Marty M. with Rev. Sally, Dave B. and Bill S. — 7th Archives Workshop — 2002

Audio

About this recording

Topic

Presentation with Rev. Sally Dave B. and Bill S. 7th Archives Workshop

Speaker

Marty M

Date

2002-09-01

Transcript

Source: Marty M – Presentation with Rev. Sally Dave B. and Bill S. 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: marty-m-presentation-with-rev-sally-dave-b-and-bill-s-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:38:37

============================================================

Is Mary in the room? Is this on? Yeah. Ah, good. All right. Mary's right over there. What? Mary's there. Oh. Thank you, Mary. Some adjustment. Okay, thank you. We are very glad to be here today and very honored to be included in this group of experts. We're beginners, and we've had to learn the hard way. Fortunately, Dave has been my mentor. I'm not the primary researcher and archivist; he is, and he'll be able to tell you lots more of the kinds of things that you're interested in hearing about.

We had many resources that we had to tap for this book, and someday I can tell you about how we came to write the book, but I'm not going to start with that. Among our resources were 51 tapes of Marty and a couple of other tapes, and I bet that some of you have tapes of Marty's talks. We've acquired our tapes through various purchases, not from private collections. And our tapes span from her earliest career in 1946 until she died, two weeks before she died in 1980.

So they're fairly representative. We also had access to libraries, archives, and various kinds of letters, pictures, family pictures, and all that kind of thing. And we had access to a couple of video—they're now videos—were films, little excerpts like from The March of Time. And we had many, many, many interviews, over a hundred interviews of individuals who had personally known Marty in some capacity or other.

And those were fascinating. Some of them were from family, some were from friends, some were from different parts of her life. If some of you have read the book, you know that she had many different parts to her life. Besides being the first woman to achieve long-term sobriety in AA, she was not the first woman to come into AA. There were other women who preceded her, but who fell by the wayside for one reason or another. And there were people who ended up with longer sobriety than she did.

And you can read that story in her biography. One of the things that we were very surprised about was Marty's impact on the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm a recovered alcoholic of 25 years, just celebrated my birthday last month. And I had no idea, and of course Dave didn't through Al-Anon, that Marty had as big an impact on AA itself. We knew that she was the founder and director for her whole working life of the National Council on Alcoholism, now called National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

But we had no idea about her impact on AA, on its growth, on its membership, on the distribution, gender distribution in AA, and particularly on the numbers of AA. And for the women who are in recovery in this audience, I almost said congregation. That's the preacher in me. None of us would be here, I don't think, or certainly not in the numbers that we are. But what we also, Dave and I discovered, is that thousands and thousands of men would not have been in AA if it had not been for her devoted, consistent, passionate educational effort of whole communities and groups of people who had something to do with the healing and the hope for alcoholics and addicts. So that's the introduction, and I think Dave now would like to take you through his baby, which is this PowerPoint presentation, and tell

[00:05:04]

you a little bit about some of the people that are on it. My name is Dave, and I'm a grateful member of Al-Anon. The plan for this presentation is that Sally and I will speak alternately for maybe 35, 40 minutes. Then Bill's going to use up the rest of the hour. He says he takes only 10 minutes to tell his whole story. It's a longer one than most. But we want to finish up by 9 o'clock so we have time for questions and discussion. Also, we've got a box of books so that if anybody hasn't been able to buy a book and would like to get one tonight, that will be possible after this.

Now, you haven't heard the last from Sally. We're going to go back and forth, and we haven't got a completely rehearsed presentation. We've never talked to a group of archivists before. It's a great opportunity. I'm thrilled to do it, and I want to tell you about some of the experiences we've had. What we have in this PowerPoint presentation are mostly photographs, a few letters and things that we collected during our research on the biography, and the pictures are ones that didn't get into the book.

Hazelden was able to accept—first they wanted 15, then they wanted five, and we ended up with 25 in the book. We're very pleased that we got some nice illustrations in the book, the ones you're going to see tonight are not in the book. And I'm going to go through parts of this real fast because we don't have time to talk about each picture. But there are a few pictures around which there's some interesting stories, maybe of a research or archival nature, that we want to tell.

So here we go, and we're going to cover Marty Mann's whole life, from baptism to grave. Oh, Sally mentioned that we went to various places to get information. You may remember or recognize Judith S. in there, archivist at the GSO in New York City. She was very gracious and helpful. We got to know her and like her very much. This is Judith and Sally, and behind them are two unauthorized copies of photographs of Dr.

Bob and Bill W. Another resource was this one, National Council on Alcoholism, and this is a kind of a catalog or inventory of the collection that the National Council on Alcoholism had. There's a little story to go with this. We visited their office there at 12 West 21st Street, and they said, Gee, we just don't have much on Mary Mann. She ran this place for umpteen years, but we've lost everything.

It's gone elsewhere. We sat down at the conference table with the director and their public relations guy, Jeff Hahn, and we had a nice talk, and they said, Gee, we really want to support you and see this biography written. It needs to be written. And Jeff said, What about that stuff at Iron Mountain? And the director, Paul Wood, said, Oh, sure. You can go look at that if you like, and I'll tell you, right now you can take anything you want, return it, but I'll give you permission to take anything you want. It was a few hours' drive up the Hudson to Port Ewen.

It's a commercial business document archival facility, just beautiful, and with lots of help and Xeroxing, and this was the first of 14 inventories, 14 boxes full of stuff. We found all kinds of letters and things about her work at National Council on Alcoholism, but also baby pictures, love letters, copies of her divorce settlement, things you wouldn't expect to find in a place like that. And all on the basis of a kind of a casual chance remark, What about that stuff at Iron Mountain?

Nobody knew it was there. They'd almost forgotten about it. We've heard that since this time, since we've written the book, that that whole collection is going to go to Brown University. Another place was Syracuse University. Now Marty arranged with Syracuse to get her papers, and

[00:10:02]

I think we spent three days there. We should have spent twice that number of days. But they've got it all cataloged in a nice catalog. There are 16 or 17 pages. This is just the top of the first. But her papers consist of 10 boxes plus nine packages, things that were too big to go in boxes, 21 linear feet of documents. These are what Syracuse manages, and they're there for anyone who asks to come and see. And there were some love letters there that I want to come back to a little bit later. Here's the baptism.

We're getting started. That's Marty and her beautiful mother, Lil. Lil was a redhead. And there's Marty with a bow on top of her head when her sister Chris was born. Grandfather Christy and Marty, so with a bow. Grandfather Christy was a furrier, and so the family knew furs real well and wore them too. There's Marty beginning to grow up, but still a girl. Twins were born when she was around 14 years old, and these angelic twins here are Betty and Bill.

We were able to interview Bill. Bill was very helpful in giving us information nobody else could have. He was her brother. A year after the last interview, he died. This book couldn't have been written any later than it was. Marty came down with tuberculosis when she was 14, and that was an event of great significance because it was a disease that caused her to change her lifestyle. It was life-threatening.

She had to live with it for the rest of her life. She had to take care of herself. It was an unknown disease. There was stigma associated with it. People thought she had done something wrong or hadn't lived right to come down with tuberculosis. They sent her off to Pasadena, where the air was pure and clear, and hence the picture of Marty with the orange tree there. You want to go on for a while? What do I press?

The right mouse button. That was the left one. I'm sorry. Here we go. Okay. Okay. Well, Marty's growing up is what Marty's doing. And shortly before she went abroad for her last year of schooling, she was at the family home in summer home north of Chicago. She came from an extremely wealthy family. You're getting ahead of yourself. Yeah, I'm pressing it. How do I back up? You can see why you need Dave.

Okay. So they spent that summer there at Highland Park, and then she went off to a finishing school in Florence, Italy. It was the last, for one year, that was all finishing school was, and then you came home and you were a debutante. That was the last formal schooling she ever had until she went to Yale University for two weeks or a summer session or something, when she was about to start the National Council on Alcoholism after she got sober.

This is her brother in the Army. One of the twins. One of the twins, yes, one of those angelic twins. When we started writing, doing the research on the biography, there was considerable discussion about whether Marty had ever really, in quotes, been married, because it was known by some people that she was a lesbian. And so why did she have this Mrs., and maybe that was just a cover for her orientation. Well, it took Dave about two minutes to find out through his genealogical expertise that of course she had been married, and we have all the papers for it, as well as the divorce papers. This was her husband.

He was in the Navy, obviously, at the time, and his name was John Blakemore. They were married all of three months when she decided that he was an alcoholic, and she divorced him. He really was a— He really was a stunningly far-gone alcoholic when

[00:15:03]

he was in his cups. He was violent and abusive and absolutely uncontrollable. It was unusual for a woman in those days, in the early 1920s, to get divorced, number one. Number two, to get— if you didn't— she had so much money, though, from his money and her family's money, and there were no children involved or property, apparently, so it went along. Then they came back together when she first got sober, just as friends. From 1930 to '36, she was in England.

She went there because she was seeking her fortune. Her family had lost all its money. Her father was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic. And so she went to England, and she almost took out citizenship there. And at one point, she was asked to step in and manage this lovely inn in the little town village of Broadway. And she did that and nearly ran this poor little inn into the ground in the three months that she had it.

This is— Would you punch a drink of water? Oh, good, thank you. This is a picture of Robert Foster Kennedy. Some of you may know of him. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about him. He was a physician, a neurologist. He was head of the neurology department at Cornell Medical School. He was the position that finally accepted Marty as a patient when she was in the depths of her alcoholism, and she thought she was insane.

She didn't know what the matter with her was. No doctor could tell her. Doctors didn't know about alcoholism then. The term wasn't used. But Foster Kennedy gave her a bed in his neurology ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and kept her there for six months. And he'd come and see her once a week or so, but that was all he did in the way of treatment. She dried out. She couldn't get anything to drink.

But he arranged through friends and relations to get her accepted as a charity patient at a sanitarium in Connecticut, Blythwood. And after six months at Bellevue, she transferred to Blythwood, and that is where her real recovery began under Dr. Harry Tebow. Foster, we had a hard time finding that photograph and more information about him. He was, besides being a prominent physician in New York, he lived in Sutton Place.

He was a bon vivant. He would have dinner parties. He'd go out in the town with an opera cloak and a top hat and a monocle. He'd drop in on patients at the hospital after a night on the town. In his fifties, he married a 23-year-old student, and it was the child of that marriage that we finally tracked down through a clergy person in Puerto Rico, and we found Hester Rubin, who sent us this photo. A lot of this happened incidentally to tracking down copyrights and permissions. You are kind of worried about that, and we had it in spades writing this because everything we quoted or photograph we wanted to use, we had to track down the present owner and— To find a photograph, and the person who owned the photograph was not an easy task, but it was lots of fun. It made the whole thing an adventure.

This is Blythewood. This is 1936. I got it wrong. 38. Close. Marty's the one on the right there, the skinny one. She's just come out of Bellevue. She's on the steps of Blythewood. There are two sisters, Chris and Betty. This is taken on the Fourth of July. Marty's just gotten back from a two-week drunk, and her sisters are holding her up there. But this was the beginning of her recovery under Harry Tiebout.

I could never get permission to use this photograph. I had to steal that one, so don't tell anyone. He's an important guy and should be in the book, but he's not.

[00:20:00]

We talk about him and give him credit that he deserves. But Marty saw him every day, every working day, for an hour for years. How long was it? A year and a half, two years? And who knows what they talked about. We'd love to have heard some recordings of that. We can only guess. But he's the one who got a manuscript copy of the Big Book and gave it to her because he thought that was what she needed to know.

And she had a spiritual experience as a result of reading that. And Harry Tiebout arranged for her to go to her first AA meeting. And there she met Bill and Lois. And then she introduced Bill to Harry Tiebout and friendship ensued. And Harry Tiebout became a strong supporter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Marty's campaign to educate the world about alcoholism. This is Marty's father, Will. He was at one time wealthy.

He was the vice president of Marshall Field, but as Sally said, he was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, and he ended up destitute in New York City and died in a welfare hospital there. And Marty was around at the time, and she maintained contact. She would never give him any money. She was a good Al-Anon in that respect. There are the siblings, Betty and Bill. Bill is the one you saw in military uniform, and Chris and Marty. Marty's out of Blythewood by this time. Okay, Marty.

Now Sally's recovering. Can you hear us okay? Yeah. Marty has almost the same suit on that she did in the prior picture. She's working at Macy's. That was where she started after she came out of Blythewood. And this was her publicity picture for Macy's, and it was one that was used extensively by her infant organization, the National Council on Alcoholism, for a number of years, because NCA couldn't afford to have any publicity photos itself.

Marty never liked this picture. She said it didn't look like her at all. I skipped past Gail, but she finally, at about five years, decided she wanted to do something with her life. And so Gail was starting up the school of alcohol studies, and so she came on board there and very quickly became an important part of that community. And Bill Swegan will tell you a little bit about that when he gets up to talk. Can I interrupt? I forgot one thing I wanted to be sure to say about Foster Kennedy.

He became a strong supporter of AA, in addition to Harry Tiebout. And when the Big Book came out, they did a review of it, and they said it was of no scientific value and without merit. Very short book review. And Kennedy got up and made a speech, and he wrote a letter to the AMA protesting. They wouldn't publish his letter, but he said, among other things, I believe medical men of good will should aid these decent people rather than loftily condemn them for not being scientific. He recognized there was something there, whereas most of his colleagues said it was of no consequence. And this one, if I can read the little description below the cartoon, this poor guy doesn't know what ails him. His family and friends think he's a bad egg or worse.

The National Committee for Education on Alcoholism is going to try to get the public to understand that this bird has a disease called alcoholism, that he is worth helping, and that he can be helped. Peren, witness us. A.A.'s inquiry. You'll note that this comes from the Grapevine. Marty and Priscilla, her partner for 40 years, were two of the co-founders, the ink-stained wretches that Bill W. talks about, who were the founders of the Grapevine.

[00:25:01]

And Priscilla wrote for it, Marty wrote for it, and Priscilla was on the editorial board for many, many years. Here's some more stuff just from the Grapevine, early years, familiar to many of you, I'm sure. And Marty, the title of this one, in case you can't see it, is Women Alcoholics Have a Tougher Time. Marty tried very hard from the very beginning to interest women alcoholics in coming into A.A., and she didn't have much success.

She also was a very good strategist, and she knew that if she concentrated on women alone, instead of the community and groups as a whole, that she wouldn't be as effective. And eventually the women did start coming in, and coming in in droves. This was a newspaper story. She was a marvelous publicist, journalist. She called herself that her trade was journalism and public relations, and she was a wonderful writer. This newspaper story is interesting for one reason, though.

At the very top it says, Alcoholics Anonymous official tells of… And of course, that's not what she wrote. That's what the copy editor put on there, who was writing the headline. But that was the kind of difficulty she got into all the time. And when she started NCA, she made a conscious decision, after some thought, to say that she had found recovery in AA. And it caused more stink than you can imagine.

It nearly tore AA apart. They were so furious with her, and with Bill Wilson, who was her sponsor in Hawaii, and heck, couldn't he control her, you know, even though he had agreed to it in the beginning. So finally she decided that that was more trouble than it was worth, and so thereafter she did not mention AA at the level of press, radio, and film. But her experience with that, which you can read about in the book, is absolutely pivotal to the development of our anonymity traditions.

They might not have been hammered into shape quite so fast if it hadn't been for Marty's testing them to those limits. Do you know what year that article was? That newspaper article was? Yeah, we do. Yeah, that was a series of three articles that she wrote. It had her byline on it, and the—oh, nuts, the date isn't on here, but it was like '43, something like that, the early '40s. Can that be? No, no, no.

Later '40s. Late '40s, like '46, '47. Yeah. Okay. She used every media possible, including radio. Television, everything. She would have used the internet that had been available in her time. And she was just a great crusader. The reason I included this, you can't read the little pink thing, but she was always on the warpath about the folly of incarcerating alcoholics instead of finding treatment for them.

That's another thing we wouldn't have today if Marty hadn't laid the groundwork for treatment. Yes. Did Gips have Women Suffer Too? Yeah. Is that story her story? Yeah, yeah. That's her story in the Big Book. Right. Now, there is an interesting thing about that, because the fourth edition of the Big Book continues to have her story in it, in the Pioneers there in the first group of stories. But that group of stories is prefaced by, I can't quote it exactly because I don't have a Big Book with me, but says something like, All of these pioneers stayed sober their whole lives.

Now, AA read that manuscript, I hope, of ours, so that they know she didn't stay sober her whole life. She had a relapse when she was about 20 years sober and recovered very quickly from it, and it remained a deep, dark secret. You can read the story about it in the book. It's kind of dramatic. But, you know, AA. But you know, AA is not telling the truth. So maybe they didn't read the manuscript.

[00:30:03]

I don't know. I like to read this letter here. It's from Bill Wilson to Marty. It's dated 1949, and he says, Marty dear, at first reading, that memorandum which you dated June 30 was terribly dispiriting to me, yes, and more, it was devastating because I think I understand better than some how much of your blood and courage has gone into the committee. As one who has made an expenditure of this kind himself, I find it quite impossible to picture such a disappointment.

Then I read your footnote in there. Between the lines, I could see you at your best even though enduring the worst. Somehow I could see you rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the great flame you kindled, a flame whose warmth will be felt by many a generation of our brothers and sisters. God bless you and keep you, my dear girl. See me at any time you can. Affectionately, Bill. Then Lois added a postscript: Marty dear, your work in the National Committee has been so outstanding and so beneficial to the alcoholic that I hope you won't have any sense of failure now because there's the chance of not having the money to go on. Many AAs don't understand how much you've helped the public to understand.

Bill and I are proud of you, dear, and love you very much. Lois. So. Marty kept going, and here she is doing a radio interview in Texas. She developed contacts with organizations. Here she got something in the Stars and Stripes, and as a result of her story in Stars and Stripes, an AA group started in Tokyo. Then the great benefactor, Brinkley Smithers, appeared on the scene, a wealthy man who had been through detox over and over and over again, and he finally met Marty Mann, and with her help, he got sober, and he became a member of her board of directors.

He and his estate now is still the greatest philanthropic organization benefiting the recovery of alcoholics, the Smithers Foundation. Marty wrote two important books, New Primer on Alcoholism and Marty Mann Answers Your Questions About Drinking and Alcoholism. This is—she became president of NCA, the National Council on Alcoholism. That was her organization. This is a publicity photo, and here she's talking about the economic consequences of alcoholism and how it— These are the Pikes, Catherine and Tom Pike from Pasadena.

He was a wealthy man in California, and he was a recovered alcoholic, became interested in what she was doing, joined her board. He was a friend of Nixon and talked Nixon at the last minute on December 31st of some year into signing the legislation that established NIAAA and the recovery programs that stemmed from that. But Marty was behind that, really. This is— Part of the employee assistance programs that she promoted.

Dreamy picture by Irving Penn, the famous photographer. And Irving Penn did a lot of photographic work for Vogue magazine, and Priscilla, Marty's partner, worked for Vogue. Here's another Penn photo. That's Priscilla there, Marty on the left, Priscilla on the right. Well, they are walking on the beach. They built a cottage at Cherry Grove on Fire Island. There's a picture of the cottage. We took that there, and this is their house apartment.

They had that top floor there on right off of Cliff Avenue in Greenwich Village. This is Priscilla at work in Vogue. There's a story about this, but I won't go into it anyway. That's Alex Liberman, the art director of Vogue. Priscilla succeeded him and became the art director of Vogue magazine. That's one of Priscilla's paintings we happen to have. That's a cartoon she did for Vogue magazine, I guess.

[00:35:01]

She was an artist, and she loved art. She purchased avant-garde art. They had this Jackson Pollock in their apartment that you saw. Marty never gave up cigarettes. She tried, and her doctor finally said, Well, it's too much of a stress and strain on you. Why don't you just smoke? So she did. The movie The Lost Weekend came out, and then there were several follow-ons, and this was one of them, Smash Up. They hired Marty Mann as a consultant to go to Hollywood to— Help with that.

That's her sister, Chris, and sister Betty. There's Carson McCullers. Marty had a couple of affairs with women. Carson McCullers was one of them. And in the Syracuse library, there's a whole packet of passionate love letters from Carson to Marty. We wanted to put one of those love letters in the book, and I tried and tried to get permission. It took them a long time, but finally the literary estate said no. So we can talk about it, but there's no letter in the book.

But you can go to Syracuse University and read those love letters if you want. Another affair was with Jane Bowles. And Sally actually talked to her husband in Morocco, right, who died right after that. So many of the people we interviewed died right after we interviewed them. This is Sally hosting. Eventually Marty and Priscilla sold their property on Fire Island and in Cherry Grove and bought property in eastern Connecticut, and this is their lovely six acres in Easton.

This is just Marty professionally. This is Harold Hughes, who was the author of the act that established the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse. And he and Marty worked very, very closely together. Marty began to receive many awards and honors in her life. Here it's an honorary doctorate from Adelphi University. And in the mid-1970s, when she was semi-retired and somebody else was kind of running the shop for NCA, they had the bright idea through Walter Murphy of having an operation understanding where 100 alcoholics, recovered alcoholics, would get up in front of the public and say, I am a recovered alcoholic.

Now, most of them were in AA, but they didn't mention that. And by that time, AA was comfortable enough with, I think, with anonymity that it was all right to say you were a recovered alcoholic, especially if you were famous and could get other people then to come and seek recovery, because if somebody famous could do it, well, maybe I could too. And so there are Wilbur Mills and Gary Moore and Dick Van Dyke and Buzz Aldrin.

This is towards the end of Marty's life, towards the end of—