Moriarty tames his demons

VANCOUVER - Michael Moriarty shuffles into a downtown restaurant, a baseball cap on his head and cane in hand.

Seeing him here in this gritty, pedestrian light, you would never know he was one of the best actors to grace the television screen.

Now 64, his conversation flits from one thing to the next, alighting like a bird on shaky branches. He denounces euthanasia, abortion, liberalism, matriarchal thinking and socialism. Trying to follow his train of thought is like trying to stay on an erratic flight path with stops on shifting ground.

While his voice spews venom against various politicians, liberals and an assorted cast of miscreants, his eyes are those of a little boy searching for understanding.

Moriarty can't blame the drinking any more for his eccentricities, although he thinks it might have left a few residual effects. He suspects he suffered a mild stroke from the last year of solid boozing, but not being one for doctors or hospitals, he can't be sure.

After nine years of hitting the bottle hard, he took his last drink 17 months ago.

"It was miraculous," he said, sipping on coffee and Coke and dipping bits of pita bread into hummus in a downtown Vancouver restaurant. "It's as lovely as heaven. I have been without pain for 18 months. I have not even had a hangover. I am utterly in bliss."

Welcome to the new Michael Moriarty. He has recently resurfaced doing gigs as a jazz pianist, largely at Vancouver restaurant Rossini's Kits Beach. He will also play at the Maple Ridge jazz festival. This all comes about just as a new DVD has been released of the third season of the popular television series Law & Order, in which he received wide acclaim for his portrayal of assistant district attorney Ben Stone. Wrestling with issues of right and wrong, he was the heart, the glue and the conscience of the show filmed in New York City.

"I am profoundly grateful to God for those four years," said Moriarty. "I learned leadership. I watched the crew work for 12 to 15 hours a day, five days a week. I only worked the second half of the week. I gave up complaining when I saw what they were putting into it."

In those years, Moriarty drank very little. Fear of the bottle made him shrink from it. He grew up in Detroit in what he describes as a war zone with alcoholic parents who had an acrimonious divorce. "When you grow up in a war zone, you go to bed crying every night. That's when I would call out to God. He got me through it."

He credits his stepmother, his father's second wife, with rescuing him. "If it weren't for her, I would have thought the whole world insane. She was an extraordinary woman, an old-school Italian who loved my father unconditionally and he was not the easiest man in the world to get along with."

That was life behind the curtain. In front of it, Moriarty attended Jesuit high school and Ivy League universities in New Hampshire and London. At the age of 23, while on spring break, he went to Florence, Italy, where he suffered what psychiatrists might call a breakdown.

Moriarty sees its differently. He says he was hit by the "Stendhal syndrome," an overdose of beauty.

"When I returned to England, they were handing out electroshock like Aspirins. They gave me 10 of them, then poured me on a plane to my father." His father and stepmother nursed him back to health but he said it took 10 years to get his talent back.

When Moriarty left Law & Order in 1994, claiming U.S. attorney general Janet Reno was trying to kill the show, he moved to Halifax and married for the third time. He also began drinking heavily, which resulted in a series of high-profile pub brawls both there and in Maple Ridge, B.C., where he moved in 2000.

Of that, he now says, "That's the price of drinking. I learned a lot. I had a good time. I spent three days in jail and three days in hospital. I paid the price. I wouldn't want to go back."

Around the time he moved to Vancouver, he met his current partner, Margie Brychka, in a bar in Surrey, B.C. That was back in the days when both were heavily into drinking, although Brychka says she has been sober now for four years.

Sitting at Moriarty's side in the restaurant, Brychka said the last year of his drinking was particularly difficult. "Watching someone destroy himself is terrifying for anyone."

Moriarty interjected, saying Brychka did the right thing. "She never badgered me about it. Out of my own free will, for my own sake, I quit."

Moriarty says he lives a bit like a recluse in Maple Ridge, although he has his favourite haunts.

He remains on good terms with his first wife in the United States, with whom he had a son, Matthew, who now lives in California. He adores him as well as his daughter-in-law, Ingrid, and his granddaughter, Ella. There is another child on the way.

He has no contact with his second wife. "She is the quintessential New World feminist. She did protect my freedom. She let me run but she could not join me. She was too deeply embedded in New York liberalism. She couldn't possibly extricate herself from that. A greater threat to marriage is not sex. It's politics."

He remains married to his third wife, Susanne, in Halifax, although they live apart. "For some reason, she doesn't want to divorce me and I still love her."

Now that he and Brychka have quit drinking, their lives together are on a more even kilter.

"I enjoy life like I have never enjoyed it before," said Moriarty. "Every little detail of life around me. When I'm aware of the sacredness of human imperfection, it's always comic in some way or another. But there is something sacred about it."

"Where do you go from here, Michael?"

"To have a cigarette. I need a cigarette."