16
AS AA AND AL-ANON GRADUALLY SPREAD THEIR HEALING tentacles around the world, doctors, scientists, spiritual leaders, and social architects were eager to know more about the astonishing results these two Fellowships were having on a segment of society once almost forgotten and abandoned. Prominent politicians and celebrities soon wanted to align themselves with the dramatic successes of these movements. Newspapers, magazines, and motion picture producers sought out stories of their “miraculous cures.” Lois and Bill Wilson suddenly found themselves, as one AA old-timer put it, “the royal couple of recovery.”1
Lois winced when once told of that appellation although she couldn’t deny the growing demands on her and Bill’s time and attention, and not only from people in the Fellowships. Bill was now explaining the workings of the program to the American Psychiatric Foundation, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, church organizations, and other groups around the country and around the globe.
“People mainly wanted to know more about Alcoholics Anonymous,” Lois would say. “It took a while before a lot of them came to understand the effects of alcoholism on families, that it’s a family disease. But we finally broke through.”2 Still, the recovery of a poor, hopeless drunk—particularly one who had once been a movie star or sports celebrity—was apt to draw wider attention. So the spotlight was mostly on Bill and AA throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Oftentimes in their travels, when out amid a throng of AA admirers, Lois sometimes watched in awe as people mobbed her husband as though he were some kind of mystic or messiah or recently canonized saint. As soon as they were alone, however, she would quietly nudge him and say, grinning: “Sweetheart, your halo’s on crooked.”3
But the truth was, alcoholics throughout the Fellowship, both here and abroad, literally believed Bill and Dr. Bob had saved their lives. And now with Dr. Bob gone, they couldn’t get close enough to the remaining founder, both physically and emotionally.
John L. Norris, M.D., who served as one of AA’s nonalcoholic trustees for twenty-seven years, often talked about this phenomenon. A very close friend of Bill’s, “Dr. Jack,” as he was fondly called by many AA members, once said, “One of the amazing things to me about Bill was the amount of devotion and real adoration he was getting almost everywhere he turned. How any human being could have been on the receiving end of the kind of devotion that he had from so many people, and keep any sort of personal humility was amazing.”4
Lois was to face the same kind of devotion and adulation herself later on as the cofounder of Al-Anon, and it would only intensify right up to the day she died at the age of ninety-seven.
While Lois always remained her husband’s biggest fan—perhaps becoming even more “addicted” to him than ever, in a more loving and less dependent way—she liked to tease him on occasion about his shortcomings, maybe to help keep his feet on the ground and his ego within bounds.
Still, it must be said that Bill Wilson was usually the first to admit he had many character defects and shortcomings, right up to the day he left this world and the great universal movement he and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith had founded almost seventy years earlier. Lois usually smiled and nodded at such confessions, but not at the flaws she found exasperating at times.
One such shortcoming was Bill’s penchant to monopolize the conversation when surrounded by guests in their living room at Stepping Stones after Harriet had served them all a home-cooked meal and a lip-smacking dessert. Lois recalled how he’d lean back in a straight chair, arms in motion, holding the floor as he expounded on whatever aspect of AA was occupying his mind at the moment. Once he got started, few had the audacity or temerity to interrupt. Even when Lois tried, as the clock ticked away, Bill would scowl in her direction and continue without missing a beat. He let everyone know when he was finished by plunking the legs of his chair noisily back down and folding his arms as if to say, “Now it’s your turn.”5
And then there was his tendency to exaggerate. One AA old-timer who knew Ruth Hock claimed she was constantly correcting Bill’s “overgenerous” estimates of membership figures or conference attendees. One example of this flaw was his often-quoted statement that there were more than five thousand members at AA’s 1955 International Convention in St. Louis, when those handling the registration count said the number was actually closer to thirty-one hundred.
When Ruth teased her boss about such matters, the old-timer said, Bill would wink good-naturedly and reply: “You’re spoiling all the fun.”6
While Bill did handle the “hero worship” rather well, Lois often recalled with a twinkle in her eye just how disappointed her husband was if he were not recognized at all, even though he claimed he preferred anonymity. “He told me every time he went to a meeting in New York,” she once shared with a friend, “he would try to sneak in unnoticed. But sooner or later someone would spot him and he would be asked to make a few remarks. Then he would come home and complain how he just wanted to be another AA member attending a meeting anonymously.”
“Then on our first trip across the country by car,” she continued, “we stopped off in Barstow, California, a little town out in the desert. We learned there was an AA meeting that night at a local church. When we arrived, no one had any idea who Bill was. Since we were from back East, however, they wanted to know if we had met any of the old-timers who started the program. I could tell Bill was just busting to tell them he not only met the founders but he was one of them. But I kept pinching his arm and we left the meeting without anyone being the wiser. Later in the car Bill laughed and said it was good for his humility. I said, ‘What humility?’ and we laughed some more.”7
The truth was, Bill Wilson loved to be recognized. In fact, when Time magazine was doing a major story about Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1960s and wanted to put his picture on the cover, calling him, as Aldous Huxley once said, “the greatest social architect of the century,”8 Lois remembered how he struggled with his decision: it would be against the very tradition of anonymity he himself wrote. He grudgingly turned down the request.
Some years later, after Bill had passed away, one of his closest friends, a great philanthropist named Brinkley Smithers, was asked how the AA cofounder was able to muster enough humility to pass up such an immense honor. Smithers laughed and replied, “You just didn’t know Bill Wilson. How many guys do you know who could go around for years bragging about turning down the cover of Time magazine?”9
When Lois later heard about Brinkley’s comment, she also laughed and said, “That was my Bill and I loved him for exactly who he was.”10
Lois enjoyed sharing another incident involving her beloved husband’s lifelong struggle to simply be, as his cofounder Dr. Bob used to put it, “just another anonymous drunk.” She was with her husband hurrying through LaGuardia Airport to catch a plane to an AA conference in Atlanta when Bill literally bumped into Joe Hirshhorn, the well-known financier whom he hadn’t seen in over thirty years—and whose wine cellar he once ransacked. They were both so excited about meeting that they kept shaking hands and patting each other on the back.
Finally, Joe wanted to know what had happened to Bill, why he disappeared from sight, why he hadn’t heard anything from him or about him all these years.
Lois looked on as her husband stammered, “Haven’t you heard, Joe? I . . . I mean, about this AA thing?”
“I could tell from the blank look on Joe Hirshhorn’s face that he had no idea at first what Bill was talking about,” Lois remembered. “Then suddenly his face lit up and he smiled at Bill and said, ‘Hey, that’s great! You really needed AA, that’s for sure.’ Then Joe rushed away. I could see how disappointed Bill was over Joe’s reaction.”11
Lois knew that the wealthy art collector was one man her husband would have wanted to acknowledge his enormous contribution to society, a prominent figure who knew him only as a drunk and now failed to recognize his great achievement. She said she squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek, and led him off to catch their flight.
While Bill would have liked Joe Hirshhorn’s recognition, he already had it from an even greater financial tycoon—John D. Rockefeller, Jr. For some years now a Christmas card sat atop the fireplace mantel at Stepping Stones containing the following message:
“How gratifying it must be to know how many people your organization has helped! Your leadership throughout has been an inspiration. Sincerely, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.”12
As for Bill’s flaws, his ego, his outspokenness, his tendency to exaggerate, they were all part of his biggest character defect—one he often spoke of himself—his drive for power and success. But Lois said she came to understand that without these tendencies, these innermost desires to always want “doubles of everything,” AA would never have gotten off the ground, much less grown into the worldwide organization it is today.
A former Chicago bartender, sober in AA for more than twenty years, astutely said, “God put a bright, ego-driven Wall Street promoter together with a laid-back practical country doctor, mixed well, shook and stirred, and out poured the miraculous cocktail of Alcoholics Anonymous.”13And over the years it has become a proven potion that saves lives and restores families, but only when those in need reach out for it. According to national statistics, there are more than forty million people in the United States alone who drink alcoholically. Yet, the sad truth is, even today only a small percentage of them are willing to try this “miraculous cocktail.” And among those willing to give it a sip, many soon reach back for their tried-and-true “magic elixir” called booze because it works faster to ease their fears and frustrations, to take the edge off their anger and despair. AA admittedly takes more time, and too many impatient alcoholics refuse to wait. So they drink again even though deep down they know it is taking them down. That’s the insidious, inexplicable disease of alcoholism.
As Bill often said, alcoholic behavior is “self-will run riot,” and “self-centeredness is the root of our problem.” And the answer? “Only through utter defeat,” he wrote, “are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.”
While AA does take time to work its own magic, its history from the beginning shows that about 50 percent of alcoholics who come and give the program a serious try stay sober. Another 25 percent who come with reservations as to whether they are “real alcoholics” do find sobriety after some relapses. The remainder who come to the Fellowship under pressure or in serious denial soon leave, and their disease continues to progress until they hit a much lower “bottom.” But many of these people in whom the seed is planted return over time.14
“It is frequently the denial of their disease that keeps them from coming to AA in the first place,” Lois noted. “It is a pity that so many alcoholics still have to suffer the same pain and loss that Bill did before trying Alcoholics Anonymous. Although I am happy to see both men and women coming to the program today at a much younger age. They can have such a wonderful life.”15 And that’s exactly what Bill Wilson found—a wonderful life. For after his spiritual experience and his meeting with Dr. Bob, he came to truly love and care for his fellow drunks. This ability to love again helped reunite him with his long-suffering wife, opened the door to her own discoveries, and enabled him to be mindful and considerate of others as well.
Lois also observed how her husband’s dramatic change from almost total self-centeredness to sincere concern for others also affected his relationship with his mother and father, whom he had seldom seen or communicated with during those terrible years of drinking.
Bill’s father, Gilman, and his second wife, Christine, had moved from Florida shortly after the highway project he had been working on was completed. He returned to the quarries in British Columbia, where his health began to deteriorate. He suffered from hardening of the arteries. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bill scraped together at least a hundred dollars each month to send to his father to help with his medical expenses. Bill also brought Gilman and Christine to Bedford Hills for extended visits. After so many lost years, they finally built a loving father-and-son relationship.
Soon, however, Gilman’s health worsened. Through some AA friends in Vancouver, Bill had his father admitted to a nursing home. Gilman Wilson died on February 14, 1954, just three weeks after Lois had her heart attack. He was eighty-four. Bill had his ashes returned to East Dorset, where he buried them in the small country cemetery amid the Wilson clan. Then it was left to Bill to inform his mother, the woman who long ago had been his father’s wife.
By now, Bill and Dr. Emily Griffith had grown very close even though she still lived on the West Coast. He visited his mother on his travels, and she often wrote or phoned simply to say how proud she was of his work. She said she knew so many people in California who were benefiting from AA.
Lois and her mother-in-law had long since buried the hatchet. Once Bill sobered up and Lois came to realize that she herself needed to change, she and Dr. Emily became very good friends. In fact, now a widow, Bill’s mother was a frequent guest at Stepping Stones. While there, she fell in love with Al-Anon, which made Lois immensely proud. They often went to meetings together. After Lois invited her to volunteer at the Al-Anon Clearing House, Dr. Emily was soon “bossing” the other volunteers around. Lois would simply smile and shrug as if to say, “Some things never change.”
In 1956, Bill persuaded his mother to move East. She agreed, but although she was now eighty-five, she insisted on having her own place in Westchester. Lois and Bill took Emily for rides in the countryside and for brief visits to East Dorset. They were brief because Emily was always in a hurry to leave Vermont. Perhaps it held too many upsetting memories for her.
It was in the winter of 1960 when Bill was forced to put his mother into a nursing home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he could visit with her often. Her physical and mental condition was such that she required constant care. Emily Griffith died there on May 15, 1961, at the age of ninety-one. Despite whatever upsetting memories there might have been, Bill and Lois buried her in East Dorset.
Lois said she came to admire the way her husband was able to handle the many ups and downs in his life, the adversities that in the past would have made marvelous excuses for him to drink again. But each new difficulty, every new challenge only seemed to strengthen his sobriety and his ability to lead his now vast army of recovered alcoholics.
Lois often recalled one of the most pivotal times in her husband’s life. It was at AA’s International Convention in St. Louis in 1955. Until then, Bill still held tightly to the reins of the Fellowship, listening but also guiding the voice of the “group conscience,” especially in matters that could, in his judgment, prove controversial or harmful to the movement.
But at that four-day event, Bill finally dismounted the tiger he had been riding for more than twenty years. He sat on stage as the membership unanimously approved merging the Alcoholic Foundation and AA’s General Service Office into one organization called Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. He forced himself to let go and let the elected board of alcoholic and nonalcoholic trustees run the Fellowship with as little interference from him as his “humility” would allow. He would now become its “roving Ambassador.”
AA’s cofounder was fifty-nine. He now had a good income from the sale of the Big Book and was finally free to pursue many of the interests and subjects that had been whirling around in his brain for some years. He wanted to write more books and more articles for AA’s Grapevine magazine. He wanted to travel more and share experiences with AA members around the globe. He wanted to seek out and investigate some of the lesser-known and more intriguing paths to spiritual and mental health, both to find help for his own recurring depressions and to assist others with similar problems.
As Lois once said, Bill suddenly possessed the rabid curiosity of that schoolboy back in East Dorset who wanted to know what made a boomerang return and a tiny crystal radio crackle with voices hundreds of miles away. At the same time, like a father who never ceases worrying about his children no matter how old they are, Bill could not break completely with his own “offspring.”
“He kept an office at AA headquarters,” Lois remarked with a smile, “just to make sure he knew what was going on. I think it was to be sure everyone was doing things right—his way. He also loved to walk down the hall to the conference room to check the world map on the wall that had pins indicating the number of groups now officially registered with World Services. In fact, he loved to put the new pins in himself.”16 By the late 1950s, after Bill had resigned his stewardship, there were more than 12,000 AA groups in some 75 countries including the United States, with an estimated membership of more than 200,000. By 2002, there were more than 100,000 groups in over 150 countries and an estimated membership of three million recovering alcoholics still attending meetings. No one knows how many thousands more left AA but remained sober by continuing to practice the Twelve Steps in their lives.
As for his writings, Bill turned out numerous articles for the Grapevine concerning the principles of the program and the importance of “walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” A series of his essays became a book published by AA World Services, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. In 1957, he wrote about the early history of the movement, its first twenty-one years, and the people and concepts behind its growth and success in another book, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.
Lois used to remark that her husband seemed to become a more prolific writer with age, perhaps because he had more time or became more productive or simply because he came to see things much more clearly through sober eyes.
Lois said Bill loved the studio he and his friends built on a hill near their house. “He would spend hours there meditating and writing whenever we were home. He called the studio ‘Wits End’ because that’s where he found so much peace and contentment, writing about what he loved and dreaming about the things he still wanted to do.”17
And then there were the traveling years. Lois and Bill first toured the Northwest together, then the West Coast, and then all sections of America where new AA and Al-Anon groups were being established. They would speak at these groups and attend various regional conferences, explaining in detail the concepts and Traditions that made both Fellowships so meaningful and so beneficial.
Bill also visited drunks in the alcoholic wards of local hospitals and at halfway houses while Lois met with families and shared with them the inspiring program of Al-Anon. Soon they were traveling overseas, accepting invitations from AA and Al-Anon groups in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
“We were like motorcycle hobos all over again,” Lois would laugh, “only this time we were traveling all around the world, but without our bike and sidecar. And wherever we went, everyone greeted us so warmly, like they were close friends we simply hadn’t met yet.”18
Lois loved to tell the story of their first visit to Oslo, Norway, and how AA and Al-Anon had reached the shores of that distant land. “It wasn’t until we arrived,” she recounted, “that we discovered the Oslo group had actually been founded by a coffee shop owner from Greenwich, Connecticut. He had come to America from Norway and after twenty years of drinking he wound up as a derelict. But in 1947, he found AA and a brand new life.”
After getting back on his feet, Lois explained, the man opened a coffee shop and began to make a good living. As his shame and guilt left, he finally wrote to his family back in Oslo telling them his story. Within a matter of weeks he received a letter back pleading for his help. His only brother had also become a hopeless drunk and was about to lose his job on an Oslo newspaper. The family also feared he was about to lose his life.
The coffee shop owner quickly sold his business and bought a ticket to Norway. But upon arriving home, his brother expressed no interest in hearing about AA or listening to a translation of the Steps or any stories of sober members. He only wanted to keep drinking. Thoroughly discouraged, the coffee shop owner began talking with local doctors and ministers, but found a shocking lack of interest wherever he went. So he started making plans to return to Connecticut.
On his last night in Oslo, his brother called, sick and fearful of dying. He asked how these anonymous American friends found a way to stop drinking. So the two sat down and his brother explained the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. This time it worked. Sober and back at his job, the brother ran a small ad in his newspaper, asking that anyone with a drinking problem call him. The wife of a florist answered his ad and the two brothers made their first Twelfth Step call. Soon there was another call, then a third and a fourth, and AA was established in Norway. Al-Anon was soon to follow.
When the Wilsons arrived at the airport in Oslo, Lois recalled, a large number of sober AA’s were waiting to welcome them. They learned that there were hundreds of members and that new groups were popping up all the time.
While Lois would tease about Bill’s “flaws,” she was always willing to expound on her husband’s positive attributes and accomplishments. However, she was reticent when it came to discussing those events that created controversy in AA or Al-Anon. She was deeply concerned, particularly after Bill’s passing, about protecting his reputation and preserving his legacy. But the truth was, being a seeker unafraid to investigate and test ideas and potential remedies that might benefit himself and his fellow alcoholics, Bill was bound to stir up a hornet’s nest now and then. And he did just that on several occasions, sometimes dragging his unsuspecting wife into it with him.
Two major controversies actually began with a chance meeting with famed physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Lois and Bill had finally saved enough money to take a two-week vacation at Trunk Bay in the Caribbean. They found themselves staying at the same resort as the Oppenheimers. The couples hit it right off. During long walks on the beach, Dr. Oppenheimer, after hearing about his friend’s alcoholism and lifelong bouts with depression, revealed his efforts to discover the possible chemical composition of neuroses—especially in the form of depression. He invited Bill to visit his Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University to evaluate his work on the chemistry of the brain.
Perhaps another factor that sparked Dr. Oppenheimer’s interest was Bill’s fascination and involvement with psychic phenomena. In fact, soon after Bill sobered up, he came to think of himself as having some psychic ability and believed he was capable of picking up energy from others, even those who had passed from this life.
His belief in clairvoyance and other extrasensory manifestations came from his deeply held conviction following his spiritual experience that life after life is a matter of fact as well as faith. This led to his attempts to get in touch with other lives in other times. Both he and Lois had discovered early on that Dr. Bob and Annie Smith also had great interest in the field of extrasensory phenomena.
Bill and Lois came to hold frequent Saturday evening “spook sessions” at Stepping Stones, joined by such friends as Anne and Devoe, Ruth and Wilbur, Tom P. and Adelaide, and Dr. Bob and Annie when they were in town. They would conduct various psychic experiments, often involving a Ouija board, in a downstairs bedroom that was quickly dubbed by Anne Bingham as the “Spook Room.”
While reluctant to discuss all that went on because of its somewhat controversial nature, Lois did describe once how some of the dramatic sessions were conducted.
She said Bill would lie down on the couch. People would come in and they’d carry on some story. There would be long sentences Bill would utter, sometimes in different languages, and Anne would try to write them down. Lois said sometimes it made sense and sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes even stranger things would happen.19
Lois said her husband’s motives in almost everything he did were always somehow connected to AA—in this case they were to deepen his spirituality by trying to discover more about God’s workings, wonder, and wisdom.
Lois revealed that Dr. Oppenheimer actually invited her husband to work with him at Princeton, mainly to oversee the research being done on the possible physiological and chemical aspects of depression, a problem Bill had always approached in terms of its psychological and spiritual ramifications. She said Bill had to politely turn down the scientist’s invitation because, as the “symbolic” leader and the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he was concerned that its members might feel he would be violating the Sixth Tradition: “An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.”20
Nevertheless, Lois said, Bill’s frequent visits to Dr. Oppenheimer’s institute and their numerous conversations opened his mind to many new discoveries that might help those in the Fellowship suffering as he did from other maladies related to or beyond the disease of alcoholism. He soon learned that while he had been concentrating his energies on arresting alcoholism through what he called spiritual means, many scientists had begun looking into the interrelated social, psychological, and biochemical aspects of the illness.
Two such men were Drs. Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer, both psychiatrists who were working with alcoholics and schizophrenics at a mental hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Through some mutual friends, Bill was introduced to the doctors and quickly became excited by their experiments since he believed he and they were working on “parallel tracks.”
Bill had already discovered that many “hopeless cases” such as himself could be reached through what he called “ego deflation at depth”—hitting a bottom that finally breaks through the wall of the ego. Drs. Osmond and Hoffer were trying to reach the same end with their alcoholic patients through chemical means. The psychiatrists were using an experimental synthetic chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide, which would later become notoriously known as LSD.
Lois always disliked discussing this particular chapter in her husband’s life because of its “complete misunderstanding” and the “terrible rumors that were spread” when all Bill did, she said, was simply involve himself in an investigation he believed might possibly help his fellow drunks. Encouraged by the two psychiatrists to be a “comparison case,” Bill participated briefly in their controlled experiments, taking small doses of LSD in August of 1956. But this quickly came to an end when word somehow began spreading through the AA community that “Bill Wilson is taking drugs.”21
Upon returning to New York, members and trustees alike, including Dr. Jack Norris, expressed outrage that the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous would even consider experimenting with a then totally unfamiliar, poorly researched, and possibly mind-altering substance—even though no one at the time knew anything about “acid trips” or whether it was an addictive chemical. Bill assured everyone his involvement in the research was over and then had both scientists confirm to his colleagues that the chemical contained “no addictive properties.”22 “Bill tried to explain the reasons he did it,” Lois once remarked, “but nobody would listen. Bill actually had the doctors give me some when I was with him one day in Saskatoon and it had no effect on me at all. It wasn’t until much later that we all learned what effect much larger doses could have on the mind.”23
Nell Wing was willing to elaborate a bit more on the controversy.
“Bill wanted to see what it was like,” she said. “He was intrigued with the work that [the doctors] were doing in Saskatoon with alcoholics. And he thought: anything that helps the alcoholics is good and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Techniques should be explored that would help some guy or gal recover who could not do it through A.A. or any other way.”24
The truth of the matter was, Bill Wilson had always been on record against giving alcoholics drugs, at least those narcotics whose severe addictive effects were already well known. But LSD was then an “experimental chemical.” Even the psychiatrists themselves abandoned their project once they saw there were few, if any, beneficial effects. Bill closed that particular chapter in his life when he told a close friend one day that he considered the chemical to be of some value to some people and practically no damage to anyone. He added that it will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego and keep it reduced.25
Just when Lois felt relieved that the controversy was finally behind them, Bill jumped from the frying pan into the fire. And to her dying day, Lois could never really understand what all the fuss was about.
It concerned her husband’s sudden, outright, and unabashed endorsement of one of the lesser-known vitamins at the time—vitamin B-3, better known as niacin. He began proclaiming its beneficial effects for alcoholics after becoming engrossed himself in the many studies that had been done on its properties and alleged curative powers. Bill became absolutely convinced of three things. First, giving niacin as part of the alcoholic’s detoxification process could lessen the effects of alcohol withdrawal. Second, studies showed that it stimulated the blood vessels, particularly in the brain, which helped alleviate depressive mood swings. And third, it prevented to some extent a drop in blood sugar, which researchers said improved the feelings of both physical and psychological well-being.
“I think the problem was,” Lois once hinted to a close friend, “that with most things Bill got interested in, he became overenthusiastic. Wherever we went, he was telling everyone to take niacin. He even had me taking it and I must admit it seemed to help. In fact, I still take it. Maybe some people didn’t realize that niacin is only a vitamin, not a mood changer. It helps without hurting.”26
Lois was absolutely right about Bill’s excessive enthusiasm getting him into hot water again. He was spreading his niacin gospel wherever he went. He even wrote several papers on the subject, which he distributed far and wide. Soon the pros and cons of vitamin B-3 were being argued in AA meetings, which ran head-on into another of the Fellowship’s Traditions, the Tenth: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”27
Once again a group of AA trustees sat down with their cofounder to express their concern about the latest hornet’s nest he was stirring up. They had no argument over his promoting the values of niacin; they asked only that he not mix it up with the AA name or in AA activities. Despite his absolute conviction about niacin’s beneficial effects for all alcoholics, Bill agreed to separate his personal interest in it from the Fellowship. This solution quickly ended the controversy.
Lois said that her husband’s interest in vitamin therapy did not end with niacin. She said they both came to believe that other vitamins offered their own specific benefits as well. While she approached the subject in her usual low-key style, Lois said Bill could talk for hours about how various vitamin regimens could help alcoholics in their early stages of physical recovery and later with their mental and emotional recovery.
“I think at one time we had almost every vitamin there was here at Stepping Stones,” Lois would smile. “I must admit it became a bit confusing after a while so I just stuck to the few I knew the most about, like B-12, C, and E, and of course, niacin.”28 Over the years of Bill’s investigation into vitamins and related natural health therapies, he was introduced to a woman in Mount Kisco, New York, who had spent many years following a similar avocation—improving mental and physical well-being through natural remedies. Her name was Helen Wynn, a woman of pleasant looks and a stoic disposition, said several people who knew her.
According to mutual acquaintances, Helen and Bill became good friends and were seen together now and then shopping at pharmacies and health food outlets or having lunch on occasion to discuss their latest finds—a new Chinese herb, an Indian root, or a newly discovered benefit of an A-vitamin. Then the rumors began.
It should be mentioned that AA’s cofounder had always been open and friendly with the women at the Central Office—too friendly, some of his detractors might whisper. He even had an open ear for women alcoholics in the Fellowship who wanted his advice or some encouragement now and then. So the rumors were not just about Helen Wynn but about Bill’s “womanizing” in general.
The gossip was whispered at first, then it grew less subtle and finally became downright mean. Nell Wing, for example, became a target. She once heard a third- or fourth-hand story about herself and Bill—a man she always looked up to as a father figure. She was mortified and thought about leaving her job as AA’s archives director. Then one day while at Stepping Stones, she decided to tell Lois what had happened. Nell said she was astonished by her dear friend’s response. “Lois told me,” Nell said, “that the founder of any great movement or organization, especially one like Alcoholics Anonymous, can develop enemies, men who fall away, get drunk and then angry and jealous. And when they find people putting someone like Bill up on a pedestal, they know that even the rumor of such frailties or indiscretions can bring him down and make them feel bigger in their own eyes. But the real problem is that such rumors can disillusion members and cause great harm to AA. So Lois told me not to pay any attention to such hurtful stories but simply to trust in my own feelings and in what I really knew.”29
How did Lois react to these rumors? She followed the same advice she gave to Nell. She decided the best way to respond to such “hideous gossip” was not to respond at all. She simply showed her great love and support for her husband at every opportunity despite the pain such stories must have wrought and the deep resentments she must have had as the sick rumormongering continued. Even today, more than thirty years after Bill’s death, there are those who for some reason still seem to enjoy digging up and passing along such ugly gossip.
As for Helen Wynn, who has since passed away, there is a gentlemen who knew her quite well back then—her dentist for many years in Mount Kisco. Preferring to remain anonymous, the dentist also remembered meeting Bill on two separate brief occasions.
“If ever there was a platonic relationship,” he volunteered, “this surely was one. I mean, I knew Helen quite well and I must say she wasn’t what you would ordinarily call a ‘loose woman,’ if you know what I mean. In fact, she appeared to be just the opposite, rather uptight and very businesslike if not downright bossy. I really couldn’t see them together except maybe as friends or business associates.”30 Lois once said she never knew anything about Helen Wynn until after Bill’s death, when she discovered her husband had left the woman some money in his will. When asked about it, Lois simply shrugged and said her husband left money to several other people as well—and that was to be her final comment on the matter.31
Most old-timers in the AA program have little or nothing to say about their cofounder’s so-called womanizing. But there were two who knew Bill back then, Jim G. and Jack O., who claim his relationship with the Mount Kisco woman was really no different from those with his other female friends and colleagues, whom he admittedly loved being around.
“But if you’re talking sex,” Jim G. said quite frankly, “I honestly don’t know, although I’m inclined to doubt it. Why? Look, everyone has their temptations, their appetites you might say. And if you’re looked upon as kind of a savior like Bill was, I guess there’s more opportunity to be tempted.
“However, let’s not forget this is the same guy who had a spiritual experience, the same guy I believe was divinely inspired to write the Big Book, and the same guy who wrote in that Big Book that our sobriety depends upon our spiritual condition. Where I come from, if you’re a married guy screwing around with babes, you’re not in a good spiritual condition. And if you’re not in a good spiritual condition, you’re not going to stay sober for very long. And Bill Wilson was sober—and for a very long time.”32 How often Lois heard these rumors, or whether they even permeated their circle of AA and Al-Anon friends, no one really knows. The only thing that does appear certain is that despite the LSD and niacin controversies, and unseemly gossip at times, none of this apparently interfered with Lois and Bill’s life together at Stepping Stones. Harriet Sevarino, their longtime housekeeper, was among many who testified to that.
“When they would walk together in the gardens or along the dirt paths,” Harriet said, “they would always be holding hands. And I would see them kiss each other hello and good-bye whenever I was around. You could tell they really loved and cared for each other. And don’t forget, I was with them over thirty-five years.”33
Nell Wing also fondly recalled the strong bond between “two of the most important people in my life.” As she put it: “Certainly they had their little spats and misunderstandings, but they were usually brief and never dragged on. Lois and Bill not only adored each other but they respected each other. To me, I think that’s what really keeps people together for such a long, long time—love and respect.”34
Nell and Harriet said it was evident again on the evening of January 24, 1968, when they were both at Stepping Stones for the surprise celebration of Lois and Bill’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Nell had been staying at the house, working with Bill on some correspondence he needed to get out. She sensed that both he and Lois were expecting some kind of surprise party for their anniversary and appeared quite disappointed that nothing was happening. To keep them even more in the dark, Nell said she was taking them to lunch to celebrate the occasion. That’s when Lois and Bill’s spirit seem to rise, thinking the party would probably be at the restaurant.
Their faces fell again when they walked into the nearby bistro and saw only a few unfamiliar faces in the place. Nell could hardly contain herself although she did say they had a very pleasant, drawn-out lunch.
During the ride back to the house, no one said a word. But as they reached the top of the long driveway, Lois almost had another heart attack. The yard was filled with cars and a throng of relatives and close friends were standing there to greet them—sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, and AA and Al-Anon friends from as far away as Arizona and California. Harriet had prepared a marvelous buffet that not only satisfied all of the guests, but also soothed the slightly jarred egos of the fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrants.35
Lois recalled that after everyone had gone that evening, she and Bill sat together in front of the large stone fireplace. They watched the sparks crackle off the flaming pine logs and shared their memories of the years that had flown by—their youthful hopes and dreams, their struggles with a disease they once knew nothing about, and the awesome opportunity God had given them to share their recovery and experiences—the pain and the joy, the sorrow and the elation—with their fellow sufferers throughout the world. They sat together long after midnight wondering what the future might hold, hoping they would have many more nights like this, many more years of sharing their love with each other and all those still in need of what they had found.
But that dream wouldn’t come true. For while their fiftieth wedding anniversary was a milestone in their lives, the celebration was tempered somewhat by Bill’s growing health problems. He was seventy-two now, and his deteriorating health had become quite obvious to all who were close to him—especially Lois.
“He was trying so hard to stop smoking,” Lois said. “He would often get angry with himself whenever he would light up another cigarette. I knew there was nothing I could say that would help. I had already said it all.”36
So had Dr. Leonard Strong, who had been warning his brother-in-law for years to stop smoking: his coughing and wheezing could lead to serious heart and lung problems. Bill would merely smile and nod and promise to try harder. In 1965, pulmonary specialists diagnosed Bill with emphysema and told him that unless he gave up tobacco completely, he could be dead in a very few years. Bill no longer smiled and nodded, but neither did he say anything to Lois. He simply continued struggling to break what he always called his “nasty old habit.”
Lois soon learned the truth and did everything she could to keep her husband healthy, encouraging him to walk every day to help his breathing and strengthen his lungs. “Sometimes when we were out walking together,” Lois recalled, “Bill would begin coughing and gasping for breath. So he began carrying a pocket inhalator with him, a small device that would pump medication into his mouth and down into his lungs. It would help him to stop coughing and wheezing. It could be very frightening at times.”37
Bill had loved to walk for miles, Lois said, but now her husband had to stop and rest more frequently, often perching on a tree stump until he caught his breath. Their neighbors, who for years would wave as they passed by, began to notice that Bill was slowing down, not walking as often, and soon not walking at all.
Lois would sadly reminisce about the year everything took a turn for the worse. It was 1969 and it actually began on an upbeat note. Bill had clung to his latest New Year’s resolution and had actually stopped smoking. In fact, even those sullen moods that always accompanied his many stabs at quitting were gone. He was smiling and boastful that cigarettes were finally out of his life, once and for all. He felt so good that one day after an ice storm in late February, he climbed up on the roof of his studio to survey the damage it had caused. He slipped and fell into the snow, ice, and slush and wound up in the hospital several days later with his first bout of pneumonia. It would reoccur several times over the coming year, due to his worsening emphysema.
“Bill stopped going into his office in New York,” Lois explained, “because by the end of the day he was so tired he could hardly walk the few blocks to Grand Central Station for the train ride home. So Nell began spending more time with us at Stepping Stones, helping Bill answer his mail. I think many times she would write the letters for him, she knew so well what he wanted to say. And she was such a big help to me. I don’t know what I would have done without her during those last few years when Bill was so sick.”38 Lois said her husband’s last public appearance was at AA’s huge International Convention in Miami Beach over the July Fourth weekend of 1970. Despite his failing health and frequent need for oxygen, Bill insisted on attending the worldwide gathering of AA’s held every five years. He and Lois arrived a few days early so that he could rest up for the five major talks he always gave at these Conventions. But the evening before the usual opening day press conference, Bill’s breathing took a turn for the worse. He was also having chest pains. He was rushed by ambulance to the Miami Heart Institute, where his fellow AA member and devoted friend Dr. Ed Bradley was the director. He was given oxygen and was soon resting comfortably.
“Bill had his heart set on being with his fellow AA’s,” Lois shared. “So, on top of his physical problems he also became very depressed. He made Dr. Ed promise to get him well enough to attend at least one of the major meetings at the Convention. I didn’t think it was possible, but it happened.”39
In the meantime, other AA’s had to fill in for their cofounder. Dr. Norris substituted at the press conference. Bernard Smith, the past chairman of the General Service Board and another close friend, delivered the main Saturday night talk Bill was scheduled to make. He assured everyone that their beloved Bill W. was on the road to recovery.
Lois managed to sneak away from the hospital to fulfill her Al-Anon commitments and also to attend a number of AA gatherings on her husband’s behalf. Lois had often said that she, like Annie Smith, felt as much at home in AA as she did in Al-Anon. She never had a problem talking about the AA Fellowship’s miraculous beginnings, its colorful growing-up years, and where it stood today. And she continued to accept invitations to speak at AA gatherings throughout the rest of her life.
Lois said that by Sunday morning, her husband insisted he was feeling well enough to leave the hospital and attend the convention’s closing session. Dr. Ed, despite his concerns, accompanied Bill and Lois in an ambulance that took them directly to the convention center’s stage entrance. Wearing a nasal tube and taking oxygen, Bill was helped into a wheelchair and pushed onto the stage to the surprise and rousing cheers of more than twenty thousand people.
“I still choke up when I think about it,” Lois once told a close friend. “Everyone stood and shouted and applauded for almost five minutes. Bill kept raising his hand for them to be seated but they just had to let him know how much they loved him. His eyes filled up and he kept wiping away the tears.”40 Then everyone seemed to gasp in unison as his lanky frame rose slowly from the wheelchair and his ashen face moved close to the microphone. He began to speak, and for a few minutes he was his old self, the man who could mesmerize thousands, the leader every drunk in the world who wanted sobriety was willing to follow. That Sunday morning Bill Wilson knew more than ever why he was still sober and the debt he owed not only to his pal Dr. Bob but also to every recovered alcoholic who had followed them. Perhaps that’s why, as his lungs tightened and his breathing came again in gasps, he closed his last brief AA talk to his fellow drunks with an ancient Arabian greeting, “I salute you, and I thank you for your lives.”41
Lois said her husband was rushed from the stage back into the ambulance and returned to the Miami Heart Institute, where he stayed until the end of the month. Upon his arrival back at Stepping Stones, Bill promptly caught pneumonia once again. He was taken to Northern Westchester Hospital for a few weeks, then brought home. Then, two more times, just as soon as he was able to walk again, the pneumonia returned and he was back in the hospital. Even at home, Bill was now on oxygen twenty-four hours a day. Soon he was totally bedridden and had nurses caring for him around the clock. Despite all this help, it was still exhausting for Lois, who was now seventy-nine.
“When Bill would be awake,” she once told a friend, “he would want me to read to him or pray with him. No matter what the hour he would call for me and I would come. If I had the strength, I would never have left his side. He was still the most important thing in my life.”42 Dr. Ed remained in constant touch from Miami. In early January of 1971, he called to say the Heart Institute had developed a new type of breathing apparatus he thought might help Bill. It was similar to the decompression chambers used by deep-sea divers. Lois sensed it was a last-resort measure, but her husband still had great confidence in his cardiologist. So she made plans to fly down to Miami with Bill and Nell in a Learjet chartered by their philanthropist friend Brinkley Smithers. They left from Westchester County Airport on the cold and windy Sunday morning of January 24, 1971—Lois and Bill’s fifty-third wedding anniversary.
Lois’s recollections of that day were blurred by her deep distress over Bill’s fragile condition and fears that he might never reach Miami alive. But Nell vividly recalled that “mercy flight.” “Dr. Ed had flown up on the jet to be with us and watch over Bill as best he could on the return flight,” Nell explained. “He had Bill placed on a stretcher across the backs of several seats, wearing his oxygen mask. He put Lois at his side where her physical presence and her own special love would aid him most. I sat at the foot of the stretcher.
“As we flew, Bill slipped in and out of hallucinations, seeing dead or absent relatives at his feet, whom he would describe in detail for us. His left arm would occasionally slip off the narrow stretcher and hang down. I would lift it back onto his lap and give him a pat. He would try to smile and give my hand a grateful squeeze. I simply said, ‘Hold fast, Bill—one of his favorite expressions—Hold fast, Bill.’ ”43
Arriving in Miami around noon, AA’s had arranged for an ambulance to rush Bill to the Heart Institute. Lois spent the rest of the day at her husband’s side. When he was placed in the breathing apparatus, she sat next to him hoping and praying this latest technology would perform some kind of a miracle. It was after eight o’clock that evening when Bill finally dozed off and she left his side. Lois and Nell checked into adjoining rooms at a nearby Holiday Inn, had a bite to eat, and then, thoroughly exhausted, fell into a deep sleep. What happened next was something Lois never forgot.
There was a knock on her motel door around six that morning. When she opened it, there stood Dr. Ed, his eyes filled with tears. He said they had twice tried to revive Bill from a coma. They worked on him throughout the night. They couldn’t save him. He reached out and held Lois in his arms as she sobbed uncontrollably.44
William G. Wilson died at 11:30 p.m. on January 24, 1971, the fifty-third anniversary of his marriage to Lois Burnham Wilson. He was seventy-five. The death certificate said he had advanced emphysema for three years and pneumonia for two weeks. It also read that congestive heart failure was a major contributing cause of his death.
Nell remembers flying back from Miami with Lois that Monday afternoon. They barely talked. At one point through her grief and tears, Nell recalled her dear friend murmuring to herself, “Maybe I was too possessive. I wanted so much of his time, to be with him. Because I loved him. I loved him so much.”45
Nell also knew how deeply hurt Lois was over not being called by the hospital when her husband was close to death. Lois wrote about that pain in her memoirs:
“Bill’s death had been expected by the doctors at several periods during his illness, and I had known it was a probability; but we had both been so hopeful about this new treatment of Ed’s.
“The missing him would come later. But the hurt of not being at his side at this supreme moment was immediate. Why was I not called? Bill and I had shared so many of life’s adventures; now, when the door opened for him into the greatest of mystical experiences, I was not there.
“I try to be practical about it. It was to save me that the doctors hadn’t called me. Perhaps they were being kind to me. The pain might have been worse if I had been there. Bill might have been in a coma and not known me. But even so I wanted to be there, and the hurt of not being at his side is still with me.”46
Since the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous state nothing about a member’s anonymity after passing away, the whole world came to know the full name of the Fellowship’s cofounder on Tuesday, January 26, 1971, when Bill’s biography and picture were displayed on the front page of the New York Times.
Memorial services were held in cities across the country and in capitals around the world. Tributes were paid to Bill and the founding of AA by U.S. and foreign dignitaries alike, from religious leaders to movie stars and from well-known social leaders to the lowliest of drunks recently arrived at the doorstep of the Fellowship.
But perhaps the most moving memorial service was the one Lois held at Stepping Stones on the afternoon of January 27. While the old country house high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River valley found itself jammed with friends, relatives, and AA and Al-Anon members, Lois and Bill’s favorite prayer, the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, could be heard quietly echoing through the rooms and drifting softly out across the snow-covered grounds and bare-limbed trees and shrubs. Lois often said it filled everyone there that day with a sense that Bill was still among them and that his spirit would always be wherever an alcoholic was in need. They prayed:
Lord, make me a channel of thy peace; that where there is hatred I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that where there is error, I may bring truth; that where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that where there is despair, I may bring hope; that where there are shadows, I may bring light; that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek to comfort rather than to be comforted; to understand, than to be understood; to love, than to be loved. For it is by giving that one receives. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life. Amen.
Bill Wilson was buried without fanfare in the small family cemetery in East Dorset, Vermont, near his parents who bore him and his grandparents who raised him. The simple gravestone that contains his name and military rank is made of the same white marble his father once quarried in the nearby Green Mountains. There is no mention of Alcoholics Anonymous.