She entered the tunnel of alcoholism and that of cocaine, but in both cases Whoopi Goldberg she managed to get out of it “after hitting rock bottom”, as she herself admitted. «I was invited to parties where I was greeted by trays full of narcotic substances – said the 68-year-old Oscar winner in a passage from her biography “Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me”, out Tuesday 7 May -. I could choose what I wanted, rows of cocaine were arranged on the tables and shelves in the bathroom, available to everyone.” In those years – they were the legendary Eighties – drug-fueled parties were normal in Hollywood and everyone was “calm and relaxed, because they knew the police wouldn’t come.”
For a year, Goldberg convinced herself that she could manage her addiction, “because cocaine didn’t seem dangerous. But then she started kicking my ass and I began to hallucinate. Once I thought I saw a monstrous creature lurking under the bed and if I got up, it would attack me. So I didn’t move from bed for twenty-four hours.”
What made her finally stop was an episode that occurred while she was staying in a luxury hotel in Manhattan. «I locked myself in a closet to take cocaine – the actress confessed – and suddenly a maid opened the doors and, seeing me sitting there, she started screaming. I jumped up and saw myself in a mirror all covered in cocaine. It was like a slap in the face. I knew that to get clean I would have to change friends and give up parties. But I could do it, because I didn’t want to die.”
In another part of the biography the “Ghost” star also talked about theelectric shock which her mother underwent when she attended primary school and which made her forget her children: due to a nervous breakdown, Emma Harris she remained hospitalized for two years and throughout this period Whoopi e his brother Clyde (who passed away in 2015 due to a brain aneurysm) were unable to see her (“the children were not allowed in the hospital”) and this traumatic experience inevitably had a great impact on the actress’s life.
