The End of My Addiction

influence of mood-altering substances and to help physicians themselves. But it is strange, indeed, when the program dictates that physicians receive substandard medical treatment, denying them the basic human right to appropriate medication and compassionate care.
    Acting with her characteristic concern for the patient, Liz Khuri called CPH in the state capital in Albany, while I was sitting in her office. I listened to her explain why in her medical opinion Valium was an appropriate medication for me. And then I watched her face turn pale as she listened to whoever was on the other end of the line.
    She hung up and said, “Olivier, I can’t prescribe it to you. I am so sorry.”
    Being denied a standard medication for severe anxiety, the condition that triggered and fueled my craving for alcohol, was at best counterproductive and at worst callous and cruel. If I had not been subject to monitoring by CPH, Liz Khuri could have treated me like a normal alcoholism patient. I began to think more and more about relocating to France, where I could seek an adequate level of care.
    In the meantime I felt like a shadow of myself, dutifully trying, just the way Marworth taught me, to avoid strong emotions that might raise my mood too high or sink it too low. I labored under what one of my psychiatrists later called “the conformist dullness” of those struggling to remain abstinent while their underlying dysphoria remains untreated. Every ounce of my energy went into resisting the craving for alcohol.
    One place I sought relief was in music.
    I had become great friends with the legendary producer Arif Mardin and his wife, Latife. Arif and I had met in August 1988 at a party given by his Turkish countryman Engin Ansay, a diplomat I knew through Murat Sungar. Arif was like a Marcello Mastroianni character in a Fellini film, someone who is always on, who is always performing, with a splendid flair for the dramatic gesture or remark.
    The Mardins frequently invited me to parties and to dinner in their grand apartment on Central Park West. It was a special treat for me that Arif usually asked me to play the piano on those occasions, when the other guests might include one or more of the extraordinary musicians he worked with. I played my own compositions for Arif, and he was so taken with them that he did studio arrangements of several of them over the years, beginning with one, “Una flor en la memoria” (A flower in memory), that I wrote with the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, as Arenas relates in his autobiography, Before Night Falls. Arif told me he had never done this for any other nonprofessional musician.
    In the spring of 1990, Arif told me, “I want you to meet Bette Midler. Latife and I are going to invite just you and Bette and her husband to dinner. When the time is right, I’m going to show her the last song of yours that I arranged.” As producer and performer respectively, Arif and Bette Midler had recently won the Grammy for Record of the Year for “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the theme song from the movie Beaches . While we were lingering over dessert and coffee, Arif asked me to play the piano. I always enjoyed playing his Steinway concert grand, and I happily complied.
    After I had been at the keyboard for a little while, I wondered if I should play the melody of mine that Arif wanted Bette Midler to hear. Before I could act on the thought, the fear struck me that this would be trespassing on Arif’s good graces as a host. Surely if he wanted me to do that, he would have said something about it when he asked me to go to the piano. I tried to tell myself that out of concern for both of his guests’ feelings, he would naturally rather play her a tape or show her the song in a private working session, where she did not have to be diplomatic if she was not crazy about it.
    The conviction that my compositions were really no good began to fill my mind. In the meantime, my fingers were doing whatever they were doing, drawing on my memory below the level of consciousness. I didn’t know what I was playing; then I heard Bette Midler sing, “Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien” (No, nothing at all, I regret nothing at all), the first line of Edith Piaf’s signature song, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
    I looked up from the piano at Bette Midler, a tiny woman not much bigger than Edith Piaf herself, who had seemed like a quiet little mouse during dinner. She had pushed back her chair and