Runners-Up: an actor, an actress, a mayor, a Congressman, a writer and a rock star
Runners-up for top story of the month:
Actor Lane Garrison, a co-star of the TV series “Prison Break,”reported by Beverly Hills police as having a blood alcohol level of over .20 per cent along with cocaine in his system after the crash in December that killed a teenager. I wrote in the January report that his attorney, Harland Braun, asserted that Garrison had consumed only two drinks that evening. I also suggested that Braun seems to have made a career of enabling alcoholics (prior clients include actor Robert Blake and former basketball player Dennis Rodman). Braun now says the actor’s memory of how much he consumed may be unclear “because he’s been in a horrible accident.”No, his memory is unclear because he may have been in an alcohol- and cocaine-induced blackout that resulted in the death of a 17-year-old boy. A .20 requires the consumption of not two drinks but rather 12 (two bottles of wine; 18 ounces of 80-proof liquor) in three hours for a 200-pound person. Police recommended that he be charged with gross vehicular manslaughter, which could result in up to 13 years in a real prison.
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, apologizing for having an affair with a good friend and trusted aide’s wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, Newsom’s appointments secretary. Infidelity is almost as apple pie in the lives of addicts as verbal and emotional abuse. Newsom has announced that he plans to seek counseling for “alcohol use,”explaining that while “my problems with alcohol are not an excuse for my personal lapses in judgment,”life might be better without alcohol. Mayor Newsom, 39, was recently reported to be dating a 20-year-old. Vast age differences are also common in the love affairs of alcoholics because of their ego-inflating potential (“look at the babe I caught!â€). There’s more under “co-dependents-of-the-month.â€
Former Ohio Representative Bob Ney, the only Congressman to be criminally charged in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, sentenced to 30 months in prison. Ney, now in recovery, apologized in the courtroom to family, friends and constituents while taking “full responsibility”and accepting the consequences for his actions. The judge in the case, Ellen S. Huvelle, said, “an alcohol problem doesn’t explain everything.”No it doesn’t your honor. It required that he attain a position from which he could wield power and act accordingly. Sorry Judge Huvelle, but everything else is explained. His physician, Dr. Renata Dela Cruz, wrote the judge, “I became concerned that his use of alcohol was influencing his behavior.”A doctor got it right, for a change.
Writer Barbara Seranella, a former auto mechanic, dead of liver disease at age 50 while awaiting what would have been a third liver transplant. She was jailed 13 times by age 21 due to behaviors resulting from addiction, readily admitting, “I got into liquor and drugs and underwent a complete personality change.”Facing a long sentence at Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles, she made the decision to get clean and sober and appears to have stayed that way. According to a 1997 L.A. Times interview, her husband, whom she married in 1994 after he made her service manager at a Brentwood, California gas station he owned, told her that he didn’t want her hauling engines out of cars when she was 50 years old and asked, “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”She told him she’d like to write. She wrote about the street life she knew via a character named Miranda “Munch”Mancini, a young prostitute who attempts to rid herself of booze, other drugs and her biker buddies after becoming involved in a murder investigation and assuming a new identity as a car mechanic. The book, No Human Involved, made its way to number five on the Los Angeles Times best seller list in 1997. She went on to write seven more mysteries featuring Munch, which also chronicled her personal progress.
Singer and songwriter for the 1960’s band, The Mamas and the Papas, Denny Doherty, dead from kidney disease at age 66. The group had six Top 10 hits in a two-year career together, including “California Dreamin'”and “Monday, Monday,”which strongly influenced the “California sound”of the era. In fact, several musicians and I recently brainstormed the question, are there any non-addicts who made revolutionary changes in music? and we found none. Mozart, Beethoven, at least three of four Beatles, Elvis, James Brown, Miles Davis”all addicts, willing to take risks in their craft that the sober among us wouldn’t dare. The other members of the Mamas and the Papas were all addicts as well. Their short stint together ended amid “exhaustion”and interpersonal “tensions,”which included Doherty having an affair with his band mate and best friend John Phillips’ wife Michele. While as mentioned in the Gavin Newsom paragraph that affairs are rather normal in the lives of addicts, this one was a bit out of the ordinary: the three of them lived together and the lovers kept the secret for a time. Doherty is believed to have gotten clean a couple of decades ago and likely remained”and died”sober.
Actress Yvonne De Carlo, dead at age 84 from complications of heart disease. De Carlo, who played Lily Munster in the 1960s television comedy, “The Munsters,”reportedly stopped drinking in 1998 subsequent to a stroke, a year after her son was likely murdered by a drug dealer. Her father abandoned the family when she was a child, after which she lived with grandparents and cousins. She played the wife of Moses in the 1956 movie “The Ten Commandments”and listed 22 lovers in her 1987 autobiography, including Howard Hughes, Burt Lancaster, Billy Wilder and Robert Stack. Her only marriage was to Hollywood stunt man Robert Morgan, who “had a bad temper and squandered”her money. Alcoholics are often children of alcoholics and marry what they are used to, which is how the disease travels generationally. Still, we’ll miss you, Lilly.