Del Close was an alcoholic who hated booze. Booze had been wrecking his career. In 1982 he asked me to interview him because he wanted to talk publicly about checking into a hospital in Fort Worth to stop drinking. The interview was for Chicago Theatre Monthly, a magazine I put out then, but it folded before we could run the story. The American Medical Association had made a recent statement on alcohol as a public health menace. About time, Close said–and what nobody seems to know is, there’s a cure. –Ted A. Donner
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So since I knew I was going to be spending the rest of my life working in cabaret theaters, and they were selling booze, it was important to get it fixed, to do something practical so that you stop drinking. You can do a lot of jobs drunk, but you can’t do the show drunk. You can’t turn up for rehearsals loaded. And to make a long story short, I had just about drunk myself out of professional competence about five years ago. Severn Darden told me about a treatment for alcoholism that he took that’s called aversion therapy, which for him was completely successful. And I thought, well, I’ve followed Severn’s advice before.
The real problem in treating alcoholics is to get them to stop drinking, not to understand why they drink. And so they’ve invented this system that can get you to stop. This is the Clockwork Orange treatment. They don’t know what the cause is–they just get you to associate the taste, the smell, the look, the advertising, the sound, and the effects of alcohol with extragalactic nausea. Nobody in this galaxy ever felt this sick. They shoot you up with some chemicals that create a very unusual kind of nausea. Instead of feeling warm and kind of glowing in the booze, you get cold and clammy, and it also produces a tremendous nausea. They shoot you up with this stuff, and then they make you drink enormous quantities of whatever it is you’ve been drinking. And in my case they practically had to cover the entire bar–in fact they even had to go out and get a special bottle of green Chartreuse. So you drink large quantities of lightly salted and extremely diluted whatever-it-is-you’ve-been-drinking, like maybe a half a shot of green Chartreuse and a pint of water with some salt in it, warm. So you drink it down and you throw it up. And then OK–You like rum? Have a little rum? So ten minutes of rum drinking. How about some scotch? Blah, blah, blah. Then it all comes up.
