Depp has exposed the ‘happy hellraiser’ myth – and good riddance to it
Towards the end of my drinking, I decided that I did not have a problem with alcohol – the only problem I had was with other people’s boring judgments about alcohol. Far from being a 37-year-old mum who regularly drank herself into blackouts, waking with strange bruises on my body and even stranger notions of where I had been in my brain, I was one of Truman Capote’s Swans, a glamorous good-time girl who just happened to like a drink of an evening (or 15 drinks of an evening). My issue was not that I needed to stop drinking – it was that I needed to stop worrying about my drinking, and give myself over to a life of fabulous hedonism. Problem solved!
Like so many others who find themselves in the thrall of alcohol and drugs, I had fallen into the happy hellraiser trap: the one where you believe that heavy drinking somehow makes you cool and interesting, and all your terrible – sometimes criminal – behaviour can be excused because you are an exceptionally fabulous human being who gives so much in all other respects.
In retrospect, I can’t believe it took me so long to reach this deluded state. For many alcoholics this is the first stop on the journey – a journey that usually ends in prison, rehab, or a coffin, depending on how lucky you are. For Johnny Depp, the actor who this week found his career had effectively been ended when Warner Bros dropped him from their Fantastic Beasts franchise, part of his journey has involved the High Court, where he learnt last week that he had lost his claim for libel against The Sun. Depp, previously known as a Hollywood hellraiser-cumheartthrob, can now legally be described as a perpetrator of domestic violence.
And while this may seem a costly lesson, the likes of which most of us will never have to learn, something about this tawdry tale will resonate with any of us who have ever been – or had to live with – an alcoholic in their cups.
The happy hellraiser trap is one of the most pernicious that alcoholism will lay for its victims. You can spend years and years in it, until finally you wake up one morning and you are lying in your own urine, or walking into the High Court in front of the world’s press after pursuing an ill-judged case against your ex-wife.
Depp has been in the happy hellraiser trap since the get-go, the evidence there in his adoration of Hunter S Thompson and Keith Richards, and the documentary he is said to be producing about his long-term friend Shane Macgowan. “When I met Shane he was negotiating a pool table. There was a drink in this hand, a p pint, and in this hand t there was a guitar,” Depp explained two months ago. “And he was teetering, balancing back and forth trying to negotiate w which way to
fall. I watched him do that for about 15 minutes. Then I was introduced to him, before he fell, and from that moment on you just knew… there are moments in life when you know this will happen one time and one time only, when you get the opportunity to spend time with greatness.”
Oh, the delusions of the happy hellraiser! To think that such a scene – one played out every night in pubs by drunks around the world – constitutes “greatness”!
The tragedy here is that so many of us fall for it, alcoholism attaching itself to these delusions of tortured, misunderstood genius, gaining traction there and causing misery in the process. This is the great part Depp has been playing for much of his life, a part so many of us in recovery will recognise: the role of the sick human telling themselves they are complex and unique characters the likes of whom mere mortals cannot fathom, when in fact they are just another drunk screwing up their life and the lives of everybody around them.
In a recent interview, Ian Hislop spoke movingly about his friend, the late, great Peter Cook, who died at the age of 57 after a gastrointestinal haemorrhage that was almost certainly a result of his heavy drinking. “Instead of saying, ‘Isn’t it brilliant, he’s pissed all the time,’ we might have said, ‘Do you think it’s good he’s pissed all the time?’ As friends, we could have been a bit more rigorous.” More wisdom can be found in those two sentences than in my entire drinking career.
Like the world in which Fantastic Beasts is set, the idea that there is such a thing as a happy hellraiser is an illusion. And though he probably never intended to, I am grateful to Depp for exposing it.
Not the tortured, misunderstood genius he thinks he is: Johnny Depp