More on the Smithers Foundation

R. Brinkley Smithers
ALCOHOLISM'S SOBER PHILANTHROPIST
By Harry Minetree

R. Brinkley Smithers is everything that his name suggests: reserved, eccentric and the canny custodian of a vast, old fortune. Surrounded by retainers and sixty pristine acres, he lives in a mansion on Long Island's North Shore and, since his wife dismissed the chauffeur for dawdling, drives himself to a daily light lunch at the Piping Rock Club in a vintage Oldsmobile with a Cadillac hood ornament, a memento from a favorite car whose interior was eaten by a favorite hunting dog. At 78, "Brink" is still a crack shot with a scatter gun (though perhaps a bit too brittle for the larger bores), a worldclass angler, and a wry raconteur whose tales are set in other, if not better, times, on Scottish grouse moors and glacial salmon rivers in Alaska.

Brinkley Smithers is a recovered alcoholic, too. A drinking problem is not unusual among his well heeled peers, but there the stereotype stops, because he has recovered from his illness with a vengeance. "When I was drinking," he says, "I was stingy. Afraid people would like me only for my money. When I stopped drinking, I became generous. Now I don't care why people like me ... as long as they do, of course! "People do like him. They admire him, too, not for his money, but for how he has chosen to spend it. To this day, R. Brinkley Smithers is the only philanthropist anywhere to direct his wealth and energies exclusively to the fight against alcoholism. Though those energies are failing a bit, his resolve is still firm. And the wellspring of his largess, one of the major American fortunes, endures as the very model of blue chip security. Corporate mythology notwithstanding, Brinkley's father, Christopher Duncan Smithers, was a founder and one of the major stockholders of IBM. And, true to the family fiscal motto, "When in doubt, do nothing," his son has not sold one of the approximately half million shares he inherited.

His grandfather Charles Smithers, who immigrated to Canada from Tunbridge ells, England, was the first commoner to become president of the Bank of Montreal. Christopher, the youngest of his twelve children, entered the field of finance at age 18. On bitter winter mornings, gloved, muffled, and topped with the mandatory stovepipe, the young man would trim candlewicks and stoke the office stoves in preparation for the day's dealings. His weekly reward was a $5 bill engraved with the stern image of his father.

Following his father's death, Christopher moved with his mother to Brooklyn and went to work at F.S. Smithers & Company, the family's Wall Street concern. From the beginning, he was successful, analyzing, investing and then holding on. His consuming goal was to make a million dollars, retire from the firm and concentrate on his personal investments. With little time for socializing beyond business related appearances, and full of rigid Victorian standards regarding women, he was a long time finding a wife. But he did--in Memphis, at a friend's wedding. She was a vivacious Southern belle named Mabel Brinkley. She was from a good family that had interests in finance and railroad building, and she was at once bright and fetchingly ingenuous. Christopher Smithers was smitten. But the following day when he came calling, he found Mabel's father dead drunk in the gutter in front of the family home. Christopher hoisted the older man over his shoulder, deposited him on a settee in the parlor, then turned on his heel and left.

Chaos erupted in the Brinkley household. Despite bloodlines and appearances, James Brinkley had drunk and gambled away a fortune, and the family was near penury. Mabel, the eldest of nine children, had been their best hope, as this wealthy young man had been hers. Railing to the heavens, James Brinkley swore on his sacred honor that if Christopher returned to court Mabel he would never, so help him God, take another drink. The following year, in 1902, Christopher and Mabel were married, and James inverted his wineglass forever. The young couple settled into an apartment on Manhattan's fashionable Riverside Drive, but Mabel shortly became pregnant, and they moved to a mansion in Locust Valley. Their first child, Christopher Jr., was 4 years old when he died of cerebral meningitis. In 1907, Robert Brinkley Smithers was born. He was a sickly child, weaned early on a noxious pap of beer and German malt soup-a prescription that later gave him pause-but he survived. Having eased his parents' grief over the loss of their first child, little Brinkley could, from the beginning, do no wrong.

By 1915, Christopher had achieved his million dollar goal and had made his investment in what was to be IBM, hiring T. J. Watson as its manager. But when war broke out in Europe and the foreign currency market, in which Christopher had invested heavily, failed, he was obliged to remain at F. S. Smithers.

The reversal was temporary and had no effect on the elegant lifestyle of the Smithers family. Their home, DunRobin, which Mabel had named after an ancestral home in Scotland, was the botanical showplace of western Long Island. She was interested in garden clubs, charities and charity balls. Christopher was a club man. He was cofounder of the Piping Rock Club and the Creek Club in Locust Valley and the Gulf Stream Club in Delray Beach. The children-daughter Mabel was born four years after Brinkley-were schooled according to the traditions of American high society. But Brinkley didn't take to his studies or to country club pursuits. Although he dutifully played golf with his father, he was far more interested in hunting and fishing. At 7, he was shooting ducks on his uncle's plantation in Arkansas. At 9, he mastered the fly rod and fished the wilderness streams of Washington's Olympic Mountains.

Like his father, whom he idolized, he was shy and undemonstrative. But there was an incipient streak of his mother's mischief, too, a faintly discernible twinkle that would inevitably come out.

During his final year at prep school, a master spied young Smithers out after hours, smoking a cigarette and rollicking on a local midway ride. Questionable deportment and poor marks brought a recommendation that the boy be set back a year. In an effort to assuage his guilt and make academic amends, Brinkley, who was planning to become a physician, loaded his curriculum with math and science courses. Though turned down at Princeton, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, in premed. The first term went well, but that Christmas, he met his nemesis in the hollow of a fluted cocktail glass.

According to form and at their mothers' insistence, Brinkley and his college room mate made the holiday deb party rounds in Manhattan. Both boys were shy, gawky and profoundly fearful of the pretty girls to whom they were attracted. One night at the Plaza the band was playing ragtime. The ball was in full swing and the two collegiate wallflowers were eyeing the girls in their white gowns from a distance when Brink's roommate excused himself. An hour later he returned with an eager glow. He had, e said, just experienced an amazing revelation. In a speakeasy. It was called a martini. After two quick ones, he had felt as light as a feather and, miraculously, shot through with confidence. Brink ducked out, downed a couple, returned to the ball, straightened his white tie, and danced off with the nearest pretty deb. His shyness, his devastating fear of rejection, gave way to an inexplicable warmth and an image of himself as an outright Casanova. He had never before dared touch a girl, but when he did he was welcomed. And from then on, he was seldom turned down.

The Volstead Act of 1919 was more an inducement than a deterrent to wealthy young college men who were determined to drink. At Hopkins, Brink made a deal with his chemistry professor: in exchange for an apartment in which to party, he was allowed to tap the laboratory's alcohol supply for his bootlegging activities. Gin was the specialty-one gallon of water to one gallon of ethanol, a little glycerin, a few drops of juniper

essence. Or apricot drops, if he was in a brandy mood. During the summer, an attendant at the Nassau Club in Glen Cove, Long Island, who had an arrangement with a Canadian Pullman porter, kept Brink's locker well stocked with bonded booze.

At the end of Brinkley's second year at Hopkins, most of which passed in euphoric fogs alternating with debilitating hangovers, his father removed him from the university --"It seems you are unable to determine where the country club quits and the college begins"-- and put him to work at F. S. Smithers. By then Christopher had retired to tend to his personal investments and was not around to keep an eye on his son. Mabel knew about the drinking but said little. However, when Brinkley was arrested for drunken driving during a club crawl with his friends, the family chauffeur broke his promise and reported the incident to Christopher. The following day, father and son played eighteen holes of golf- Brink hitting the longer, wild ball; Christopher, as usual, short, steady and deadly accurate-and the matter was dismissed as, more or less, boys being boys.

The Smithers' attitude toward their son's drinking was not considered particularly permissive, if, indeed, it was considered at all. These were Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age times. Wild and gay. White flannels and picture hats across wide East Egg lawns. Hooch and laughter in fashionable excess among America's richest socialites in America's richest era. "Alcoholism" was unknown here. "Heavy drinkers," "hard drinkers," men who could "hold their liquor," were considered strong, exemplary males. Those who couldn't hold their liquor, and those few who chose not to drink, were dismissed as simply less manly. And that was that, so long as one's conduct conformed to the society's rather liberal notions of decorum. The odd drunk could be entertaining; "inebriates" were the dregs of society, hopeless wretches who lacked moral character and lived only on the Bowery.

Summer at the shore, the social season in town, or warm winters in Palm Beach, the scene was the same. For Brinkley, the license afforded by wealth and position constituted a threat. Had anyone been aware of predispositions toward alcoholism, he would have been recognized as vulnerable to the disease. He was painfully shy; lacked self-esteem in the light of his parents' accomplishments, the Johns Hopkins disgrace and the consequent loss of his personal dream to become a physician; and, perhaps most important, came from a long, unadmitted or unrecognized family history of problems with "ardent spirits." So he drank. And since his peers drank as much or more, and he himself was not given to drunken spectacles--in fact, during his increasingly frequent blackouts he became reserved to the point of superciliousness--Brinkley's excesses passed virtually unnoticed ... except, of course, by Brinkley.

All the young gentlemen, and perhaps more of the young ladies than one was inclined to admit, subscribed to the lie. Assuming a determined air of camaraderie, with a wink toward the promise of later licentiousness, you drank with abandon, passed out or blacked out, and awakened in the morning to a wave of nausea and remorse, which, if you were like Brinkley, you smothered with a drink or two before breakfast. When the cumulative physical insult became too great, you consulted your doctor, who corroborated what you already knew: if you didn't stop drinking, you were going to kill yourself. At the party that night, you announced with the pride of a student prince duelist that Doc had put you on the wagon for a while, a little liver flareup, nothing serious. Then, after a week or so, at the insistence of thirst and self delusion, the final, devastating lie: a clean bill of health, but only three drinks . . . to begin with.

In the summer of 1929, returning from Europe aboard the Mauritania, Brinkley met Gertrude Finucane. She was tall and beautiful and from a prominent Spokane family. They were married the following year and moved into an apartment on East 88th Street. By now Brinkley had mastered the art of masking his alcoholism. No one except his wife suspected that he had a problem, and she, having come from a hard drinking family herself, took it as a matter of course. Consequently, there were no complaints regarding his work at the Wall Street office, and in 1934 he was put in charge of the IBM operation in Washington, D.C. He did well, making the largest sale of business machines in the company's history, to the newly established Social Security System. There were a few disapproving glances when alcohol was on his breath at odd hours, but no complaints were registered where it mattered. In fact, on the basis of his success in Washington, Brinkley was offered a promotion. Upon considering the matter in relation to his financial independence and the life he wished to live, he wrote to T.J. Watson and tendered his resignation: regrettably, each advancement occasioned additional responsibilities, which were seriously interfering with his drinking.

So, at 30, he retired to a farm in Maryland and spent the next few years hunting and fishing quail in South Carolina, black duck on Long Island, billfish off Peru and salmon wherever they ran. A bout with jaundice exacerbated the severity of his hangovers, but he didn't stop drinking. Then one Sunday, after a long pause at the Congressional Country Club's nineteenth hole, he rearended a car and landed in jail--no license, no registration, drunk. His lawyer appealed to the arresting officer's wife. At the trial, the officer apologized and the charge was dismissed.

The characters and settings changed now and then, but otherwise it was a familiar, steepening descent. According to the wisdom of the time, the "dipsomaniac" was socially and physically irredeemable. Even in Brinkley Smithers's ostensibly permissive clique, if a hard drinker evolved into a drunkard, the door was bolted after him. If shyness and a genetic inclination toward alcoholism prompted his fall, it was sustained by a series of myths as inaccurate as they were cruel. For fear of ostracism, he hid his drunkenness. Convinced that there was no way out, he failed to seek assistance. And in the belief that he was lost to God and man, he suffered the private anguish of the damned. Had he been dependent on a job to provide for his family, someone might have come to his rescue. But wealth provided a cushion from reality and responsibility and contributed to his decline. After the war, during which Major Smithers drank boilermakers rather than Scotch so as not to intimidate the less affluent officers, he set up a Kaiser-Frazier automobile agency in Locust Valley. But his partner turned out to be an alcoholic, too. Pragmatists, they agreed to abstain on alternate weeks.

By this time, several of Brinkley's contemporaries had died in alcohol related circumstances--suicides, cirrhosis, car crashes--and he was becoming increasingly concerned about his own health. He followed the fashionable palliative of checking into a drying out facility.

Charles B. Towns Hospital was a private sanitarium on Central Park West where the clientele was as select as the address. "It was a place," Smithers says now, "where you went to get over hangovers and the d.t.'s. Very few of the patients were committed to the idea of stopping, because most of them were rich enough to avoid ever being down and out. If things got so bad that I consistently needed drinks before breakfast, I would phone Towns Hospital and make a reservation for that night." The routine never varied. After two whiskey sours, toast and coffee, he would drive to the city, drop his suitcase at the hospital, then go to his club. He would return to the hospital drunk and check in a few minutes after midnight, thus assuring himself a full day's allotment of whiskey according to the established tapering off regimen: one drink per hour on the first day, one every two hours on the second and so on until the fifth day, when the nurse arrived with a "Molotov cocktail" of castor oil and black coffee flavored with a few drops of spirits.

Two floors were reserved for alcoholics-- "Duffy's Tavern" for AA patients who were determined to quit, and another for patients who weren't. The top floors housed morphine addicts, mostly well known physicians who checked in, on average, at six month intervals. Brinkley's visits were more regular. Recalled to active duty during the Korean War, he pleaded alcoholism; it was his first formal admission of the problem.

Ordered to provide proof that he was an alcoholic, he requisitioned his records from Towns and discovered, to his astonishment and dismay, that in the past five years he had been hospitalized fifty times.

In 1954, at age 87, Christopher Smithers died and named Brinkley as executor of his estate. "Most of the stock had been transferred to me prior to father's death," Smithers says. "I was accustomed to wealth and could live with that. But to make me executor of his estate--me, an alcoholic, incapable of making a sober decision--was a shock and, I thought, more than I could bear." His father's dying faith in him was at once poignant and terrifying, and he began to drink more heavily. Hungover, alone and desperate in Towns Hospital, Brinkley Smithers made a telephone call. "Billy had worked for me at the automobile agency. I had fired him for drinking, and he'd joined Alcoholics Anonymous and made a go of it. So I phoned him and asked if he was mad at me. When he said he wasn't, I asked him to come to the hospital. I needed help."

Billy came. Two days later, he introduced Brinkley to Yev Gardner of the newly founded National Council on Alcoholism. During their conversation, Gardner mentioned that alcoholism was, of course, a disease. "Deep down," Smithers says, "I had suspected this, that I was suffering from a disease that, for some reason or other, I was particularly susceptible to." He asked if it was true. And if alcoholism was a disease, why hadn't someone told him? Because, Gardner explained, publicizing this sort of information--which was the main purpose the NCA--cost money. And the NCA was broke. "Well," Smithers told him, "you have the money now."

Yev Gardner introduced Smithers to George McCarthy, a recovered alcoholic who had helped many others to admit their problem. McCarthy brought him into a self help group. At the time, Brinkley Smithers was 47, the same age as James Brinkley when he inverted his wineglass at Christopher and Mabel's wedding.

In the years that followed, Brinkley Smithers served as treasurer, president and chairman of the National Council on Alcoholism, distinguishing himself internationally as one of the two most powerful forces in the fight against the disease and prejudices associated with it. The other was Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous. If Wilson was, as Aldous Huxley said, "the greatest social architect of the twentieth century," Brinkley Smithers was the one who put his plan in action. The quiet genius of his leadership, a birthright so long submerged in a presumption of personal worthlessness, and the power of his generosity have been greatly responsible for the long evolution of the alcoholic's image from that of a lost soul to that of a clinically ill person capable of being treated.

He sits in his paneled office in the isolated North Shore mansion that serves as headquarters for the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation; the favorite dog--a springer spaniel named Salty--who ate the interior of the favorite Cadillac lies at his feet. Smithers wears a sport shirt emblazoned with the names of exotic ports of call that he recently visited on a twenty six country inspection cruise to alcohol treatment facilities around the world. His wife Gertrude died a few years ago; their two adopted children have families of their own now. And he has remarried (his wife is the former Adele Croci of New York) and has a son. Over the mantelpiece is a tall portrait of Kip Farrington, the famous sportsman who counted Hemingway and Brinkley Smithers among his companions. Otherwise, the walls of the old house, the living room and formal dining room converted to offices, are hung with photographs and awards commemorating thirty years of combating alcoholism.

He moves slowly from picture to plaque, coloring the images with brief personal anecdotes, appearing more appreciative than proud. The innumerable grants to NCA affiliates around the world. His support of Dr. E. M. Jellinek in writing The Disease Concept of Alcoholism. The first management labor corporate programs at Con Ed, AllisChalmers, and the New York Times. The formation of the Alcohol and Drug Problems Association of North America, whose Washington lobby pushed through the Hagen Act, which first presented alcoholism as a national health problem, and the Hughes Bill, the most comprehensive alcoholism legislation to date. The $718,000 grant matching with HEW establishing the Center for Alcohol Studies at Rutgers. His efforts to educate the medical community through books and newsletters. The foundation's total grants come to $15 million, not including what Smithers has given on his own. This year he is being honored at the Amethyst Ball by New York's Alcoholism Council for all his good works.

His personal gift of $10 million to New York's Roosevelt Hospital for the education, treatment and rehabilitation of alcoholics is the largest single grant ever made by anyone, including the federal government, to combat the disease. The cornerstone of their program is residential treatment in the Smithers Rehabilitation Center, located in a handsome turn of the century mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"There were some problems with that one," he says. "I ran a contest to learn which institution had the best ideas for an alcoholism program. All of the proposals were poor, but Roosevelt Hospital's was less so. As a test, I gave them the income from $1 million to see what they could do. At first, they did a good job. So I gave them $5 million. But then they botched things up rather badly. I thought the trustees, the people I knew, ran the hospital, but they didn't. It was the doctors who ran things, and they had some serious problems. But eventually that was settled. They got the full $10 million, and they run the program as they see fit. "Detoxification and hospitalization are important parts of the program. But my main interests were prevention-especially among the children of alcoholics-and rehabilitation, including finding the recovered alcoholic a job. The latter was a problem that I, because of my family's wealth, never had to face. Nor does the absolute down and outer; he will be taken care of. But what about the person in the middle?

"In the old days, the alcoholic was caught in the revolving door of the jail. Then it was the hospital, because the doctors didn't know how to treat the disease. Early rehab was the same. Out of jail, out of the hospital, out of rehab ... out of a job. How could these people who needed to work, who wanted to work, get jobs without references? So I got together with some government agencies, I put up some money myself, and we started a job placement program. Now the recovered alcoholic has someplace to go, a chance to rebuild his life. We're stopping the revolving doors."

He stops for a minute, and eyes the photographs of individuals in whose recoveries Brinkley Smithers had had a personal hand. "Always the frustrated doctor!" he says. "I drank my way out of any hope of medical school; ironically, I can help after all."

Fifty percent of the alcohol sold in the United States is consumed by 10 percent of the nation's drinkers-alcoholics. There are at least ten million of them, and as the stigma is fading, the known numbers are increasing-by 14.3 percent since 1980. Alcoholism is the most serious health problem in the country, the direct or indirect cause of 100,000 deaths per year, and yet only 15 percent of all alcoholics are receiving formal treatment for their illness. And alcoholism is an illness. According to Dr. Nicholas A. Pace, a pioneer in the field of corporate alcoholism and founder of the innovative, outpatient Pace Health Services in New York City, "There are a number of proven physical differences between the alcoholic and the nonalcoholic. In the first place, the alcoholic metabolizes alcohol differently from the nonalcoholic, and in withdrawal he has a physical compulsion to drink more. Dr. Charles Lieber at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York has shown that the alcoholic has a higher systemic acetaldehyde level, and there is further evidence that the alcoholic develops different metabolic pathways than the nonalcoholic. Leucine, an amino acid, responds differently to the ingestion of alcohol in the alcoholic; there are strong suggestions that brain function differs as well. All this and more produces an abnormal, morphinelike addiction in the central nervous system of the alcoholic. Then there's the genetic predisposition to the disease, which is undeniable."

Brinkley Smithers recently observed that the acceptance of alcoholism as a disease has coaxed so many alcoholics out of the closet that "it appears that we're producing drunks faster than we can treat them!" His observation and the fact that health insurance now covers treatment for alcoholism have not been lost on the health services industry. Treatment centers are popping up almost as rapidly as patients. Some are good, some are not so good. It is important to find a good treatment program for alcoholism and other drug addictions.

Town & Country Magazine, May 1986

This article and photographs courtesy of smithersfoundation.org