save themselves, Bill came up with the plan to travel the country on a Harley to study lucrative companies, and send back telegrams to his former bosses. When Wall Street gave his first report a thumbs up, he felt it was a call for a celebration. He left Lois on the side of a country road on their broken-down motorcycle while he walked to the nearest town to get hammered. While most wives would have attempted to run over his retreating figure with the Harley, Lois patiently awaited his return. She believed if she could just love him enough, Bill would be saved. Penniless and in despair, they moved into her parents’ home on Clinton Street.
Lois worked as a salesclerk in Macy’s, and when she returned home Bill pilfered from her purse; when she hid her money, he panhandled. In despair, one rainy night she almost succumbed to adultery, but her faith and her love for her husband stopped her from succumbing. Filled with self-loathing, when she entered the house it was to the sound of a lamp crashing as Bill used it to help him stand. Lois—also at a breaking point—screamed, “You don’t even have the decency to die!”
During these years on Kenny Rodger’s “train bound for nowhere,” there were endless arguments followed by desperate reconciliations where Bill promised to stop drinking. He even wrote one of his pledges in the family bible. Lois found her unanswered prayers “turning to ashes in my mouth.” Her life had become the antithesis of idyllic.
After seventeen torturous years, Bill had his epiphany: only a drunk could help another drunk. Armed with the knowledge, he conceived the principles for Alcoholic Anonymous. It should have been the time when Lois had the better rather than the worse, the health rather than the sickness, portion of her wedding vows. But it was never smooth sailing as the wife of Bill Wilson.
The Clinton house Lois had once envisioned filled with children overflowed with the local Bowery drunks who she fed while Bill initiated meetings: “My name is Bill W. and I’m an alcoholic.” Ironically, while her husband found his calling, Lois began to flounder. She was devastated she had not been the instrument of her husband’s salvation, and the purpose that had sustained her for decades—saving her husband—was now out of her hands. She recalled, “He was always with his A.A. cronies. I guess I was jealous and resentful that these strangers had done for him what I could not do.” The turning point came when she threw her shoe at him as hard as she could. Although this was a case of quid pro quo—Bill had once hurled a sewing machine at her—she was so ashamed she walked around the block several times. It was then she realized she needed some therapy herself. Rather than succumb to bitterness, as always, she determined to still rise. It was then she had her own revelation—one that was to save herself, along with thousands of strangers. She realized for every man in her smoke-filled home, there was a woman waiting outside in her car, with her own story, her own struggle with an alcoholic husband. She invited them inside, and Al-Anon was born. It was set up under the same principle as her husband’s, with its same conformity to anonymity, and to her group she was known as Lois W. And to those who were familiar with her life, she was also a member of SA—Saints Anonymous. Just as Rapunzel wove straw into gold, Lois used her experience to form a group with universal healing power.
Fired with enthusiasm for their respective causes, Bill and Lois started to rebuild their lives and marriage until they were felled with a terrible blow. Dr. Burnham had left the house on Clinton Street to his daughter, but in 1939 they could no longer make payments. In desperation, Lois sold her engagement ring and family heirlooms, but it did not ward off foreclosure. For the following two years, they couch-surfed, and the life of a nomad was especially hard for Lois, who ironically loved interior decorating and possessed a nesting spirit.
In 1941, a permanent home came when a fan of AA offered her sprawling home in Bedford Hills to the Wilson’s at a price far below market value. It had taken twenty-three years, but at last Lois had her own home and to share it with her now sober spouse. Perched on a hill, the property could only be accessed from the driveway by a series of stone steps that led to its double entendre name: Stepping Stones.
A reversal of their always shaky finances occurred when Bill published The Big Book, one of the best-selling of all time, his 12-step principle escape from purgatory. With its release, it knocked F. Scott Fitzgerald from his perch as the most prolific, alcoholic writer.
During the first half of their marriage, the couple had been known as the drunk and his long-suffering spouse; however, post The Big Book, they were fêted as the royal couple of recovery. Eventually the world came to recognize Bill Wilson as the great man his wife always knew him to be. Aldous Huxley proclaimed him “the greatest social architect of our time,” and he was chosen as Time’s top 100 heroes of the twentieth century. True to the feminist slogan, behind the great man was a great woman, though she was obscured by his shadow. Although a lifelong addict, he never became addicted to fame, and refused to have his portrait on the cover of LIFE Magazine, even with the offer to photograph him from the back. Part of his modesty came from Lois, who, when his head began to swell, teased, “Sweetheart, your halo’s on crooked.” In tribute to her unflagging devotion, on their 1954 wedding anniversary he wrote on a card, “Come any peril, we know that we are safe in each other’s arms because we are in God’s.”
It would have been a nod to poetic justice had Bill and Lois W. spent their twilight years relaxing in their beautiful retreat, secure in their satisfaction they had weathered the storm and been instrumental for thousands doing the same. But it was never easy to navigate the rocky road as the wife of Bill Wilson.
Although he had overcome his addiction to alcohol, he became addicted to sex, and he took to chasing skirts as fervently as he had once chased bottles. At AA meetings, after talking about his 12 steps, his 13th was hitting on recovering young women. And the older he got, the younger they became. These flings crossed the threshold from physical to emotional adultery when he began an affair with actress Helen Wynn that lasted fifteen years. Fortunately for him, bottles had been banned from Stepping Stones, or Lois would have smashed one over his head. In his will, Wilson bequeathed 10 percent of royalties from his book to his mistress.
In addition to slipping into non-marital sheets, other crosses Lois had to bear were Bill’s experimentation with LSD and the occult. But she took to heart the advice of the gambler: she knew what she wanted to keep and it was the man she had met through kerosene lamps. Upon his retirement from head of the powerful organization he had birthed into existence, he wrote, “Clearly my job henceforth was to Let Go and Let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was safe—even from me.” But Bill Wilson was not safe from himself.
In his final years he began his final addiction, this time to nicotine. Lois now had to ferret out his secret stash of smokes, just as she had once done with his bottles. Although suffering from emphysema, he alternated between inhaling from his oxygen tank and inhaling from his cigarettes. When Bill passed away, many feared Lois would soon follow, but, as always, she soldiered on, devoting her life to Al-Anon.
At age ninety-seven, Lois passed away and was laid to rest beside her husband in a Vermont cemetery. Her Los Angeles Times obituary stated that she “left no immediate survivors.” In a sense, through Al-Anon, she had left thousands. In her will she bequeathed her hilltop home to her foundation in the hope that it would educate and inspire future generations. Lois’ at-long- last home is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is open to tours. Every June, hundreds of AA members undertake the pilgrimage where the faithful pay tribute. The site is a shrine to memorabilia: there is the letter to Mr. Wilson from Carl Jung and a photograph of Richard M. Nixon receiving the millionth copy of The Big Book. With its mahogany antiques, including the desk on which Bill wrote his great work, it seems as if the Wilsons had just stepped out. In the master bedroom, a can of Perma Soft hairspray still rests on the vanity, along with a single bobby pin. In another area, a box of Wash ‘n Dri and a can of lighter fuel sits alongside books.
Alcoholic Anonymous is the Holy Grail to millions. The name on its spine is Bill Wilson, and yet it would not have been written without Lois, his ever present stepping stone.
