False friends

Tone-deaf tributes and overly-simplified obits were unfair on Matthew Perry but even worse for addicts in recovery who might read them.

Previously: Auctioning a haunted house.
Who the hell would want to own the Telegraph or Spectator? These ghouls...

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Of course, ‘Matthew Perry is in rehab’ became a huge news story. I was not even granted the opportunity to work out my problems in privacy. Everyone knew. It was on the covers of all the magazines — I didn’t even get the anonymity everyone else got. I was terrified. I was also young, so I bounced back quickly. Within twenty-eight days, I was back on my feet again and looking healthy. This was a big news story, too, but nowhere near the size of the other one. 

— Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (2022)

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A Guardian piece by Zoe Williams on the death of Matthew Perry ran longer in print than online; the extra section that appeared in the newspaper was ugly, undermining the otherwise fairly gentle tone of the piece. I’m reproducing it here because I think it illustrates a mindset that’s common among even the relatively well-meaning when it comes to discussing addiction:

Perry’s entire adult life was plagued by addiction. Telling his story in numbers, he estimated he had been in twice-weekly therapy for 30 years, checked into rehab 15 times, and attended more than 6,000 AA meetings. The actor’s death at 54 is not thought to be drug-related in the strictest sense, in so far as he hadn’t relapsed. Yet it was foretold in his tone, which was one of puckish, self-mocking ex-addict’s wonder: had he dodged the Oxy with his name on it, or had he already taken it? 

The cause of Perry’s death is still unclear. He was found unresponsive in his hot tub and while the LAPD says there were no signs of foul play, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner lists his cause of death as “deferred”, an indication that further investigation is required. But the British papers craved, with unseemly desperation, for Perry’s death to be related to addiction; the collective press pack were craning their necks in the hope of spotting some grim clue.

That final line in the print-only passage from Williams’ piece — “Had he dodged the Oxy with his name on it, or had he already taken it?” — combined with the clumsy inaccuracy of “ex-addict” is an example of hacks needed a ‘neat’ button to the story of Perry’s life and death. The generally accepted thinking around addiction is that an addict is always an addict; it’s just a question of whether they are in active addiction or recovering. Some, like Peter Hitchens whose Newsnight debate with Perry has rattled around social media since the latter’s death, think otherwise.

I’ve known enough addicts in my life to feel and believe — two complementary but different emotions — that addiction is a horrible cocktail of compulsion; an illness of the body and the mind. Williams concluded her tribute by surmising:

… in a pre-opioid world, [Perry] would have just got clean, eventually. Maybe he wouldn’t have made old bones, but he wouldn’t have died this young, not at 54. He should have had a longer sunset. His death feels tragically discordant — and unjust end to a life lived in the service of the punchline.

The desire to reach a conclusion is an understandable impulse, even when the person reaching it isn’t a journalist. But journalists need to understand that writing the ‘first draft of history’ is a more delicate job when your subject is someone who has recently died in circumstances that are far from clear. We often feel that we know actors but usually, we don’t; we know their characters and their media performances.

Williams’ article was clumsy but Celia Walden’s contribution to the Daily Telegraph on the same topic was beyond crass. Beneath the headline I like to think Matthew Perry was optimistic when he died she writes:

When, as a young journalist, I was sent to ‘babysit’ a very drunk George Best for another newspaper he was contracted to, I was surprised by how quiet and introverted the footballing legend was in the rare moments he was sober. 

He may have had the weakness in his DNA coding or whatever addiction specialists tell us, so that when it came to alcohol his ‘pilot light’ was always on, but it was clearly fame that made the fire take hold… it’s a profoundly unnatural state to find yourself in. Because most human beings simply aren’t equipped to deal with it. 

I was reminded of Best when I read some of Perry’s last interviews yesterday. The black humour he enjoyed, lapping up the laughter right up until the end… Then there was the optimism. Because, as anyone who has ever been close to an addict knows, their particular brand of optimism is so dazzling it can win everyone over, convince anyone this is it: the new chapter. 

I like to think Perry was optimistic when he died. No drugs were found at his home and according to the actor he’d been sober for some time, so I hope that after his Saturday game of pickleball and a burger at The Apple Pan — the best place in LA — he died, despite everything, looking forward to the rest of his life. 

It takes levels of gall almost equivalent to those exhibited by Walden’s husband Piers Morgan for her to raise the subject of Best. Her dismal book Babysitting George — which opens with Best telling her to leave him alone and implies that his wife ‘got off’ on being hit by him — united his widow Alex and former mistress Gina Devivo in disgust. The Observer review accurately summed it up as “muck-raking tabloid journalism with pretensions towards something grander.”

Essentially, Walden has reheated one act of exploitation to enable another. While she quotes an interview she did with David Schwimmer, another member of the core Friends cast, she never spoke to Perry or met him. So we’re ‘treated’ to a brief piece of journalistic anti-fan fiction, larded with an unsubtle boast about Walden’s familiarity with LA restaurants and a blatant, slapdash, and deadline-driven approach to the topic (“… or whatever addiction specialists tell us…”)

The same flat-pack expertise — who cares if you can’t find most of the screws? — was evident in Sarah Vine’s column about Perry (Matthew Perry was the goofy guy with the big heart who never loved himself enough). Like Walden, Vine didn’t know or even briefly meet Perry, but she and her daughter love Friends so that, combined with her qualification from Laughing Lord Rothermere’s Travelling Psychiatry School, is enough to support 800 words on the topic.

Vine writes, after a gratuitous recitation of the drugs that Perry took and the physical effects they had on him, that:

There is a certain bitter irony in the fact that America’s boy-next-door, beloved by mums and daughters alike, should ultimately have succumbed to the plague that has swept that nation: the opoid crisis… 

… How many Chandlers have suffered the fate of Perry — talented, sporty guys who’ve ended up broken, hopeless addicts? 

Far too many, is the answer. He spent $9 million (£7.4 million) trying to wean himself off these drugs. What hope for the ordinary guy on the street? 

Ultimately, Perry’s tragedy is America’s tragedy. He wanted to be remembered for his work helping other addicts. 

But the world will always remember him as the goofy guy with the big heart whom everyone loved - but who, sadly, never quite loved himself enough. 

One of the reasons Vine is considered such a ‘star’ at the Mail is her ability to harness that cloying condolence card sentimentality undercut with spite that the paper and its readers seem to love so much. What’s most grotesque here is that while Perry cannot read Vine’s crass musings, other addicts will. “What hope for the ordinary guy on the street?” Perry offered others hope in life; it’s horrendous that his death — cause still not certain — should be used to squash that potential.

On the day that Vine’s column was published, MailOnline was featuring auto-playing aerial footage of Perry’s body being taken from his home and loaded into a coroner’s van. No one is so beloved that the Mail won’t use their corpse to increase its time-on-site statistics.

Over at The Times, a paper which can still produce wonderful obituaries, the one for Perry opened with a grim elision of his life and that of his most famous character:

In series one, episode 13 of Friends, Chandler Bing delivers a sardonic one-liner while sprawled on the couch of the Central Perk coffee house, boyishly good-looking in his bedraggled suit. Everyone laughs, especially Roger, the psychologist Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) is dating, who is as yet unversed in Chandler’s whip-smart humour.

“You’re so funny,” Roger says, then adds: “I wouldn’t wanna be there when the laughter stops.” Chandler’s smile fades, and he asks Roger what he means. “It just seems that maybe you have intimacy issues, that you use your humour to keep people at a distance … Only child, right? Parents divorced before you hit puberty? … It’s textbook.” 

… As Roger the psychologist had guessed, Matthew Langford Perry was indeed born an only child, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1969, and he was not yet a year old when his parents divorced.

Yes, Perry wrote of how similar he and Chandler were (“It wasn’t that I thought I could play ‘Chandler’, I was Chandler,”), but he also wrote that the character grew up way faster than he had and began his book by talking about the temptation to and fear of “dropping [his] game, [his] Chandler” and showing his real self.

Chandler wasn’t an addict, but Perry did play an addict very well in a show written by another addict, Aaron Sorkin. On the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — which forced to compete on the same network with another metatextual show about producing a sketch comedy, 30 Rock — Perry sparkled as Matt Albie, a verbally dexterous but damaged writer in and out of recovery. Bradley Whitford’s character Danny Trip was an analogue for the director Thomas Schlamme and Albie was a Sorkin self-insert elevated by Perry.

My reason for bringing up the evidently flawed Studio 60 is that columns, tributes, and obits assigned to writers with a better understanding of Perry’s life and career beyond Friends mention it, just as they raise his brief but striking turn as a republican lawyer on The West Wing, another Sorkin show. It’s as easy and glib to write about Perry and ‘Chandler’ as one and the same as it is to write slogans about addiction.

The headline of another Times piece on Perry’s life sums up the problem with most of the coverage neatly: Matthew Perry — from troubled childhood to lonely star. It strips out the joy and the complexity. It’s the male version of the romantic curse put on Perry’s Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston; the easiest way of boiling down a life to a paragraph-long kicker: Man gets fame, fame fails to fix him.

Thankfully, an answer from an interview that Perry gave to Tom Power on CBC’s Q in 2022 flew around social media and forced many commentators and obituarists to reckon with how the actor wanted to be remembered:

The best thing about me — bar none — is, if somebody comes up to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking. Can you help me?” I can say ‘yes’ and follow up and do it… When I die, I know people will talk about Friends, Friends, Friends. And I’m glad of that, happy I’ve done some solid work as an actor, as well as given people multiple chances to make fun of my struggles on the World Wide Web… But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people. I know it won’t happen, but it would be nice … I created the Perry House in Malibu, a sober living facility for men. I also wrote my play, The End of Longing, which is a personal message to the world, an exaggerated form of me as a drunk. I had something important to say to people like me, and to people who love people like me. 

That has all the joy and pain and complexity that the quick takes, glib obits, and ignorant summaries of addiction could not or would not recognise.

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