Paul Williams wrote songs that a whole generation can still sing from memory: “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” for the Carpenters, “Evergreen” with Barbra Streisand, and “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog in 1979. By his own account, he then spent most of the next decade disappearing. The story of how he came back starts long before the fame, with a little boy and a father who drank.
A Boy Who Sang “Danny Boy” for His Dad
Paul Williams was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1940. His father worked in construction, and the family moved so often that Paul changed schools again and again. One thing stayed the same. His father, a few drinks in, would wake him in the middle of the night and ask him to sing songs like “Danny Boy.”
“We were raised in a household where alcohol was the reward for a hard day’s work,” Williams later recalled. When Paul was 13, his father was killed in a car wreck. “He was loaded,” Williams said on the Bullseye podcast in 2024. Paul was sent to live with an aunt in Long Beach, California.
It would be nice to say that loss scared him away from drinking. It didn’t. He started drinking with friends in high school, and he has described it as a rite of passage.
“Better at Showing Off Than Showing Up”
By the late 1970s, Paul Williams was everywhere: on records, in movies, on talk shows. He has said he first used alcohol and drugs to celebrate. Over time, he needed them to handle the fear that came with fame.
“I did forty-eight Tonight Shows. I joke that I remember six.” — Paul Williams
“Eventually the addiction to the cocaine and the vodka outran the other addiction and took me off the map,” he told writer Leo Adam Biga. In the 1980s, Williams turned down jobs and avoided appointments. He has described growing paranoid, watching for police from his bedroom. Apart from the 1987 film Ishtar, he called the decade “a lot of hiding out.”
His one-line summary of those years is one he has repeated in interview after interview: “You know you’re an alcoholic when you misplace a decade.”
Two Trips to Rehab, and a Prayer Circle He Didn’t Know About
Williams went into treatment twice. The first time did not last; he relapsed months after leaving. Meanwhile, someone he had worked with was quietly pulling for him. “Years later I found out that the gentleman who booked me in Oklahoma was a recovering alcoholic and met up with several other people and started a prayer circle that I’d get sober,” he told HuffPost.
He had his last drink in 1989. The date he counts from is March 15, 1990.
March 15, 1990
Williams has described that morning the same way for more than three decades. “On March 15th, 1990 I woke up. Instead of coming to, I got sober.” For anyone who has loved someone in addiction, that difference between waking up and coming to says everything.
He later called his recovery “the single greatest gift I’ve ever been given.” The career, he admitted, “had basically been gone for a decade.”
The Mornings at the Treatment Center
What he did next had nothing to do with show business. A jazz musician friend named Buddy Arnold, who had gotten sober himself and founded the Musicians Assistance Program, urged Williams to enroll in UCLA’s drug and alcohol counseling program.
For a year, Paul Williams went to class two nights a week. Every morning he worked alongside Arnold at a local treatment center, trading his services so musicians who needed treatment could get a bed. He never finished the credential, but he volunteered with the program for years. It later became part of MusiCares, the Recording Academy’s charity for musicians in crisis.
What Came Back
The music came back too. “Everything changed when I got sober,” Williams told American Songwriter. In 1992 he wrote the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol. In 2009 he became president and chairman of ASCAP, where he still speaks up for songwriters today. He co-wrote a book on recovery, Gratitude and Trust, with Tracey Jackson.
He was not the only one in his family to make it out. He has said his father and both of his brothers were alcoholics, and that the three brothers all got sober.
Paul Williams has made his home by the water in Long Beach with his wife, Mariana. He has said his work in recovery “feels like my most important work.” His morning prayer, he has said, is three words long: “Surprise me, God.”