Lawrence O’Donnell Interview…
David Sheff interviews Lawrence O’Donnell in Playboy Magazine…
PLAYBOY: What haven’t you wanted people to know?
O’DONNELL: My big dark secret is I’ve never had a drink in my life. I’ve never been drunk in my life, and I’ve never taken a drug.PLAYBOY: That’s your deep dark secret? For most well-known people, that would be the untruth. Why have you hidden it?
O’DONNELL: That fact would generate a set of presumptions.PLAYBOY: Such as?
O’DONNELL: It would suggest a tremendous amount of behavioral conservatism, and that’s just not the case. It also would suggest a kind of intolerance, which isn’t the case either. To some people it suggests a kind of discipline that’s absolutely not present. I wish I had that discipline in the face of ice cream. I just don’t have an attraction to the most corrupting and dangerous of consumptions.PLAYBOY: Did you abstain as a reaction to the alcoholism and addiction you’d seen growing up?
O’DONNELL: Every guy was drunk every Friday and Saturday night by the time he was 11 years old. Most of them started around the age of 10. Everybody was drunk by the time they were 11. By the time they were 12, they were seriously drunk every Friday and Saturday night. Some of them never came out of that. But that’s not why I never did it. I simply hated the taste of it. I had nothing against it. I just wouldn’t put something in my mouth that I hated the taste of. It became a mostly faulty girl-getting strategy. My teenage strategy was, “I’ll be the one who’s not puking. Let’s see if that works.” It turns out the girls in my neighborhood weren’t interested in you no matter what you did, so it didn’t work. I was well into adulthood until somebody said to me, “Well, you know, it can help on a date if a girl has had a drink.” And I went, “Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m behind the curve.”
Inside Cable News 
May 12, 2011 at 11:09 am
To me, the story above speaks more to the issue of just how concerned Larry is with how other people view him. That suggests a lot of insecurity, the story itself is irrelevant.
I didn’t drink until I turned 21… and had to deal with a lot of pressure about it in college. But I did it for myself. At first I didn’t like the idea of not being in control… and then it was just to see if I could defy the odds, and not fall to the pressure of everyone else. But at no point was I worried about what “everyone else might think.”
Odd.
May 12, 2011 at 11:27 am
“My big dark secret is I’ve never had a drink in my life. … I simply hated the taste of it.”
Question for the Smugest Man in the Universe: How do you know what beer tastes like if you’ve “never had a drink”?
May 12, 2011 at 11:31 am
@Steve: Ever heard of non-alcoholic beer?
May 12, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Nice “missing the point” literalism, Blue. He obviously tried alcohol and didn’t like it. It’s an interesting human interest story..nothing more.
May 12, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Oops, Farris was the literalist, but Blue thought a bit of piffle was “odd”.
May 13, 2011 at 11:54 am
That’d be fine, but words mean things and “never” has a distinct definition.
May 30, 2012 at 1:50 pm
“Never had a drink” doesn’t mean “never tasted alcohol.” I tasted coffee when I was a little kid (HATED IT!), and never had a cup of coffee until I was in my 30’s. Get it?