now, I’d been lying to my doctor for 20 years.

  I had been lying to myself for even longer.

  I was a highly advanced liar.

  While I waited for my doctor to pick up the line, things around me didn’t quite seem real. I felt detached from myself and dazed. I’d gone past some point, some point that had always been in the distance, some emotional, spiritual, or moral point that did not have a name. But passing it meant that something was about to change.

  Something was on the verge of happening.

  Dr. Cohart picked up and words fell out of me. Words that hundreds of times had nibbled at the edges of my mind and that I had always fought away. Words that I had always hated and feared.

  Yet now even as they tumbled out they were oddly comforting, though finally saying them out loud was like uttering the first syllables of a foreign language.

  I said simply into the phone, “I think I have a problem with alcohol.”

  Chapter 11

  New Beginnings

  Dr. Cohart gave me the number of “New Beginnings” at Century City Hospital, a six-week live-in drug and alcohol recovery program. I made the call and they said they’d send a cab right over but I had four things to take care of first.

  1. I wasn’t sure if I still had insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. I had been doing very little work and was well behind on dues. Miraculously, after a phone call I learned that my insurance was still good.

  2. I needed $200 for the deductible and I was flat broke. I drove over to Mickey Fox’s apartment and told her what I was doing and that I needed money. Mickey was elated for me and even though she was living on social security and barely had two dimes to scrape together at that moment, she and two of her friends were able to pool their cash and loan me the money.

  3. I went back to my apartment at Ken Rose’s house and apologized for not arranging for my dog Fudge’s care while I was off with Jack and asked Ken and Helen if they could continue to care for him over the next six weeks. They were more than willing.

  4. I went back to my little apartment and drank a half-pint of vodka — a wimpy amount for a true alcoholic but I didn’t have the money for any size larger.

  The next morning, August 17, 1984, Ken drove me to Century City Hospital and I checked myself into the program.

  First things first. At New Beginnings they gave me a full medical checkup, something I hadn’t had in a long time. They found I was suffering from anemia, malnutrition, and the first stages of liver disease.

  After that, they went through my suitcase and all my belongings to ensure I hadn’t tried to sneak in any drugs or alcohol and then they took everything away, except for the clothes I’d wear and a few other essentials. My private room was essentially a hospital room — no swanky health spa setting here. The bed was a standard issue hospital bed and the room had a lot of the functional trappings of a typical medical facility.

  They kept me on a mild sedative and in isolation for the first two days so the medical staff could keep me under observation and see how I managed the physical and emotional effects of alcohol withdrawal.

  While I felt weak, I hardly felt terrible. The idea of life without alcohol was not a daunting prospect, nor was it sad, disappointing or awful. It was something else altogether.

  It was as though for years I’d been wearing a suit made of bowling balls and when I entered New Beginnings, they had all fallen off and gone crashing away. It was the biggest relief you can possibly imagine. It was like getting out of jail. Like escaping from kidnappers. I felt totally liberated. There was no more hiding. No more lies. No more pretending I didn’t have a problem.

  The idea that I could be in control of my life — instead of the thing inside of me that craved alcohol — was freeing and transformative. For the first time in a long, long time, I was happy.

  More than happy, I was euphoric.

  I called my brother and sister and other family members and the response from all of them was relief too. They said things like “Thank God we have you back.” Alcohol had put barriers between us. Now I had returned to their lives and they were welcomed joyfully and tearfully back into mine.

  I called Jeanne and other friends and told them things like, “The food here is so good!” Looking back I realize it was pretty standard, ho-hum hospital food like turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. But after such long neglect, living on a diet of vodka and hotdogs, this food was rich, solid, nourishing, and dazzling. I’d forgotten what it felt like to actually feel good.

  After my brief isolation I was judged ready to mix with the others in the program, to attend the meetings held throughout the day, have meals in the common area, and take part in the other events.

  One of the things my counselors stressed was the idea of learning how to tell the truth. Anyone with an addiction like this becomes a world-class, overachieving, Triple-A-rated liar. And the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.

  I have to say, it’s pretty hard learning how to be truthful.

  One of our exercises was to write our feelings every day. And I had to learn to write the real things I felt — not to write things other people wanted to hear, not to gain something, not for the effect it might have, not for the image I hoped to create for myself.

  This is hard for anyone though I have a tendency to believe — perhaps in a self-centered way — that it may be harder for actors. We want to be liked. We spend our careers obsessing over winning people over whether it’s an audience watching us on the big screen or a casting director’s 19-year-old intern who’s operating the video camera during an audition in a nondescript office.

  A lot of the people in the recovery program were younger than I was and were coming off of profound addictions to drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, and heroin, drugs I’d never taken and had no connection to.

  We all told our stories in the group m
eetings — or pieces of our stories or versions of our stories. We were all taking those first steps into the strange unknown — telling the unprettified truth about ourselves, which is scary and awkward. In one meeting I stood up when it was my turn and related how after I’d come back to Los Angeles and was bouncing from place to place after I lost my home and was housesitting for a friend. I’d run out of unemployment money, there weren’t any residual checks coming in, I was just eking by, and how my dog Fudge and I were living on packages of hotdogs. I realized while relating this that I was hearing someone crying. I looked around the group and saw girl in her 20s who’d burst out in tears as I was talking about my dog and me living on nothing and I remember looking at her in confusion, unsure why this would make anyone cry. I’d just been talking about how I’d made it through a rough spot; it hadn’t occurred to me that that level of poverty would move someone so much. But we were all raw and new and our emotions were wobbly and wonky. I know mine were.

  An important step, they told us, was to admit that you were an alcoholic. Yep. I was. No problem with that. Another was to admit my helplessness in the face of alcohol, to understand that I would never stop wanting it, there would be no finish line to cross and that for the rest of my life I would require support — the support of others in recovery, of friends and family, and of a “higher power.” I did indeed find such powerful support in the program and made many new friendships.

  My relationship with my self changed. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I began to see that the story I’d always told myself about myself — my internal autobiography — was completely different than I’d ever imagined.

  The new and truthful central story of my life was this: when I was born there was a tiny seed implanted in my brain, something I’d inherited from my dad, that sweet, kind, quiet man who started his day with bourbon and kept cases of Jim Beam in the barn and my mom, who had cocktail hour all too often. Hell, it came from their parents too. I remember my grandmother on my mother’s side always had a little brown bottle with her, which she called her heart medicine. I hadn’t realized what it was until one day she went to the pharmacy in Yuba City to get a refill and was complaining about the price. The pharmacist, who apparently had no use for euphemism, said pretty loudly, “Well, ma’am, the price of brandy has gone up.”

  When I was a child and I hung out on the fringes of those weekend cocktail parties that make up my first memories, and I would take sips of those drinks, the seed stirred. Later in high school when I drank beer with my friends, the seed cracked open and something peeked out, liking what I was doing. In college, at the Pasadena Playhouse, I started to drink in earnest. The umbilical-cord-like worm that came out of that seed grew, stretching itself out lazily across the top of my brain. Over time it continued to grow, nourished and strengthened by the alcohol I kept feeding it. And eventually it had a voice and it was my voice and it had thoughts and desires and they were now my thoughts and desires. It was telling me what to drink and when to drink. It told me that Tim Considine was totally off base, controlling, and no fun at all when he said we should stop drinking. It told me that he was the wrong guy for me and that better things were to be had outside our relationship. It said drinking was more important than Tim, more important than my marriage. Later, as I entered my thirties, it became clear that I couldn’t keep drinking and ever have children. I had seen Barbara Jean caring for her seven beautiful kids and I knew somewhere inside that I could barely take care of my dog. And so I got my tubes tied because the worm mandated that drinking was more important than children. But we both came to an agreement, the worm and I, that my career was still important. We struck that bargain. And while shooting Little House we stuck to that deal. I would say, “Okay I have to work now but as soon as I’m finished filming, then we can drink again.” But after Little House was over, the worm had no more patience and it told me I didn’t need to go to auditions or show up to meetings with my agent. In fact I didn’t need to work anymore. I needed to devote myself fully to the worm and I needed to start the day drinking and I needed to take cocaine in order to increase my capacity to drink and to feed the worm. Then it told me I needed to marry Jordan. The worm liked Jordan because we both liked to stay at home and drink and do cocaine and drink more. Somewhere in the haze though, I wanted to quit all this, something didn’t feel right, and I moved to San Francisco and I tried to stop and I went to that spa but the worm said, “You can’t quit, you need me. You have to drink. Who will you be without drinking? What will you do? Drinking is your life.”

  Back in Los Angeles, after I’d lost everything, the worm told me it was no problem if I didn’t have money — vodka was cheap and smoking crack was cheaper than cocaine and just as good. If anyone, such as Ken Rose, questioned my drinking, the worm took great offense and told me to cut those people out of my life. It told me to move in with Jack. I didn’t need to go out of the apartment. I didn’t need my family. I didn’t need to work. I didn’t need to eat. I just needed to keep drinking. I had to. Nothing else mattered.

  Going into alcohol recovery with its ongoing group meetings, mentoring, and community of support meant that I, Charlotte, the true Charlotte, had reasserted herself and that I stopped feeding the worm. But I couldn’t kill it. It was always there. And it would always remain there. Sometimes sleeping but sometimes still whispering, “Go buy a bottle. No one will know. You can hide it. You don’t have to tell anyone. It’ll be fine. You can handle it. You deserve it.”

  It was a strange time. The freedom, the new sense of lightness, and the clarity were amazing. But learning to live without alcohol, without the worm, meant nothing short of starting life over. Finding my boundaries, my voice, my likes and dislikes, finding my identity. Even simple things like how did I pass the time? How did I reward myself? How did I prop myself up on hard days? My relationship to the world, to my innermost self, and even to my own body felt tentative, new, vulnerable, and not always clear.

  It was like a divorce, a cure, a release from prison, a death, a transformation, and a rebirth all wrapped in one.

  At New Beginnings the staff told me that once my six-week stay was over, I needed to change everything in my life. Even down to rearranging the furniture in my apartment. Anything in my surroundings that could remind me of old ideas, old patterns, old ways of thought had to change.

  I realized pretty quickly that it was going to be hard to significantly reinvent the look of my one-room apartment. So I was grateful when Jeanne called, to her everlasting credit, and invited me to move in with her.

  Jeanne was starting over too. After dating for several years, and just 11 months of marriage, Stephen had broken the news that he wanted a divorce; he’d already, unbeknownst to her, set himself up in an apartment and had another relationship well underway. Nothing had prepared her for this and it smashed through her like a freight train.

  So we were both beaten up, both bruised, and starting over. I moved into the house that she and Stephen had shared in Sherman Oaks, which was situated up on a hill, offered a lot of privacy up off the street and was surrounded by trees and greenery. It was an ideal place to begin again.

  I knew one of the most important things I could do was to ensure that I didn’t have hours and hours of time with nothing to do — as I had done following my stint on Little House.

  My first job was to go to meetings. I threw myself into recovery, committing to — and succeeding in — going to 90 group meetings in my first 90 days out of the live-in program. I was gung-ho. I went to a group meeting on Radford Street in Studio City and on Thursdays and Saturdays I drove my yellow Pacer over to New Beginnings and took some women who were in the program to the group meeting as well.

  Beyond that I needed to fill the hours of my day. The old schedule of working a day or two here and there with lots of days in between to fill — and falling back into old habits — wasn’t going to work any longer. Which is why I count myself extremely fortunate to have connected with
a great TV and film industry company called Lantana in Santa Monica. Lantana was created by producers Alex Winitsky and Arlene Sellers. They’d produced a strong line-up of films since the mid-1970s such as The Seven-Percent Solution, Swing Shift, and Stanley & Iris. During that time they’d both gotten sick of driving from their home in Beverly Hills up the 405 to their production offices in the San Fernando Valley. The traffic was usually terrible and a ridiculous waste of time so they got the ingenious idea of starting Lantana in Santa Monica which would offer office space, including pre- and post-production space to film companies.

  When you’re a producer and you’ve put together your total package — you’ve got a script, a director, and a couple of main actors — and you get the green light from a studio, what you need to do overnight is create a company that will make the film. You have to get the gears of your project moving right away. It’s called a green light because it means go. Now.

  You need an office for yourself and other producers, for your writers, you need a casting office and more. At Lantana we were able to offer connected office space in Santa Monica (not up the river of bumper-to-bumper traffic in the San Fernando Valley) and when you came to us and said, “We’d like to rent this block of six offices,” the next morning you could move in. You’d have furniture, desks, phones, a computer network, Internet service — everything.

  At Lantana I performed a lot of different jobs — as did the entire staff of six people — under the excellent management of Maggi Kelly, who’d been Robert Altman’s assistant and had gone on to run his Lion’s Gate Films before this. I would show prospective clients the offices, talk them through the set-up we could offer and I could write-up leases. The idea of production offices in Santa Monica was a big hit and a lot of industry people came through to check out our set-up. Tom Cruise came by once while director Cameron Crowe had offices there. Someone had seen Tom walk up the hallway into the bathroom and Maggi let me know she was going to park her bulldog Gladys in the hall, to see if Tom would stop to pet her on his way back out. And it worked. He took one look at Gladys, couldn’t resist her charms, and we got to meet Tom. Denzel Washington was another guy all the ladies in the office wanted to meet. When they heard that I was touring Denzel there was more excitement than if the Pope was visiting. I made sure we had to drop by the office to review lease agreements.