Jamie Lee Curtis had just turned 40. She and her husband, director Christopher Guest, had been married for 14 years and had two children, Annie, 12, and 2-year-old Thomas. A two-time Golden Globe winner, Curtis had just landed on the New York Times best-seller list with her second children’s book “Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day.”
One night — it was late 1998 — Curtis was doing what she usually did. She was in the kitchen of her Los Angeles-area home making dinner for the family. She reached into her pants pocket, scooped up five Vicodin and swallowed them all at once with a swig of wine.
Curtis didn’t realize that a friend who was staying at the house was watching her from a doorway. “I heard this voice: ‘You know, Jamie, I see you. I see you with your little pills, and you think you’re so fabulous and so great, but the truth is you’re dead. You’re a dead woman.’”
“The jig was up,” Curtis says. “Now I knew someone knew. I had been nursing a secret Vicodin addiction for a very long time — over 10 years.”
Even so, she wasn’t ready to face her demons. A few weeks later, her actress sister Kelly Curtis, who was staying with the family, was prescribed Vicodin after being injured while performing in a play. Kelly didn’t like the way the medication made her feel, so she tossed the full bottle of pills into her suitcase.
Curtis was soon sneaking in her room and stealing pills. “But then when she was moving out, I knew she was going to find the empty bottle,” Curtis remembers. “So I wrote her a letter and I said, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing, and I’ve stolen your pills from you, and I’m sorry.’ When I came home that night, I was terrified that she was going to be so angry at me, but she just looked at me and put her arms out and hugged me and said, ‘You are an addict and I love you, but I am not going to watch you die.’ That’s it. She didn’t wag her finger at me. She didn’t tell me anything else.”
About two months later, in February 1999, Curtis picked up a copy of Esquire. Flipping through the pages, she stopped at an article titled “Vicodin, My Vicodin.” As she read writer Tom Chiarella’s story about his addiction to painkillers, Curtis felt for the first time that she wasn’t the only one.
The article inspired her to attend her first recovery meeting. That was about 20 years ago. She has been sober ever since.
Here, Curtis opens up about first getting sober and how she’s maintained her recovery for two decades while working in Hollywood:
When did you start taking painkillers?
I had a routine plastic surgery because of a cameraman. I naturally had puffy eyes. If you see photographs of me as a child, I look like I haven’t slept. I’ve just always been that person, and we were shooting a scene in a courtroom with that kind of high, nasty fluorescent light, and it came around to my coverage in the scene, and [the cameraman] said, “I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are too puffy.” I was so mortified and so embarrassed and had just so much shame about it that after that movie, I went and had routine plastic surgery to remove the puffiness. They gave me Vicodin as a painkiller for something that wasn’t really painful.
Did you ever take pills while you were working?
I was the wildly controlled drug addict and alcoholic. I never did it when I worked. I never took drugs before 5 p.m. I never, ever took painkillers at 10 in the morning. It was that sort of late afternoon and early evening — I like to refer to it as the warm-bath feeling of an opiate. It’s like the way you naturally feel when your body is cool, and you step into a warm bath, and you sink into it. That’s the feeling for me, what an opiate gave me, and I chased that feeling for a long time.
Who knew about your addiction?
No one. No one knew at all. Not one person knew except the people I would get [the painkillers] from.
What did you say to your friend who caught you taking the pills in the kitchen?
I think I sobbed and thanked her, and told her I loved her.
