'Pass It On'. Anonymous
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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