Fiona O’Loughlin — Sex, booze and smoking meth in a Glenelg drug den | SA Weekend cover story
Fiona O’Loughlin, the troubled SA comedian who has long battled alcoholism, has revealed she smoked crystal meth as part of a bizarre attempt to heal at a Glenelg “drug den” in 2015.
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In an exclusive interview with SA Weekend magazine, and in her new book, comedian Fiona O’Loughlin lifts the lid on smoking meth in a Glenelg drug den, fighting back from near-death after a drug overdose, how she unwittingly revealed to her husband she’d had sex with another man, saw imaginary wolves while suffering from alcohol withdrawal and found the power of prayer and a new future after almost a year without booze.
There’s not much that is off-limits for stand-up comedian Fiona O’Loughlin. Even after nearly dying during a 15-day coma following a drug overdose in 2015, she’d joke about her rollercoaster life. “People ask, ‘How do you write your shows?’ And I say, ‘I don’t – I just wait’. How lucky was that coma! You can’t buy material like that.”
If you don’t laugh, she says, you cry. Today she will do both. We’re in a cosy living room belonging to friends of O’Loughlin in Brighton.
There’s a vase of flowers on the window sill, an occasional smoke and cup of tea, and a comfy armchair for the 57- year-old to curl up, wisecrack and sometimes weep in.
That year, 2015, was especially horrible. The South Australian comic’s alcoholism was out of control. She was lost, alone, almost beyond hope.
In quick succession she went from the coma, to a psychiatric ward, and then to live with a “healer” in a Glenelg drug den where her treatment included puffing on an “ice” pipe with crystal meth.
Even in a life that had been smashed by a recurring trauma of benders, blackouts and alcohol poisoning, this was bad.
And it all might have ended for O’Loughlin when a visit to a Melbourne dentist, and prescription for painkillers, morphed into a full-blown crisis after her daughters found her screaming, naked, in her home.
Despite the empty packet of Panadeine Forte and full bottle of Valium, she hadn’t – she insists – tried to kill herself. But she was unconscious by the time an ambulance arrived and doctors gave her little chance of surviving.
In her new memoir Truths from an Unreliable Witness, she recounts how her devastated family, including estranged husband Chris, gathered to hear she might not live.
Recalling it now overwhelms her. “I had terrible post-traumatic stress,” she says, suddenly faltering, her voice shaking, “but I didn’t know what it was. To go through something that frightening is bad enough, but to know that you’ve frightened so many people that you love to death …”
She pauses and sobs. “And coming that close to losing your life. I think one of the most frightening nights was after I was out of the Austin Hospital and I was in the psyche ward at Albert Road Clinic and my white cell count went down to f. king … very dangerous.
“I was alone … and a nurse came and she said, ‘You know, you’re not out of the woods yet’. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die here. Nobody knows’.” She wipes her eyes at the memory.
That nightmare was five years ago, and there have been many crises since. Not all of them are in the book; the title, after all, gives some wriggle room. Still, today, O’Loughlin is looking worn but well. She’s smaller than I expected and she’s ditched her dark wavy hair in favour of a new, short “blonde” treatment. She seems nervous, and occasionally forgetful, but upbeat and determined to revive and even extend her comedy career.
Since her last alcoholic bender in December after a Channel 7 show, The All New Monty: Guys & Gals in Sydney, “not a drink has passed my lips, nor a codeine tablet,” she says, despite 2020’s stresses. “And that’s the first time I’ve been able to say that.” Then she pauses, unable to resist a throaty cackle: “The year’s not over!”
“HAVING A CRACK” FOR A WORLDWIDE AUDIENCE
She now lives in Adelaide, in a tiny brick rented flat. Every day, her job is not to drink. True, she has tried before and failed; this time she has new tools to beat the alcoholism and addictions that have stalked her for decades.
“I seriously have never been so excited,” she says of the things she’s been working on, including a web series she hopes to launch. “I’m creating something I would like to watch. I know I’m a great communicator. COVID has changed things for everyone and I’m investing in myself online.
“Seinfeld says a good comic has got to have that 20 minutes of gold that they can pull out anywhere, anytime, and I’ve got a beautiful bag of tricks. I’ve got three hours of stand-up comedy material. The world’s changing so rapidly, and in a good way, that nobody bats an eyelid at an older woman having a crack.”
The other thing in her corner that’s new is Sue Underwood, her manager, and a former nurse she met while in that Glenelg drug den. Underwood is clearly a caring person, and she got O’Loughlin through what might have been her most difficult time. “I have no doubt I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Sue,” she writes. Now the pair are working on a possible documentary, mockumentary, reality TV miniseries and a web series. Her stand-up show includes a “funny” version of the book and keynote for schools and companies on addiction and mental health.
O’Loughlin has just started doing live shows again, and also Zoom web broadcasts that she has been surprised to find work well even without a live audience. And, of course, she’s promoting her new book, written with journalist Alley Pascoe.
It’s fair to say there are not a lot of laughs between those covers, and like the title says, O’Loughlin can be vague on facts, details and time frames. It takes us from her life as one of seven kids in the Taheny family, Catholic farmers on the Yorke Peninsula, through to her marriage to dental technician Chris O’Loughlin and their shift to Alice Springs where she had five kids – and somehow sparked a career as one of the country’s most successful comedians.
What a story it could have been: Mum of five follows her dream and conquers the comedy world – all from Central Australia! Except she didn’t do it alone, and the other member of the double act was usually vodka.
The result is a harrowing story, and O’Loughlin is unflinching in her self-flagellation. Every time you think she has hit rock bottom, she finds another basement. She falls down drunk in front of a crowd at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, she pawns her engagement ring for vodka, she steals booze from an old lady’s house while pretending to use the loo, she attempts suicide in Melbourne, she has sex with a stranger in Canberra but doesn’t know how it happened – and, when Chris rings, forgets to switch off the phone so he can hear her telling the man to leave.
She could have died, several times. Yet without fail – from excruciating embarrassment, a broken marriage, the brink of death – she gets up and fights on.
“I BROKE MY CHILDREN … AGAIN”
“At times I felt weary for the reader,” she says of the number of times she relates another awful experience. “But the reason I did that was to explain the reality of recovery. The perception people have of alcoholics is that they realise they are alcoholics, get treatment, then they’re better.
“And I think the worst aspects of the disease, the hardest for me, were the relapses. My sister said it was a harrowing read, and I said, ‘Try living it’.”
That’s the joke. More seriously: “I think it was partly to explain myself to my family, so there’s a very personal reason for it. It’s not just that people die from it; it’s the agony you live in when you are in it.
“It’s looking at your children. They look at you like they’re broken. You broke them again. And then you did it again. And again.” She cries quietly. “I found that the hardest, to explain myself to them again.”
O’Loughlin always liked to make others laugh. She felt bad if they were sad. Her father was the gold standard – she’d watch Irish comedian Dave Allen with him, and knew if she got a smile she was hitting the mark.
“My role was to keep the party alive, and it nearly killed me,” she says.
In Alice Springs, where she moved with Chris and started a family, the love of performing seeded round the family dinner table, then with a few pals at school, started to take off. She was addicted to applause before booze, and success with a stage show she wrote led to a grant to study comedy in Melbourne.
She had two lives: one in Melbourne building a career, the other as a young mum in Central Australia, in a marriage that was no longer working. By the time she was in her 30s, she’d won best newcomer at the Melbourne International Comedy festival in 2001. From there it was international festivals and guest spots on a swag of TV shows.
But her drinking – never for taste, always impact, whether to boost confidence or numb mental pain – was starting to become hard to stop. She recalls her point of no return, at her brother-in-law’s 40th birthday, when green to the gills from a hangover she was given a shot of whisky. She learned that one solution to a hangover was to keep drinking.
Just how reliant her body had become on alcohol became apparent one terrifying night at her sister’s home in Adelaide.
“It wasn’t until the Adelaide Fringe, I was 36, and I remember I had the DTs (delirium tremens),” she says. “I didn’t write this in the book. It was the first time I had drunk every day ever in my life. It was a month, and it wasn’t just drinking, it was like going to a 21st for 30 nights in a row.
“So at the end of that Fringe that’s pretty much I think when I started becoming physically dependent on alcohol.”
THE WOLF WHO CAME AT NIGHT
So it’s tremors? “No, much worse. I went to bed, I didn’t feel well at all. I didn’t know that my body had become dependent on the drug, and I saw things that weren’t there. Like a wolf in your face that is real to you … things under my skin, very similar to heroin withdrawal. Withdrawal is brutal. And I didn’t know what the f. k was happening … until years later.”
Did she go to a doctor? No. One of the things people do not understand, she says, is that alcoholics have no choice. It is a disease. “We’re not free people,” she says. “It’s not just that day or the ramifications of a hangover, it’s that deep inside yourself you are terrified because you are the only body you’ve got, and your mind and body aren’t working the way they should.”
That’s why interventions by friends or family are important, she says. The sooner it happens, the less chance the drinker has of dying. She wishes she’d had one sooner.
O’Loughlin realised she was sick. As Irish writer and rabblerouser Brendan Behan said of himself, one drink was too many, and a thousand not enough. She’d start on a Sunday afternoon expecting to have a couple of drinks with her sister and somehow find it was Monday and she was still drinking.
In 2000 she told her husband she thought she was an alcoholic. “There’s something wrong with me. When I drink, I can’t stop.” She says Chris disagreed.
Yet she was right: she couldn’t perform without a drink, usually two small bottles of vodka. Sometimes she couldn’t perform with one either. In 2008 she was admitted to hospital three times; in 2009 she collapsed on stage performing in Brisbane, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.44.
That’s when she went public, announcing herself as an alcoholic; shortly after she was on Dancing with Stars. She stayed off the booze for a year but in 2012 resumed – and for much of the next eight years “I relapsed every three months like clockwork, and it got uglier each time,” she says.
The drinking was so extreme that one night in Canberra in 2012 she woke in her hotel bed after a booze-fuelled night to feel herself in the throes of sex with a stranger. When Chris called later as she was talking to the man, trying to work out who he was, she forgot to turn off the phone. He heard everything and their marriage was over – although they did not divorce.
O’Loughlin was in the thrall of the booze. She scored occasional victories but the war was being lost. In 2013, when she was forced to perform sober in a country town where the pub was shut, she found that she really could do a show without vodka. It was a breakthrough moment that must have given her hope?
“That’s what I thought,” she says. But the disease was waiting for her. It’s a monster with its own personality, with one answer for everything, and it is always to drink. When she was in remission, she was once warned, alcoholism “is in the corner doing push ups”. “It changes shape,” she says. “It’s like wrestling with jelly.”
SMOKING METH IN GLENELG DRUG DEN
In 2013 she tried to kill herself with prescription drugs in a Melbourne hotel. For a year she gave up booze ahead of an Australian Story show; then celebrated her abstinence by getting smashed.
She began using cocaine. But it didn’t numb the pain like vodka did. What pain? “The reality of me,” she says. “I’d broken up a family, I was still secretly drinking before gigs, there was just so much I was not proud of. Addicts can’t stand being in their own skin. I was full of shame.”
In 2015, she must have felt like she’d walked inside Edvard Munch’s nightmare painting The Scream. After the coma, a friend organised a stay in a Glenelg share house with a “healer”. It was surreal: O’Loughlin’s bedroom had no window, a rabbit hopped around defecating, and through thin walls she could hear talk of stolen goods and people to be knocked off.
The healer was a former heroin addict and the refuge was a drug den she described as the “most stark, hopeless and frightening place I’ve ever seen”. Part of her treatment was an occasional puff on a meth pipe.
“I take a puff of the meth pipe handed to me and feel numb,” she writes. “I’m in the bleakest place I’ve ever been, and I’m not scared. I’m nothing. It’s like I’m floating.
“I immediately understand that meth is a dangerous dance partner and I don’t seek it out,” she writes in her memoir, “but I do accept its hand when it’s offered to me, ushering me onto the dance floor with its arm wrapped tightly around my waste, waltz ready.”
Just skin and bone, she barely recognised herself. And when she searched her bags for money, it always went to the mini-bottles of vodka that had paved her private road to hell. “I am the walking dead,” she thought.
She survived though, largely thanks to Underwood, who lived next door and convinced her to keep going. Underwood had her own troubles at the time, but she always helped O’Loughlin survive – and still does.
Glenelg was the lowest period but not absolute bottom, O’Loughlin says. That was when she moved to be with her mum and dad back on the Yorke Peninsula. “Because at least as weird and whacko as the drug den was, I still wasn’t accountable to look at my life and what I had done. And it’s not until I was home – and that was so desperately low. My reality kept bouncing out of my head. It’s like surviving a wreck and you walk away alive and you can’t believe where you went.”
A series of voluntary institutionalisations – at Glenside Psychiatric Hospital in early 2016, and then to Canberra to a rehab clinic – gave her some respite before she returned to Melbourne and tried again at a career.
In 2018, she got a big opportunity for redemption with an appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here, in the African jungle.
She won, earning $150,000, but not before the monster in her head convinced her she needed a drink, in this case hand-sanitiser. It seems from the book it was a one-off; in reality, she says now, it was multiple times. It made her retch, but she says there was no buzz.
The win did not set her phone ringing with work offers from the networks, as she had hoped. Her unreliability was always working against her. So towards the end of 2019, O’Loughlin moved back to Adelaide and asked Underwood, who’d helped her with her books when facing massive tax bills, to manage her.
O’Loughlin says she’s never been comfortable with money. “It’s hard to stick up for yourself and ask to be paid what you’re worth when you believe you’re worthless and feel silenced with self-loathing,” she writes. “Even harder when you’re a woman. And almost impossible when you’re an alcoholic.”
She also gave a lot away. She spent $4000 on a formal dress for one of her daughters – “guilt money”, she says. This was a problem on top of the alcoholism – co-dependency. She couldn’t stand others being in pain, so to make herself feel better, helped them with cash.
THE POWER OF PRAYER
Last year’s problems, she insists, are behind her. After the breakout after The All New Monty: Guys & Gals, Underwood got her into an addiction specialist. This year she realised the need to treat herself with kid gloves.
“Recovery is years you know, and there are all sorts of things that could trigger me,” she says. “All I have to be responsible is being in contact with my children and my grandchild, and loving them stupid, and meeting my work obligations.”
That means she can’t go to the many funerals, birthdays and weddings in her extended family. “All of a sudden I said I have to say no. I have to treat this as the deadly disease that it is. It will kill me. And there was a lot of pushback from that from my close family. But I’m not, I can’t, I won’t.”
What she needs is time. “The first thing you’ve got to get rid of is shame,” she says. “And that’s the hardest thing … because that’s the first thing everyone around you wants to remind you of.”
O’Loughlin, despite everything, remains an optimist. Her new hope is prayer. She stopped praying as a Catholic because she didn’t believe in what she’d been taught.
But, after reading about Daoism, an ancient Chinese religion and philosophy based on going with the flow of cosmic forces, she prays. “I don’t pray for things … the nuns would say at school pray for rain,” she says. “Is God really going, ‘Jeez, the Yorke Peninsula really needs some rain’? All of that was nonsensical to me. I pray for strength. All you can pray for is strength.”
Truths from An Unreliable Witness by Fiona O’Loughlin with Alley Pascoe (Hachette, $32.99). For urgent help with mental health issues contact Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 or Lifeline on 13 11 14. For drug and alcohol issues try Alcoholics Anonymous Helpline 1300 222 222 and Alcohol and Drug Information Service 1300 131 340