My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [70]
As soon as I got home, I poured myself a glass of bourbon. And then another. And sometimes still another. In a frank admission to columnist Marilyn Beck, I said, “Somewhere along the line I progressed from being just a party drinker to the point where I’d run a race with Margie each night to see if I could get drunk before she could get dinner on the table.”
I did not get drunk—not in the way most of us think of drunk. It was more that a couple of drinks before dinner put me in a more tranquil state of mind. And a couple more after dinner kept me in that place.
But I never thought of myself as an alcoholic.
And why was that?
Well, I would ask myself simple questions.
Did I drink in the morning? No, not unless it was a Bloody Mary at Sunday brunch, and who didn’t have one then?
Did I drink at work? Never.
Did I go to bars? No.
Did I have a problem? No, not as far as I was concerned.
Others saw it differently. In 1967 a friend dropped by the house and said some people who had worked with me were whispering about my drinking. They hadn’t actually seen me drinking, he said, but they’d noticed me complaining a few too many times about being hungover.
“Maybe you want to get some help,” he said.
“I don’t have a problem,” I said. “I appreciate your concern and friendship and willingness to come to me, but I swear to you, I’m fine. I have a couple drinks at parties, one or two to unwind at night, but that’s it. If that makes me an alcoholic, well, I guess everyone else is, too.”
“But Dick, you understand why—”
I cut him off.
“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t have a problem.”
The staff at St. Luke’s did a double take when I walked through the doors and said I was there to check in for treatment. They were not expecting anyone famous. They kept looking out the windows for reporters. Eventually I was able to assure them that no one knew I was there. I explained that I had called earlier about getting help for a drinking problem, my wife had dropped me off, and now I wanted to be treated like anyone else.
And I was. I was placed in the psych ward with other alcoholics and drug addicts. We were separated from those with serious emotional problems, but we heard them in the background. The addicts and alcoholics were bad enough, though. Some were having fits and throwing up from withdrawals, others were agonizing through the DTs. I had no such side effects.
Although the hard-core addicts scared the hell out of me, I didn’t let that get in the way of the work I needed to do. I attended group meetings daily in a basement room with concrete walls and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. One day, I suggested that I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, or a severe case, since I didn’t have any physical problems going cold turkey. A thin, pasty guy about my age said, “Buddy, there aren’t different types of alcoholics. You are one or you aren’t. And you are. And it don’t matter if you’re rich and famous like you are or a desert rat like me. The only way to beat this thing is to put a plug in the jug. Period.”
During treatment and therapy sessions, I dredged up emotions and fears I had buried long ago, like the fights my parents used to have when I was a child. I remembered hearing their screams rattling through the house. It was always after my father came home drunk following one of his lengthy road trips. Then, a little after I turned six years old, my mother gave him an ultimatum: either quit drinking or she was leaving.
She left and went to a friend’s house in Boston. Then my dad went back on the road.
All of a sudden I found myself, along with my brother, at my paternal grandparents’. I had no idea where my mother and father were. I was told only that they were gone. Nothing specific was said to me (and Jerry was too young to know). I sat in my grandmother’s lap at night and cried.