Up Till Now (33 page)

So I stopped cold turkey. It was very difficult. At times I was desperate because the nicotine wasn’t out of my system. Leonard remembers a day when I finished a scene and walked away and started screaming, “I want a cigarette! I need a cigarette.” But I beat it and it seemed obvious to me that if I could beat an addiction, then anyone who sincerely wanted to beat a demon could do it too.

I didn’t know what I was talking about.

We were together six years before we began thinking about marriage. We certainly were a couple in every other way. But one day she said to me, “Bill, we should get married,” and I understood that she was telling me she needed the permanence of that particular commitment. I agreed. It wasn’t a difficult decision. I was in love with her.

But it was around that time, maybe a little earlier, that her alcoholism first began to get out of control. I didn’t know then that
before we’d met she had been through rehab. The details of that were always sketchy, but apparently it was because of cocaine. Okay, but there were a lot of people in the entertainment business who had successfully fought that particular addiction. It wasn’t unusual and certainly nothing about which I was going to make a judgment.

We were making preparations for our wedding when she was caught driving drunk—and almost killed my daughter. She had picked up my daughter from a spa in Palm Springs and, apparently, as she drove home she would stop at gas stations, go into the ladies’ room, and down a small bottle of whatever she was drinking. She was exiting the freeway and for no obvious reason suddenly slammed on the brakes. If there had been another car behind her it would have slammed into her car at a freeway speed. What kind of insanity, what kind of mental illness, allows someone to do that? To drive drunk with a young person in her car? After that she swore to me that she was done with drinking, that she could control it and would never drink again. I didn’t just want to believe her, I did believe her. Of course she would stop drinking, she would do it for me, for us. See, that’s all it took to solve this problem. So we set another date for six months later.

Five months later she was again arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. “We can’t get married under these circumstances. You promised me that if we got married you’d stop drinking. How can I marry you now?”

She turned to me with her bright blue eyes and said to me in the voice only lovers know, “Don’t do this to me, Bill.”

Don’t do this to
me
, she said, and she said it with such frankness and honesty that my heart just went out to her. It was a plea, it was a cry. I just couldn’t resist her. But by now, at least, I had some help. We had been to a dinner party with several other couples at Leonard and Susan Nimoy’s. At that party she was, as Leonard later described it, “erratic in her behavior.” I thought she had hidden it well, but apparently it had been obvious to everyone. Leonard recognized the symptoms immediately. The next day he called me and said, “Bill, you know she’s an alcoholic?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I love her.”

“You’re in for a rough ride, then.”

I didn’t understand what Leonard was saying to me. I didn’t have the vocabulary. I was so certain that by loving her enough I could cure her. I know it’s a romantic concept, but I’d seen it work. I’d seen children flower and animals respond to love. I’d experienced the joy that love could bring to a life, happiness almost beyond description, and it was inconceivable to me that there could be something stronger than complete love. Particularly something so dark and destructive. I believed without any reservation that love heals. So what I thought Leonard was saying to me was that I had to love her that way, I had to surround her with the love and support that she needed to beat this.

That wasn’t at all what he was saying. What he said was simple and clear and came from the depth of his own experience. “Bill, you know she’s an alcoholic?”

I decided to marry her, perhaps believing that she would rely on me rather than alcohol to provide whatever it was she was looking for. I still believe that marrying Nerine at that time was the greatest sacrifice I could have made for her. I married against the advice of my family and friends, against my own good sense. But I thought it might be the only chance we had. That she would recognize how strongly I believed in her and would make a sacrifice of her own; she would risk giving up alcohol for me. She was my fantasy and I was going to heal her. During our wedding ceremony I read her a poem I’d written, pledging my love to her, and in return she said, “I pledge my sobriety to you.” We had a beautiful celebration in Pasadena with our family and friends. Leonard was my best man. “It’s wonderful that we’re all here tonight to celebrate the coming together of these two wonderful people,” he said, toasting us. “And Bill has asked me to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. He doesn’t want to let this opportunity go by without telling about his latest book, which is available in most of your local...”

Nerine and I danced the night away. I just didn’t want to let her go. She took down her hair that some Hollywood makeup person
had done, scrubbed off the makeup that a Hollywood makeup artist had applied, and there she was in her natural beauty. She was sober, and to that point it was the happiest day of my life. Imagine being able to point to one day and know it was the happiest day of your life. It was truly amazing. And finally we put all the presents people had brought into our car and drove home. We climbed into bed and I was ecstatic. Ecstatic, that’s the only way to describe it.

I woke up about eight o’clock the next morning and she was drunk. Later we discovered that she had hidden bottles of vodka all over the house, in places we would have never dreamed of looking. There were small bottles at the bottom of the clothes hamper, in a small drawer hidden below my athletic socks. Places I would never imagine looking.

I tried to understand her addiction. If I said anything about it she would immediately become defensive, she’d respond by becoming furious with me. “I’m not drunk,” she’d say in a slurred voice. “What makes you think I’m drunk?”

“Because you’re slobbering.” “I’m not slobbering,” she’d insist, slobbering. She used all the clichéd phrases. I remember her telling me, “Alcohol is my only friend,” which I took as an accusation that I had let her down. Once, when she was drunk, she looked at me sadly and asked, “Why, Bill. Why?”

I thought she was saying, Why am I drinking? When she was sober the next day I asked her if she remembered asking that question. She didn’t. I asked her, “Why do you think you asked, why? It was a profound question, what do you think you meant by it?”

She sighed. “I was probably asking you why you didn’t understand why I drink.”

I tried so hard to talk to her. “You’re killing us,” I told her. “Why can’t you stop? I love you. What do you need? We’ve got love. We’ve got our home. We’ve got our future together. Why are you getting drunk?”

“I’m not drunk.”

The situation got steadily worse. We had to install an alcohol
monitor in the car, a device that makes it impossible to start a car with alcohol on your breath, so she couldn’t drive drunk. We were terrified she was going to kill herself, or someone else.

Two or three months after our marriage I just couldn’t take it anymore. Finally I told her, “Nerine, I’m going to get a divorce.”

“You can’t use that word,” she said. “You should never use that word.”

“You promised me you would be sober and you haven’t stopped drinking. I’m starting divorce proceedings.” People who have not dealt with the addiction of someone they love deeply can’t really understand the compromises you make to love that person, the lies that you tell yourself, the insults that you have to accept. But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to get through to her. We separated for a brief period during which she pleaded with me for another chance. This time, she swore, this time. I was facing decisions unlike anything I’d ever had to deal with in my life. Did I really believe in the healing powers of love or was that just something I said because it sounded good? Finally I told her, “You go to rehab and I’ll stop the divorce.”

She agreed. I thought we’d won. When she came home we spent a quiet evening together, talking hopefully about the future. She was committed to sobriety, she told me. The next morning I went to play tennis with some friends. “Come with me,” I said. “Everybody’d like to see you.” Instead she stayed home, and by that afternoon she was drunk.

Nerine was in rehab for thirty days three different times. I understand now that the concept that a person can change their life in thirty days of rehab is nonsensical. A person can’t change the driving forces in their life in a month. Perhaps it could be done in a year, but certainly it takes a minimum of six months to let your body heal.

Twice she almost drank herself to death. Once, when we rushed her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, her blood-alcohol reading was 3.9—legally 0.08 is considered drunk. She couldn’t stand, she was as pale as death. Four days later I brought her home. “You almost died,” I said. And there was such an arrogant, quizzical smile on her
face, similar to the expression I’d seen so many years earlier when she jumped off the platform on the bungee cord ride. It occurred to me at that moment she wanted to see how close she could come to death. I asked her, “Do you want to die?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I’m stopping.” Within a day she was drinking again.

The second time she was literally missing for three days. No one had any idea where she was. I was totally frantic. Finally someone called from a charity home in downtown Los Angeles, a flophouse really, telling me that “a woman who said she was Mrs. Shatner” was there. The people in that home welcomed her and saved her life.

I was so frustrated, so angry. We were so close to a wonderful life together but we just couldn’t get there. She was everything I had ever wanted; she was a princess, she had such majesty about her. And then to see her drunk, to see our life together being shattered. I would sit in our house and cry. I remember sitting in a chair one morning, my hands over my eyes, sobbing softly. She had been drunk the night before and I’d finally begun to understand that my dreams of our life together were never going to become reality. She came down the stairs and looked at me and asked, “Why are you crying?”

“Don’t you know?” “No.” She had no memory of the night before. I remembered every ugly detail, I remembered the impact and she remembered nothing. I just couldn’t solve the mystery of alcoholism, why our love wasn’t strong enough to overcome her need for alcohol.

Leonard and Susan were incredibly supportive. Leonard tried to help, he knew from his own experience what she was fighting, and he tried so hard. Leonard felt blessed that he had been able to stop drinking. We talked about his alcoholism, and he remembered being with Susan one night shortly after they were married and she asked him if he was happy. He was, he told her, he didn’t remember ever being happier. “Then why are you still drinking?” she asked.

That was the day he got serious about stopping. And Leonard has always been extremely proud of the fact that he never had another
drink. So he knew what Nerine was going through and he got involved. It was one of the most noble acts of friendship I’d ever experienced, although I’m certain he would insist he did it for Nerine, not for me. He took her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he spent time just talking to her, he offered advice and suggestions to me. Leonard told me once that she didn’t want to stop, she had no intention of quitting. And until she reached that point, there was little I could do.

The horror began when she went into rehab for the third time. As always, I was so hopeful that this time would be different. This time it would work, she’d stop drinking and we’d be happy forever after. About a week before she started we were at the horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky. It was a beautiful July night and we went out for a moonlight motorcycle ride. I stopped and we just stood there, listening to the rustle of the wind. It was a beautiful, sensual moment. “What will it take to get you to stop?” I asked.

“If you’re with me twenty-four hours a day,” she said. “If you’re there, I won’t drink. That’ll stop me.”

“Then I’ll be with you twenty-four hours a day,” I promised.

She had been in rehab for only a few days when the director called. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to come and get Nerine. She’s drunk. We want her out of here now.”

I had finally understood that our marriage couldn’t work and I was helpless to do anything about it. Once again, we began talking about a divorce. This time I was serious about it, I thought. She was drinking every day and there was nothing I could do to stop her. Finally I called the director of the rehab facility and begged her to take Nerine back. She was very reluctant, but finally I convinced her. She said, reluctantly, “Okay, Bill. Get her sober for one day and we’ll take her back.”

One day is such a short period of time, but for Nerine it seemed impossibly long. One Monday morning I asked a friend of mine, a New York psychiatrist who had been working with addicts for years, to help me. She wanted to hold an intervention. “I’ll come out and
you get some of her family and friends together and we’ll confront her.” Nerine’s family couldn’t help, they had their own issues. So I got some friends together. We were going to hold the intervention on Tuesday and after that she would go back into rehab. Hope is resilient.

After setting up the intervention I called the rehab center. “I’ll have her there tomorrow,” I said. Sober.

I had planned to visit my grandchildren in Orange County that afternoon. Nerine had been drunk the night before, but had been sober in the morning. There were two people to help at the house, so I knew she wouldn’t be there alone. I decided to go. As I was backing out of the driveway she stopped me. “Where you going?”

When I told her she asked to go with me. “I can’t,” I said. “Nerine, you’ve been drunk so many times in front of the kids that they’re fearful and I don’t want to go through that scene. I’ll be back in the evening.” Then I added, more from habit than anything else, “Please don’t drink.”