The Harder They Fall (34 page)

It was important for me to get affection from women, but I was also scared shitless. You know, in sobriety I’ve made amends to every woman I had a serious relationship with. They all told me that they cared about me, loved me, and I’m still friends with some of them. Some are alcoholics, and I’ve tried to help them. I might have hurt them or hurt their feelings at the time, but I gave them enough love, affection, and caring when I wasn’t high that they knew I had a disease. After the fact. I’m proud I didn’t burn almost any bridge. I didn’t burn my career, wind up insane, or go to jail. I didn’t kill anyone while drunk. I made amends to everyone I thought I hurt. All my relatives and everyone said they loved me and they are proud I’m overcoming this disease.

I can’t say that for a lot of people. A lot of people I know have blown up their lives and sometimes can’t get a lot of it back. I remember an older guy I met who would always say, “Hi, I’m so-and-so, and I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic.” He’d been in recovery for thirty years. I just thought it was his hook, you know, like every comic has a hook. An alcoholic with a punch line. But now I totally get it. Sometimes I even say it. I’ve stolen his hook! I mean, “I am sooo grateful for two main reasons: I didn’t kill anybody, and every amends I made was taken with love and respect and best wishes for me.”

Back to my mother, who was unfortunately the type of woman who felt guilty about everything. She had a very interesting personality. She was incredibly narcissistic and unbelievably filled with low self-esteem. I’m certain I inherited part of that. I’m not as narcissistic as I used to be. You have to have some to be in show business, or you’ll get trampled to death. And self-effacing? I’m even less that. The more grateful I got, the less self-effacing I became.

I remember one day, I was about two or three years sober, my mom had this wonderful man, Jack, who is still alive, whom she met a year or two after my dad died. They became boyfriend and girlfriend for twenty-five years. Jack used to work in sports as a soundman. He’d work at Yankee Stadium, wherever. He’s a great guy. He’s getting up there. Jack was great to my mom. And when I’d be in New York, it was almost like a religious thing: the Friars Club in New York has maybe the greatest brunch in the world, and almost every Saturday, I’d take Jack and my mom. So this Saturday we were at brunch, and I told my mother I was an alcoholic. “No you’re not!” she said flat out. And I blew it. I lost it. I took her into the other room in a frenzy, to talk privately, and said, “Don’t you ever say that again. I am an alcoholic, and I’m in recovery. I’m a drunk, alcoholic, drug addict, and I’m fixing myself.” And she couldn’t accept it, because she felt responsible. At the time, I was angry because I was in early recovery. A lot of people would have said, “Hey, good for you, you’ve surrendered.” I understand my mother’s reaction now, but then it made me so, so angry. I got sober in ’94. My mom started getting sick in the middle of ’97 and died a year and a half later. I had moved to California so I didn’t see her often. When I saw her the last time, she had lost her marbles. It was very hard to see her that way. I’m not sure she knew who she was or not. I told my older sister, who was in the trenches with my mother on a daily basis, “I want to be alone with Mom.” She really was pretty gone by that point. And I held her hand, and I didn’t talk about alcoholism, but I said, “Look, you did the best you could given who you were, with warts and all. I did the best I could too. I love you and I know you love me. And if you know what I’m saying, can you squeeze my hand?” And she squeezed it really hard. That was the last time I saw her.

I was born into the Jewish religion. I’m not a huge organized religion person, and I’d feel a lot better if I could see some proof. On the other hand, I’m convinced the big bang wasn’t Hugh Hefner’s first party at the mansion. I think maybe there was also some kind of spiritual thing going on: “All right, there’s going to be a big bang, and then we’re going to have some apes, and the apes are going to evolve.” I think something came first, and that’s where I’m at. I’m very spiritual in a lot of ways. Like Spinoza said,
“God is everywhere.” I have personal ideas of what a deity is, and it saved me. Initially I had problems getting sober because I felt, being an agnostic, I was being forced into being more spiritual. I hated it. I remember in college when a new band came out, like Led Zeppelin or something, as great as they are, I waited months to buy their record. I hated to follow the line around the record store. I disliked following. I felt like people were forcing me to believe in something I didn’t believe in. It took me some time, but I found something other than Richard Lewis, because Richard Lewis was going to kill me. So that was a good thing.

I guess with women, though, I was an affection junkie. I don’t think I was so much a sex addict as I was an affection junkie. I really needed women. Laughs were great and accolades for my art were good, but women …

I guess it had a lot to do with my mom, in that I felt rejected by her so much of the time. She had no choice but to reject me, because a myriad of reasons stemming from her own complexes made it so that she just couldn’t accept me. She would’ve had such a nicer time if she could have. I would always hear, “Oh, your mother’s so proud of you,” but in reality, she had a hard time being proud of me. I think I searched out as many women as I possibly could. Being well known, it was easy to meet women, but it was empty.

This past year I ran into a lovely woman whom I recognized, and we’re friends now, again, but this is how bad it got towards the end. She came over and introduced herself. I had forgotten her name. I had gone out with her about three years before I bottomed, so I was really on a bad roll. Apparently, she told me, we had gone out for four months, and I had no recollection of making love with her, kissing her, seeing her. I totally blocked out the whole relationship. I remembered her. I remembered who introduced me to her. And then she started telling me specific events of parties that I recalled. She knew my license plate! She’s a producer and married now and has a beautiful child. This episode scared the shit out of me. A four-month relationship! If you can’t remember dating a woman for four months! Now that we’ve become really great friends, she has shared something interesting with me. She only went out with alcoholics. She had a problem with commitment back then. Finally though, she met her
husband-to-be, and I was the last drunk that she went out with. Thank God! She said, “You know, when they carried you out of the restaurant on New Year’s Eve, I thought to myself, ‘You know, it’s time maybe to find another kind of guy.’”

So things got really bad. As my therapist told me, I needed to get as much affection as possible from women to prove to myself that I was worthy of a woman’s love. Writing and performing was a natural high, a way to express myself. I was scared when I started, like everyone else. I struggled. I was poor, but I didn’t care. I had this tremendous passion for comedy, and it took me ten, fifteen years to make anything close to a decent living, but I couldn’t care less. I felt like a million bucks, I really did. I felt like I was living in a castle. I was going on stage in the early days in New York for free. Getting laughs, talking about my feelings, and that’s all that mattered. I really needed that. Unfortunately, alcohol came into my life. Although at the beginning I knew how to manipulate the booze while perfecting my craft, in the end I finally couldn’t.

At the height of some of the greatest things in my career, I quit. I could have made a fortune at stand-up and put so much away, but I knew in the back of my mind that I would have blown it. Drinking was affecting my performance, so I just coasted.

I remember once in Hollywood during this time, I went to a screening of Penny Marshall’s movie
A League of Their Own
, a baseball movie. I drank most days, unless I thought I had the flu. If I wasn’t working, I would often binge, but I wasn’t stumbling around like a Robert Louis Stevenson pirate all the time. You know, I’d had horrible days, and normal drinking days, and some days nothing at all. On this day, I had a little dinner and a couple glasses of red wine. The premiere was at a huge theater in Hollywood, with everybody there, every high roller in town. I was in a relatively successful sitcom at the time, with Jamie Lee Curtis. Everybody knew me. So I went and sat in the front row, and as soon as the curtain opened, I fell asleep. Literally fell asleep. I don’t know if I snored. I could have walked in my sleep. I could have gone shopping for pajamas next door. I have no idea what I did, but as soon as I heard applause, it woke me up. I don’t recall my exact feeling, but I knew that I had to fake something really major, ’cause
I didn’t see the movie. Forget about being rude—falling asleep! I wish someone would have tapped me on the shoulder … “Wake up, jerk!” Instead they let me snooze for two hours.

So I walk up out of the theater and hear, “Hey Richard, Richard, over here!” The cameras—
Entertainment Tonight
,
Access Hollywood
—all those shows are there. “What did you think, Richard?” … “Unbelievable! Tom Hanks. Is he ever bad?” I was going way over the top. It was a good film, I eventually saw it, but I was so nervous that I hadn’t seen it that I was making it like
Citizen Kane
.

So I got home and said, “Wow, I dodged a bullet.” I thought, “Great, who knew?” About three in the morning, I got a call from a friend who knew I had a drinking problem. He said, “Let me tell you one thing, Richard. If you think nobody in Hollywood thinks you’re alcoholic, I got news for you. Everybody knows.” Then he hung up. And I still had three years left in my run.

I just had lunch with a friend of mine who was very responsible for my intervention. She and another friend set up the intervention in 1994 to get me to this great doctor in New York. I was in a hotel, and I was out of it. They barged in the door, all of them, including my sister. That did it. When my sister came up from Maryland along with my friends, that connection with my family just brought me down. I would have gone to their doctor but not with the same kind of import, if my sister hadn’t shown up there.

I ended up going into rehab. I didn’t do the twenty-eight days. I wish I had. I would have learned more about my disease had I stayed. But I worked my ass off. I couldn’t believe I had ended up such a mess. Like I said, I left the facility because I felt ashamed when other people recognized me. So I flew home, but the next day, I went to a support group and I haven’t left since.

When I think back now, had I bottomed by the time I got to rehab, I would have stayed. I wasn’t ready. I used the fact that people pointed and said, “That’s Richard Lewis,” and that shame caused me to bolt. But the truth is I wasn’t ready. I wanted to see if I could still do it.

There’s a guy, a very famous songwriter and a real recluse, who lived a mile away from me. I’ll never forget this. I was in my house. I had been
doing cocaine for about six days, and I looked like hell. I knew this guy had done coke, but that he didn’t do it anymore. I was scared, so I reached out to this guy. I knew he wouldn’t throw me into a rehab again but was somebody who understood the disease. He flew down to my house and sat there with me. He’s one of the most brilliant songwriters in the world, a rock-and-roll guy.

In my house, an old house in Hollywood, I have a lot of photographs of dead people who OD’d. Lenny, Joplin, so many. And this guy sat there, and he looked around. He told me about Miles Davis and Tim Hardin, an old folkie that I loved, and he said to me, “Look, Richard, these guys checked out way before they had to.” He said, “You don’t have to check out now. You’re going to check out, but you don’t have to.” I started crying. I was scared. I thought it was over.

He left, but he started faxing me. Faxing me these beautiful letters of support. Then I called somebody, a very prominent sober person in one of my support groups, and he zoomed right over, like my songwriter pal. He said, “Okay, here’s what you’re gonna do.” Whatever the guy said, I was going to do. If the guy said, “Don’t eat mustard,” I wouldn’t have eaten mustard. And you know, it worked. I listened. I’m a decent actor. I know how to listen, but for a long time, I wouldn’t listen about alcohol. I changed when I started to take direction.

I’ve also learned how to help friends. I never knew when to stop trying to help, and it took a few years to learn that they have to want it. It was really hard for me to let go. To say, “I’m here. You know where to reach me. Get sober and we’ll get help.” For years I would go to friends’ houses. They were high; it was insane. It almost brought me down. I was told by people with long-term sobriety: “They’re high, you say no. You want to get sober, call me, and I’ll help you.” I couldn’t understand that. Now I get it. I have to watch out for my own sobriety.

One reason I love being sober is that I thought about this guy I saw before coming to New York, who slipped last week, who I spoke to this morning. I wouldn’t have got up at six in the morning and written him this long e-mail. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was drinking. I couldn’t have helped this guy. 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 greatest 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 to my life.