40th anniversary of Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s death
A journalist asks, “Aug. 27 is the 40-year anniversary of Beatles manager Brian Epstein’ s death. How would we analyze his life, assuming that his personal life was in disarray and yet he was obviously an extraordinary over-achiever?”
Epstein was a raging pill-popping alcoholic. This would explain a paradox common to the lives of addicts: the personal life is often in disarray, yet they frequently excel in their professional lives. This seeming contradiction is explained when we recall from my book, “Alcoholism Myths and Realities” that alcoholism causes egomania, which requires the wielding of power over others. Addicts exercise such power by abusing family, friends and other others with whom they come into contact and also, perversely, by overachieving at work. After all, what better way to wield power over family, fans, constituents, co-workers and others than by being able to say, “I make a million dollars a year”?
One of my biggest beefs about biographers is that they rarely have a clue about alcoholism in their subjects, and even if they do they don’t understand its relevance to explaining the behaviors they write about. In my first book, “Drunks, Drugs & Debits,” I explained that an alcoholic cannot be understood without grasping the concept of alcoholism described above. Every biography I have read since has only reinforced this conviction.