One Drunk to Another Number One Man
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Illustration · A plain white marble headstone and footstone in a Vermont hill cemetery at dusk in May, the lettering worn past reading. Not drawn from a photograph of the grave.

Bedford Hills, Miami Beach and East Dorset · 1969–1971

Legacy

He quit smoking too late, asked for whiskey four times in his last weeks, and died sober on his wedding anniversary.

“I salute you, and I thank you for your lives.”

Bill W., in his last message to AA, read by Lois at his anniversary dinner, November 1970 · quoted in Pass It On, 1984

The last two years

Bill had been trying to quit smoking since at least 1940, when Ruth Hock, AA’s secretary then, remembered him smoking her cigarettes while he was “quitting,” often two at a time. Dennis Manders, from AA’s office, remembered the edges of his desk scarred by cigarettes he had set down and forgotten. “He had turned 70 in 1965, and he was still smoking,” Pass It On says. By 1968 he was short of breath, and AA’s office newsletter later said, “He had been treated for emphysema since 1968.”

In February 1969 he climbed onto the low roof of his studio to look at the winter’s damage, slipped, and caught a branch as he slid off. From then on his health declined. “By April of that year, he had actually quit smoking, and this time, he stayed stopped.” Bob H., who managed AA’s office, put it plainly: “A good deal of damage was done by that time.”

At the General Service Conference dinner in April 1970 he stopped in the middle of a sentence. “I’m sorry. I can’t continue,” he said, and sat down. In July, at AA’s convention in Miami Beach, he was taken to the Miami Heart Institute the first night. On Sunday morning an ambulance brought him to the hall, a lift raised his wheelchair to the stage, and with oxygen tubes in place he spoke for four minutes, “and for the first two or three of those minutes, he was the old Bill,” Bob H. remembered. The film tells the convention.

A color slide of Miami Beach in 1966.
Miami Beach in 1966, four years before AA’s convention there, on a color slide by Edmund L. Mitchell.Edmund L. Mitchell Collection, Boston Public Library

Home again, he got pneumonia, and it never really went away. Soon he was never without oxygen. He had hallucinations so real that he described them to Lois and to Nell Wing, and sometimes, Pass It On says, they laughed despite themselves. By September he was bedridden, and after November he never came downstairs. Some mornings he woke saying, “Oh my God, I’ve got to go through all this again today.”

Susan Cheever read the notes kept by his night nurse for her 2004 biography. She reports that at 6:10 on Christmas morning, 1970, he asked for three shots of whiskey, and that he asked again on January 2, 8 and 14. He didn’t get them, and she writes that he was upset. Pass It On doesn’t mention it.

In January the Miami Heart Institute had a new breathing machine that might help him. An old friend chartered a Learjet, and Dr. Ed B., the institute’s director and a fellow AA member, flew up to bring him back, with Lois and Nell. On the way Bill described his parents, his grandparents and his old friend Mark Whalon, who all appeared to him in the cabin. “Hold fast,” Nell told him. They landed in the late afternoon, and Lois said good night at eight. It was January 24, their 53rd wedding anniversary, and “Bill died at eleven-thirty that night.” He had been sober 36 years.

AA’s board gave his full name to the press for the first time, and the New York Times ran it on page one with his picture; he had agreed to it in a signed statement in 1966, the Times reported. On February 14, groups around the world held memorial meetings. On May 8, “when the Vermont ground had thawed,” he was buried in East Dorset. Lois lived until 1988.

Listen Legacy About 1 minute

December 1970 and January 1971

The last weeks

His last Christmas and the month after it: the four mornings he asked for a drink, and the day he died.

The requests are from the night nurse’s notes, as Susan Cheever reports them (2004) and as the Washington Post described them that year; we haven’t seen the notes. Pass It On is silent about them. It does record that by then he was on oxygen all the time and at times hallucinating. That’s context, not an excuse.

December 1970
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January 1971
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  • Friday, December 25, 1970

    At 6:10 in the morning he asks the night nurse for three shots of whiskey. He doesn’t get them.

  • January 2, 8 and 14, 1971

    He asks again, three more times.

  • Sunday, January 24

    Flown to Miami Beach on his and Lois’s 53rd wedding anniversary. He dies at 11:30 that night. Pass It On doesn’t date the flight outright, but its account runs straight from the landing to his death, and the Stepping Stones Foundation says he died “shortly after he arrived.”

His sobriety date held

Cheever has said that the notes chilled her, and that she came to see them as a story about the power of alcohol: after more than thirty years sober, even he still wanted a drink. He asked four times, and four times he went without.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What he turned down and what came anyway, the stone in East Dorset, and what the members made of a flawed founder.

What he turned down, and what came anyway

He turned down six honorary degrees, Yale’s Doctor of Laws among them, in 1954. In 1951 he declined to be listed in Who’s Who in America, and asked that the Lasker Award, offered to him that year, go to AA instead; it did. When Time wanted him on its cover, even with the back of his head to the camera, he turned down the cover and the story.

At his death AA’s office newsletter, Box 4-5-9, listed three of the honors he had declined: “an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, a movie of his life story, and a cover picture story by Time magazine.”

What came anyway: his name and picture on page one of the New York Times, and in 1999 a place among Time’s hundred most important people of the century. The profile was written by Susan Cheever, who noted that he had once turned the magazine down.

The stone
A small country cemetery in a Vermont winter, with old headstones.
A small country cemetery near Taftville, in Windsor County, Vermont, in February 1940. It isn’t East Dorset; no cleared photograph of Bill’s grave has been found.Marion Post Wolcott, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

He is buried in the family plot in the East Dorset cemetery, next to his uncle Clarence, who had “bequeathed” him his violin. His mother, Dr. Emily, had been laid to rest in the same plot in 1961.

The headstone is a plain marker of white marble, “the same white marble that his father once quarried for the buildings and monuments of New York City.” It gives his name and his years, 1895 to 1971. A small footstone gives his rank and battery in the First World War and the dates of his birth and death.

“There is no mention of A.A.”

A flawed man

When Ernest Kurtz published the story of Bill’s LSD, he wrote later, the members and others who loved AA didn’t object. They “rejoiced that it revealed that Bill W. remained a flawed human being even in sobriety, just as did they.”

Lois had said much the same in her own way, in the line at the start of this piece: “He was a tremendous egotist. But he recognized this, and I believe that the triumph of his life was his victory over himself and his becoming truly humble.”

Of the day at St. Louis in 1955 when he handed AA to its members, Bill wrote that Alcoholics Anonymous “was at last safe — even from me.”

Sources