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ОглавлениеChapter Four
In the late 1920’s, Bill and Lois began to enjoy a new and exciting affluence. Like many speculators of that fevered time, Bill was a margin trader. He bought shares of stock by paying only a part of the actual price. If stock rose, his profits could be enormous. But if the price fell sharply, his equity in the stock was wiped out. He might even be called on to pay additional amounts to make up the deficit — called “covering the margin.” In the stock market debacle of 1929, the sudden drop in prices1 itself drove prices even lower because of the panic selling to avoid further losses, or to obtain cash to cover margins on other holdings.
Clint F., from Greenlawn, Long Island, New York, remembered the Bill of the Wall Street years:
“I first met Bill Wilson at J. K. Rice Jr. and Co., 120 Broadway, New York City, a stockbroker firm specializing in speculative situations. My job was telephone trader during the Roaring Twenties, when Coolidge was President and Wall Street was the place to get rich quick.
“Understandably, the climate was feverish in the financial district. This was the buildup of the nation’s first mammoth bull market. Anyone who did not join in the mass exuberance to the point of unbalance was simply not with it and was a little conspicuous. Such a one was a certain tall and loose-jointed character named Bill who worked on the outside as a special investigator for one of the partners of our firm, named Frank Shaw. This Bill was a mystery to me, because with all the shouting and scrambling going on in our office, he came in and went out with the grave dignity of a circuit judge. He did not mix with the crowd much and never joined the magpie chatter around the stock ticker. I learned about a year later that his investigations uncovered some of the most profitable situations the firm got into financially. And for some reason, he never took off his hat, a soggy brown box perched straight over his eyes.’’ (Clint’s memory was acutely accurate; all photographs of Bill wearing a hat show it squared away.)
“A couple of years [after I met Bill], a split took place in the Rice firm. Bill’s boss Frank joined another stockbroker house, Tobey and Kirk, 25 Broad Street, taking Bill with him, as well as several traders, including me. I was drinking a little at the time and made some costly mistakes, which did me no good with Frank. However, I had little contact with Bill, who was a very busy guy then, and so I stumbled along in my own losing way, and married my lifelong gal, Katy. With good business sense, Frank fired me on my wedding day.
“Up to the historic crash of 1929, everybody and his uncle seemed to be floating along to riches on the sweet euphoria of paper profits. I met Bill now and then, and although his appearance was unchanged, I knew he was going great and in on some deals with large promise. My own lack of big success depressed me, and I got a little morbid over the fact. My wife had been working in Macy’s since we were married, and still I could not catch on the big train the way Bill and others did. Perhaps my own [drinking] problem was catching up to me, if there was one. The fatal earthquake came and went in the stock market with a mark 8 on the Richter scale. The mighty were swept from their seats, and we of low degree went lower.”
Back in 1927, the Wilsons had no premonition of disaster. Motorcycle travel had been abandoned in favor of transportation more befitting their new, higher standard of living; they could travel by car or rail; and there was money for hotels and entertainment. Although Bill drank heavily on some of these trips, he was able to complete excellent reports.
He had begun to lie. With Lois, he was returning from a trip to Canada, where he had investigated an aluminum company development and had stayed sober the entire time. Just as they were about to cross the border back to the United States, Bill mentioned casually that he was going to stop to get cigarettes. “I realized this was nonsense, since cigarettes were more expensive in Canada,” Lois said. “But liquor was cheaper and more easily available than in the U.S. in those Prohibition days.”
Parked in the plaza of the bridge that was the United States- Canadian border, she waited for hours; Bill had gone off with both money and car keys. Finally, she set out to look for him. “In the very last saloon in the area, there he was, hardly able to navigate. Our money had all but vanished.’’
When Bill became interested in Cuban sugar, there was nothing for it but an on-site investigation. They had bought themselves a secondhand Dodge for $250, and this, outfitted for sleeping, took them in high style to Florida. It was the summer of 1927.
In Cuba, they were given a warm reception and treated as important people. A car, a chauffeur, and a motorboat were placed at their disposal. In Havana, they stayed at the Hotel Sevilla. It was apparently above their means, judging from a letter Bill wrote to Frank Shaw in which he promised that they were “going to move to another place which will be more reasonable and which from now on will answer our purpose just as well.” According to Lois, they never did leave the Sevilla.
Of that trip, Lois said, “It was a frustrating time for me, though, because of Bill’s drinking. One day, to keep him from going down to the bar, I threw one of his shoes out the window, but this did no good. It landed on a nearby roof, and Bill simply called the porter to retrieve it. In no time, he was down at the bar wearing both shoes.”
In the same letter to Shaw, Bill addressed Shaw’s concern about his drinking:
“Thank you for your remittance and your letter which followed. Now a few lines for your eyes alone. I have never said anything to you about the liquor question, but now that you mention it and also for the good reason that you are investing your perfectly good money in me, I am at last very happy to say that I have had a final showdown (with myself) on the matter. It has always been a very serious handicap to me, so that you can appreciate how glad I am to be finally rid of it. It got to the point where I had to decide whether to be a monkey or a man. I know it is going to be a tough job, but nevertheless the best thing I ever did for myself and everybody concerned. That is that, so let us now forget about it.”
The letter was dated September 3, 1927.
Bill made several visits to sugar plantations and sent in his reports. But those investigations were unsuccessful. To Lois, the reason seemed clear: Bill continued to drink during their entire month in Cuba.
On their way home, they stopped to see Bill’s father and his second wife, Christine, in Miami Beach. Gilman had a contract to cut rock for the foundations of the Overseas Highway that would connect the Florida mainland with the Keys. On this visit, Bill also met the daughter of Gilman and Christine, his young half sister Helen, born in 1916.
Back in New York, they rented an expensive three-room apartment at 38 Livingston Street, in one of Brooklyn’s good residential neighborhoods. Because it wasn’t big enough to satisfy Bill’s grandiose desires, they enlarged it by renting the apartment next door and knocking out the wall between. Now, they had two bedrooms, two baths, two kitchens, and a single huge living room.
The elevator man in their building was a West Indian Rosicrucian named Randolph, who did what he could to keep Bill sober — and when that failed, to keep him safe. If Bill was late getting home, Randolph would go out and look for him in the neighborhood bars. Bill was grateful; when he learned that Randolph’s daughter was studying music, he gave Randolph a check to buy a piano.
By 1928, Bill was a star among his Wall Street associates. “In those days, of course, I was drinking for paranoid reasons. I was drinking to dream greater dreams of power, dreams of domination. Money to me was never a symbol of security. It was the symbol of prestige and power.’’ He dreamed of the day when he would sit on prestigious boards of directors. “J. P. Morgan and the First National Bank were, you know, my heroes.’’
There was now no question about the seriousness of his drinking. As soon as the three o’clock bell sounded the closing of the stock market, he would head for a speakeasy, then drink his way uptown. “I’d be pretty much out of commission at 14th Street and completely lose my wits at 59th. Start out with $500 and then have to crawl under a subway gate to get back to Brooklyn.”
There were unhappy scenes in the sumptuous Livingston Street apartment. Promise followed empty promise. On October 20, 1928, Bill wrote in the family Bible, the most sacred place he knew: “To my beloved wife that has endured so much, let this stand as evidence of my pledge to you that I have finished with drink forever.” By Thanksgiving Day of that year, he had written, “My strength is renewed a thousandfold in my love for you.” In January 1929, he added, “To tell you once more that I am finished with it. I love you.’’
None of those promises, however, carried the anguish Bill expressed in an undated letter to Lois: “I have failed again this day. That I should continue to even try to do right in the grand manner is perhaps a great foolishness. Righteousness simply does not seem to be in me. Nobody wishes it more than I. Yet no one flouts it more often.’’
His drinking had begun to greatly worry his other Wall Street partners, despite his phenomenal success at ferreting out profitable situations. He embarrassed them by getting drunk on trips or by getting into arguments with company managements. Always pleasant and good-mannered when sober, Bill could become troublesome and overbearing when he drank.
He was no longer welcome among Lois’s friends: “Even though some of them drank a good deal, they couldn’t stand me,” Bill remembered. “And, of course, I was very loudmouthed when I drank, and I felt a terrible inferiority to some of her people, and the boy from the country had come in and made more money than they’d ever seen, and that was the theme of my talk, and people increasingly just couldn’t take it. We were in the process already of being isolated, that process being mitigated only by the fact that we were making money and more money.’’
As Lois said, “By the end of 1927, he was so depressed by his own behavior that he said, ‘I’m halfway to hell now and going strong.’ He then signed over to me ‘all rights, title, and interest’ in his accounts with his stockbrokers, Baylis and Company, and Tobey and Kirk. . . . Night after night, he didn’t come home until the wee small hours, and then he would be so drunk he’d either fall down just inside the front door or I’d have to help him to bed.”
Lois described the profundity of their dilemma in these words: “Bill rarely drank socially or moderately. Once he started, he seldom stopped until he became so drunk he fell inert. He was not violent when in his cups and was deeply remorseful afterward. When he finally realized he couldn’t stop, he begged me to help him, and we fought the alcohol battle together. We did not know at the time that he had a physical, mental, and spiritual illness. The traditional theory that drunkenness was only a moral weakness kept us both from thinking clearly on the subject. Yet Bill was morally strong. His sense of right and wrong was vivid, extending even to little things, and his respect for the rights of other people was extraordinary. For example, he wouldn’t walk across another person’s lawn, though I often would. He had plenty of willpower to do anything in which he was interested; but it wouldn’t work against alcohol even when he was interested. . . .
“I suppose the pattern of his tolerance to alcohol was like that of many alcoholics. At first, liquor affected him quickly; later, he became able to drink more and more without showing it; but then, suddenly, his tolerance dramatically diminished. Even a little liquor made him intoxicated.’’
Early in 1929, on a trip to Manchester, he got off the train in Albany and telephoned Ebby, his school friend from Burr and Burton. He suggested that they meet downtown and take on a couple of drinks. Until this time, they had never drunk together, though they had both progressed into serious drinking. And as Ebby said, “I saw a lot of Bill. We met and were firm friends from the beginning.” (Lois remembered it otherwise, however; she thought Ebby was initially much closer to her brother Rogers than he was to Bill.)
Ebby was the son of well-to-do parents, but the family business had failed in 1922. For a time, he sold insurance and worked for an investment house. He also was helped by his brother, the mayor of Albany. Ebby’s drinking was gradually making him a local problem in that city.
At the time of this meeting with Bill, Ebby recalled, “I was playing around in Albany with a bunch of flyers who were barnstormers at the Albany airport. They called themselves Flyers Incorporated. Bill and I attended a party at the house of one of the pilots. Bill was headed for Vermont the next day, and I couldn’t see why he would have to take that two-by-four railroad up there. Why not hire a plane? So I made a deal with a boy, one Ted Burke, to fly us up the next day.” Ebby also recalled that after putting Bill in the hotel that night, “I went out and drank all night, so I would be sure to make the trip.’’
Bill, whose version of the story had them both partying all night, remembered that they paid the pilot a stiff fee to take them to Vermont. He had been reluctant to take off, probably because of bad weather. A new landing field was being built at Manchester, but no planes had yet landed. “We called Manchester to tell the folks that we would be the first arrivals,’’ Bill said. “I vaguely remember spotting the town of Bennington through the haze. The excited citizens of Manchester had got together a welcoming committee. The town band had turned out. The town delegation was headed by Mrs. Orvis, a rather stately and dignified lady, who at that time owned the famous Equinox House.
“We circled the field. But meantime, all three of us had been pulling at a bottle. Somehow, we lit on the pretty bumpy meadow. The delegation charged forward. It was up to Ebby and me to do something, but we could do absolutely nothing. We somehow slid out of the cockpit, fell on the ground, and there we lay, immobile. Such was the history-making episode of the first airplane ever to light at Manchester, Vermont.’’
This exploit, hilarious as it may have appeared, actually caused Bill great remorse. He remembered wandering around East Dorset the next day, in the grip of a crying jag. He visited Mark Whalon, and he also sent off a letter of apology to Mrs. Orvis. Ebby took the evening train back to Albany.
However remorseful Bill felt about the incident, it did not make him unwelcome in Manchester; he and Lois went up there later in the year to golf at the exclusive and genteel Ekwanok Club. In that frenzied last summer of the Roaring Twenties, Bill pursued his golf game with characteristic determination to excel. In addition, “Golf permitted drinking every day and every night,” he said. “It was fun to carom around the exclusive course which had inspired such awe in me as a lad. I acquired the impeccable coat of tan one sees upon the well-to-do. The local banker watched me whirl fat checks in and out of his till with amused skepticism.’’
Continuing his investigation of stocks, Bill became interested in a corn products company called Penick and Ford. In a well-orchestrated maneuver, “I did the job just in reverse of everybody else. I went on the theory that I would go out and sell my friends this stock — in other words, encourage them to buy it on the open market. I got ahold of this specialist in the stock. I sold him a bill of goods — that is, after accumulating my own line. And then I figured that if I did enough advertising with this around, and solid selling, every time we got a bad market setback, I could bring in enough buying to peg the damn thing. It wasn’t too big, only 400,000 shares, which by this time had gotten into the 40’s (I’d started in with it at about 20 the year before). I could peg it and so protect myself, and that would enable me to run on a pretty small shoestring. In other words, I could carry lines of thousands of shares of it myself.
“And sure enough, in the spring of 1929, there was a hell of a crack in the market, and boy, I let that thing down five points, and I got thousands of shares of it into my friends’ hands and meanwhile pegged the price and protected myself. So I thought, ‘Well, you put your friends in on the dip instead of selling it to them on the bulges, and that gives them a wonderful break, and meanwhile they’re protected. I’m not trying to trade on them and make money that way. And we’ve got a long, full operation, good enough for quite a while yet.’ ”
He even persuaded his mother to buy 900 shares, advising her, in January 1929, not to sell at less than $60 per share. He then decided that he was prepared for a possible drop in the market. It was also in 1929 that he broke with his friend and benefactor Frank Shaw. Bill Wilson was going to be a lone wolf on Wall Street, and a powerful one at that.
Few margin traders were ready for the cataclysm that hit the market that October. Even Bill had prepared only for a squall. What impended was a hurricane. When the first wave of selling sent prices plunging, his Penick and Ford shares dropped from 55 to 42, a loss of $13 per share. With the help of friends,
Bill bought heavily in an attempt to shore up the price. The stock rallied, climbed to 52, and then made a sickening dive to 32 in a single day, wiping out the friends who had trusted his judgment — and Bill himself. He was broke.
“The minute my money went, the confidence in me was suddenly zero,” he recalled.
A friend named Dick Johnson offered him a job with his firm, Greenshields and Co., a brokerage firm in Montreal. In December, he and Lois moved to Montreal. Upon their arrival, about Christmastime, they moved into a dingy apartment. Within weeks, Bill was back into the market, again trading in Penick and Ford, which in the spring of 1930 actually climbed back to $55 a share.
It seemed that Bill was going to make a fast comeback. “I felt like Napoleon returning from Elba,” he said. “No St. Helena for me!” They soon found much better lodgings in Glen Eagles, an expensive new apartment house overlooking the St. Lawrence River. They had a wonderful time in Montreal, playing golf and dining at the Club House. By fall, Johnson had dismissed him. His Waterloo was, as always, booze.
In the last months of 1930, Bill caught what he called “occasional glimpses of the downslope leading to the valley of the shadow. But,” he said, “I could still turn and look the other way, even though I had been deeply shocked by the calamity of the 1929 crash and now the dismissal by my good friend Dick Johnson.” Again, he wrote a promise to his wife in the family Bible: “Finally and for a lifetime, thank God for your love.” The promise was dated September 3, 1930. Like those that had preceded it, it was not kept. That was the last of the Bible promises.
While Bill stayed on in Montreal to clean up details, Lois went back to Brooklyn, because her mother had fallen ill. “Even at the very end with much to do, I still couldn’t keep sober,” Bill said. “I remember getting very drunk, falling into an argument with a hotel detective.” He was thrown in jail, but released the next morning by a lenient judge. Drunk by noon, he met another alcoholic, an individual of the “tinhorn confidence man” variety. This companion was still with him when he finally woke up in Vermont, at the Burnham Emerald Lake camp. It took almost every cent Bill still possessed to send the man back to Montreal.
When Lois arrived in Vermont from Brooklyn, they discussed what they should do next. “By this time, I really began to appreciate her intense devotion, courage, and still high confidence in me,” Bill said. “After a season of no alcohol, we advanced again upon New York to recoup our fortunes.” It was after the Montreal disaster that Bill, for the first time, tried hard to stop drinking because he really wanted to stop. He did not yet realize that he was in the grip of an obsession, that he had lost the power of choice where drink was concerned, and that all his personal efforts to control or stop his drinking would come to nothing.
Back in Brooklyn, the Wilsons were taken in by Lois’s parents. While Bill must have been in some disgrace by this time, they apparently treated him with kindness and concern. “They were truly a marvelous couple,” he said of the Burnhams. Of Lois’s mother, he said, “Her capacity for the kind of love that demands no reward for nearly everything and everybody was quite beyond belief and understanding.” Bill remembered his father-in-law as “an exceedingly handsome individual, dressed immaculately and as courtly in his speech and manner as anyone I ever knew.” Underneath Dr. Burnham’s politeness, Bill said, there was an extreme aggressiveness and a terrific domination that affected the whole family life, without his in the least intending it or anyone’s realizing what was going on.
An indication of how totally out of control Bill’s drinking had now become was his behavior at the time of his mother-in-law’s death. Following an arduous course of radium treatments for bone cancer, she died on Christmas Day, 1930. Bill was drunk when she died; he had been drunk for days before; he stayed drunk for days after.
These words were written by Lois in a moment of despair:
“What is one to think or do after so many failures? Is my theory of the importance of love and faith nothing but bunk? Is it best to recognize life as it seems — a series of failures — and that my husband is a weak, spineless creature who is never going to get over his drinking?
“If I should lose my love and faith, what then? As I see it now, there is nothing but emptiness, bickering, taunts, and selfishness, each of us trying to get as much out of the other as possible in order to forget our lost ideals.
“I love my husband more than words can tell, and I know he loves me. He is a splendid, fine man — in fact, an unusual man with qualities that could make him reach the top. His personality is endearing; everybody loves him; and he is a born leader. Most kindly and bighearted, he would give away his last penny. He is honest almost to a fault. . . .
“The morning after he has been drunk, he is so penitent, self-derogatory, and sweet that it takes the wind out of my sails, and I cannot upbraid him.
“He continually asks for my help, and we have been trying together almost daily for five years to find an answer to his drinking problem, but it is worse now than ever. If we go away on a trip, he says he does not miss alcohol and goes without it a month or more at a time; but the minute we get back to the city, the very first day, in spite of all kinds of plans and protestations, he is at it again, sometimes coming home early and sometimes at five o’clock in the morning. . . .
“I hate even to think of it, but if I went away for a short time and did not come back until he had behaved himself for a week at least, and then, if things did not continue as they should, stayed away longer, would that help? Would it finally arouse his interest?
“In writing this down, I can see that . . . the problem is not about my life, of course, for probably the suffering is doing me good, but about his — the frightful harm this resolving and breaking down, resolving and breaking down again, must be doing to him. How can he ever accomplish anything with this frightful handicap? I worry more about the moral effect on him than I do the physical, although goodness knows the terrible stuff he drinks is enough to burn him up completely. . . .
“We understand each other as well as is possible for radically different temperaments. I admit I cannot understand the craving for liquor, for it has no appeal for me, although several times I have made myself drunk in order to try and find that appeal.
“I believe that people are good if you give them half a chance and that good is more powerful than evil. The world seems to me excruciatingly, almost painfully beautiful at times, and the goodness and kindness of people often exceed that which even I expect. Francis Bacon said that the human mind is easily fooled; that we believe what we want to believe and recognize only those facts which conform to that belief. Am I doing that identical thing? Are people bad, is love futile, and Bill doomed to worse than mediocrity? Am I a fool not to recognize it and grasp what pleasure and comfort I can?”
Bill, for his part, wrote Lois “thousands of letters. He would write to me over and over again how he never would take another drink.’’
Humiliated by his failures and by their dependence on his wife’s father, Bill found a job as an investigator at a salary of $100 a week. A fortune to many families in those Depression days, it was a comedown for Bill. He held the job for almost a year, however, and even made a little headway in the organization. But following a barroom incident that he described as “a brawl with a taxi driver,’’ he was fired.
With this dismissal, Bill’s standing on Wall Street was totally gone. He was $60,000 in debt and out in the cold. “I began to canvass my few friends in the Street who had survived the crash, but I found their confidence in me had really oozed out years before,” he said. “Now that I was penniless and obviously in deep trouble with liquor, they had nothing for me, and surely they could not be blamed for that.’’
Bill now entered a phase of helpless drinking. It was compounded by the Depression, but even had times been prosperous, it’s doubtful that he could have earned his living any longer. Lois found a job at Macy’s, earning $19 a week plus a small commission on sales, and that became their livelihood. Bill sat around in brokerage houses during the day, trying to give the appearance of being at work.
Occasionally, he was able to develop ideas for small deals in securities, and sell them for a few hundred dollars. Lois saw little of that money. “Most of the money by now would go to pay up the speakeasy bills in order to be sure of a line of fresh credit when I should next run out of money. I had become, too, a lone drinker, partly because I preferred it and partly because none of my Wall Street companions cared anymore for my company.’’
Sometimes, he got through the day by buying a fifth of gin and nipping at it discreetly as he made the rounds of brokerage houses; he usually managed to appear sober enough. After borrowing a few dollars, then buying another bottle from the nearest bootlegger, he would ride the subway for hours, still nipping, and might appear at home at any time of night.
Such was Bill’s life in 1931 and into the summer of 1932. He was beginning to show signs of mental impairment. When people tried to reason with him during a drinking bout, he would turn violent and talk gibberish that frightened them. He “began to understand what real hangovers were like and sometimes bordered on delirium.” He would lie in bed and drink while Lois was at work. “The demon was now moving into full possession,” he said.
In 1932, when blue-chip shares were selling at bargain rates, Bill decided he should form a buying syndicate to take advantage of the extremely low prices. He had the help of brother-in-law Gardner Swentzel, husband of Lois’s younger sister Kitty. Swentzel, whose firm was Taylor Bates and Company, had numerous friends in the financial community.
Although Bill was no longer welcome in many offices on Wall Street, he made a superhuman effort to restrain himself during business hours. Before long, he struck up an acquaintance with two men who agreed to form the buying syndicate with him. They were Arthur Wheeler and Frank Winans; Wheeler was the only son of the president of the American Can Company.
That bleak year of 1932 appeared to be a poor time for speculative buying, but Bill had realized that it actually was a most favorable time. Many securities were selling for a half or a third of net worth. “If one could overcome his fears, have capital and patience, there could be a fortune in the recovery that was bound to come one day,” he said. “America was rapidly approaching the state where a turn simply had to be made.’’
Bill was utterly overjoyed at this chance to make a comeback. His new partners, impressed by his ideas, assigned him a generous share but made one important stipulation in their contract: If Bill started drinking again, not only would the deal be off, but also he would lose his interest in the venture. “I signed the agreement and drew a tremendous sigh of relief,’’ Bill remembered. Confident that he was on the road to financial recovery, he plunged into the work.
For the next “two or three months,” things went well. To his amazement, he had little urge to drink; in fact, he felt a complete lack of temptation. Word soon got around, and his reputation on Wall Street began to improve. This led to another opportunity: an assignment to investigate a new photographic process at the Pathé Laboratories in Bound Brook, New Jersey.
Accompanied by several engineers, Bill arrived in Bound Brook to make the investigation. After dinner, the engineers began a game of poker and invited Bill to join them. Bill, who had never had any interest in cards, declined. From somewhere appeared a jug of applejack, called “Jersey lightning.” Quickly and easily, Bill again declined.
As the evening wore on, Bill’s companions would now and then renew their offer of a drink, and Bill steadfastly refused. At one point, he even went so far as to explain that he was a person who couldn’t handle liquor.
By midnight, he was bored and restive; his thoughts drifted back to his hilarious wartime adventures and his enjoyment of the excellent wines of France. The misery and defeat of recent years faded from his mind. And while he was indulging in this pleasant reverie, it came to him that he had never tasted Jersey lightning. A serious omission; no doubt he had missed a real experience. The next time the offer came his way, his one thought was: “Well, I guess one bolt of Jersey lightning couldn’t hurt me much.”
He was drunk for three days. Word of the debacle soon reached Wall Street. It was the end of his contract — and of his “comeback.”
“Up to this time, I think my drinking had been motivated by the desire for the grandiose. But now there was a complete and abrupt shift in motivation. I still thought it was the same, but my behavior belied that. I made my way back over to Wall Street, but all my friends were so sorry, so sorry. Nothing could be done. Sometimes now, I got drunk in the morning even while trying to transact business. When I was crossed, I abused the very people upon whom I was trying to make an impression. Sometimes, I had to be led out of offices. I would repair to the nearest grogshop, throw in a few drinks, buy a bottle, and down great quantities. I would try to arrive home not clear out, always concealing a fifth of gin or possibly two. At this point, two bottles were far safer; there would be some in the morning — that is, if I could find the one that I hid.
“Like all other alcoholics, I hid liquor about as a squirrel would cherish nuts. Liquor could be found in the attic, on beams, underneath the flooring; it could be found in the flush box of toilets; it could be found buried in coal in the cellar; it could be found in the backyard. I would take pains during the times when Lois was at work to replenish my stores.
“But to return to my motivation — I now see that I was drinking for oblivion. There would be days of drinking about the house, barely able to get through supper, then the blackout, then a tearful parting with Lois in the morning, and at it again for the day. Two and three bottles of gin had become a routine.
“My morale was utterly shattered. I remember throwing a small sewing machine at poor Lois. At another time, I went around through the house kicking out door panels. Seldom had I done anything like this in all my drinking career. Now, it was routine when I was bad enough and crossed. In the more lucid times, Lois would tell me, with terror in her eyes, how truly insane I had been. What could we do about it?”
A way out of despair seemed to open when another professional opportunity appeared, in the form of his old friend Clint: “One day at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, I bumped into Clint F., an over-the-counter trader with whom I had a slight acquaintance. Clint told me he was working for a perfectly wonderful fellow, Joe Hirshhorn, who, despite the times, still had money and was making it hand over fist. I soon met Joe and outlined some of my ideas.
“Joe had come up in Wall Street the hard way, starting as a trader in penny stocks when people stood in Broad Street and traded in the curb market. Subsequently, his great acumen had brought him important connections, and he had an uncanny trading flair.
“He made me great promises, and I began to be faintly encouraged. Sometimes, he would tell me he had bought a line of stock and was carrying me for a few shares on credit. Now and then, he would hand me a small check. This was usually spent on fifths of gin, now the delicatessen variety.’’
Clint’s version of the connection with Hirshhorn: “Following the calamity in the stock market, which hurt everybody, the depression and poverty of 1931 and 1932 looked like the end. With subway fare of two nickels from my wife but no lunch coins, I ambled daily up and down Wall Street, looking for anything. Luckily, I met up with a rich and very smart broker who had survived the wreck. His name was Joe Hirshhorn, and he took me on because he liked my training in specials. But I knew that alone I would fail. I always did. Where could I get help in what was surely a great opportunity right out of the sky?
“I thought of Bill and wondered if he was still in Brooklyn Heights. He was, and no surprise to find that he had hit the roller coaster like the rest of us. Having snowed Joe under with the buildup I had given Bill’s ability as an investigator in securities, there was no problem in getting Bill to come over to 50 Broad Street and get hired, which in turn would assure the safety of my own job (or jump off Brooklyn Bridge). Joe was quite satisfied with him, because I overheard him tell a broker friend what a ‘schmaltz’ guy he picked up — ‘an Einstein, and he came in the mail.’
“Times became a little more cheerful now as the market commenced to recover, and when Bill felt a lot more affable being on the payroll, he invited me for lunch to talk about the shape of things to come. Naturally, we gravitated toward the well-known gentlemen’s bar, Eberlin’s, Bill saying as we went in, ‘Clint, a little mild sherry will clear our vision.’ He still wore that same sad brown hat and did not jar it once while we cleared our vision. The midday wore on, and a high point I recall, after a short sermon on economics, [was] his predicting what big things we were about to do for our pal Joe. ‘Why, Clint, this man can become a Rothschild.’ The fact that this man did just that in the years since seemed to have little relation to our kind intentions at Eberlin’s saloon.
“I never did know exactly what work Bill did at our office; but he traveled extensively, I think, investigating properties in which Joe had large financial interests. For my part, in 1933 I stayed comparatively sober, making a tough living with little spare cash for booze.
“If Bill was taking a snort now and then at the beginning of this job, I didn’t notice. However, there were some dangerous moments, such as the garden party our boss threw at his Great Neck estate. It was a charity affair to raise money for his new temple, and his business friends and other guests were getting their arms twisted real hard. Crates of champagne were being pushed on the crowd at an awful price, for a good purpose, of course. Although it was costly philanthropy in those hard times, Joe was a kind person at heart and wouldn’t let Bill or me pay for anything. His wife sat with our wives, Lois and Kay, most of the evening. We sipped a little of the free bubbly in a dignified way, then sipped a little more, and then for real! Lois and Kay didn’t look comfortable until it was time to go home.
“On a trip to the cloakroom, Bill and I discovered the storage pantry for the champagne. What a sight! Bill said something like ‘Heavens to Betsy, look at this!’ We each tucked away as many bottles as we could hide in our coats, and decided as an emergency to open a couple of extras. We busted the necks over the plumbing in the men’s room and choked the stuff down like crazy. There was broken glass and wet sparkles all over the place and us. We tried to hurry back to join the others saying good night to our loving host, but we both got hit the same time.
“My wife grabbed my arm, but I couldn’t speak or hear anymore. Lois got in front of Bill, who was slowly spinning and trying to say something to Joe. Kay said he was breathing blessings on the new temple. The fog closed in. Kay got Bill and Lois back to Brooklyn in a borrowed car. Somehow, with great effort, Bill and I got into the office the next day. We were much younger then. Joe greeted us and commented, ‘Can you beat it? Some bum from the people we invited swiped some champagne and broke some bottles all over the bathroom. Imagine our own people acting like that.’
“Bill had the faculty of carrying on his work and talking to people without revealing that sometimes he was real loaded. He never staggered, although I sometimes saw him sway a bit like [in] a gust of wind.
“Before Prohibition went out, we would collect in a variety of saloons called speakeasies, such as the Steam Club, Busto’s, and a host of others now forgotten. Nearly half a century has passed, but I can still see Bill coming into Ye Old Illegal Bar on a freezing afternoon with a slow stride — he never hurried — and looking over with lofty dignity the stack of bottles back of the bar, containing those rare imported beverages right off the liner from Hoboken. One time at the Whitehall subway station, not far from Busto’s, Bill took a tumble down the steps. The old brown hat stayed on; but, wrapped up in that long overcoat, he looked like a collapsed sailboat on the subway platform. I recall how his face lit up when he fished out of the heap of clothes an unbroken quart of gin.
“Another time [later, in 1934], we made a few rounds and found we were short of money. That is, Bill was short — I had none. As a result of spending all the paper currency, he had accumulated a pocketful of nickels, dimes, and quarters. This was serious, being early in the afternoon, so we took a cab to Brooklyn and stopped at Loeser’s department store. There, Bill’s ever- devoted wife, Lois, was holding down a job, the same as my weary wife at Macy’s, while he and I were getting on our feet, so to speak.
“It was a little awkward paying off the cabby in nickels, dimes, and quarters, and after dropping several on the sidewalk, Bill dumped a shower of coins into the taxi and orated something about it being more blessed to receive than to give. Lois saw us coming down the aisle, and her face dropped a mile. After some whispered exchange, Lois went back somewhere and returned with her pocketbook. I never felt more insolvent — first Bill’s last buck, now probably hers. We went to their apartment in Brooklyn Heights, closing a hard day, and plowed into a fresh bottle with emotional overtones. I sat down at their piano and pounded out the first line of something in A flat major. Never played it as well before, I thought, while Bill pulled a violin off the wall somewhere and joined me in a clatter of noise until Lois came home and quieted things down.
“However, by now the pretense of sobriety gradually crumbled. The office, especially Joe, commenced to eye Bill with concern. His final assignment was an important one in Canada. He took off with his usual self-assurance via rail to Montreal, and the next we know, Bill telegraphs that he is in jail at the Canadian border. Joe went straight through the ceiling. His secretary went up to the border to square matters with the law — something about ‘very drunk and disorderly.’ ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘It can’t be the same man. He might have taken a glass of beer now and then at lunch. But publicly intoxicated? Never!’ I looked for a new job.
“Months later, I received a couple of rambling letters from Green River, Vermont, where Bill had now gone native like Thoreau. He was camped out in a tent on his brother-in-law’s place and starting a crusade against the then New Deal administration and F. D. Roosevelt. I cannot say that there was any apple cider involved in this undertaking, but it didn’t sound like good whiskey thinking.’’
Joe Hirshhorn remembered both Bill and Clint with great appreciation. He described Clint as “a smart boy and a nice man’’ and did not remember his having a drinking problem. Bill was another matter.
“He was awful; he was an alcoholic; but I liked him. He was one of the brightest stock analysts on Wall Street. There were a lot of analysts around, but they didn’t know what in hell they were doing. Bill was a very thorough man. I admired him and liked him; he was brilliant; and I helped him along. You know, he used to get awfully drunk in front of [our office at] 50 Broad, and a couple of boys and myself would go down and pick him up. I had a big office, and we’d put him on the couch and let him dry out.”
Said Hirshhorn, others on Wall Street were down on Bill because of his drinking — because of his making promises to lots of people and then, after a few days, getting cockeyed again. “He would fall in the street or fall in the lobby of a building. It was very embarrassing to them.’’
By 1933, Hirshhorn said, he was probably one of the few people on Wall Street who would still have anything to do with Bill. But his dealings with Bill were profitable: “He gave me a report on one stock that went from $20 to about two hundred and some odd dollars,” Hirshhorn said.
Their association finally came to an end that year, when Bill followed Hirshhorn to Toronto, where Hirshhorn was launching the mining ventures that would make him one of the country’s richest men. After some difficulty at the border for being drunk (probably the incident described by Clint), Bill did finally arrive in Toronto, where he stayed in Hirshhorn’s suite at the Royal York. But he did little work and soon had to be sent home.
The connection with Hirshhorn was Bill’s last chance on Wall Street.
Bill and Lois continued to live at 182 Clinton Street, in the apartment Dr. Burnham had built for his wife on the second floor. The doctor, who had remarried in May of 1933, had moved out. Lois continued to work at Macy’s, where her weekly salary in 1933 was $22.50 plus a one percent commmission on sales.
This was the darkest period of their life together. “Sometimes I stole from my wife’s slender purse when the morning terror and madness were on me. Again I swayed dizzily before an open window, or the medicine cabinet where there was poison, cursing myself for a weakling. There were flights from city to country and back, as my wife and I sought escape. Then came the night when the physical and mental torture was so hellish I feared I would burst through my window, sash and all. . . . A doctor came with a heavy sedative. . . . People feared for my sanity. So did I.”
There were still times when Bill would go on the wagon or make other determined efforts to stop drinking. Once, Lois obtained a three-month leave of absence from Macy’s, and they spent the summer at the Vermont farm of Dr. Leonard Strong Jr. and his wife, who was Bill’s sister Dorothy. All summer, Bill worked hard on the farm. But as soon as they returned to Brooklyn, he resumed drinking. He and Lois had long discussions about it; he was making a desperate effort to quit.
By late 1933, they both were losing hope; all efforts had failed; and they had been particularly disillusioned when he had started drinking again after the summer at the farm. Besides Lois and her father, Bill now had only two other people who still stood by him: his sister Dorothy and her husband, who, like Bill’s mother, was an osteopath. Often, Dr. Strong would treat Bill for his terrible hangovers, and they would discuss Bill’s problems.
It was Leonard who finally arranged for Bill’s admission to Charles B. Towns Hospital on Central Park West, a facility for treating alcoholics. In 1933, it was very expensive, and Leonard paid the fee.
Towns was run by Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, the man who would have such a profound influence on Bill. “As I came out of the fog that first time, I saw him sitting by the bedside. A great, warm current of kindness and understanding seemed to flow out of him. I could deeply feel this at once, though he said scarcely a word. He was very slight of figure and then pushing 60, I should say. His compassionate blue eyes took me in at a glance. A shock of pure white hair gave him a kind of otherworldly look. At once, befuddled as I was, I could sense he knew what ailed me.”
1. It was estimated that more than a million Americans held stock on margin during the summer of 1929. See Frederick Lewis Allen, “Only Yesterday,” Harper and Brothers, 1931.
