In “Crash and Burn,” Artie Lange tells the behind-the-scenes story about his meltdown on “The Howard Stern Show” when he famously quit on air. Writing with Anthony Bozza, Lange also reveals the horror of his suicide attempt. He’s grotesquely honest about his addiction to heroin and prescription drugs, too.
Now happily engaged to his longtime girlfriend Adrienne and hosting “The Artie Lange Show” on the Audience Network for DirecTV, Lange looks back on those very public moments when everyone, except him, could see what was happening.
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Howard wasn’t kidding when he asked Chris Rock on the air, in the spring of ’09, “Chris, you’re a smart guy; please tell me, how do I help Artie?”
“Howard, I hate to say this, man, but you’re going to have to fire him,” Chris said without missing a beat. “If you fire him, that might wake him up.”
I was sitting right there, by the way. “That’s a great idea,” I said, “Thanks, Chris.”
“Artie, I’m trying to help you out, man,” Chris said. He yelled it actually, because that’s how Chris says anything. “If Howard fires you, it might wake you up! You’d be fired, you’d be out of a job, and it’d be your fault. It would be a consequence of your actions that you could not ignore.”
* * *
In June, I also appeared on the debut of Joe Buck’s HBO show, “Joe Buck Live.” About four hours before the show I’d crushed up four 10-milligram Vicodin and snorted the entire pile, then chased it with liberal swallows of whiskey, so by the time I got to the studio I was what anyone would call “loopy.”
The first thing I said on what was, by design, a classy show, involved the phrase “sucking ---- dot com.” That’s right, “sucking ---- dot com.” The audience, who’d had zero opportunities to laugh thanks to two painfully boring and egotistical guests (that would be Brett Favre and Chad Ochocinco), exploded.
That was just the start of me getting out of control. Basically Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis sat there and watched this happen, because I wasn’t letting anyone else take the focus off me. During the break, Paul Rudd leaned in toward me.
“You realized that what you just did was legendary, right?” he said.
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His encouragement inspired me to take things further. And that’s where it all really went wrong because I completely lost the plot. I thought I was delivering the kind of performance they were after and since I was on a drug and booze cloud I didn’t notice how wrong I was. The tension onstage was flying right over my head.
I know a lot of my fans, plus people who don’t like Joe Buck, still think this performance was f------ genius, and I suppose some of it was, but let’s be honest, it’s a guy having a meltdown in an inappropriate way in the wrong place. That appearance represents what drugs had become in my professional life.
* * *
It was about this time in my crash that my performance on the “Stern Show” slid into the s--- after eight solid years. If you want to talk about a loss of timing, all I need to say is that falling asleep on air, with 6 million people listening, became my most consistent contribution. That is when I wasn’t making nonsensical comments, interrupting Howard, or fighting with just about everyone.
One morning that sticks in my mind was the day we had Ben Stiller and Jimmy Kimmel on the show. At some point in the conversation Kimmel mentioned that he was friends with Tom Cruise and that he didn’t believe the story in “Too Fat to Fish” (Lange’s first book) where I talk about how rude Tom was to me on the set of “Jerry Maguire.” Jimmy was being friendly about it, just saying it didn’t sound like Tom, but I didn’t see it that way at all. I saw it as a personal attack.
“F--- you, Jimmy,” I said. “Tom Cruise is a f------ a------. He’s a f------ creep.”
“Calm down, Artie,” Howard said.
I didn’t calm down, of course. I kept at it to the detriment of the show and to my already sagging performance. That was the first time I really sucked, but it was far from the last.
In September Howard had to sit me down for a heart-to-heart, which he’d never had to do in my eight years on the show.
“Listen, Art,” Howard said. “We don’t know if you’ve got something going on again, but you’ve not been doing your job on the air lately.”
“Howard, I’m clean,” I said. I was totally lying — I was high at the time.
“We always had a rhythm, Art,” Howard said. “You and Robin and I were always seamless, and that was great. But now you’re sort of interrupting us and I’m worried about you. You get crazed over little things. I don’t want to drug test you because that’s none of my business, but I want you to be all right.”
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“Howard, I’m clean and I’m working on myself,” I said. “I’ve gotten rid of the drugs, but I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself. I understand that.”
“I don’t want to fire you, Artie,” Howard said. “It seemed like you were doing so good. Just work on that.”
“I will, Howard, I promise.”
Yeah, right. It just got worse and worse.
* * *
I’d agreed to appear in a film as a favor to my friend Maria Menounos, who is best known as a host on “Extra” and “Access Hollywood.” She also writes, directs and produces movies.
I told Maria to send a car to the Mandarin Oriental at six a.m. to drive me the two hours to Connecticut. Maria is a sweetheart, but this was the last thing I wanted to do on a holiday weekend. So I locked myself in my hotel room and numbed out by snorting heroin all night. I got in the Town Car Maria had sent completely f----- up, with a bunch of heroin in my pocket to “get me through the day.”
I don’t know what the f--- that movie was and I barely remember doing it, but I love Maria and I hope it worked out. I tried to learn my lines, but I was all f----- up, and there was nowhere for me to get some privacy. There were no trailers; the best they had was a spare sedan, so I climbed in there, and, in the heat, dozed off in the middle of “rehearsing.”
After a fourteen-hour shoot, the car took me back to the Mandarin Oriental.
* * *
My on-air “fatigue” became a regular feature of the show. It got so ridiculous that one day when Kathy Griffin was our guest, I fell asleep so deeply and snored into the microphone so loudly that Howard couldn’t continue. He could only be heard between snores. Howard turned it into gold, of course, but after they’d finished laughing at me, they woke me up and suggested that I sleep it off (whatever “it” was for me that day).
“Art, why don’t you just go into the dressing room and sleep,” Howard said. “We don’t need you for the Kathy Griffin interview.”
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“Fine,” I said, so during the commercial break they kicked Kathy and her hair and makeup people out of her dressing room so I could get back to snoring.
“You’re kicking me out so Artie can sleep?” she asked our producer, completely dumbfounded. “I have an Emmy.”
* * *
Around this time (after his suicide attempt) my hero, Bruce Springsteen, called me. He and I had met at a funeral of a mutual friend who’d died of a heroin overdose. I told him in the ten minutes we spoke that I had a lot of the same issues as the deceased and that I was trying to work them out. I was supposed to be clean at the time — though I wasn’t.
I’d had no contact with Springsteen since, until my mother came into my room one night and in the same way she used to tell me my friends were at the door asking if I could come out and play stickball when I was twelve, said, “Bruce Springsteen is on the phone for you.”
I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Bruce had heard about what had happened, and he actually called — twice! The first time my mother didn’t wake me up!
“Well, just call him back,” she said.
“Ma, that’s not how it works,” I said. “You don’t call someone like that back. You wait for them to call you. I mean, he didn’t leave a number, did he?”
“No, but it’s on the Caller ID.”
“Ma, no believe me, I can’t do that. There’s an unspoken rule — you wait for the famous person to call you.”
Anyway, the second time Bruce called, we ended up speaking for over an hour and he couldn’t have been cooler.
“I’m thinking about you, just want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, you know,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys who have what you’re dealing with and you can reach out and get help from a lot of people. There’s a lot of good people out there who can help you.”
To be sitting in that bedroom in central Jersey and have my mom come in and say that Bruce Springsteen was on the phone helped me in such a profound way I can barely express it. I was
16 when “Born in the U.S.A.” came out and he was instantly my hero, as he is today. To be there at 43 getting a call that sincere from him was an instantly amazing moment and I remember thinking how much I hoped I lived long enough to be able to thank him for it in person one day. Bruce was so genuinely concerned. He ended the conversation by giving me his number and telling me that I could call him anytime. It was the first time I’d thought about living for months.
Artie Lange will be signing copies of “Crash and Burn” on Tues., Oct. 29, at 12 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue, 555 Fifth Ave.
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