Role Models for the Recovering Alcoholic : Talk-Show Host’s Book Contains the Confessions of Rock Stars, Congressmen

If the book “The Courage to Change” were a newspaper, it would be a supermarket tabloid. Packed with political, sports and entertainment figures’ moving, horrifying and sometimes-raunchy confessions of alcoholism, the book could be read for its prurient fascination alone.

Dennis Wholey’s purpose in putting the book together, however, was a lot more noble. The public television talk-show host wanted alcoholics to recognize themselves in the stories of role models from rock stars to congressmen and reach out for help.

“I am not trying to get everybody to stop drinking,” he said during a visit here. “I am trying to get people who are in pain to stop their pain.”

Wholey, whose “LateNight America” show out of Detroit is seen by more than 1.5-million television viewers five nights a week, is a recovering alcoholic himself.

There is a messianic glint in his flinty eyes as he speaks; his outlook on life is self-consciously bent toward a new and better future. Even at the end of a long day, his personal appearance reflects it. Brown hair juts out over his tanned forehead at a jaunty angle, his blue crew neck sweater and gray slacks look just-pressed, his burgundy loafers just-shined.

And when Wholey (pronounced HO-lee) autographed his book for a reader, he wrote the pop Christian mottoes “Spread the Good News” and “Expect Miracles” above his name.

His basic message is one that has been written about often--alcoholism is a disease, an allergy, a sickness--but he brings it new vitality because almost all of the testimony is in the eloquent words of victims.

The comments sometimes seem like a masochistic, hurtful exercise. Wholey explained why recovering alcoholics seem to feel such a strong need to air their problems in public.

“If you lived all your life lonely, apart, in isolation,” he said, “feeling self-pity and uselessness and lots of fear of other people, of things, of having no sense of who you are, of feeling unworthy and angry. . . .

“If you live that kind of a life--and all of a sudden you didn’t have to live that kind of life, if all of a sudden you begin to be happy beyond the dreams you believed you deserved to dream, and you suddenly come to understand that in the middle of the transformation was alcohol, and you saw the substance around and ruining other people’s lives, wouldn’t you want to tell them about it?”

Book of Compelling Stories

Wholey answered the question by writing the book, which was published by Houghton-Mifflin and sells for $15.95. Despite its do-gooding origin, it is a book of compelling stories told in the first person.

For the young, there are contributions from rock musicians Grace Slick and Pete Townsend; for the political, there are Reps. Wilbur Mills and Robert Bauman; for show-biz buffs there are Gale Storm and Gary Crosby; for lawyers, there is Gerry Spence; for bibliophiles there are novelists Elmore Leonard and Tom Tryon. There are many others, including more than a dozen unnamed members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Some of the most intriguing stories are those of the children and spouses of alcoholics--such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Even a reader opposed to the man’s leadership of the Moral Majority could not fail to be moved by the portrait of his father--a successful, generous Virginia businessman who always made sure his son had a handful of cash in his pocket.

“I never recall a time when my father was not drinking--not a single day,” Falwell told Wholey. “We had no perception of the problem he was facing, and we had no concept of how to help him.”

After relating how his father made alcohol at home, staged chicken fights on the farm, held county authorities in his pocket and was protected by his wife, Falwell adds:

“(Mother) would try to give us a ray of hope. I don’t think I ever had any hope that he would stop. I don’t think I ever believed what she was saying. He died at the age of 55 of cirrhosis of the liver, right in the spring of his life. He was victimized by alcohol.”

Actor Rod Steiger tells a similar story, although it has a happier ending. His alcoholic mother was eventually helped by Alcoholics Anonymous, but his early home life could be summed up by a single sentence from the interview: “There were unlit Christmas trees and cold houses and no dinners.”

According to Wholey, alcoholics must realize they are just different than people who can have just a single drink before dinner and leave it half-finished at the bar when called by the maitre d’.

“It wouldn’t occur to an alcoholic to have just one drink,” he said. “Eight, sure. 10? OK, now you’re talking. . . .

An Allergy to Alcohol

“An alcoholic never knows how many he’s going to have--or where he will be when he stops. I know one alcoholic who puts it this way: ‘I have an allergy to alcohol. I have one drink and I break out in a drunk.’ ”

Wholey knew some of the people he interviewed for the book from their appearances on his public television show. Others he discovered while doing research and, he said, by “reading between the lines” of their statements in other contexts.

Nearly everyone Wholey interviewed said they did not at first believe they were an alcoholic because they drank in suburbia, not Skid Row.

Father Vaughan Quinn, the Detroit priest who got Wholey straightened out, said: “Everybody is educated to believe that an alcoholic is a bum. Brown paper bag, Sterno . . . starting to drink at seven in the morning, living in a flophouse.

“Now we have to grow up. A person turns 25 and is an alcoholic and doesn’t identify with that. A lot of work has to be done.”

Wholey includes Alcoholic Anonymous’ standard, dog-eared, 20-question in his book. But he also proposes a simple self-exam, with corollaries by his subjects.

“If you think you might be an alcoholic,” he said, “you probably are.”

The Billy Carter Corollary: “And everybody else knows about it.”

The Grace Slick Corollary: “People who don’t have a problem with alcohol don’t think they have a problem with alcohol. I think that’s real simple.”

The Shecky Greene Corollary: “You can’t be a drunk without hurting people. I’m sure I hurt everybody around me.”

The Pete Townsend Corollary: “You should listen to what people tell you.”