Addicts can be great in sobriety, but also adulated when still using. The stories of Jonathan Winters and country music icon George Jones.
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
Comedian Jonathan Winters, dead at 87 of natural causes surrounded by family and friends in his Montecito, California home. His ability to create “a cavalcade of charmingly twisted characters,” as the Los Angeles Times writer Dennis McLellan put it, led to Tonight show host Jack Paar to quip Winters was “the 25 most funny people I know.” The son of a down-and-out alcoholic who had trouble keeping a job and often left his young son locked in the car while he got drunk in bars, Winters enlisted in the Marines at 17 in 1943 because, while he wanted to fight, he “mostly…wanted to get away from my parents.” Soon after WWll he met his future wife (to whom he was married until her death in 2009) who encouraged him to enter an amateur talent show; his career took off from there. Having inherited his father’s alcoholism, he was reportedly drinking up to two quarts of liquor a day before getting sober in his early 30s. I haven’t found details of what triggered in him a need to clean up, but his wife likely played a crucial role.
In 1959 and 1961, at the ages of 34 and 36, he suffered two nervous breakdowns, the latter of which kept him in the hospital for eight months. I’ve long hypothesized that not only does alcoholism mimic certain personality disorders, but it also often triggers them (see the discussion in Drunks, Drugs & Debits of Patty Duke, who was likely drinking alcoholically by age 14 and suffered her first bipolar episode at age 19). Among many comedians giving Winters credit for having inspired them was Robin Williams. Winters starred as Mearth in the early 1980s sitcom Mork & Mindy, hatching out of a giant egg as Mork (Williams) and Mindy’s (Pam Dawber) middle-aged “infant” offspring. Williams acknowledged later that “Jonathan’s the source for me, the guy that made it all possible….First he was my idol, then he was my mentor and amazing friend….He was my Comedy Buddha.”
I first saw Winters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood when I was 10 and last saw him at an antique shop in Montecito, as always “on,” entertaining everyone around, about a decade ago. My wife and I thought he was a nutcase, but long live the nutcase—one of the greatest comic geniuses ever.
Country music icon George Jones, succumbing from respiratory failure at 81. Seeing only headlines—variously describing his “tumultuous life,” that his “songs mirrored [his] turbulent life,” and that he lived “a life of heartbreak, redemption”—and aware such descriptions are always euphemisms for “alcoholism” (or “alcohol and other-drug addiction”), I knew an obit was in order even though I barely knew his name. His is quite the classic case. While receiving two Grammies and putting 167 records on the Billboard Hot Country Song chart, with a record-making 143 in the top 40, he married four times, earned the nickname “No Show Jones” for his numerous failures to appear for scheduled performances and had, by his own account, numerous brushes with death. He credits the last, crashing his Lexus SUV into a bridge abutment near his Franklin, TN home in 1999, resulting in a collapsed lung, ruptured liver and a two-week hospital stay, with the realization he had to stay clean and sober. This time, it seems he did.
In addition to his own self-abuse, Jones financially abused others. He got into legal problems for not paying child support for his daughter to his first wife, with whom he was married for all of one year (1950-1951). His talent, financial rewards and most importantly “friends” helped keep his financial difficulties under control for much of the next few decades. Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash admitted they periodically helped Jones, who became penniless fighting lawsuits for missed performances and arrests over alcohol and other-drug charges. Despite enormous success and making millions, Jones declared bankruptcy in 1979.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that Jones was an entertainer and a country icon—whose personal tragedies and turbulence led an air of authenticity to his music—his alcoholism would never have been so public. Forget about the famous; consider the number of alcoholics engaging in similar misbehaviors throughout their lives who go undetected until it’s too late for their victims. If all we know is someone repeatedly doesn’t show up for work, doesn’t pay child support or that he’s been married four times, using clues from How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics we can ascribe 80-90% odds of alcoholism—and take measures to protect ourselves from the emotional, physical and financial abuse that goes hand-in-hand with the disease.
Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman, who Wikipedia reported was a “reformed cocaine and pill abuser,” dead from alcohol-related cirrhosis at age 49. His friends and family were reportedly unaware of the “true extent of his liver condition until the last days of his life.” We might speculate that Hanneman may have relapsed and that he, like countless alcoholics before him, was an expert at hiding use for extended periods.
And so long too, to movie critic Roger Ebert, 70, sober since August 1979, whose wonderful 2009 commentary on his sobriety and AA is worth a read.