Edith Efron wrote on “Who Drinks, Why and How” in the April 14 Sunday Times Magazine. In later years Efron would become a right-wing polemicist who wrote from the perspective of Ayn Rand school of “libertarianism,” although Efron was among those disciples who had been expelled from the inner circle. Efron’s twist was the use of the language of psychiatry to skewer her targets, psychoanalyzing subjects such as Bill Clinton and Anita Hill, whom she had never met. But on this week in 1946 as a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, she was concerned not with politics but with delineating the social customs and psychology of the various categories of boozers, a popular topic since the success of Billy Wilder’s film “The Lost Weekend,” winner in March of multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Efron divided the nation’s drinkers into five categories from the social drinker to the alcoholic. She limited the latter category to the beyond-the-pale drunks who began drinking the moment they awakened and stayed drunk through much of the day. On the other hand, people who merely drank several times a day and only got hammered every week or so she categorized as “serious drinkers,” the semi-pros of the drinking world who according to the prevailing fiction of the day could “handle their liquor.” In mid-century Manhattan heavy drinking had replaced the gluttony of an earlier era as the hallmark of the successful man. Reading the biographies of some of the notable “serious drinkers” among writers and journalists of mid-century, one can’t help but notice how many of these swaggering boyos eventually succumbed physically or mentally to their addiction. Most of Efron's "Serious Drinkers" would be classified as alcoholics by modern definitions.
The social drinker was by far the most heavily populated of her categories. These were those men and women who drank on occasion and generally preferred cocktails that masked or diluted the taste of liquor. She humorously detailed their habits and customs, their giggling delight over their inebriation, and their amorousness under the influence. The most popular liquors for this group at the time, she said, were rye, scotch, bourbon, rum, gin and brandy. Women social drinkers, she averred, liked pretty, sweet drinks like Daiquiris, bubbly Pink Ladies, Old-Fashioneds and Alexanders.
The serious drinkers, on the other hand, liked their booze straight with a chaser. They drank because they liked to drink. There was no cocktail sipping here; it was down the hatch. These were the guys who invented the drinking lexicon of the day: to get high, to get tight, to get crocked, pickled, stewed, potted, soused, tanked, polluted, stink and out cold. The serious drinker was impressed by people who could hold a lot and boasted about his own capacity. He felt drinking was a manly activity and he even might object to women drinkers. Drinking was a major part of his conversation.
Miss Efron identified two additional categories. The military drinker was a temporary phenomenon, similar to the serious drinker, manifested by men in uniform who drank often to excess and as noisily as possible. Unlike the true serious drinker, they were not fussy about what they drank. When the military drinker mustered out he might become a social or serious drinker or even a teetotaler.
Superficially resembling the social drinker, the 2-million intemperate drinkers also drank only occasionally but almost always to excess. These were the poor souls, despised by the serious drinker, who could not hold their liquor. Miss Efron said that this pathetic group, rather than the manly man serious drinker, was the group most likely to fall prey to alcoholism.
Efron wrote that according to psychiatrists, alcoholics often belonged to that pariah group of the day, the unconfident, "sensitive" male dependent on the approval of others. These unmanly psychological weaklings lacked patience and drive and were volatile, superficial and irresponsible and often the product of a lonely and painful childhood, unlike the virile, confident serious drinkers. Like other Ayn Rand disciples, Efron slobbered at the feet of the confident man.