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ALCOHOLISMIS A DISEASE
Illustration · An empty New York subway car in the 1940s. Among the cards above the windows is one with the plain statement her committee put on the city’s buses and subway trains: “Alcoholism is a disease.” Not drawn from a photograph.

People Like You

Meet Marty

A Chicago debutante who drank her way to the Bowery, then spent the rest of her life telling America that people like her were sick, not bad.

“… she became in later years among the most active workers we have, as well as a pioneer in the field of education and rehabilitation for alcoholics.”

Bill W., in AA’s history of its first twenty years · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

Marty M. was born in Chicago in 1904, the eldest child of a rich family. At fourteen she had tuberculosis, kept secret as a disgrace. She drank from seventeen, eloped at twenty-two, and lost control of her drinking in London. By 1937, back in New York, she was cadging drinks in Second Avenue bars, sure she was going insane.

For years doctors had called her one of “people like you,” with no name for what she had. In 1939, at a sanitarium in Connecticut, her psychiatrist handed her the manuscript of a book written by alcoholics. That April she went to her first AA meeting, in Brooklyn, and found she had come home.

In 1944 she founded the committee that became the National Council on Alcoholism, and for the rest of her life she told the country, in thousands of talks, that alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic a sick person who can be helped. One of AA’s books would call her “the first woman to achieve lasting sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous.” She wasn’t the first to try, and her record had slips in it: three early ones she spoke of, and a late one, her biographers found, that she kept secret. She died in 1980, a little over two weeks after telling AA’s women, “You’re my children.”

This is her story in seven parts and Legacy. It’s built mostly from Sally and David R. Brown’s biography of 2001, which draws on tapes of her talks and on her papers, with AA’s own histories and her testimony to the Senate in 1969; where they disagree, these pages say so.

Start with 1 · Catherine

Her life at a glance

  1. 1904Born October 15 in Chicago. By the time she is seven, her father is a vice president of Marshall Field.
  2. 1918Has tuberculosis at fourteen, and spends three years getting well, the first at a sanatorium in Los Angeles.
  3. 1927Elopes from New Orleans with John Blakemore, and leaves him three months later.
  4. 1930Moves to London. Within two years her drinking is out of control.
  5. 1936Sails home to New York on the Queen Mary, and is carried off on a stretcher.
  6. 1938About six months on a ward at Bellevue, then Blythewood, a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut.
  7. 1939Goes to her first AA meeting, in Brooklyn, on April 11.
  8. 1940The last of three slips, at Christmas.
  9. 1943She and Priscilla P. are in love. They will be together nearly forty years.
  10. 1944Founds the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism, which opens that October.
  11. 1950Publishes Primer on Alcoholism.
  12. 1954Buys a house in Easton, Connecticut, with Priscilla. Brinkley S. joins her board.
  13. 1960Around this year, her biographers learned, she drinks again, briefly. The few who know keep it secret.
  14. 1968Hands the council to a successor and becomes its founder-consultant.
  15. 1969Testifies to a Senate subcommittee on alcoholism on July 24.
  16. 1980Speaks to AA’s convention in New Orleans. Dies July 22, at 75.

Seven parts and Legacy

Walk through her story

Each part has a short story, a one-minute audio stop, and a closer look for anyone who wants to go deeper. Read them in order, or start anywhere.

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