Why Do Actors Drink?

All the talking that actors do has to do with why they drink. Oiling the throat, a little lubrication in the morning, gargling with vodka before curtain time, waiting for the click. Actors have to talk, without a mumble or a fumble. Why do you think they ever called those joints speakeasies? The Milland character in The Lost Weekend is wonderful on this ice-slick eloquence, and Milland knew to do it without a slur but with just one slice of actors' ham-miness. Ham is often booze. "I'm Horowitz playing the Emperor Concerto," he says reveling in the liberty of booze. "I'm John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat, and Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them, and W. Shakespeare. And out there it is not Third Avenue, it is the Nile, man, the Nile, and down comes the barge of Cleopatra."

Richard Burton had his own Cleopatra, of course. He had given up a first wife for her, as well, eventually, as Wales, Shakespeare, the theater, socialism, and peace of mind. Burton had been reckoned in London as the natural heir to Olivier, the greatest young classical actor of the age. But from the outset Burton had also flinched from acting. He took American money, and earned interest on self-contempt. He was a miner's son. He knew poverty, harshness, the life of the pits, and the need for social reform. He could never lose the fear that acting was queer, an evasion, the putting on of makeup, a homosexual thing. So Burton was determined to be very manly. He pushed his pitted voice deeper, and he drank. And Elizabeth drank; she was also stronger, no matter her illnesses. So they sailed down their Nile into the stagnant lagoon of celebrity, both aghast, both from time to time in love, both good actors seeing just how much money they could burn from the stupid, cynical business.

Burton kept a journal. So many drunks dream of writing--there is that craving for eloquence. And sometimes he took the cure, and stopped dead. He could stop whenever he wanted to, so long as he could start again when he had to. As he sobered up once, he noted that he and Elizabeth were in love again, or being lovers: "I had a fear that the complete cessation of drink would decrease my sex desire, and so it did for a time probably because I concentrated so much on stopping the alcohol that everything else became diffuse--I had difficulty in concentrating on reading for instance--and I found that my mind raced and flitted from thing to object to idea at a bewildering speed. Now that the poison is nearly out of my system--I'm told it takes six months to dry out totally--I can think clearly again. I don't see the world whole, but I see it steadily. I have lost the hungover nightmarish fear of imminent disaster and early death and all its concomitants and am better balanced. I am not a nervous wreck for days before I fly as I used to be, and am indeed so calm about it that I have to remind myself of the helpless hazards of flying so that I don't stretch my luck too far."

Burton was dead within a few years, a great tragedian making tragically futile films, the eyes so harrowed you could hardly look, the voice cracking with the load.

There have always been celebrations of booze culture: drunk comic acts--fall-down comedy--and William Powell and Myrna Loy in all their Thin Man films, the chink-chink of their rocks like drums beneath their repartee. Wouldn't it be pretty to think that being tight could be so pretty?

There's a recent movie that does this prettiness a treat: Miller's Crossing. Its very first shot is of a glass, and we actually hear the musical collision of ice before the picture blooms. It's a closeup. And then the amber stuff goes in. We hear those spiffy little orgasmic spits and cracks the ice makes when the creeping gold spirit hits it--it's a very sexy thing, Scotch on the rocks, or Irish. All of Miller's Crossing has that erotic look of fall colors--bare floors, wood paneling, and every stitch of clothing seems to be leaning into the amber-umber end of the spectrum--forever amber. You could think the film stock was marinaded in 80-proof before they exposed it. But that's only the start. Miller's Crossing has a drunk's regard for the world: dreadful things happen as smooth as clouds passing. The film can't work it up to care. There are awesome beatings and they're very tranquil, as if to say, what does anyone expect?

There are films I like but can't watch anymore--because I know the story. Miller's Crossing I can watch every night, in the way that every drink is starting again. It's got a great boozer's rhythm.

Here is director John Boorman talking about Lee Marvin (the two men worked together on Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific): "So many actors when required to play bad guys cannot resist some coded plea to the audience for sympathy. My dear friend Lee Marvin never did, which is why his villains were so shocking. Lee knew from his war experiences the depth of our capacity for cruelty and evil. He had committed such deeds, had plumbed the depths and was prepared to recount what he had seen down there. What characterized his performances was an unflinching truth that was sometimes almost unbearable. He knew this stuff was hard to take. Also he had to live in the world, the Hollywood world. Just as alcohol offered him an escape from unbearable reality, so his other acting persona, the bumbling drunk, released him from his obligation to truth-telling. The two manifestations are perfectly paired in Cat Ballou, where he played the dual roles of deadly killer and hopeless drunk."

John Barrymore died in 1942, at the age of 60, from all the effects of alcohol. He had a last birthday party, three months before his death, at which he told a story of when he had done Hamlet, in London, in 1925. At that time he had been most anxious to get to bed with a beautiful lady in the English aristocracy. But she had refused him, many times, until the day of Hamlet's first night. Could he drive to the lady and be back in time? He decided he could. There was splendid love-making, but out of tenderness, the lady had laid in a supply of good wines and functional spirits. Late in the afternoon, Barrymore was smashed. He reached the theater only half an hour before curtain time, drinking Scotch to stay awake. He went on and played the role as drunk as a skunk. He was throwing up in the wings. He had to sit in a chair for his "To be, or not to be..."

Barrymore paused in the story, and surveyed his guests. "The dramatic reviews the next day were... marvelous. They praised me as the greatest Hamlet of the age. Every one of my drunken staggers, my exits to vomit in the wings, my reeling into a chair to recite 'To be, or not to be,' were hailed as brilliant artistic interpretations of Hamlet's role.

"I've kept those notices as a reminder of the foolishness of fame--and the lunacy of life in general."

Drunk's luck, or a drunk's dream? Would a dry Barrymore have lived longer and been a greater actor? Does reform bring fresh life? There's a church a few blocks from where I live that has AA meetings, and on Saturday afternoons you can see the people outside taking a break, smoking, chewing gum, counting leaves on trees, chatting things over. I always hope they make it when I pass by, but there's a spooky air to them, a strange mix of passivity and tension, like people who've been body-snatched. Maybe, I wonder, there are alcoholics who hate the idea of anonymity. But Anthony Hopkins, he's a reformed case, a fearful fall-down drunk once, and now... not a drop in 19 years and a mighty man. Yet I wonder if his two great roles--Lecter, and the butler in The Remains of the Day--aren't perfectly geared to someone who's given up the fire that burns him, safe behind bars or safe within the refusal to admit feelings. Look in Hopkins's pale, bleak eyes: you can feel the chain on the beast.

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David Thomson is the author of Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick.

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