Everyone’s done some pretty cool stuff nailed. For a lot of people, booze or drugs will be involved with, or a least partially instrumental in, some of the greatest moments in their lives. The thing is, those moments are normally hooking up with someone, saying something funny, eating a really awesome pizza or, for the really lucky, all three at the same time. For very few people do genuine success and being fucked out of your mind go hand in hand. But it can happen, as this collection of successful wreckheads shows…
1. Stephen King Writes Cujo While out of His Mind
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Stephen King has written fifty novels and sold over 350,000,000 books. It’s hard to think of a living author better-known than him, or anyone who has caused more nightmares. He’s also spent a while being a massive drunk. He claims to have next to no recollection of writing his 1981 novel Cujo, in which the titular rabid dog can easily be seen as a pretty good metaphor for addiction. King later wrote:
“There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.”
2. Dock Ellis Pitches a No-Hitter While on Acid
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For a baseball pitcher, a “no-hitter” is the Holy Grail. Out of the 2,430 Major League Baseball games played every year, on average two of them’ll be no-hitters. On Friday June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates threw a no-hitter while completely out of his tree on LSD. He’d thought it was still Thursday, and forgotten he had to play that evening. As a result, he played the game high as shit, at one point thinking both Jimi Hendrix and Richard Nixon were involved (Nixon was the umpire; Hendrix was swinging his guitar like a bat). A film about his life, No-No: A Dockumentary, was released this year.
3. Chris Herren Has No Idea What's Going On
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Basketball player Chris Herren started drinking at 13 and had no intention to stop really. He went on to play some of his best games in college completely full of booze and coke. A drugs bust and a stint in rehab did nothing to stop him, and he joined the NBA, being drafted by the Denver Nuggets in 1999. One clean season later, a trip home introduced him to the painkiller OxyContin, which he immediately became hooked on. When he was transferred to the Celtics, it should have been one of the best days of his life—a local boy made good. Instead, Herren has no recollection of the announcement. “I couldn’t tell you how the press conference went, or who was next to me. All I was thinking about was getting in touch with my dealer” he later said. After taking the unusual and ultimately unsuccessful step of using heroin to try and get off the OxyContin, and some very low points including selling his vacuum cleaner to pay for smack, Herren cleaned up—he now lectures on substance abuse. ESPN made a documentary about him, Unguarded, which is super bleak but very good.
4. Matt Stone and Trey Parker Enjoy the Oscars
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Matt Stone and Trey Parker have been up for umpteen awards in their time, for South Park, The Book Of Mormon, Team America… but nothing more high-profile than an Oscar nomination. Getting nominated for an Oscar is a pretty big deal, so when Parker got nominated for the Best Song award (for Blame Canada, from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut) in 1999, he decided to do it in style. First he took co-creator Matt Stone along as his date. Second, the pair of them had dresses made to match the ones Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez had worn the year before (“We thought about doing duck costumes, but they wouldn’t let us in in duck costumes, so we had to wear something someone else had already worn” said Parker later). Then third, they dropped acid on the way there.
“We got out of the limo and went ‘oh shit!’” said Stone. “There were 60,000 fucking people and every camera in the western hemisphere, and we just went ‘let’s go!’”
“Then we lost to Phil Collins and had to sit there through the Oscars while coming down. The Oscars fucking suck,” says Parker. “We didn’t really feel that cool.”
“People were there going ‘Dude, this is my big night, fuck you!’” says Stone.
5. Peter O'Toole Makes Drunk Cinema History
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Peter O’Toole was one of acting’s greatest drunks, as well as one of acting’s greatest, er, actors. There’s a story about him taking Michael Caine drinking—when they both regained consciousness, Caine asked what time it was. “Never mind what time it is—what fucking day is it?” said O’Toole. It was five PM, two days later.
When filming Lawrence Of Arabia, the role he’d be best known for, O-Toole didn’t slow down. He got in a fight with a waiter at one cast and crew dinner that nearly turned into a gunfight.
One of the film’s most iconic scenes sees O’Toole and co-star Omar Sharif charging on camels in Aqaba. Time magazine hailed O’Toole’s “look of messianic determination” in the scene. O’Toole and Sharif were freaking out beforehand at the idea of doing it, as both were scared of the camels involved—rather than the racing camels they’d been expecting, they had big wild-ass camels. Sharif’s initial idea of being tied onto the camel was soon joined by O’Toole’s suggestion of “Let’s get drunk”. Several brandies later, two shitfaced thespians were flung down a hill on some camels. “That look of messianic determination was a drunk actor” said O’Toole.
6. Martin Sheen Drinks Himself Crazy
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Everyone involved in making Apocalypse Now pretty much went insane, and Martin Sheen used the time to get some hardcore boozing in. The opening sequence features Sheen’s character, Captain Willard, in a hotel room. Sheen had been celebrating his 36th birthday that day by getting completely torn up, and was rambling incoherently. Director Francis Ford Coppolla kept the cameras on him as he smashed a mirror, cutting his hand open and smearing blood all over his face. Sheen was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, the only such nomination of his career, but withdrew from the competition. This was possibly for the same reason he’d earlier withdrawn himself from an Emmy nomination, as he believed actors shouldn’t compete against each other, or was possibly because he hadn’t actually been acting, the big pissed bastard.
