Unlike Dr. Phil, with his bootstrappy southern straight talk, or Sanjay Gupta, with his numbing self-seriousness, Drew's persona has always been that of reluctant participant, a kind of "Well, since you asked me, I'll answer" stance. Drew would often make references to his twenty-year experience as the head of the chemical-dependency program at Los Angeles's Las Encinas Hospital or to treating psych patients and addicts in his private practice, which always gave the impression that he had more important shit to do than talk about Nicole Richie. Drew gets calls all the time from families desperate to get treatment for loved ones in the depths of an addiction, "and it breaks my heart," but he can't take on anyone new. Last year he just became too busy being a full-time media personality. So what does it mean if he's no longer Dr. Drew Pinsky—only Dr. Drew?
Drew, life-size now, enters the CNN-studio lobby to greet me. He is in a black tee and jeans, armed with three Coke Zeros to pound down before he has to get on-camera. With Dr. Drew, he's expanded beyond the cycles of recovery and relapse to the whole news cycle, and on this May afternoon he'll be talking about the death of Osama bin Laden, its impact on our kids, and the autobiography of Jesse James, Sandra Bullock's cheating ex-husband.
Drew and I sit in his undecorated office, stuffed with suits, his ties dangling from the shelves, and we try to chat as he preps for the show. His producers burst in at least eighteen times. One, wearing a beanie and, for reasons undisclosed, two pairs of glasses, reads over an intro for the September-11-and-your-teen segment. "Good, but too many words," he says. "It won't come off natural, trust me. Come back with less words." Later a brusque veteran who used to work with Jerry Springer pops in: "Could you write me a prescription for this skin thing I have?" Drew obliges.
When we finally get twenty minutes of uninterrupted time, Drew turns out to be charismatic in the traditional sense: theatrical, eloquent, and fervent. When Drew talks to you, his eye contact is direct and unbreaking. He cusses like a polite teamster—a lot of "shit," but no F-bombs. When you're talking to him, his face creases, his lips and eyebrows curve. When you say something he agrees with, he'll pound his hand on the table and point a finger at you and say, "You're totally right!" It's ridiculously easy to take Drew at his word.
As a preteen, I obsessively cherished Loveline, the late-night call-in radio show he has co-hosted since 1984, the way a young boy in the pre-Internet age would his first glossy porn mag. Drew made me feel secure that if I needed to, I could just call; once I even did, about a red bump on my bikini line that I was certain meant I had some life-threatening venereal disease. Because I was still a virgin, Drew explained, it was likely an ingrown hair. It was.
When my intimate, adored little show became an MTV sensation in the '90s, Drew became the media's go-to medical expert and advice dispensary on pop culture's naughtiest pathologies. Today he is better known than the celebrity underclass he is so often called on to discuss.
Drew's CNN studio comes with the usual anonymous trappings: the shiny obsidian floor panels and lightly frosted glass walls, the requisite ceramic mug. Two teens, via remote feed from New York, explain their ambivalent, slightly confused reactions to Bin Laden's death. Drew turns back to the main camera and in a sort of affected talking-head way, says, "And that's okay!" His charisma is cranked down to a more CNN-friendly level, but he is good. He does a lot of what I call the crab claw: spread fingers pointed downward when he wants to emphasize a point. He has the proper ratio of brow furrowing and energetic cadence. He is no less somber—maybe laughably so—when reading a passage from American Outlaw where Jesse James describes how it all went wrong with Sandra Bullock: "I was a kid from the streets and just didn't seem to have much in common with her friends. Some of my hardest moments were going to premieres and awards show. I just wished she was a teacher or something."
···
After the cnn taping, Drew and I return to his office. He unbuttons his on-camera shirt, strips to his Jockeys, and gets back into his jeans and tee. Drew sees this new phase as his attempt to help heal the strongest, sickest institution in American life today—the celebrity-media complex, which has us all as messed up as benzo addicts. All his shows and appearances, those are our celebrity rehabilitation, our treatment. "The reality—I've always felt this about media—is that it's such a powerful force, and I really want on my tombstone just to say HE MADE A DIFFERENCE," Drew explains. Whether the doctor purposefully cultivates his celebrity stature for noble means or wittingly invites it because he himself likes being in the spotlight, he is operating on the assumption that his empathetic brand of TV will breed empathy instead of the more likely outcome, that it will just breed more TV.
Most of what takes place on Celebrity Rehab happens in the parking lot of the Pasadena Recovery Center. During the twenty-one days of filming each season, VH1 sets up two double-wide trailers in the facility's connecting parking lot, and inside Drew—along with an array of drug techs, counselors, and psychiatrists—does intensive therapy with the (loosely defined) celebrities about their childhoods, their triggers, and the root causes of what Drew identifies as their lack of self-worth. VH1 also rents out a separate wing of the facility to house the celebrities. When I asked the staff at the Pasadena Recovery Center how they felt about the show, I might as well have been asking bartenders at the Boston bar i was based on what it was like to work with Ted Danson.
In his book The Mirror Effect, Drew argues that addiction in celebrities often comes from pathological narcissism, which stems from some childhood trauma. Consider the case of NBA star Dennis Rodman, who appeared on Celebrity Rehab and whom Drew describes as the show's most difficult patient: Rodman's dad not only had twenty-six other kids (not a typo) but abandoned him when he was young; the basketball player struggled with suicidal thoughts and alcohol abuse. He once told Drew that he didn't have to participate in group therapy because "first there's God, and then right under God there's professional athletes." Celebrities like Rodman are plagued, as Drew puts it, by chronic feelings of loneliness and emptiness, which compel them to seek the praise of a real or imagined audience.
The upcoming season features such TMZ listers as Sean Young and Lindsay Lohan's dad. If Drew's right, it seems like a contradiction at best and a cruel joke at worst to put these troubled people in front of cameras, which reinforces rather than challenges their narcissism. Drew's heard this criticism before. "Here's the thing: These are unmotivated people who want to be on TV and make money. That's why they're there," Drew insists. "And in spite of that, they end up getting treatment, feeling good about it, being transformed by it." According to his informal data—follow-up calls, e-mails, what you read on Perez Hilton—about 20 percent of Celebrity Rehab cast members stay clean after the program. Obviously the success rate matters less than the ratings, which are excellent.
···
During the first season, Drew constantly asked the cast if they were okay with being filmed. But then Mary Carey—an alcoholic porn star born to a schizophrenic mother and a father with cerebral palsy—told him, "Drew, I've done just about everything in front of a camera. I understand what this means. Stop worrying." Drew finally understood: "These people live in front of cameras and do all kinds of shit in front of cameras. They really did understand what they were getting into."
Audiences have now seen model Amber Smith puke into a wastebasket from opiate withdrawal, Mackenzie Phillips smash a car with a bat (for therapeutic reasons), Crazy Town front man Seth Binzer smuggle crack back into the rehab center. It's not reality TV, Dr. Drew assures me. It's a docudrama that serves dual purposes: The first, Drew says, is getting these sick people care.
The second is to push back against the celebrity-media complex. "I've made it explicit that the show is the pushback. You're going to laugh at these people? We're pushing your face to the mirror. Look at what you're laughing at, at what pain these people are in, and you've been sitting in judgment of them." This logic absolves Drew of any guilt when treatment fails or proves beside the point. The joke is always on us.
If we tune in to watch attention-starved junkies emotionally gore themselves but they get clean by the end of the season, then we've witnessed Drew perform a miracle we secretly hoped he could not. If Mary Carey relapses and makes a porno called Celebrity Pornhab with Dr. Screw or pill-addicted Grease star Jeff Conaway is taken off life support after two weeks in a medically induced coma or Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr ends up dead from a suspected cocktail of methadone and antianxiety medication, then we can chide ourselves for enjoying their self-destruction but feel safe in the knowledge that Drew did all he could to save them."In spite of telling him repeatedly his addiction would kill him, I could not pull him from the clutches of the pain meds." Dr. Drew told People about Conaway. "Devastating to hear of Mike Starr succumbing to his illness," Drew tweeted, about the bassist. "So very sad."
But things have been done on Celebrity Rehab and Sober House that would usually be vigilantly avoided in nontelevised treatments. Most notably: putting former lovers Tom Sizemore, who appeared in some big-time movies like Saving Private Ryan, and Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam, on the same season. Years ago, Sizemore, a serious drug addict, was found guilty of assault and harassment of Fleiss. Around the same time, she was granted a restraining order against him.
"Both of them had to be willing to do this," Drew tells me when I bring them up. Though the two were civil to each other at first, Fleiss was eventually using her time in group sessions to shit on Sizemore. "The thought of being with you would turn a woman gay," she once said. Things got uglier when both agreed to go to Sober House. Fleiss would needle Sizemore, who would explosively lash out. When I pressed the point about why it was okay to put them together, Drew responded, "It happens all the time that people are in the same treatment center that either were involved in nefarious relationships or were involved in criminal activity together."
"It happens all the time" is a shitty answer I didn't expect from Drew. It happens because mental-health services lack the resources or staff for full-on background checks. But Celebrity Rehab patients have their lives in the public domain, and VH1 has plenty of money.
If I know all this, Drew knows this, which means that by doing this ethically murky stuff (a) he bowed to a network's desire for sensationalism, (b) his judgment as a doctor is tangled, or (c) in this new phase of his career, his choices are one part clinical, the other part showbiz.
···
I am nestled deep inside Adam Carolla's man cave in Glendale, California: a converted warehouse that serves as a recording studio for his various podcasts on comedy, cars, and home repair, as well as a working garage for his collection of really expensive-looking vintage automobiles. Fries and pizza and leather couches and vintage Playboys and Frank Sinatra iconography are strewn about the place.
Carolla hosted Loveline alongside Drew from 1996 to 2005, known to many of us listeners as the Golden Era. Adam's comedic roughhousing of callers and his unaccommodating advice made him the perfect match for Drew's more conservative manners and Hippocratic concern. I hoped Carolla could give me some insight into his old friend's evolution from doctor to star.
That night, Carolla's guest, by pure coincidence, is Sober House alum Andy Dick. VH1 approached Hollywood's Dionysian forest creature to be on Celebrity Rehab's first season, offering him what he says was a really, really large amount of money that I'm not allowed to disclose, but it was less than a million and more than what the president makes.
"I said no to Drew," Dick says, superfey, overgesticulating, "because even though I totally love him, I didn't want to go on-air to air out all my dirty laundry." He didn't want to stop drinking for three weeks, either. Two years later, Dick was in jail for drug possession and sexual battery, and he called to see if the offer still stood. Nope. But the producers would give him some small fee and a slot on Sober House. "Look, I didn't want to go to a rehab where people are trying to hang themselves or are coming off of crack binges, " Dick says. "Every time I go to jail, I'm kept separately from other people. I'm different from other people, because I'm famous. Dr. Drew understands that, so that's a big reason I was willing to go on the show. I knew he would get it." Tonight the tragicomedian looks taut, groomed, alert. When I compliment his tan, he says, "Well, it's probably because I haven't been drinking, and I've been working and taking care of myself!" Nonetheless, he's only recently been released from jail for getting too drunk at a movie wrap party. At one point, when he and I are sitting alone on a couch, Dick looks down at his phone to read an incoming text message and with what sounds like a genuine note of despair says, "I really hope I didn't fuck this whole thing up."
Dick possesses the fatalism that you see in a lot of addicts, a radical acceptance of their inability to change. Before leaving the studio, he asks me, with the adolescent whine of a kid who knows he broke curfew, to tell Drew that he is fine and for Drew not to be mad at him and he'll be okay. Adam shuffles into the back of the garage in track pants, a flannel shirt, and socks with sandals. It's clear that he wants to go home and that I'll only have a few minutes before he gets off the couch.
Unlike Drew, Carolla isn't big on eye contact, active listening, or even appearing to give a flying fuck about this line of questioning. I ask him why he thinks Drew now dedicates his talent and practice to the treatment of celebrities instead of regular old addicts. "I don't think Drew thinks about it nearly as much as anyone else thinks about it," says Carolla.
After a moment, he adds, "Look, we can always ask for people to do bigger or better or greater things. I always remind people that every job he gets, he pays more taxes, and that's sort of charity work, if you think about it."
Carolla gets up. As he's walking toward the door, I leap up to keep my tape recorder on him. He says over his shoulder: "Yeah, he's not Mother Teresa. He's not a saint. He's somewhere between Mother Teresa and Charles Manson. As we all are. And he's just a little closer to Teresa than Charlie, that's all. But he's not her."
···
"Everyone's dick is bleeding tonight," says Krysta, the beautiful round-faced blonde who spends several nights a week in her flip-flops screening calls at Loveline's Culver City studios. "Too many dick calls. We need more women callers or else the show gets boring."
Krysta hands me a landline so I can listen in on potential callers. In rapid succession, people are describing their warts, their reliance on dildos for orgasms, the dumb shit their boyfriends are doing. Krysta is merciless and efficient. There is no denying it: I'm giddy. For close to two decades I had imagined a tireless bullpen of call screeners, putting STDs up on the board like some Glengarry Glen Ross wet dream. I'm utterly endeared that it's just one girl, a phone twice the age of Justin Bieber, and a single screen that flashes "19 years old, from Texas, thinks he tore off his foreskin during sex."
It's clear that Drew finds his moral center in Loveline; whenever I ask about the tenuous ethics of his mediacentric work, he refers back to the radio show as a "model." "We want to give that caller something real and something to take home and think about," Drew says. "But we want everyone else to listen and learn." In other words: If people are fucking up their lives but have questions and are willing to publicly broadcast it, Drew will be there. But how this works beyond the Loveline studio is anybody's guess. In the amoral world of mass media that Drew now traffics in, there is little evidence that he can jujitsu what is essentially voyeurism and cheap titillation into a public good.
For the past year, Dr. Drew has been hosting Loveline with "Psycho" Mike Catherwood, a hyperactive, high-decibel carnival of a human being. Drew is a little sluggish, but Psycho Mike's indefatigable energy catches, and by the time the show starts, the doctor's up and talky. The anticipation and electricity in the studio feels like we're playing Russian roulette. There are a lot of blanks in the chamber, dull calls about whether it's a good idea to have a threesome (no), is it normal to masturbate twice a day (yes), is it cool to date a 15-year-old girl when you're a 19-year-old boy (idiot).
Then comes the blast. A 20-year-old woman wants to know how she can get her husband sexually interested in her again.
"What is he interested in instead of you?" Mike asks.
"He plays video games all day," she responds, "for, like, eleven hours a day."
Red flags up. Psycho Mike and Drew slow down. "Has he suffered any trauma?"
None that she knows of, she says, and tries to redirect Drew and Mike back to getting her man to want to fuck her. But the doctor keeps up his line of questioning. Within three minutes, it's revealed that her husband was beaten as a kid and that the young woman's father once tried to strangle her mother. In front of her. Drew attempts, with a steady but dissolving patience, to suggest that maybe she's asking the wrong questions. "Instead of trying to figure out how to get more sex out of your husband, why don't you start asking why he is detaching himself from you for eleven hours a day?"
This is my favorite Drew, the Drew I want to persevere. People here are confused, in pain, desperate, and they call him for answers, which he delivers, this cool disembodied voice of wisdom and care. We see only rare, ineffectual glimpses of this Drew when he's addressing underage, unraveling girls on Teen Mom or sloshing through the histrionics of Janice Dickinson on Celebrity Rehab. The metastasizing growth of Dr. Drew's projects may make him more famous but ever less important.
Psycho Mike cuts to commercials. Everyone agrees that she was "the call of the night"—the one person whose life could possibly be a little better because of the show.
Break's over. The headphones go back on. "Can I give my boyfriend AIDS if I'm on my period?"
"Do you have AIDS?" Drew asks cautiously.
The caller responds that she doesn't but read somewhere that women can transmit the disease through menstrual blood. Everyone in the studio takes a deep breath. And then Dr. Drew adopts the calm, assuaging tone of a physician speaking to an anxious, vulnerable patient within the intimate space of an exam room: "It's impossible to give someone AIDS if you don't have AIDS," he says. "Period or not."
Natasha Vargas-Cooper is a writer living in Los Angeles. This is her first story forGQ.
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