Towering TV figure still has stories to tell
Milch memoir recounts upbringing, career and Alzheimer’s experience
The door to a room at an assisted-living facility in Los Angeles swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment’s primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.
“I’m so grateful,” he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. “As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux.”
To television viewers who have followed the medium’s resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-yearold Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writerproducer on the influential 1980s police drama “Hill Street Blues,” he went on to help create boundarybusting programs like “NYPD Blue” and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO Western “Deadwood.”
In his industry, Milch is well-known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.
Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator. This is where he has lived since fall 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.
“When you’re in transition, there’s a sense that life lives you,” he said. “You’re holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties.”
Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called “Life’s Work.”
The book, which was recently published by Random House, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch’s fictional characters.
The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.
As his wife explained, the memoir shows that there is beauty in “how he took his life and turned it into art. All the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back.”
David Milch saw an even more fundamental value in the project: “I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am,” he said.
Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at
work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch’s memories, all in the service of creating “Life’s Work.”
“There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion,” said his daughter Olivia Milch. “And then there are days where he just rolls, and it’s stunning, how he’s able to talk about the disease and what he’s going through.”
“Life’s Work” is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author’s upbringing in Buffalo, New York, at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer.
The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent.
In television, David Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his “imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment.” He was hired at
“Hill Street Blues” by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created “NYPD Blue,” whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.
Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at age 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, “Deadwood,” a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.
On that show, Milch writes, “It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say.” He adds, “The actors told me their characters’ deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to.”
“Deadwood” was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like “John From Cincinnati” and “Luck,” had even briefer runs, and still others weren’t picked up at all.
In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about
$23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.
A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David Milch was able to complete the story of “Deadwood” in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.
As the publication of “Life’s Work” approached, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, “I’m a background person, a behind-thescenes person. It doesn’t make me comfortable.”
But she said those concerns were less important than allowing her husband to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can.
“It’s a horrible diagnosis, and it ain’t fun,” she said. “But life goes on. You don’t have to hide people away. They don’t have to disappear.”