The Hazards of Publicity

Today’s three sentences come from the middle of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, his book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, published in 1953. The essay begins by counting what publicity had done: half of AA’s members, it says, had been led in by the press, radio, films and television. Then it sets attraction against promotion, with two kinds of promotion everyone knew: a party that advertises its leaders, and a charity that puts every distinguished name it can get on its letterhead. Right after today’s lines comes the reason for holding back. By temperament, the essay says, nearly every one of them had been “an irrepressible promoter.”

Bill’s own name had been on such a letterhead. Marty M. opened her National Committee for Education on Alcoholism in October 1944, with Bill’s name and Dr. Bob S.’s on its letterhead, and she toured the country named in the papers as an AA member. Bill stood by her at first. To a member in Georgia who asked to do the same, he wrote that he still felt “it was right for her to do exactly as she did.” In 1946 the committee mailed an appeal for money on that letterhead, and some of it reached AA groups. Bill came round to cutting all ties, and within a year he and Dr. Bob had withdrawn. In 1948 he wrote that consenting to her break had “proved to be a mistake.”

By his own account, he had chased the spotlight himself. In the Grapevine for January 1955, in an article reprinted two years later in AA Comes of Age, he told how a famous ballplayer’s comeback in the press had given him ideas. Soon, he wrote, he was on the road handing out interviews and pictures; for two or three years, he guessed, he had been “A.A.’s number one anonymity breaker.” He remembered two-column spreads about “Bill the Broker,” with his full name and picture.

His biographers found otherwise. Pass It On, AA’s life of Bill, names the ballplayer as Rollie H., a catcher for the Cleveland Indians, whose story ran in May 1940. But Lois W.’s diary for that year has Bill outside New York and New Jersey only once, on a trip to Washington and Baltimore in April, and the breaks he did make, the book says, came two years later. Bill liked to make a point with a story, it says, and to cast himself as the bad example, “something he would not do to anyone else.”

In February 1954 he turned down an honorary Doctor of Laws from Yale, one of six degrees he declined, and asked those who knew of the offer not to talk about it. “I don’t want to capitalize on humility,” he said.

More on the anonymity breakers of the 1940s and the letters AA’s office sent the press: The short form, in Rule 62. Marty M.’s break, before and after: Something useful, in People Like You.