Journeys to Recovery Stars share stories of substance dependency and second chances.

By Jane Merrill

Gary Stromberg.

Mariette Hartley.

Richard Lewis.

I met former legendary L.A. publicist Gary Stromberg in Westport, CT, running along the Saugatuck River. He was soft-spoken, modest and attractive, but, almighty – those stories! His off-the-cuff accounts of the Hollywood, New York and London entertainment scene of the 60s and 70s positively glittered. It was like seeing the Southern sky when you've lived only in the Northern Hemisphere. I looked him up in books on the Doors and the Rolling Stones and got the gist that he was a major player in a one-time-only-in-the-U.S. history of insane high jinks.

His was not quite an enviable situation though. Without denying that it had once been fun to drive around Beverly Hills in a vintage Bentley offering LSD and other goodies to gorgeous girls, or to live the Malibu beach scene, Gary talked also about searing loss. He had written obituaries for many of his contemporaries – Mama Cass Elliot, Marc Bolan of T-Rex, Jim Morrison. And he had lost his own career, home and relationship to what he called the excesses of wild living and drug abuse. Gary keeps an old photo ID in his wallet. The drugged eyes of the bearded hipster in that picture remind him that he is grateful for his decades in recovery. 

Reading the celebrity interviews in The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery (Hazelden, 2005, $21.95), which I co-authored with Gary, is taking a journey through the most carefree, unbridled lives of any generation the world may have seen – great talents at a continuous party and on an endless roller-coaster ride. In the course of their fantastic and phantasmagoric pasts many of these celebrities' companions crashed and burned. How did the survivors lose their reason and how were they so blessed as to get it back? What the celebrities in the book have to say today is so insightful because they speak with their judgment cleared and a powerful wisdom about what was lost and gained.

“Clean and sober” means to these celebrities in recovery something grittier and vastly more affecting than simply quitting. To quote Pete Hamill: “I … learned that I was going to have to live my life without anesthesia, and that meant accepting the pain along with the laughs.”

In The Harder They Fall, the stars in recovery – among them athletes, musicians, actors and even a member of Congress – share great anecdotes (and nuggets of wisdom): Nile Rodgers once thought that only children slept lying down because he used to come home from school to a room filled with nodding heroin addicts who looked as though they were asleep standing up; songwriter Paul Williams would sneak out the puppy door of his house to score more drugs while his wife slept; Grace Slick attended a White House tea with Abbie Hoffman prepared to drop acid into then-President Nixon's teacup; a recovering Alice Cooper discovered the new magic of his concert persona onstage.

The tales have a similar catharsis, but like heroes returning from the underworld they bear different gifts. As Lewis Lapham writes in the foreword to the book, “Each individual speaks to his or her own experience of wrestling with what they mistook for a muse of fire or an angel of deliverance.”

It's a paradox that these accounts of the terror of addiction give us hope. This was the chance for 21 celebrities to cut through the media hype and tell it like it was, to bolster others' sobriety and to explore how much more intoxicating creativity is when you are sober.

“All of us are in such a process of integration, constantly, whether we want to be or not. What the opportunity of recovery or sobriety does for me is I become conscious of the integration. Even if I'm doing the same things without alcohol, I can learn from that situation now. I don't have to go back into that rat's cage again and again and again. Which is what alcohol does. It makes me forget. It's a disease that keeps saying I have no disease.”
– Mariette Hartley, The Harder They Fall

“To think if I walked over to the refrigerator in this hotel room and had a Scotch, not only would I let myself down but I couldn't help anyone else. It's one of the great things of the rest of my life. If I'm going to leave any kind of legacy, making people laugh is fine; but to help somebody get the darkness from out of their eyes and to turn their life around, it's the most important aspect of my life.”
– Richard Lewis, The Harder They Fall