Tallulah Bankhead
According to Christine Sismondo’s bibulous bible, Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History, Bankhead drank two bottles of Old Granddad a day. Two. Per day. They don’t make ’em like they used to. Of course, distilled spirits in that quantity is excessive for anyone, especially for a 5’3” woman. Another apocryphal story holds that her doctor told the badass Southern belle to cool it, advising her to eat an apple every time she had the urge to drink. Sensible enough, right? Not quite. Bankhead complained about the prescription to her friends: “Really, dahlings, sixty apples a day?!”
William Faulkner
“Old Corndrinker Mellifluous” is what Hemingway (no dim light himself in the firmament of literary lushes) called his rival. Indeed, the prolix Mississippian was a great consumer of distilled spirits, especially brown liquor. But, as Sismondo points out in Mondo Cocktail, he wasn’t completely without discipline. Despite what some readers might think when attempting to penetrate his dense and abstruse stream-of-consciousness passages, Faulkner didn’t drink while he wrote. Instead, he would go on “long dry, monastic writing spurts, interspersed by alcoholic benders when he would entirely give up his writing habit — cold turkey — sometimes for months at a time.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In her book, A Drinking Companion: Alcohol and Writers’ Lives, Kelly Boler reports that Fitzgerald once tried to cut back on his drinking by limiting himself to beer — a glass of it 30 times a day. She also makes the bold pronouncement that “Francis Scott Fitzgerald died young, but not young enough.” Instead of flaming out at the top of his game and croaking when he was a golden boy, immediately following The Great Gatsby’s success, he lived another 15 years, cementing his image as a troubled drunk. His second act was a tragic waste.
Jackie Gleason
“I’m no alcoholic,” goes his famous quip. “I’m a drunkard. There’s a difference. A drunkard doesn’t like to go to meetings.” The Great One never stopped at one. And that worked for him. No rehearsals needed. Get a few in him, show up, hit his spots, and away we go: another bar awaits. Who says comedy’s hard? Gleason gets bonus points for being fictionalized: he was written into the beginning of Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld. DeLillo had him drinking beer at the 1951 Dodgers-Giants “Shot Heard ’Round the World” game — and puking on Frank Sinatra’s shoes.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
This story is too good not to pass along. Nick Tosches, in a Creem magazine profile of the scarifying R&B yeller, put it thusly: “A year, two years ago, he stayed perpetually oiled. Black & White Scotch. Preserved in alcohol, he used to say. Drunk. Once, in the early ’60’s, traveling from Jamaica to Boston, he wound up in Buffalo after boarding the wrong plane at what was then, in those days before the donkey’s demise, Idlewild airport in New York. Blearily thinking himself to be in Bean Town, he hopped a taxi and asked to be taken to a certain hotel where he had a reservation. The hackie told him there was no such address, no such hotel. Jay got pissed, jumped out of the cab, and found a couple of Buffalo’s finest. They told him the same thing. It wasn’t until later that evening, whilst sobering up in the clink, that he realized he was in the wrong city. Which is pretty drunk.”
