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RELATED LINKS

• Article on Mr. Lawford
• Excerpt from Symptoms of Withdrawal
• The Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University

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Tavis: Christopher Kennedy Lawford is a writer, actor and activist who has penned a personal memoir about his life, family and battles with substance abuse. His father was Rat Packer, Peter Lawford. His mother, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, is the sister of President Kennedy. The book is called "Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption.' Chris Lawford, nice to have you on the program.

Christopher Kennedy Lawford: Good to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you here. Let me go right to the heart of this because it's a wonderful read. The pictures, by the way, are great. I love the cover, to begin with, but the pictures are great. You got great stories in here, but one thing you are very, very clear about, very adamant about, while your life for a lot of years revolved around your substance abuse, you are very clear in suggesting that you would not do that over again. I mean, you wouldn't change. You don't regret it, which I found fascinating. You don't regret a single day of it?

Lawford: I regret time wasted because I think that this life we're given is so precious and I feel like I've been reborn. I felt like I had one life and then I was given a second one twenty years ago. So in a sense, I regret the days that I wasted, but all of those days got me here and all of my awareness today is a result of all of that time spent. So I can't say the darkness wasn't as vital to my existence as the light.

Tavis: I wonder, though -- and I respect that point -- I wonder whether or not, though, you think it was or is now worth it.

Lawford: Those days?

Tavis: Yeah.

Lawford: Absolutely. I mean, because --

Tavis: -- the lessons learned are that valuable?

Lawford: Without a doubt. I mean, this is the interesting thing. Because, you know, when I got sober, I heard people say, "I'm grateful to be an alcoholic" or "I'm grateful to be an addict" and I didn't understand what they were talking about. But what they were saying was, the awareness that you get about life, having gone through the hell -- I mean, if you look at human history, great people go through great struggle to get enlightened or whatever wisdom they get. The wisdom that I have today, I don't know how great it is, but for me the life I have today is so remarkable on so many levels. My knowledge of myself is so valuable to me and I would not have any of that without the struggle that I had.

Tavis: You first started abusing when you were thirteen?

Lawford: Yeah.

Tavis: Tell me about that.

Lawford: Well, you know, people ask me about that night. I think -- look, I came from divorce. Two of my uncles were brutally murdered in a very public way. The world was a very scary place to me. I think I have a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism and addiction. It's clear that it is a disease and it runs in families. I think I have that. I think that the world was a scary place and I was looking for a way out.

At the time, you have to understand that this was 1969. It was a different culture. You know, experimentation was thought of in a positive way. We had no idea what the downside to these kinds of drugs were. You know, the awareness was not nearly as great as it is today. So I think those three things came together in kind of a perfect addictive storm and I started down that road. Now many people started down that road and didn't spend seventeen years in misery, right? But I had the genetic predisposition for that, so once I found a way out, I was gone.

Tavis: When you say genetic predisposition, and I say this with all due respect, when you say genetic predisposition, I suspect there are some people watching right now who say that's a cop-out, that life is about making choices, and when you are a Kennedy and a Lawford, in your case, you had the best of everything. You didn't have to make those choices.

Lawford: Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. They are my choices and I take responsibility for them. As I say, I was fourteen and I made that choice. Now what happened was, I will say this to them. Many people have this attitude about addicts, that they're weak-willed, that they could have made a different choice. I knew I was in trouble at the age of twenty-one, Tavis, and I tried everything humanly possible to get sober and it took me nine years. I am not a weak-willed person. I am not a person who is lazy. I'm not a person who can't get stuff done. In twenty years, I've shown that. Yet this disease is a monster. You know, I describe it as similar to dancing with an eight hundred pound gorilla. You keep dancing until the gorilla stops dancing. It is that powerful.

Now, true, I made those choices and, if I could have done it a different way, I would have and I wish I had. You know, the day that I first used drugs -- my friends had been trying to get me to do it for two and a half months and I had said no. I knew deep down inside it was the wrong thing for me to do. I absolutely knew it. One day, I just said yes. It was like they asked me, I had always said no and one day I said yes. I don't know why, but once I did and I had the experience of being out of this world, which was what I was looking for, I was gone.

Tavis: Speaking of genetic predisposition, there is a funny story -- I found it funny, at least -- a funny story in the book about what happens to young Chris just after he's born on his way home with mommy and daddy. That's a funny story (laughter). Well, go ahead.

Lawford: (Laughter) You know, my mom and dad had this amazing life. They were thirty years old when they got married. You know, they had a very -- my dad was a movie star and lived on the beach and should have stayed there, quite frankly. My mom had a career in television and she should have been a career woman. But they came together and they had this boozy beach life full of -- you know, they used to hang out at this place called "The Beachcomber Bar" and legend has it that, on the way home from the delivery room, they stopped there with all their friends and they had a cocktail to celebrate the birth of their new son. They put me on the bar --

Tavis: -- on the counter (laughter).

Lawford: Yeah, which I think is absolutely wonderful. I mean, I absolutely -- my parents -- the greatest thing about writing this book was the appreciation I got from my parents as human beings.

Tavis: Was the writing of this any way -- what word do I want to use here -- therapeutic for you?

Lawford: Well, it rooted me in my life and it also freed me, to a large degree, from my life, you know, in the sense that I've written this book -- I wrote it -- you know, I tell the story in here that I had a lot of ambivalence about doing it. I'm the first person in my family outside of my grandmother, Rose, who wrote her autobiography in 1974 -- and my grandmother, Rose, in my family was a saint. She deserved to write a book because she had an amazing life. I didn't know whether I deserved to write this book. I didn't know whether I had the right to write this book.

One day, I was playing this game with my kids and we'd write a question that we wanted somebody to answer and we'd pass it to the person to your left. My son Matthew who's eight years old -- he's this precocious wonderful kid -- furiously wrote this question on his pad and he handed it to me and I had to read it out loud. It said, "Dad, who the hell are you?" I was like, I know why I'm writing this book because my kids, after reading this book, will know who I am. Good, bad or indifferent, they will know who I am.

Tavis: What did the family have to say? I want to talk about the Kennedy family for a second. What did the family have to say when they heard that you were writing this book? Because, to your point, it had been since 1974 and you're only the second person in this very tight-knit family to go public with a book like this.

Lawford: Well, you know, my family has been looking at the books written about them through forty years of questionable emotional experience with that thing. You know, not all books that have been written about my family have been positive. You know, my family is a public family, but very private, and they were not thrilled. I wrote a letter to my Uncle Teddy and I told him why I was writing this book. You know, I wrote this book because I'm a writer. I wrote down fifty pages and it turns out I do write fairly well. It's been well reviewed and I'm going to write more books. I told my uncle that. I said, "This is the first book I have to write. Many writers write from their experience, write their story before they move on to other topics."

Tavis: And Uncle Teddy said?

Lawford: He didn't say anything, actually (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) And that is unusual that Ted Kennedy did not say anything, yeah.

Lawford: Yeah. He lifted an eyebrow the next time he saw me. But, you know, the thing was, they all cooperated with my book. They all let me use their letters. There are wonderful letters in here back and forth from me and Teddy and me and Eunice and me and my grandmother and they all let me use those. So they supported me in their way. You know, they didn't want to say anything until they saw what came out. I still haven't heard from them and I think that's either because they're slow readers or they're waiting for the movie (laughter).

Tavis: Tell me how you got to be a part of the Kennedy clan. I don't mean biologically. I mean, you were out here in California. They're holding fort back east, but at one point in your life, you actually moved to New York.

Lawford: Right.

Tavis: I guess that was the opportunity for you to become more --

Lawford: -- well, the reason why I used that photograph on the cover, aside from it's one of my favorite photographs of my life. It's me and my Uncle Jack at the house that I grew up in. It was a house that was built for Louis B. Mayer on the beach. That was the happiest time of my life. My parents, their marriage was over before 1963, but they didn't get divorced because my mother was the sister of the first Catholic president, so they were waiting for 1964. On November 22, 1963, when my uncle died, my mother didn't have to wait and we were gone. We were back to New York and my life changed. You know, I left the beach and ended up in Manhattan. One day on the beach in Santa Monica and the next day I'm in the winter of New York.

Tavis: Big difference.

Lawford: Also, the other thing was, my dad didn't come with us and that was a huge deal for me. The other thing was the enormous attention that was focused on my family by the world because of that event and, by association, me.

Tavis: One could argue, right quick here, Chris, one could argue that one is terribly advantaged when your daddy is a member of the Rat Pack and your mom is part of the Kennedy clan. I guess one could also argue the exact reverse which is that one is challenged in uniquely different ways when one is the son of a Rat Packer and the son of a Kennedy member. With some distance now, with that rearview mirror, were you more advantaged or more challenged?

Lawford: I don't know. You know, I don't really look at it that way. I think all of us, all human beings, have their advantages and their challenges and I think there's yen and yang everywhere. I think, with all gifts, there are challenges and there's good and there's bad. I feel that way. Peoples' circumstances are different, but the challenges of being a human being are universal. They're universal and that's what people have responded to in this book.

You know, I write about what it's like growing up a Kennedy, but anybody can identify about finding your own path or not being accepted or, you know, being confused or not having a father or addiction, whatever those issues are. So I don't really look at it that way. I look at it as I've had blessings and, you know, the interesting thing is that my sobriety has taught me that some of the great challenges or the great pain in my life are the greatest gifts I've gotten.

Tavis: Senator Kennedy -- I talked to Senator Kennedy the other day and he told me watches the show -- so Senator Kennedy, if you're watching, trust me. It's okay to read it. Go ahead and read it. Nice to have you on.

Lawford: (Laughter) Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: "Symptoms of Withdrawal" by Christopher Kennedy Lawford. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local radio listings. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.