Up Till Now: The Autobiography

either.
    Nerine was right with me. “Well, if you’re going to do that, I am too.”
    We jumped in the water without any fear and managed to get about a third of the way there before we had to climb into the tender. Maybe that describes her best, she had no fear. Whatever I did, she kept up with me.
    We were together six years before we began talking about getting married. For much of that time she was able to hide her alcoholism. Unless she had been drinking very heavily she didn’t show it on the surface. What happened was that her attitude would change, when she drank she would get a little meaner. I’d think, wow, that’s too bad. It didn’t occur to me that it was caused by alcohol. I thought she just had a mean streak. I didn’t like it, but because I loved her I accepted it: nobody is perfect.
    I tried to be understanding because she came from a difficult background. She was from south Boston, she was my Irish rose. There was a history of alcoholism in her family. What I did not know then is that to a large degree alcoholism is genetic. Having that gene means only that an individual has a propensity for it, but then so many other things become factors in whether or not the disease ever manifests itself.
    But I didn’t know anything at all about alcoholism then. I’d played an alcoholic in several movies, but really I’d just been playing a cliché. In the TV movie Perilous Voyage I’d been the happy drunk, the back-slapping good-time guy who just goes into a corner and passes out. In The Third Walker, another TV movie, I was sort of a creepy, somewhat crazy drunk. But I had no idea what a real addiction was; there had never been an alcoholic or any addiction in my family. In fact, I always believed that if you really wanted to change your behavior it was just a matter of willpower. I was a smoker, for example, and during the second season of Star Trek I happened to be in a limo with three other actors and each of us had a motive for giving up smoking. Mine was that one morning I went to kiss my girls and they turned away from me, telling me, “Oh Daddy, you smell.”
    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 thatbefore 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