ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Fame through Shame: Marty Mann, Lillian Roth, and Narratives of Alcoholic Celebrity

This paper explores the complicated dynamics of disclosure and concealment that characterized the lives and careers of two alcoholic women in the mid-twentieth-century United States:  Margaret "Marty" Mann, the so-called "first lady" of Alcoholics Anonymous and the founder of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and Lillian Roth, singer and actress whose best-selling 1954 memoir I’ll Cry Tomorrow helped created the genre of confessional autobiography.  A "celebrity alcoholic" who gained fame because of her alcoholism, Mann brilliantly mobilized her own life story to promote the disease model of alcoholism articulated by research scientists, and she offered herself as a living embodiment of the public health message that alcoholics can recover and are deserving of help.  Already well known as an entertainer before she acknowledged her dependence on alcohol, Roth can be termed an "alcoholic celebrity."  Roth also educated the public about alcoholism even as the commodification of her life story launched her show business comeback.  Most Americans believed that alcoholism afflicted men, not women, following long-standing gendered images of the male alcoholic and his long-suffering (non-drinking) wife.  Mann and Roth thus had to overcome notions of gender deviance on top of the stigma associated with alcoholism, and to do so within a genre—the alcoholic narrative—that could not easily accommodate the asymmetry that resulted when the alcoholic protagonist was a woman.