Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (43 page)

As I was leaving, I noticed several books related to gambling on the bookshelves. Aha, I thought. Were these the lingering remnants of the sociopathy he talked about? No, as it turned out. Once sober, he had sublimated his interest in gambling. He had consulted to the governor of Louisiana while the state lottery there was being set up—a considerably more profitable occupation for an economist than frequenting racetracks. In other words, with the remission of his alcoholism, O’Neill’s ego functioning had matured; instead of compulsively acting out his interest in gambling, he had yoked his passion to his Ph.D. in economics, and harnessed them both in a socially and personally constructive way.

In
closing, O’Neill told me that he could not agree with AA in calling alcoholism a disease. “I think that I
will
the taking up of a drink,” he said. “I have a great deal of shame and guilt and remorse and think that’s healthy.” I heartily disagreed; I suspect that his shame had facilitated his denial of his alcoholism for twenty years, and that by reframing it as a disease, AA had rescued him. Sadly, O’Neill died two years after our interview from coronary heart disease, a fate undoubtedly hastened by twenty-five years of chain smoking.

THE STORY OF FRANCIS LOWELL

The history of Francis Lowell, aka Bill Loman, illustrates how different alcoholism looks to sociologists and to physicians. In this case, the two viewers were myself! Without realizing it, I narrated one man’s story twice, never recognizing him the second time as a person I had studied fifteen years before.

Francis Lowell was an effective and well-paid upper-class New York lawyer. In 1995 I used his life as evidence that the misuse of alcohol, like heavy smoking, is not a disease, but a lifestyle choice.
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Given enough education, willpower, social support, and a forgiving occupation, a fortunate drinker could drink as long and as much as he wanted. In college Lowell had been a heavy social user of alcohol, and very guarded about answering Grant Study questions related to his alcohol use. By age twenty-five, this gregarious man had established a pattern of heavy drinking Friday through Sunday, and none during the rest of the week. He continued this pattern over the next forty years. His heavy weekend drinking sometimes expanded into five-day binges, with a loss of one or two days of work, but Lowell abused alcohol from age thirty to age seventy without any noticeable decline in his physical health or serious damage to his legal career (most of his clients were rich family members).

Lowell
was aware that he had a problem with his drinking by the time he was thirty. He felt guilty about how much he drank; his friends criticized his drinking; he failed to keep his promises to cut down; and when he was drinking he avoided his relatives. At age thirty-nine he had his first drunk-driving arrest; there was a second one at age forty-seven. He had his only detoxification at age fifty-two, but his physical exam and liver chemistries were normal. At age fifty-six, Francis Lowell said of himself, “No doubt about it, I do drink heavily at times,” but he never stopped drinking, except for giving it up for Lent. Many weeks he drank within social limits, and usually he did not drink during the week. He attributed his successful steady pattern of alcohol abuse to the fact that his stomach would not tolerate more than five days of drinking. And, he added, “I don’t want to sound pompous, but a sense of duty drilled into me from family and from St. Paul’s School contributes to my control. . . . You just can’t let everything go.”

By fifty-nine, Francis Lowell was making $200,000. His heavy alcohol intake did not interfere with his work, although his career did not advance after sixty. And it did not (much) interfere with his relationships; it had contributed to his loss of the woman who had most touched his heart, but by remaining single he limited further damage. After he turned sixty-two, his doctor began encouraging him to cut down on his drinking, and at age sixty-six he had a seizure “possibly related to alcohol.” Nevertheless, at seventy Francis Lowell was still working forty hours a week and earning his handsome salary. Compared to his college classmates he was still very active physically, and his liver chemistries were still normal. I wrote in my first biography of him, “At no time in his life has he described a wish to become abstinent and he continued to drink ten drinks a day on the weekend.” In short, I believed that Francis Lowell had a lifelong problem with alcohol, but not a “progressive disease.”

THE
STORY OF BILL LOMAN

But alcoholism has an unstable, chameleon-like quality. After I had forgotten my original description of Lowell, I wrote the life history of a chronic alcoholic whom I called Bill Loman. It wasn’t until after the fact that I discovered that I had written about the same man in 1983, seeing his life from a very different point of view, and making a point very different from the one I was aiming at the second time. Although there had been only four more years of follow-up and a little bit more data, my view of Lowell/Loman had shifted from the sociological to the medical one. Light can act as both wave and particle, and alcoholism can present as both habit and disease. Only years of observation allow us to identify both of these patterns in the same person. Bill Lo-man was one of the Study’s great illustrations that the genes for alcoholism can derail anyone, no matter how promising his beginnings.

Bill Loman was a man destined for great things; he became a tragic figure not because he deserves our scorn, but because he had the disease of alcoholism as his implacable enemy. At St. Paul’s School, Loman had been a senior prefect and captain of the football team. He was elected to the most prestigious club at Harvard, and he graduated
magna cum laude.
College descriptions of Loman included “unspoiled by his wealth,” “well-poised and very attractive,” “rather mature.”

His World War II record was exemplary too. He won three battle stars for active participation in the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Roer and the Rhine Rivers. His commanding officer described him as “intensely loyal, collected and cool under most trying conditions. . . . Sense of humor never deserts him.” He was promoted to first lieutenant and then to captain. The Study director, summing up the twenty-five-year-old Loman’s military record, remarked, “This boy could go quite far.” After the war, Loman went to Harvard Law School and finished in the top tenth of his class. He returned to New York to
practice
corporate law at a prestigious firm. He was elected to the very best clubs in the city, and spent his weekends playing golf and bridge with other members. At thirty, he was an upper-class football captain poised to be a superstar when he grew up.

But he didn’t. There was another thread running through Bill Lo-man’s life, and it could be seen even while he was still in college. He spent his weekends drinking. In college he experienced three- and four-day episodes of “depression”—probably alcohol-related—when he would see the world as a “very sorry place.” The college psychiatrist saw the hard-drinking Loman as “undependable, careless, self-centered and evasive.” In the military, too, Loman recalled, “I spent most of my spare time drinking and chasing women.”

In law school, Loman dared to drink only on weekends—he already recognized that he could not have even one drink without going on a binge. By the age of thirty he had established a pattern of drinking heavily from lunch on Friday through Sunday evening. He was abstinent during the week, but he took frequent sick days, especially on Monday when he was recovering from weekend hangovers.

Intimacy, Career Consolidation, and Generativity were not in Bill Loman’s future. He became emotionally involved with only one woman, in his twenties. At thirty he proposed to her, but she turned him down. Pressed, he admitted that her reluctance to marry him might have been due to his binge drinking. They remained closely involved for the next twenty-five years, both living with their mothers on the weekends. When he was fifty-three, her “dominating” mother died, and she married someone else. Loman continued to live with his mother until she died. He was discontented throughout his legal career, feeling undercommitted and undercompensated.

I interviewed Bill Loman when he was fifty-nine. He was insecure and unable to make eye contact. Instead of enjoying the interview as most Study members did, he acted like an unhappy adolescent
being
grilled. “I don’t think I’d have joined the Study if I knew it was going to last so long,” he grumbled.

Loman manifested a pervasive melancholy. When he was fifty, his brother, another Study man who
did
grow up to be a superstar, sadly revealed that Bill had stopped making new friends. Despite his high income, he took no vacations, involved himself in no civic activities, and had no exciting relationships with the opposite sex. There had never been anyone in whom he had confided. Asked who he turned to in unhappiness, Loman replied, “I turn to me.”

At age sixty-five when asked, “What is your most satisfying activity?” Loman answered, “None.” Unlike many unhappy Study men and women who could rely on strong religious affiliations even when socially isolated, Loman went to church just once a year—on Christmas, with his mother. He had been raised in a church school. But alcohol abuse interferes with spiritual solace as well as the more mundane kinds.

After our interview, Loman’s alcoholism continued to progress. By sixty-five, despite reasonable health, the once-sociable Bill no longer attended any of his clubs. He could not learn new things. Unlike most of his Harvard cohort, he never even began to master the computer. The personal losses that accrue in life had never been replaced; among his friends and relatives there was no longer a single person with whom he could say he had an intimate relationship. Not surprisingly, he saw the present as the unhappiest period of his life. The happiest time, he said, had been the war years. It was hard not to be disconcerted by that. The Battle of the Bulge is not everyone’s idea of a day at the beach.

Loman’s alcoholism never affected his liver, but it destroyed his life. At thirty, both he and the girl he loved were already worrying about his drinking. At age forty, after three DWI’s with damage to others, his mother, his brother, and the police were worrying too. At
age
fifty-three he sought his first detoxification. But at sixty he was still going on binges where he’d drink a quart of whiskey a day for five days. The only thing that stopped him was that he always eventually became too ill to drink anymore. He had his first seizure due to alcohol withdrawal at sixty-five.

After that Loman made repeated unsuccessful efforts to go on the wagon until he died from an alcohol-related fall at seventy-four. Seventy percent of his Study mates were still alive. He did not begin his life among the Loveless, but he ended it that way.

My readers will have noted, I am certain, the—unconscious—shift in focus, and even in detail, between these two versions of Lowell/Lo-man’s life. As I’ve said before, biography is more vivid than statistics, but it is much more vulnerable to vicissitudes in the writer’s intent than numbers are. The fact is that both Lowell and Loman had a problem drinking score (PDS) of 11—in the top 10 percent of both the College and Inner City samples. For many years I struggled to make sense out of conflicting views of alcoholism, both of which had fierce partisans: was it a disease or a career path? For most of his life, Lowell/Loman’s lab tests and physical exams were clean. For most of his life his mates drank as much as he did. His career, in its own way, prospered. I can see now that he was the perfect example of why it’s so hard to say what alcoholism “really is.” It wasn’t until his last years that the evidence of what alcohol had done to him physically and psychologically really began to show. Another reason for lifetime studies. Alcoholism is a crafty foe, and even under the intense scrutiny of the Grant Study, in the case of Lowell/Loman it managed to keep itself hidden for a very long time.

We can all consider for ourselves whether in my first effort to tell this story I was in my own kind of denial, missing the disease that is
alcoholism,
or whether in my second I was bending the facts, forcing a heavy habitual drinker into the mold of an alcoholic. But however we explain it, both Lowell and Loman suffered from something that was indeed cunning, baffling, and powerful. It was also ultimately fatal.

CONCLUSION

Prospective study has consistently shown alcoholism to be the cause, not the result, of dependent, sociopathic, neurotic, or aggressive personality disorders. Alcoholism is the cause, not the result, of unhappy marriages. Alcoholism is the cause of many deaths, too, and not only through liver cirrhosis and motor vehicle accidents—suicides, homicides, cancers, heart disease, and depressed immune systems can all be chalked up to this serial killer. The critical factors predicting recovery from alcohol dependence, besides its severity, appear to be finding a (preferably) nonpharmacological substitute for alcohol, compulsory supervision (with immediate negative consequences for relapse), new loving relationships, and involvement in inspirational programs.

Prolonged follow-up reveals two fundamental paradoxes in predicting the life course of alcoholism. Socially disadvantaged men, men with strong family histories of alcoholism, and men with early onset of severe alcohol dependence were more likely than other men to become stably abstinent. In contrast, alcohol abusers with excellent social supports, high education, good health habits, and late onset of minimal alcohol abuse—epitomized by the College sample—were more likely to remain chronic alcohol abusers. If their alcohol-related problems were truly minimal, they also had an excellent chance of returning to lifelong social (controlled) drinking. In short, it appears to be the most and the least severe alcoholics who enjoy the best chance of long-term remission.

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SURPRISING FINDINGS

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.