Like the rest of us, they have more than enough reasons. But because they're actors, their reasons are more attractive and more dramatic. If you want to fully justify your next bender, read these pensees and go get a SAG card.
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There's no reason to suppose that this is going to he coherent, so I'm just marking the sections to give the appearance of some kind of order. It's like keeping a tab. And I'm telling you that one of the editors of this magazine, a decent woman generally (apart from her thinking about movies 14 hours a day), proposed that I write this article--for you--with a bottle at my side, its level presumably declining as I pile the words up. Of course, she meant this as a pleasantry, a nice joke, not an ounce of malice in it. Isn't it a marvel how decent people reckon they can make sociable jokes about booze? So here's a first answer, don't you think, to the question of why actors drink: There's an imp of humor in booze.
From Roget (a poetic list-maker--it's my experience that such fellows are steadily on the sauce), and I quote this so that you can feel the imp (say it aloud to yourself--say it on public transport): imbibe, tipple, nip, tope, swizzle, tun, soak, souse, bib, booze (slang), bouse, guzzle, fuddle, swill, toast, carouse, wassail, debauch, liquor up (slang), raise the elbow, wet one's whistle, hit the bottle, go on a bender (slang).
Why do actors drink? Is there the remotest chance of an answer? I had told the editor that I had been reading a biography of Robert Shaw, the English actor (Quint in Jaws, Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons), and I was recounting the sheer wreckage of Shaw's life--a good novelist, a truly frightening actor, a father of 10 children, a monstrous drinker, dead of a heart attack at 51. I said how terrifying yet compelling the book was, and how it somehow explained the menace Shaw had onscreen, his helpless pact with the comedy of self-inflicted disaster. Why do actors drink? I asked aloud--never meaning all actors, of course.
So she said, "Which actors would you think of?"
And I said, "Well, Barrymore, Burton, W.C. Fields. Then there's Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum, Robert Newton, Wilfrid Lawson--my God, wait till you hear Wilfrid Lawson stories."
"Who's Wilfrid Lawson?" she asked. And there was another answer, straightaway: Actors seek glory, they want the world to declare what many people in the business said of Lawson when he was alive--that he was the greatest of actors--and here was a decent woman, one who could recite Harrison Ford's filmography from memory, who'd never heard of him. That would make a man like Lawson drink. [Ed. note: While I confess to being inordinately familiar with Mr. Ford's screen career, and insufficiently mindful of Mr. Lawson's achievements, Mr. Thomson, readers should appreciate, is inordinately familiar with Angie Dickinson's career.]
And by the time you finish this article, you'll more likely remember tall stories about Lawson the boozer than that he was Doolittle in the 1938 film of Pygmalion, or that he was in The Long Voyage Home, War and Peace or Tom Jones.
"Who else?" she said.
"Peter O'Toole, Buster Keaton, Dean Martin, Sterling Hayden, Robert Ryan, Bogart, Errol Flynn, Rita Hay-worth, Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins. Did I say Barrymore?"
Actors drink to help them get onstage. I use the word "stage" here in more than the theatrical sense--the stage is the place wherever they do it. And what they do is so rare, so difficult and perilous that they are in knots about it. They've had to learn their words; they have to know their blocking and their moves; they have to be in character. They have to give you a new reality. Then they have to do it precisely, on time, whether they like it or not, when the curtain goes up with that sigh it has, or when someone in the dark calls "Action!"
They need courage for this. A great baseball player, a Barry Bonds, may be paid $7 million a year, for which he has to come up to the plate and get a hit one in every three at bats. An actor must get it right every moment, every line, every pause. And while a movie actor has takes, or chances, to get it right, still his entire act consists of that "perfect" take. Making movies is always about being perfect and extraordinary--there's nothing normal to it--and sometimes it is being perfect late in the day, with murmurs that the light is going, and the co-star being gently, passively resistant, because he or she wants his or her perfect to be better, and they changed your great line at four o'clock so now you don't even understand the line, and everyone is getting a little tense.
Being perfect and beautiful and the only person in the world who could or should have played this part, that is a strain. But being perfect is not showing the strain, no matter if the location makeup guy is a bitch and out to get you. Do you want to get a reputation for asking if difficult scenes can be held over till tomorrow?
Onstage they call it stage fright. You have a dread of going on. You believe, if you are playing Othello, that Othello's pants will slide down, exposing the private parts of your body that you did not make up. Late in his career, Laurence Olivier--"the greatest actor in the world"--succumbed to stage fright (which only means that for 40 years previously he had beaten it back every night--for, know this: if you're not afraid about going on, you shouldn't be there). "My courage sank, and with each succeeding minute it became less possible to resist this horror. My cue came, and on I went to that stage where I knew with grim certainty I would not be capable of remaining more than a few minutes. I began to watch for the instant at which my knowledge of my next line would vanish. Only the next two now, no--one more... and then--NOW. I took one pace forward and stopped abruptly. My voice had started to fade, my throat closed up and the audience was beginning to go giddily round..."
What breeds that sort of apprehension in someone so accomplished? Olivier believed it had to do with a deep streak of self-loathing that had lasted through the years and triumphs of an art and a business made of vanity, narcissism and self-glorification. It may also have to do with a feeling that acting is trivial, or an evasion of actual life.
I promised you a Wilfrid Lawson story. This happened in London in the 1930s. Late in the afternoon, an actor who had been away bumped into Lawson on Shaftesbury Avenue, a street of many theaters. They were old friends, and since it was 5:30 or so they repaired to a pub to celebrate reunion.
"Well, now," said the actor just returned. "I'm out of touch. What's on that's good?"
Lawson got fresh drinks and said, "They say that so-and-so's pretty fair."
"Can we get tickets tonight?"
"I believe we might," said Lawson.
So they had a few more jars/libations/snorts/pick-me-ups/toddies/slings/fizzes, and they went on to the theater. It was close to curtain time, but they did manage to get two seats in the gallery, or "up in the gods," as they say in England. In a merry state, verging on tight, but not yet pickled, the two friends squeezed into their seats. The lights went down and the curtain came up. The play went on for 10 minutes or so, at which point Lawson turned to his friend and whispered, "Something very interesting is about to happen."
"What's that?" hissed the friend.
"Well," said Lawson, "when that woman there onstage has finished dressing, I'm supposed to come on."
If the immediate fear of going on is great enough to make actors drink, still I'm not sure that the reluctance to get off isn't alcoholically more persuasive. Though I was not onstage myself, I was once part of a production of Strindberg's Miss Julie. After the last performance in the short run, the members of the cast simply lingered onstage, in the "room" that they had helped assemble during rehearsal. There was no scenery, just furniture and plants. They could not bear to go, to abandon the world of the play. Not that Miss Julie offers a comfortable world or a happy resolution. Two of the characters are at each other's throat night after night. But the comradeship of the show had been such that a sadness marked its close. These actors had other lives. But they did not want to quit the play--perhaps they would have preferred Strindberg's endless torture. I have heard such stories about other productions, the players left in the forsaken room, chatting into the night, waiting, hoping to be rescued, or for the play's dream to begin again.
You see, to be an actor--no matter your limits or flaws--is to partake of something close to certainty, which is a kind of rapture. You know what you must wear, what to say and where to move. Even if you perish every night in the play, you know how to do it, and you take pride in the craft. You do not have to admit to the real, limitless doubts in your own life. You have the light, the company, the stage, the lines--you are like a train with its tracks. There is such a clarity, even if you do no more than walk on once and say, "Your armies attend you, my lord."
In The Shining, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), bitterly on the wagon, prowls and grumbles through the empty spaces of the Overlook Hotel. The decor and the very light seem bathed in the pale iron color of liquor. He comes to an enormous ball-room lounge, turns on the lights, and in a mood of nostalgia goes up to the pristine, stripped bar. He covers his eyes, trying to conjure up a vision, and he says he'd give his soul for a glass of beer. Lo, he looks up, the shelves of the bar are supplied with all those pretty bottles, and there is Lloyd the perfect barman (Joe Turkel) with just Torrance to serve, and torrents to serve him.
"What'll it be?" Lloyd asks:
And Jack expands, he glows and begins to be emperor of the terrible establishment. "I'm awfully glad you asked that, Lloyd," he says, and opts for a bottle of bourbon. It will be a while yet before he asks for a shot of red rum. He has a bar and a Lloyd all his own. The wagon is wood for the fire in his eyes.
Shining, lit, loaded, boiled, smashed, pie-eyed, reeling, under the influence... all the synonyms for drunk with their uncanny combination of damage and... bliss? It reminds me of the way we talk about actors and acting. We say that performances are brilliant, lustrous, stunning, transcendent; we speak of the highest realm of acting, of a state of being there on the stage that is magical, otherworldly. And when actors manage this kind of getting up or out there, to reward us with their light, we think of the experience as illuminating. We get a little high or drunk on them. And being so moved, we leave (for a moment) lighter footprints in the real ground of our lives.
Yet if we hear stories of actors who have actually gone out there into the world of being under the influence--drunk, stoned, high--we regard it as, variously, absurd, pathetic, shameful, irresponsible, a bad example. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho is out there, and many people found him extremely astonishing, beautiful, luminous, arresting. But River Phoenix in convulsions on the sidewalk outside a Hollywood club was... ghastly? tragic? a warning to us all?
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.
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.