Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic is a made-for-television movie starring Linda Blair and directed by Richard Donner right before he made The Omen, Superman, The Goonies, and Lethal Weapon — not one of them featuring Blair screaming and guzzling gin, which is why they're generally not remembered today. Entertainingly, if not wisely, Blair followed up her star turn in The Exorcist with the sleazy made-for-TV movie, Born Innocent, an appearance as a terminally ill kid serenaded by a nun in Airport '75, and the lead role in Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.
I never saw the movie. I only read the book because youu know what they say, "The book is always better."
And I can't imagine anything being better than this book.
“Sarah tipped the glass up to her lips, hoping for one last drop. She was just starting to feel good and relaxed. It had been a hard week, the first in a new town, and the kids at this school seemed much more snobbish and clique-ish than at her old school. Why did I ever have to leave? Sara thought. Why did she ever have to marry him?
”Damn, she thought, it’s empty, and they were downstairs now. She could never get to the bar and feel the cool trickle of gin down her parched throat. Why couldn’t they have gone out tonight, as they had on every other night, so that she could sneak down and pour herself one more drink? That’s all she needed, just one more drink before the guests started to arrive.”
Those are the first two paragraphs of this book, which perfectly sum up my feelings before I host a dinner party, and they’re a perfect introduction to 15-year-old Sarah, teenage alcoholic, destroyer of home bars, and full-time gin disposal unit. Sarah lives in Southern California with a brown velvet sofa, a mom, Jean, who recently married Matt, a retired military officer who "believed in training children as one would train a dog", a perfect older sister, Nancy, and she's recently started going to a new school where everyone's an asshat. Frankly, I'd be a teenage alcoholic, too.
The party in question is Jean's fête for Matt’s promotion to vice-president (“Sarah didn’t know what her stepfather was vice president of, and she didn’t care”) and the party seems specifically designed to torment Sarah that these adults can have five, six, seven drinks and all she wants is one little drinkie-poo and she can't even have that. Her dad's friends get so hammered they puke in the rose bushes, when Nancy's baby starts crying a guest swirls his finger in a glass of scotch and sticks it in the baby's mouth, slurring, “A lick of this’ll quiet her down,” and Mr. Peterson, her dad’s boss, insists on meeting Sarah and telling her how she should be friends with his son who "comes on strong with the little girls” but at least he doesn’t smoke dope or pop pills. Finally, Mr. Peterson abandons his glass of bourbon and Sarah chug-a-lugs the whole thing. She'll need it. The next morning at breakfast Jean compliments Matt on being able to bang her after getting so drunk, and he smiles, "I take a tablespoon of cocoa butter before I drink…It's an old trick I picked up in the Philippines."
Sarah lowers her head and mechanically chokes down her cereal, wishing it was a big bowl of bourbon.
Sarah wasn't always a teenage alcoholic, but at Nancy's wedding two years ago she noticed that all the adults got a whole lot nicer after have a few drinks, so she snagged a whiskey sour, squatted in the women's bathroom, and lapped it up. And, really, when your mom is pressuring you to join the "Junior Antisex League" at school and insisting you try out for Glee Club, you can't blame Sarah for wanting to murder her liver.
Sarah plays “deep, thoughtful tunes” on her guitar and auditions for Glee Club singing a Bob Dylan number all while nursing a raging hangover, which makes me think she's pretty good at multitasking, but the book punishes her by having her choke at her audition, sending her fleeing home in tears to call her dad, Jerry (played by Larry Hagman in the movie), and tell him she wants to visit. This prompts her mom to snap, “Don’t you think it would be easier for Matt if you did go live with your father? Do you suppose he needs to support another man’s family?”
Ouch.
Jerry is a sweetie who takes Sarah to the beach where he gets shitfaced and slurs endearments like, "You’re the most important thing in this whole bloodshot world to me."
“‘Just grab me another beer there, puss, before you start sounding like your mother,’ He tousled her hair affectionately and picked up the Frisbee. Sarah followed him, the six-pack in her hand. He popped the top off and took a long draw. Sarah watched him suspiciously. By his third can, Jerry was staggering across the beach, Sarah dragging behind with the half-empty six-pack.”
But, you know, at least he doesn't believe children should be trained the same way you train dogs.
Some sunshine enters Sarah's bleak life of brown velvet sofas and dog training when she meets Kenny Newkirk (Mark Hamill) and he invites her to a party, then it turns out her mom set the whole thing up (“I went to a lot of trouble to arrange this, Sarah,” Jean continued, her voice hard. “If you embarrass me…”), but the second they get to the party girls start teasing Kenny, asking "How's the mercy date going?"
Sarah finds some boys in the study drinking their dad’s gin and Sarah's like "They're playing my song," then she sneaks back for seconds, then dumb, old Marsha Cooper from the Glee Club tries to embarrass her by egging her on to sing her audition song, but gin is to Sarah what spinach is to Popeye and she belts that song out so loud it tears the roof off the house so take that Marsha Cooper, then she rewards herself with a little scotch from the study, then hits a wineskin the boys are passing around the kitchen, then she drops her fully-loaded buffet plate on the wall-to-wall carpet, throws Marsha Cooper through a coffee table, and passes out. Victory!
When Kenny gets her home, Jean and Matt are furious, but Jean is more suspicious her daughter had this much to drink on "her first time" and isn't throwing up. “A least she isn’t into drugs," Matt says, trying to see the glass as half full...of gin!
The next morning, Jean belts Sarah in the face for not respecting Matt (who, to be fair, is using an electric putting cup at the time), prompting Sarah to scream, “He’s not my father. He’s just somebody you sleep with!” Then she gets Margaret, the housekeeper, fired for watering down the scotch, figures out how to scam the local liquor store into delivering a fifth of vodka and a half-gallon of sweet wine, fills a cologne bottle with vodka and starts nipping on it at school.
It turns out Kenny doesn't hate Sarah, and in fact thinks she's rad for laying the smackdown on stupid old Marsha Cooper. He's so impressed that he introduces her to his horse, Daisy, and they bond via pony rides. But then the principal has Jean in to talk about Sarah's behavior: cutting class, refusing to undress for gym, forging excuse notes, and just generally being a teenage alcoholic. Jean tells her she's overreacting but the principal counters her with:
“Last year we had a boy who was depressed over a mild case of acne. He hanged himself.”
Jean is so upset about Sarah’s teenage alcoholism that she drives straight to a cocktail lounge to discuss matters with Matt. Meanwhile, older sister Nancy tries to talk to Sarah about their real dad, Jerry, and how he's not so great after all. Of course, Nancy was always their mother’s favorite because she was prettier, and better in school, and had lots of dates, and now at 20 she's married with a baby. But Sarah was their father’s favorite, enjoying the same pastimes like baseball, walks on the beach, and getting trashed in the middle of the afternoon.
“‘He was a dreamer,’ Nancy said, soothingly. ‘And she tried to turn him into a husband. Is that so wrong?’”
YES! Sarah screams, stealing half a bottle of gin and pedaling away as fast as she can, right to a bad boy beach party with a watermelon full of gin. Kenny is concerned that Sarah sticks a straw in the watermelon and sucks on it “as if her very life depended on it” but then they make sweet, drunken love in the sand, and everything's okay. Or is it?
See, Kenny is an idiot and he has to make at least a B on his chemistry exam or they'll never let him into veterinary school, but Sarah insists on making out during their study sessions and demanding that he tell her he loves her. Finally, he storms out in disgust, and she runs after his blue Camaro sobbing, “Kenny! Kenny, come back!”
Sarah gets wrecked at her next babysitting job and the owners of the house have to smash in their patio doors because she's passed out and the baby's crying. They take her home and dump her on her doorstep, snarling, "Your daughter! She’s dead drunk!”
Unable to deny being a teenage alcoholic any longer, Sarah comes clean, and her parents lock her in her room with a plate of meatloaf but Sarah gets the last laugh because she has a bottle of cheap wine hidden beneath her mattress. Coincidentally:
”Dr. Marvin Kittredge, psychiatrist, specialist in adolescent problems, especially alcoholism, was giving a lecture at the PTA meeting of Sarah’s high school.”
The principal forces Jean to go although, "It was more out of guilt than a real concern for Sarah." When Dr. Kittredge singles Jean out for a one-on-one session he insists that only AA can save Sarah from her addiction, then confronts Jean with her addictions, and her husband and ex-husband's unhealthy relationships with alcohol ("We're a nation of whiskeyheads," he pontificates) while puffing away non-stop on his pipe. Enjoy your lung cancer, Dr. Weird Beard!
Jean refuses to send Sarah to AA because it's nothing but a “bunch of old boozers somebody scraped up out of the gutter.” Oh, Jean. One day, Sarah will grow up and no longer be a teenage alcoholic, but you'll always be an asshole.
Sarah goes to AA and discovers “It looked like the junior prom. Most of the people were kids her age…laughing and chatting as if it were a party.” She makes friends with Bobby, an 11 year old alcoholic with the face of a child and "the liver of a 60 year old man", then Carol, another teenage alcoholic, cheerfully tells her:
“I killed an old man while I was drunk. Ran him over like rags in the street. Not much of an old man, I'll admit. But his grandchildren sure miss him. And I've got his face scratched into my brain for the rest of my life.”
Ugh. I hate old men.
Now everyone gathers to have a family therapy session with Dr. Kittredge, and even Jerry comes. But in the middle, Sarah asks if she can live with him and he turns into the ultimate divorced dad, sputtering, "Well, puss...I, ah, that might not be convenient..." Then he runs away in the middle of the session. That prompts Sarah to run away to the beach, the last place she was happy (or, for the more cynically minded among you, the last place she sucked on a watermelon full of gin) where she finds some college students in a van who’ll buy her a bottle of gin if she'll have sex with all of them. They have an orgy, then Sarah is so drunk and ashamed she goes to Kenny's house where she gets on Daisy the pony and rides him into oncoming traffic on the freeway. The cops have to shoot the horse, and Sarah goes to the hospital. Kenny's pretty unhappy, too. And so is Daisy.
Jean and Matt visit Sarah in the hospital, and so does Jerry, but they're all a bunch of losers and Sarah admits she's an alcoholic just in time for Bobby and Carol to show up after her AA meeting, or after she’s killed some more old men, and lead her out of the hospital, arm-in-arm. At which point, Sarah turns to her new sober friends and says, "What I could really use right now is a drink."
And they all laugh.
Which is pretty chilling if you're looking at this glass full of gin as half empty, but kind of hopeful if your glass of gin is half full.
PS - A special thank you to Michelle Souliere at the Green Hand Bookshop in Portland, ME who set this book aside for me special.