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Source: Max W. & Ruth B – SENY 1961 – Reel 0805-62 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: max-w-and-ruth-b-seny-1961-reel-0805-62-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:46:30
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Bill, this next is the open meeting of the same convention that Tom spoke on, The Old-Timer. Of particular interest here, I think, is the leader, Max W.. You may have read, I'm sure you've read in the papers, even though it happened here in New York, about the two young girls that were killed and the several fellows they picked up for their death. And one girl was Max's daughter. Max is a very big man in CBS television and radio chain.
He's a brother of Philip W., the writer. They're both members of Alcoholics Anonymous. As you'll get from when Max started to lead this meeting, he was quite confused. I don't know why, but he got into one of his favorite kicks about famous alcoholics of the past. And he meandered on. And when you hear him finally go into his introductions, it's because one of our old-timers, in fact, our first delegate here in southeastern New York, Henry Zola, went up to him with a note.
And Max read it and then went into his regular meeting. And Henry just wrote simply on the note, When the hell are you going to talk AA? So I hope you enjoy this meeting. On the whole, the meeting was pretty good. Max W., the Lenox Hill Group. Thank you, Ralph. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Max W.. I thought I'd spend a little preliminary time talking a little bit about my own family and the drinking in my own family.
I remember about five years ago, when I felt reasonably secure as a non-drinking alcoholic, my brother Phillip visiting me in New York. He lives in Miami. And saying, I've spent $60,000 in 25 years trying to learn how to drink normally. How come I have trouble with whiskey and you don't? And I said, because you drink it. You'll be relieved to know that after spending all that money and those years and that anguish, and Lord knows how many books he might have written that he couldn't, he joined our fellowship three years ago this coming October.
Speaking of Phil, take me back to 1936, when I think for the first time in my life I realized that alcohol was a rather terrifying dynamic. It had been an extremely pleasant one up to that time as far as I was concerned. I had an interesting job at CBS. There was a lot of drinking. I was a healthy young fellow. It didn't do anything to me. My older brother Phil and my younger brother Ted went to Russia.
We maintained an elaborate, profane, happy correspondence all the time they were on this tour. Phil was doing a series of pieces for the Saturday Evening Post. On a vacation at Lake George, I had a telephone call from a tiny little post office and postmistress in a place called Silver Bay, who had called me out of a dining room the first day that I arrived there. And she said, is this Max? And I said, yes.
And she said, this is Helen Brasted. She was the wife of a judge there and the postmistress. And then she started to cry. And I said, come on, Helen, what's the matter? And she turned the phone over to her husband, who read a message to the effect that my brother Ted had been killed in Warsaw in a freakish accident, which we afterwards immediately determined was due entirely to being drunk.
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In fact, he rolled off the roof of a hotel and died of multiple fractures of the skull.
[00:05:08]
I had the unhappy chore at that time of walking down along a small hillside to tell my father that his youngest son had been killed. My drinking was normal for about 12 years. I think that I became an alcoholic about 1946. It's a curious thing, and I've heard it recited from platforms four or five times now. There is a conviction among a certain few zealots, perhaps, among us, that if you become an alcoholic ever, you were an alcoholic at the beginning.
This intrigues me. I don't believe it's true. I do believe that my own drinking was quite harmless for nearly a decade, perhaps more. As I review my own situation, as I force myself into the merciless reexamination of the agonies that I put myself through and the humiliations that I put my family through and the disappointments that I expose my friends to, I do find that I can isolate specific examples that are incontrovertibly alcoholic drinking.
Long before 1946, perhaps as far back as 1941 or 1942, this has been reassuring to me and severely cautioning to me. I'm not going to tell you everything that happened to me. I'll tell you a little bit about it. I was in a business, and still am, where you could drink as much as you wanted to, and as long as you showed up and did your work, no questions were asked. It was an entertainment business, radio and then television.
A great deal of drinking was expected. There's a great deal of entertaining of clients. The performing talent, as a rule, is pretty disciplined, as motion picture people usually are. They don't drink, or they drink very sparingly. But the people that handle the shows and produce them and write them and fuss with them and everything else except the great body of people, except those that are right in front of the microphone or the camera, are often a pretty boozy gang.
They may be very gifted, but they're also… I enjoyed this tremendously. I worked hard. I got occasional advancements. When I try to think back over what kind of an alcoholic I was or what kind of a drinker in the beginning, I was sort of a burbling, ubiquitous, euphectic, exuberant pest. I'd drink with anybody. I loved to get eight or nine hundred people together and get them all drunk and go over to Palisades Amusement Park.
I had a certain amount of success at this from time to time. There are a lot of very happy and absurd remembrances of these days. I don't think it interfered with my work. Every year I'd get another book out or get a play written. People used to ask me why I drank so much, and I said that I drank because I was so frustrated. They said that how could I be frustrated because every book that I wrote was published and every play that I wrote was produced.
I said I'm frustrated because nobody reads the books and the plays close out of town, which was true. I think it may have been one of the true contributors to the increase in my intake. I believe, in other words, that I began drinking with increasing dedication to smother increasing disappointment. I'm through with that. Disappointments don't disturb me anymore. I finally got to the point where one day in the middle of the traffic mall in Park Avenue,
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up near my apartment, I was going down to make a presentation of an important advertising campaign, the television and radio side of it, that I'd been working on for two or three months. It was in extremely good shape. I was in the presence of a critical and important opportunity for myself. A lot of people were counting on my performance that morning. At 10 o'clock, on my way to the 86th Street Downtown Express Subway, I realized that I couldn't make it, that although people didn't stare at me on the street, although that I walked perfectly well, and to a casual passer-by was a normal male on his way to work, I was stoned.
I knew I couldn't speak. And all of a sudden I began to cry like a child. And I had never done this in my entire life. I blew this one and blew it big and blew it bad. And that night I called up a doctor and I asked him if he thought I was an alcoholic and whatnot. And I told him what had happened and what I had been doing and how much worrying about liquor I had been going through privately and with constant reminders from my wife.
And he said, Would you do anything that I tell you to? And I said, Yes, I'll do anything. He said, Do you really want to stop drinking? And I said, Yes, I do. And I did. And this was a doctor by the name of Derry Dunham that has helped many people, probably many in this room. He said, See you followed. I will be in your office at 2.30 tomorrow if you are going to your office. And I said, Yes, I'm going.
He said, Are you drinking now? And I said, Yes. He said, Are you drunk now? And I said, Yes. This is 10.30 at night. He said, You don't sound drunk. And I said, Well, I've been getting away with this for a long, long time. And at 2.30 the next afternoon a man was introduced to me, brought into my office. He was very calm and cool and very tall and beautifully dressed and something very special about him.
I'll tell you who he is in a minute. And he said, Boy, you look terrible. He said, You look like you need a hooker or whiskey in the worst way. And I thought, My Lord, this is a real sharp lay psychiatrist. He understands this. And he said, I saw a bar in the building on the way up. And I was delighted that he would suggest supposedly coming to help me that he'd get me a drink. And we went down to Stouffer's Bar right across from Grand Central.
I was in the 100 East 42nd Street building in those days. And I never had to ask for a drink at that bar. They knew me, and they just set it on the bar, and I'd snap it down, and I had two or three. And then I turned to this fellow, and I said, I said, Aren't you going to have anything? And he said, Oh, no. He said, Didn't Gary tell you I don't drink? He said, I'm an Alcoholics Anonymous. And I said, Well, what are you allowing me to have this for?
And he said, Well, he said, This is sheer privilege if you want it. He said, I think medicinally it looked like you needed it. I think that the psychological comfort that I received from my first introduction to a well-known practitioner like Steve Reynolds of the principles of AA did more to encourage me to pursue it than anything that has ever happened to me. I did drink off and on for a year and a half after I started to go to meetings.
Each time the benders diminished. The very first meeting I went to, I knew that somehow I was in the right room and that I was going to stop drinking. I didn't know when or what part it was. I am a diagnostic. You people are my religion. And I said, That's very nice. I dreaded meeting people that I was going to know because it was in my own neighborhood. The first thing that I did was to run into four people that I knew, three of whom I had known for over 20 years, one of whom, Tom Shirley, I'd had at least 50,000 drinks with.
I'm sure we had at least 50,000 drinks without either of us knowing the other was ever going to be a problem.
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And the last one was a chap that I had bought a television show from that very afternoon. I read all the literature, and after I was through drinking, I don't know when it stopped, I think it was about nine years ago, I think I came into my first meeting in 1949. I don't go with this anniversary business. I'm not conscious of them. I just know that I've had a useful and reasonably tranquil time for the first time in my whole life because I know you people.
Reading the literature and being a writer myself, of sorts, I have a terrible temptation to do a little editing from time to time, even of some of the sacred writings of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, the test questions that we have to see if you have drifted from social drinking to problem drinking, there's a list that begins, Do you lose time from work due to drinking? I believe this is a sign if you're losing time from your job from drinking.
I bought that list, and I have appended a few more that I'd like quickly to read to you before I bring on your first speaker. I not only believe that you're an alcoholic if you're losing time from your job from drink. I believe you're an alcoholic if you begin to run out bills when you had not done so before. I believe you're an alcoholic if any feeling of fear accompanies your drinking. I believe you're an alcoholic if any feeling of remorse accompanies your drinking.
We all know that you're an alcoholic if you can't remember what happened last night. I believe you're an alcoholic if, from having been a group drinker, you begin to drink alone. This had happened to me. I believe you're an alcoholic if, in making out the family budget, whiskey is either never mentioned or it doesn't cost anything. I believe you're an alcoholic if you hide whiskey. I believe you're an alcoholic if you steal whiskey.
I believe you're an alcoholic if you think about whiskey even when you're not drinking whiskey. I believe you're an alcoholic if you lie about how much you drink. I believe you're an alcoholic if your suspicion of other people's motives is increasing. I believe you're an alcoholic if your circle of friends is shrinking, or if the quality of your friends is going down, or if the quality of your wardrobe is going down.
I believe you're an alcoholic if you arrange to be coughing when the court is squeaking. I believe you're an alcoholic if your kids become frightened when they see you opening a bottle. I believe you're an alcoholic if your dog becomes frightened. I think you're an alcoholic if people start avoiding you, and if you start avoiding people. I feel very sure you're an alcoholic if you won't answer the door, answer the phone, or open your mail.
You may be an alcoholic if you start to drink out of the neck of the bottle. You may be one if you stop measuring drinks. You are surely one if it makes you feel safer and more comfortable to hear how drunk someone else got. You are positively an alcoholic if it makes you feel safer and more comfortable to tell how drunk someone else got. And I finally feel that you are an alcoholic if you come to AA meetings hunting for evidence to prove that you are not an alcoholic.
Some few years ago, we had a show on the radio called King's Row. Henry Bellin's famous book became a dear friend of mine. And I flew down to Jackson, Mississippi several times to see her.
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She's passed away. I met an astonishing woman down there. A woman who, in my view, is writing the most beautiful prose that is being written by any living American woman. Her name is Eudora Welty, from the same town of Jackson, Mississippi. Your first speaker, a delegate from Mississippi, has been active in service affairs for four years. She was on the GSO staff. She found her own way into AA in Washington, D.C. about 20 years ago.
Exactly 20 years ago. She's the founder of the first AA group in Jackson, Mississippi, and is the director of the Alcoholism Information Center there. If Eudora Welty is writing the most beautiful English prose, I have been told by many who have heard her that Ruth B. is speaking it. Ruth B.. Applause That's enough to make anybody's knees shake. My name is Ruth B., and I am an alcoholic. I'm awfully glad to be here tonight.
Tremendously glad. I love New York and New York AA and New York AA. In fact, I've conducted a long and sincere love affair with New York City since I can remember. Probably the longest and most sincere love affair that I have ever conducted in my chaotic and unstable life. So it makes me very happy to be here. Yes, 20 years ago, I went to my first AA meeting. I had been an alcoholic for many years, I believe.
I don't know about being born an alcoholic, and I don't worry about it. But I think from the time that I first began to drink, I had trouble with alcohol. I had trouble with myself long before I drank. I was an only child, and I was a pretty lonely one. I always wanted to reach people and to feel warm and friendly, and to have them feel that way about me. But there always seemed to be a sort of a glass between us, like a plate glass.
I could see them, and they were moving and talking, but somehow I couldn't reach them, and they couldn't reach me. And when I first began to drink, I found out right away that alcohol dissolved that glass wall. And I could reach people and be friendly, and they quit with me. And I thought, isn't this wonderful? This is the way to live. This is what I've been looking for. I was quite young when I first started to drink, and it was in the prohibition era, so-called.
It was the smart thing to do. You were sort of judged to be sophisticated, and heaven only knows I wanted to be sophisticated in my teens. By the number of Johns or Joes you knew and the number of Big Easy cards you carried, I sure carried an awful lot of them. It wasn't very long before I began to lose friends. I lost them so fast that I hardly remembered who they had been. And people started running when they saw me coming with a drink under my belt or through the liquor out of the window, and themselves too, if they could.
I sure brought a lot of problems to the bottle, and together we sure messed everything up. I think the world lost a great dramatic actress when alcoholism seized me.
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But I certainly put on performances for every one I knew on every drink as it came. And if there wasn't any serious situation when I entered a group, there was an awful serious one by the time I'd been there a short while. I don't know why I'm an alcoholic. I used to try and find out, you know, books this high, shells other than that long. Who had done this terrible thing to me? I never did find out, and I don't think anybody knows today. It no longer worries me.
I spent many, many years looking for a whipping boy on whom to blame all my difficulties. I spent many, many years looking for a whipping boy on whom to blame all my difficulties. And my family were my favorite targets. My father was a politician, and my stepfather was an internationally known psychiatrist, and my mother was a Shakespearean actress, and I thought this was quite a fertile field of whipping boys.
And when I was about 16, my mother married the psychiatrist. He was superintendent of a large mental hospital in Washington, D.C. And people were unkind enough to say that she had an ulterior motive in marrying this man and moving out to the hospital with her family and her daughter. And there I rapidly became a psychiatrist. It only took me about two weeks. I saw no sense in spending all these years studying. He had a degree, and I was turned loose in a large psychiatric library. I could even pronounce some of the words.
And I knew exactly what was wrong with everybody else, and would tell you so, which made me quite popular. And the only sad part about it was that I never recognized that there was anything wrong with me. I didn't know that I had to look within myself for the source of my own difficulty. I made everything very, very complicated. Well, finally even I recognized that something was very badly wrong, and I agreed to go to a sanitarium and take psychiatric therapy.
I was very proud of going out under my own steam, but actually I was just about to be placed there, whether I wanted to go or not. This left a shred of my dignity and self-esteem, I guess. And I went to a little psychiatrist who knew nothing about alcoholism, and I didn't either, so we had a fine time. He helped me, I think, in a number of respects. I think he helped me to see that I was the source of many of my, or most of my own difficulties, but he didn't really know much about alcoholism in those days.
And he got awfully worn out. This was a long, terrible struggle. And he finally found AA. He was so desperate. I wasn't. But he was. He was so desperate that he looked around to find some place to sort of dump me, I think, really. And that was 20 years ago, last February, that I heard about AA. The first article in the Saturday Evening Post had not come out. We had had no national publicity, and there was a little group there in Washington of about 15 people.
He gave me the address and told me the names of two members, and I went down there one night. I thought it was curiosity. He didn't tell me exactly what it was. He said a group of people who had drinking problems, and they got together and talked about it, and he thought that they were doing a marvelous job. And this made me very curious indeed. And this made me very curious indeed, and I put it off for a long time, but finally one night, I went, and I went with a friend of mine, we'd been incarcerated in the same loony bin, and we ran into each other on the street, both sober, and over a chocolate ice cream soda, I told him about this thing called AA,
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and he said, well, let's go down, let's give it a try, let's see what it is, well, I was all horsed up, I had my defenses all up, and I had a hat on this big, a cigarette holder that long, and heels this high, and I think I had false eyelashes on, and nobody was going to get near me, see, wow, I was hostile, especially to women, they were competition, I didn't want to think so, but they were, I was a pretty hostile character, and a very sick person, I know that now, but I walked in with a very negative attitude, one, you know, I'll come see what these poor people are doing about their drinking problems, then I decided as I listened that they were crazy, and I felt sorry for them, and thought I'd stay through the meeting and let them meet me, and I'd put them, you know, set them straight about a lot of this stuff that my psychiatrist and I just didn't go along with the stuff they were saying, I mean, this was utterly ridiculous, so I managed to sit through it.
Somebody mentioned God, and that nearly sent me right out the first window. You see, I had several serious illnesses, one of them was really, I could have been spared that, I wanted to be an intellectual, and believe me, that is an illness, and coupled with alcoholism, it's almost fatal. So this business about God was for the peons, you know, for the unwashed, and the uninitiated, and the poor people who had nothing in this life to look forward to. That's how sick a person I was.
But I've been coming back to AA ever since that night. I didn't know why then, but I have a faint idea why now. I found something in that room that night, something that is in this room tonight, or any other room in any part of the world, where any AA group is meeting. I found warmth, and acceptance, and love, and understanding, and a group of people who could come out 100% practically to me, I couldn't walk toward them at all.
And you know, for the first time in my life, I had a great experience, and I since then experienced it many, many times. For the first time in my life, someone met me with acceptance and warmth for the thing that I had become, what I was that night. I wasn't welcomed because of who I was, or what my family was, or any other reasons, except I was a drunk. This was wonderful. I had had no experience with love or consideration for others. I was much too self-involved. And I think that you have to be loved in this particular fashion first, before you can love this way yourself.
And I think that's what that little group of AAs gave me that night. And all of you in AA have never ceased to give since then. I was a pretty resistant customer. I'm sure it's old hat to you, but I was much like the man who gets up for his first talk in AA, and he's terribly nervous, and a voice in the back of the room yells at him and says,
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ah, why don't you sit down, you stink. And the poor guy, this nearly throws him, and he turns to the chairman and says, go on. So he got up again, and he gave his name, said I'm an alcoholic, and the same voice yells out and says, ah, why don't you sit down, you stink. Well, this does it. And he turns to the chairman and he says, what am I going to do with that fellow back there? And the chairman says, go on talking. He's been coming around here for a year, and that's the first sign of interest he's ever shown.
Well, I sure showed a lot of signs of interest like that. I was almost unbearable. You know, a 20-year story in AA is an awful long story, and I'm not going to take it through, throw you with, you throw it with me. When I collapsed, I didn't get sober right away, but after about a year and a half of battling it out, you know, that was early days in AA, and I used to hear these guys, and there weren't many women, hardly any, maybe one or two, and they'd all been in jail.
And I used to sit on the back row there and think, I don't think I've got this, whatever it is. I just couldn't have. I mean, of course, I'd had DTs and been in numerous sanitariums, you know, a few little things like that, but I'd never been in jail. But six months after I was in AA, the police department of the city of Washington, D.C., accommodated me, and I think that that really did something.
One of the few things that ever broke through the shell I'd build up, and that really hurt. I came back in pretty chastened, and after about a year and a half I began to develop something that I had never been able to do before. I began to listen a little bit to what somebody else said and not try to do all the talking myself. And I began to hear some things that made an awful lot of sense to me. It took me a long time to read the big book. I never did memorize the steps. I used to say it was because I wanted to have to read them every time anybody referred to them, but I think I was just lazy.
But I began to hear some things that made it all fit into place. And for ten years I went along and stayed sober. I left out the first half of the first step and skipped all the others down to the second half of the twelfth step. And that makes a pretty poor crutch to lean on. I think perhaps my intense activity, my fascination with people, with the group therapy part of the program sustained me. I think I reached some sort of a plateau where I was reasonably comfortable.
And then some pressures came along. Oh, a lot had come in those ten years. And I had, you know, they say you never stand still in AA. You either grow or you go backwards. And I'd been going backwards for quite a while. I'm not the kind who woke up and found a drink in my hand or came to at the bar. I went out and bought it. I remember that very well.
[00:40:06]
It was a horrible experience, and I think that I was insane at the moment. Because after ten years in AA, I rationalized that night that I would go out and buy two fifths and do a little drinking all by myself. Nobody would know it the next day. And I think that, on my part, was insanity. Well, then came the tough ground. I came out of that so full of resentment, I guess I was already, and so bitter that for four years I battled it out alone.
AA couldn't help me. Nobody could. And I stayed away from AA, and I tried everything else you've ever heard of. Every means of self-expression and escape. But nothing, nothing seemed to fill the void. And I was getting sicker and sicker and more and more embroiled in my, stewing in my own juice. And of course, you know what finally brought me back. It was more drinking. It wasn't persuasion. More drinking finally put the final bite, and I had nowhere else to go. I knew that.
My AA friends used to say to me all the time, Ruth, you've got to start at the beginning. And that would make me so doggone mad. Who, me? Well, I knew all about AA. After ten years, this was perfectly ridiculous. Of course, what happened was that my poor little ego was so wounded. I had lost something. I'd lost my prestige. And I couldn't take it. Finally, I really crawled back into AA and took the first part of the first step. And I don't think you can ever quite take the first part of the twelfth step.
I think this is a long, slow process of growth. I'm not sorry that this happened to me, because I feel tonight that I have something far richer and more precious than I ever had in the ten years that I was sober in AA before. And so I am the gainer, perhaps, by being the loser. I have, I think, become a much less complicated AA in the way I try to work this program. I had long left off some of the things that we are all told, suggested that we do when we come in.
It had been many a day, if indeed ever, that I had awakened in the morning and very simply asked the God of my understanding to give me a day of sobriety. But I do it now. And I forgot, if indeed I had ever done it, when I went to bed at night to thank the God of my understanding for having given me this day of sobriety. But I do it now. And so, you see, I did have to go back and make a beginning. I couldn't make the same beginning, how could I? It's like that wise old Greek said several thousand years ago, no man steps into the same river twice.
Because the man changes and the river changes. And I had changed too. But I made another beginning, and I feel richer tonight, in everything except worldly goods, than I ever have felt in my life.
[00:45:09]
It is due to people just like you. That's where I learned everything that I consider worthwhile, that I have really learned and taken into myself. And one of the most important gifts that you have given me is some small ability to feel love and interest and concern in another human being besides myself. I consider this one of the greatest gifts that AA has given me. And so that's the way I feel about you people here tonight.
It's wonderful to be with you. I just can't thank you enough for letting me come, and I hope I'll see a lot of you before I go way back to Jackson, Mississippi. Thank you. Thank you.