Why Do Actors Drink?

When we ask why actors drink, we might wonder what it is we want of them. One reason why we love actors is that they seem capable of escaping our dull lot, of being out there, as poised as fiction. But sometimes they feel that we have pushed them out there, and won't let them back. And it is very often the people who use acting most in their fantasies--who go to the movies, and follow careers--who come to the reproachful realization that actors are not really people, but ghosts or escapees, creatures who cannot handle real life, who only come alive onstage or when someone has said "Action!" Thus, there is a mood in fans that wants revenge and which is ready to mock actors for their innocence about life.

I looked at Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend again, for this essay; I hadn't seen it in years. When Paramount screened the finished picture in 1945, they talked of shelving it. Didn't see how people could stand it. There was even a rumor that the Mob had offered to buy and destroy the negative in case it brought back Prohibition. And it is darker than I remembered. There's even a scene of Ray Milland's character getting the d.t.'s, seeing a mouse come out of a crack in the wall, only for a bat to plunge down and take it--with very clear squeals. (Was that the first movie that realized the great bat, otherwise know as Dracula, was just a guy dying for a drink?)

Billy Wilder didn't really drink, and Ray Milland didn't drink, so they say. I can believe it, because I don't drink (so I say), yet I know the movie gets it. And gets it so well that you despise the stupid, false-front happy ending. What drives The Lost Weekend is the eery fascination of self-destruction, the bottle the guy leaves hanging out of the window to avoid solicitous searching by brother and girlfriend, the way he can't remember where he's hidden another bottle, and the unmistakable knowledge in Ray Milland's trembly act that getting drunk and depraved and humiliated is still a better life than sitting at the typewriter trying to be a novelist. You love his wicked cunning, his frail courage while trying to filch a purse for the money inside, and his unsentimental understanding that drunks, like junkies, can never be trusted again. They lie; they have to. The trick to The Lost Weekend is to put us on the side of the liar. Look--if he gets better, he'll have to marry Jane Wyman!

Uncommonly among Wilder films, The Lost Weekend has moments of great visual beauty--like the rings of liquor left by glasses on the bar top, a hopeless tangle of halos or nooses, their curves aglow. And the film is in black-and-white! You thirst for the color.

Anyway, Paramount released it. It got Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor. Maybe the Mob had a screening and decided that anyone seeing it was going to want a drink. The Lost Weekend was a big hit. Seventeen years later, Days of Wine and Roses did less well--it is a truly gruesome booze picture.

Here's a nice Lost Weekend story. They built a standing set on the Paramount lot of the New York bar, P. J. Clarke's. It was the complete replica, except that they had tea for booze. Every day this rather rotund, elderly fellow would come in, sit down and order a drink. It was sometime writer, sometime actor, off-and-on drunk Robert Benchley, who was hanging out at Paramount and wistful for Clarke's, which had been a beloved haunt in former times. Benchley had an arrangement with Howard da Silva, who played the barman in the picture, so that he got one slug of the real thing whenever he came in. For the atmosphere.

Another reason actors drink is because of the trouble they have with eating. Nearly every actor and actress there ever was has a terror of putting on weight, and they all believe devoutly that you photograph fatter than you really are. So a meal is as rare as a trusting marriage for actors. They maybe nibble at some Melba toast, and they scour their stomachs with grapefruit and carpaccio. But they need energy--it's energy that photographs!--and a lot of them will swear on Gideons that there's nothing like booze for quick energy, that rush of animation the camera loves. There's no end of actor's theories on the nutritional secrets of liquor. And all the while, they're getting paler and thinner. Sometimes they photograph nearly transparent.

There's the excitement in the names--I've heard of actors who learned good elocution waltzing through the list: Seagram's, Dewar's, Johnny Walker Black and Red, Canadian Club, Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Rob Roy, Cutty Sark, Black & White, J & B, John Jameson & Son, Jim Beam, Old Grand Dad, et cetera, not to mention the fancy stuff for dinners and social occasions--the creme de menthe, whiskey sours and dry martinis, or even an unassuming bottle of Chateauneuf-du-pape or Liebfraumilch.

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