CAGNEY’S TRAGIC LOVE AFFAIR — WITH MARTINIS!
How Sharon Gless sobered up at 72
FORMER Cagney & Lacy TV detective Sharon Gless confesses she was such a heavy boozer, her doc warned her she was guzzling herself into the grave.
The 78-year-old actress, who starred as Christine Cagney opposite Tyne Daly’s Det. Mary Beth Lacy on TV’s hit cop drama from 1982 to 1988, recalls she was suffering crippling stomach pains when she went to see a doctor — who told her to quit drinking!
But she was so hooked on alcohol she was back on the bottle just 36 hours later. When the tummy pains returned, her gastroenterologist chillingly told her: “If you ever have another drink again, don’t call me. “I don’t do suicides.” That finally drove Gless, then 72, to sober up and she’s been off her beloved martinis since May 8, 2015, she writes in her justreleased memoir, Apparently
There Were Complaints.
She also writes about a humiliating video that showed what a pathetic souse she was.
Taken during her 70th birthday celebration on the roof of an L.A. high-rise, the camera caught the booze-fueled actress bellowing at guests: “I don’t give a f*** about your kids!”
Viewing it “made me cringe at the progression of my drunkenness,” she writes.
Ironically, she says her “love affair” with alcohol helped her turn in one of her most realistic acting jobs in an episode where lonely, manless Cagney turns to booze and ends up drinking straight from the bottle.
In the scene, the drunk crimefighter flops on the floor in a sitting position instead of lying flat.
“From personal experience, I knew that lying down flat while drunk produces a feeling that the room is spinning,” she writes.