Buddy’s New Gig

Buddy Arnold started young. He played saxophone gigs at 9, smoked dope and popped pills at 12, went on the road with a Dixieland band at 16 and “made a conscious decision to become a junkie” at 24.

“I asked a guy to inject heroin in my vein, and the rest of my life was spent being an addict, playing in bands and getting arrested.” By the time he kicked his habit 31 years later at age 55, his wretched resume listed 34 narcotics arrests, a son he never bothered to meet, and a tour director’s knowledge of the nation’s great prisons.

His is not an unusual story for musicians, he says.

“The connection between music and addiction is not mythical,” he says.

What’s unusual is the ending.

At 72, Arnold is a big success. Not as a sax man, (although he’s playing again) but as a kind of savior. The word has gone out: Arnold’s the guy to call if your profession is music and you are hooked on drugs or booze. No money? No health insurance? No problem. No matter how strung out you are, you can phone him night or day (he carries a beeper)--from a beach, a bar or a brothel. If you qualify (meaning: If you’ve been a working musician for at least five years), he’ll arrange treatment so you can kick your habit.

“We’ve never turned someone away,” he says.

Arnold may be the first person in America to devote his career exclusively to ending the connection between musicians and drugs. He did it in his spare time for a few years, holding down various day jobs. Then, in 1992, he organized the nonprofit Musicians Assistance Program, with a one-room office (at $100 a month) in the Musicians Union Building on Vine Street in Hollywood. And from there, he arranged the first unified effort by the recording industry to combat drug abuse by musicians, securing a $2-million grant to the Musicians Assistance Program from the Recording Industry Assn. of America.

None of this came easy. The first time he asked to rent space where he could work to end the drug problem, a musicians’ union officer asked: “What drug problem?”

That executive was soon deposed, Arnold says, and union officials have embraced his efforts ever since. The assistance program now occupies five rooms, with an on-staff clinical director and two other staff members, one of whom Arnold calls “my Martha Stewart, the biggest miracle in my life.”

She is Carole Fields, 54, his wife of 12 years, a savvy neatnik and former big-time models’ agent now self-condemned to life with a man who “knows only from the San Quentin school of interior design.”

With her encouragement and aid, he has learned to pick up his socks, enjoy curtains and chintz and--more important to both of them--keep financial backing for the assistance program, with help from some heavy hitters in the music industry. The program’s board of directors includes Sony Music Vice President Michele Anthony, entertainment attorney John Branca and Warner Bros. Records President Phil Quartararo. The advisory board includes Eric Clapton, Natalie Cole, Buddy Collette, Hal David, Quincy Jones and Bonnie Raitt, among others.

Nowadays, Arnold does not have to beg as often as he used to for free beds at detox centers to help near-broke vocalists and sidemen who are just as addicted as the big-name performers who can afford to pay.

His mother, who died while he was in San Quentin, would finally be proud of him, he says.

“I’m sort of like a doctor,” Arnold says.

A Raconteur With Many Stories

How did Arnold get the music industry finally to acknowledge that there is a drug problem--and then get it to contribute funds to try to end that problem? It’s a book-length story, at least the way Arnold tells it.

Half a lifetime as an addicted scam artist, con man and convict has turned the small, bald jazzman into a raconteur. Ask a quick question and you may get an entire sitcom outline in reply. A query into how he scored his drugs, for example, leads to a lengthy description, in full Yiddish dialect, of his “call my wife’s doctor” ruse.

It goes like this: At 6:30 p.m., Arnold places a call to, say, Anaheim, to Dr. Boffo’s office--which closed at 6 p.m. Arnold uses a commanding voice to tell the busy answering service operator that he is Dr. Boffo, that he’s expecting a call from a pharmacy in Encino regarding a patient named Cecilia Bernstein. Arnold tells the operator to “ring me at this number and hold my other calls.” He gives the number where he is waiting.

Then he calls the pharmacy in Encino. In an agitated, accented, old man’s voice, he says: “Hello, you’ll give a call my wife’s doctor in Anaheim? It’s for mine wife, Cecilia Bernstein. She’s very sick.”

“What is your doctor’s phone number?”

“I dunno. It’s Dr. Boffo in Anaheim. You’ll give a call to information, OK?”

Pharmacists tended to trust such calls, Arnold says, because they sounded like legitimate emergencies and because they know the doctor’s number is legit, because they obtained it themselves by calling information. So, the pharmacist would get the number, call the doctor’s office and ask about a prescription for Cecilia Bernstein. The operator would ring Arnold at the number he had given. Now, playing the doctor again, Arnold would order from the pharmacist, in true medical jargon, the pills he needed for his habit: “Dilaudid tabs, 100 cig, every four hours as needed for pain.” Sometimes, he says, he’d do two or three different prescriptions. And he’d tell the pharmacist that Mrs. Bernstein’s husband would probably come in to pick them up.

And then he’d go in, posing as Mr. Bernstein.

“I did this all over L.A., Ventura, Orange and San Bernardino counties,” he recalls. He succeeded--until he went to pick up a prescription while so strung out that he staggered out the door without paying for it. The pharmacist called the cops.

‘Drugs Totally Took My Music Away’

There’s nothing about doing drugs or doing time that Arnold cannot relate to. And he is incredibly sensitive, clients say, to the isolation and fears that cause so many musicians to hide behind drugs while they continue to play.

“Drugs have nothing to do with creativity,” Arnold likes to say. “If a person plays good, he plays good, whether or not he’s loaded. But eventually you’ll [mess] up when you’re on drugs, because you won’t get [to the gig], or you’ll pass out. In my case, drugs totally took my music away. My desire for drugs overwhelmed everything else.”

According to an unpublished memoir Arnold has written, a music industry executive called him late one night in 1992, saying he needed to get Kurt Cobain into detox right away.

Arnold didn’t know Cobain or his music but arranged for his admission the next day to a now-defunct hospital at Barrington and Olympic in West L.A. He introduced himself to Cobain and found what he would describe in his journal as a quiet, polite, physically ravaged young man who was much more naive than Arnold would have expected a big-time rock idol to be.

Cobain asked Arnold how he had stopped using, and what it’s like “not to use, ever.” He then confided that he and his wife, Courtney Love, were going to have a baby.

“Fathers shouldn’t be junkies, should they?” he asked Arnold, sounding like a child.

After two back-to-back stays at the hospital, Cobain left for Europe, where he collapsed while on tour. He returned for yet another detox at a hospital in Marina del Rey, while Love detoxed at the Peninsula hotel.

Arnold writes: “Kurt lasts about two days before he splits. When Courtney gets the news, she leaves [her psychiatrist’s] loving care and runs around warning all their connections not to give Kurt anything.”

And there, in microcosm, is a typical case, Arnold says. Except for the ending.

Cobain put a bullet through his head. Arnold says that 60% of the 450 people helped by the assistance program have stayed totally clean, and most of the others are still working toward the goal.

What is it all about--this connection between sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll?

“Drugs and music, there’s a certain chemistry,” Arnold answers. “You’re in clubs, in concerts, you’re partying, it’s late at night. It’s not like a 9-to-5 job, where people watch you, and you have a boss. Who drinks martinis all day while sitting at a computer? But musicians, they’re waiting around, they’re jamming, it’s out there, people are attracted to them, you can get anything you want for free. Including drugs. You don’t have to ask, they offer. People love musicians. That’s the way it is.

“Or at least the way it has always been. Our job is to break the cycle, so musicians of tomorrow can follow a path that leads to their dreams, instead of to self-destruction. It can be done.”

Mementos of a Previous Life

It’s a gray day in Hollywood. Arnold looks frail and shivers as a breeze somehow breaks through the closed windows in his all-white office. The wall behind his desk features “before and after” photos of him, in his addictive and clean states. The bookcase is dotted with mementos from prison bands in which he has played, and photos of his wife, whose office is opposite his.

They can see each other through their glass walls, across the central area where assistance program volunteers are checking on the condition of clients, mailing newsletters and Christmas cards. Fields directs projects while Arnold takes calls from addicts and works to keep a benefit concert from falling apart. He can’t do it. The lead performer has so offended his bandmates that they all refuse to play, no matter how good the cause.

A group therapy session (there are two a week) is taking place down the hall, led by the assistance program’s clinical director, Janice Stimson. Meanwhile, visitors come and go.

One of them, drummer Teddy Scalise, offers to talk with a reporter. Except for his very neat ponytail, he might be an investment banker. Tall, lean, impeccably groomed, pearl gray suit, starched shirt. He’s 50 but looks younger. And, he says he’s been on heroin for almost 30 years. He recently “had such a high pill habit” that he needed two back-to-back rehabs to get clean.

“I was taking 150 Vicodin pills a day, having seizures, liver problems, my hand turned black from shooting up,” Scalise says.

He has stayed clean now for six months and largely because of the program, he believes. A friend gave him Arnold’s number, he says, and they talked by phone for an hour. Then they met. Arnold set him up at a “sober living house,” a privately owned residential facility that Scalise calls “a wonderful place to live. We do chores, eat our meals together. If we break the rules, we have to write essays on topics they come up with.”

The program has paid Scalise’s rent for five months; now Scalise is stable enough to get a job and take over. He says therapy with Stimson “has helped me more than anything in my entire life.” This time, he believes he’ll stay clean.

Why do so many musicians get into drugs?

“We’re outside the mainstream, not like classical musicians who get more training and a lot more culture,” Scalise says. “In jazz, rock and blues, you start young, you play in dives, you’ll take any gig you can get. Some are very unwholesome. You see what’s going on, and you’re impressionable. I saw a guy shooting up when I was 14. I asked could I try. He said sure. I didn’t even know I had a habit. When I tried to stop, I thought I had a cold.”

And the glamour of it all?

“No way is it glamorous,” he says. “That’s nuts. Being a musician is hard and lonely. So you pick up on women. It’s meaningless. A lot of musicians are very intelligent and sensitive. We feel the isolation and the dread. My IQ, for example, is 185. But I’m so smart, I’m stupid. Each time I stop using, I say I’m not going back.”

Parallel Lives of Junkie Musicians

Scalise and Arnold have led parallel lives. Both have had previous marriages, children they’ve abandoned, heavy drug habits into middle age. It’s a typical junkie musician’s trajectory, Arnold says.

Arnold split from his first wife, who later married Gerry Mulligan. His second wife bore him a son whom he never saw after the first few months and never wanted to see.

“My son was 7 months old,” Arnold says. “I was on my way to work at the Manne Hole [a club in Los Angeles owned by jazz drummer Shelly Manne] one night when I got busted. My wife never bailed me out. She took the baby and went back East, where she apparently had a nervous breakdown and was put in a state-owned sanitarium. The baby was taken by social workers. When she got out, she never called to ask about the child. Never asked to get him back.

“Me? I just stayed in L.A. and did what I did. I used drugs, and I played. I never bothered to find out what happened to her or to my child. For 31 years, I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. After I got clean, I would speak at 12-step meetings and say I don’t want to know, don’t want to find out he’s in prison or a junkie.”

In 1994, Fields persistently urged Arnold to call an investigator and find his son. He finally did. The first time he called him, his son, Robert, “was almost crying. He had always wanted to know who his father and mother were, and why they had abandoned him. So Carole and I flew to Connecticut to see him. We found a happily married, healthy, well-adjusted guy. We met the people who raised him. And we met his daughter, age 10, who has been playing the clarinet since she was 7.”

Arnold beams as he tells the tale. His life is now complete. Suddenly, at 72, he has a son and a grandchild who may have inherited his talent.

For Fields, that’s not possible. During her first marriage, in New York, she and her husband adopted a baby boy and girl. Years later, after the marriage failed, she came here to get settled in a house and send for the children. She met Arnold, she says, and the two became friends.

“But I wasn’t making any plans with him,” she says. “I was waiting for my children to arrive.”

In 1985, the children finally were coming to join their mother. Because they were bringing bikes and other heavy items, Fields asked Arnold to bring a second vehicle to the airport, for all the kids’ baggage. But the plane never arrived. It crashed in Dallas, killing 13-year-old Rachael and 15-year-old Christopher. Fields and Arnold left the airport together. He stayed with her to try to ease the unbearable pain. Ever since then, they haven’t been apart. They were married the following year.

A Musical Child With ‘Normal’ Parents

It’s tempting to rationalize that guys like Arnold must have had big problems from the start, must have been natural-born losers. But the opposite is true. Arnold began life as a smart, talented, naturally musical kid. His parents were middle-class, what he describes as “normal.”

He missed much of high school because he was always playing gigs, but he managed to pop into his hometown in Connecticut in time to take finals. And he did so well that both Brown and Columbia universities accepted him. He attended the latter for about a nanosecond--until Buddy Rich offered him a spot in his band. Arnold went on to play with Stan Kenton, the Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey bands and the Glenn Miller Orchestra, to name a few.

But he had started smoking pot and stealing his mother’s benzedrine pills early on, mimicking the older musicians. He got into heroin from there, and as his habit expanded over the years, his professional promise diminished.

“Eventually, drugs was all I knew how to do. I was scared to do anything else.”

He has recovered four times from a near-fatal heart-valve infection (sub-acute bacterial endocarditis).

“It comes from using dirty needles,” he says. “The bacteria eats up the heart valves, so in 1978 they put a pig’s heart valve in me. It lasted until 1992, when it had to be replaced.”

Eventually, Arnold says, he “just got tired of it all, scared of living and of dying.” Out on parole and job hunting in the 1980s, he happened to call a friend who was working at a drug treatment center. The friend told him a menial job was available, and he applied. It turned out to be the beginning of his new career.

Arnold had a genuine talent, it turned out, for learning the treatment ropes--not just the names and specialties of various detox and therapy centers, but also the criteria for determining which addicted patients would do best where.

He may have been a low-paid assistant, but as he progressed through a series of jobs in treatment units at various Westside hospitals, he absorbed protocol like a sponge. Soon he was known as a guy who’d sent a lot of paying patients to pricey institutions around the country, where addicts with private fortunes or good health insurance could dry out under fine medical supervision.

The treatment centers appreciated all the business Arnold sent their way. And every once in a while, he’d call to tell them about a musician friend, an addicted guy with talent but without insurance or money, and he’d ask whether maybe they could donate one of their empty beds. They were not opposed to the idea.

It was the 1980s, and local hospitals were closing at a furious pace. Arnold moved from one to another, making more contacts and helping more musicians. Among the down and out, his reputation spread. Personal acquaintances, fellow ex-con junkies, musicians who’d never met him but heard his name whispered on the street--all felt free to call.

In the early days, Arnold says he used to beg, barter, connive and cajole in order to get help for these musicians. Sometimes, he’d show up at a detox center with a jazz band to entertain the patients in exchange for a free bed for someone. Today, with grants in hand, he’s been able to establish trained assistance program representatives in Boston, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Minneapolis and Seattle.

Meanwhile, he and Carole look like a health club ad: scrubbed, lean, glowing. They speak gently to each other and rarely leave home without their little dog, Mingus. Each has suffered immensely and survived. Perhaps that contributes to the aura that seems to surround them.

“They live, eat and breathe to be of service to people in need,” says Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Assn. of America. “They have endless energy for that, and it’s an amazing thing to spend time with them. They’re full of love. For each other, for the people they’re helping, for their friends. They have the greatest karma of any couple I know.”

They also have great optimism, and say they can imagine a day when musicians will reject drugs. In fact, they imagine a lot of wonderful things. Asked about the constant whir of cars they hear in their charming rented cottage hard by a freeway in the San Fernando Valley, Carole says: “It doesn’t trouble us.

“We pretend it’s the sound of the ocean.”

To reach the Musicians Assistance Program, call (888) MAPMAP1