I politely received Ron’s admonition. But I was at the Super Bowl, for crying out loud, not on a psychiatrist’s couch. I told Ron that he had made some good points. But I wasn’t ready to act on them. I was still having too good a time and had no idea how worried my family was.
RON
Clint’s behavior weighed heavily on my mind during one of my last acting jobs, in a 1980 TV film called Act of Love. Mickey Rourke and I played brothers. In the movie, his character has been rendered quadriplegic by a motorcycle accident. He begs his younger brother, my character, to end his life. The younger brother heeds the older’s wishes. Then he has to stand trial for his actions.
I had an emotional monologue to perform on the witness stand, explaining how much I loved my brother, how much he meant to me. Truth be told, it had been years since I had gone to a deep emotional place in a scene; somewhere in my adolescence, I had closed off my access to raw feelings. I resorted to fake tears and ammonia capsules, show-business crutches that were supposed to be anathema to us Howards.
But on the day we shot the courtroom scene, I began to connect the speech I had memorized with my worries about Clint: my barely acknowledged fear that I could possibly lose him to addiction. In the wide master shot, I could feel my face flushing hot with emotion. The director, Jud Taylor, was sensitive to actors. He whispered in my ear that I should go somewhere quiet and hang on to whatever I was working with.
Within minutes, the crew had hustled a camera into position for my close-up. When Jud quietly called “Action!,” I let images of Clint, loaded and straight, flood my mind as I spoke. I was no longer recalling Gulliver the dog’s death; I was connecting to my mature fears about my vulnerable little brother and what he was going through.
That’s the take that the director used. It’s the last time that I wept real tears on-screen.
CLINT
I tried to get sober a few times, the first in 1984, of my own initiative. I opened up the Yellow Pages and found a listing for Beverly Glen Hospital, which offered a twenty-eight-day inpatient program for treating drug and alcohol dependency. Little did I know how fortunate I was to happen on this of all places. A mere two years earlier, Beverly Glen had hosted the very first meetings of Cocaine Anonymous—it was ground zero for what is now a worldwide organization.
Mom and Dad did their best to help me. Throughout my dark decade, they were the one consistent positive in my life. They went to meetings of Al-Anon and Nar-Anon, fellowship programs for the loved ones of people experiencing addiction. （These are distinct from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, which are twelve-step programs for addicts pursuing recovery.） That first time I went into treatment, Dad, in solidarity, quit drinking, too. He never took another drop. Like a normie, which is what we in the recovery community call those who aren’t afflicted by addiction, he remarked to me that he didn’t miss it at all. For Mom, my troubles were especially hard to bear because she viewed my problems as an inheritance from her side of the family. But that didn’t make anything her fault.
Like a lot of addicts, I needed a few tries before recovery took. Ron, bless him, consistently cast me in his movies throughout my using years. I prided myself on delivering for him and carrying myself with the utmost professionalism on his sets. In 1990, though, when we were making Backdraft, his movie about professional firefighters, he made a strange request of me.
I played an autopsy technician in the film and had a scene to do with Robert De Niro, who played a Chicago F.D. captain. De Niro, Kurt Russell, and Billy Baldwin researched their roles by shadowing real firefighters. Ron suggested that I do the same in my character’s field. So I went to the L.A. County Morgue to observe the professionals there. I saw victims of overdoses, drug-related murders, and drunk drivers. Nearly every cold body lain out before me on a slab represented a life cut short, directly or indirectly, by drink or drugs. That was a huge wake-up call.
On June 14, 1991, I cried uncle. I was no longer deriving any joy from drinking or taking drugs, though lord knows I kept trying to the bitter end. This time, there was no expensive treatment program, no getaway to a gated rehab center. I found a home group, the AA term for a meeting one attends on a regular basis, and a sponsor. One day at a time, my life started to improve.