Chapter Two: Brass In Pocket

(Author's Note: You don't have to read "Blue Light Special" under Comics-Ironman to understand this story, but if you're lost, it might help.)

New York City, 1971 , NBC Television Studios, Barbara Walters Interview With Tony Stark

(The interview is already in progress. Millions of Americans, including a large group of "maskies" who are convinced Tony Stark is Iron Man, are glued to their TV sets. Tony, of course, is crying. Crocodile tears, but crying, nonetheless.)

WALTERS: Do you need a moment, Tony?

STARK: No, Barbara. I'll be fine. (Wipes eyes)

WALTERS: Tony, you've had all the opportunities in life a man could get. Good looks. Intelligence. Success. Why? Why did you become an alcoholic?

STARK: I won't lie to you, Barbara. I could say that it was because of what happened to me in Vietnam. (touches chest plate, inadvertently) But I was an alcoholic long before that. Sure, I had it all. Money. Looks. The best of everything. Nothing was too good for Anthony Edward Stark. I drank hundred year old Scotch, smoked imported English cigarettes, every night, practically was another affair of dry martinis and white tux and black tie. And the girls, the beautiful girls, sometimes, just to look at them could take a man's breath away. Even mine. People looked at me and saw a charming man with a swashbuckler's grin, movie-star good looks and merry, laughing blue eyes. And they thought I led a charmed life. Unfortunately for me, I only had one problem. I turned out to be a scientific and mechanical genius. The one time I took an IQ test it was measured at 185, and I was blind, stinking drunk.

WALTERS: So you felt, well, isolated because of your extreme intelligence? Isolated from your peers, because, those things you mentioned, the money, the women, the parties, they weren't fulfilling for you? As a man of vision you needed…something more?

STARK: Precisely. I graduated from college in my teens, and had three masters degrees by the time I was in my early twenties. That, and all I've even been really interested in is my work. I've got a bit of the old Dr. Frankenstein in me. I don't have plans and theories so much as visions. Precise, detailed, extremely Promethean visions. As a scientist, I translate them into plans and theories, but when they come to me, when I'm working, it's like there's a monk, a mystic and an alchemist working side by side with me.

WALTERS: Not the kind of people who find high society life fulfilling.

STARK: I was warned, you know. When I was an undergraduate, one of my physics classes was taught by a sober and serious guest professor about twelve years older than me, a man well known to me and my family, Bruce Wayne. It was hard to be friends with Bruce, but I managed, then and now, and the older I get the more I realise that Bruce was right. He told me, "You'll be expected to at least pretend to be a do-nothing drunken playboy, but for God's sake, Tony, don't get serious about it. That shallow, silly, preposterous world of the congenitally wealthy and most of the time, arrogantly stupid is enough to drive most ordinary people crazy, let aloe someone with your brain. It'll drive you to drink." Naturally, Bruce hadn't meant it literally, but that was exactly what happened. By the time I was in graduate school in my early twenties, and also a captain of industry having made Stark Industries successful beyond anyone else's wildest dreams, I was both a workaholic and an alcoholic, although I never thought of myself as such. When I wasn't working, I was tripping merrily through the society milieu in an alcoholic twilight. You see, what was boring and stupid and, unbearable when I was sober was all so amusing when I was drunk. So, I passed from party to party, car to car, girl to girl and drink to drink wearing my like Flynn kind of grin. I knew that my life would collapse into rubble without my secretary and my butler, and I was cheerful about it. Some people had nobody, not a soul in the world, but I had Pepper and Jarvis, and my work.

WALTERS: It sounds like a lonely life. Not an unhappy life, just lonely. Unfulfilling. Empty?

STARK: I wasn't unhappy. I had a good time all the time. I'm a very merry drunk. I was having a ball, as long as the booze was flowing, and when you can afford to drink really, really, superlatively fine booze, it doesn't make you sick and you don't get that hung over. But, by the time I was in my late twenties, and I went to Vietnam to field test one of Stark Industries' weapons, I felt, when I was sober enough to do so, like something of a hollow man. Like living a double life since I was in my teens had left me with a hole in my heart where my soul should have been. Of course, I returned from Vietnam with a relatively small, self-charging Tesla coil hooked up to the literal hole in my heart, and I had located my soul, and his name is Iron Man.

WALTERS: Tony, you do know that making a statement like that is only going to fuel the rumours that the man in the Iron Man suit is not your bodyguard, but that you are the man in the suit?

STARK: Barbara, if it wasn't for my disability, I would be. Iron Man, what he does for the world and what he stands for, that's my heart and soul. My whole life changed after Vietnam. My life, my work, even my company. I became a truly happy man, not just a happy drunk.

WALTERS: But that was 1964. Here we are, in 1971, and you've just finished rehab. I think I understand you, Tony. I can certainly see where your frustration at being torn between the life you had and the life you wanted, and your sense of purposelessness, and aimlessness would drive you to drink, but why, after what you've described to me as a soul-altering redemption, did you continue to drink?

STARK: Well, again, I'd like to blame it on Vietnam. I could lie and say that I haven't been in good health, that I have nightmares, but that would be disrespectful to all the men and women who fought in that war and left it in that condition. I'm in excellent health, mentally and physically. And I haven't had to change my life at all. In any way. No, I kept drinking because, well, by that time I was a drunk, and an arrogant drunk. I thought I could handle it, and I didn't think I had a problem. Not until Tijuana.

WALTERS: Are you referring to when you were jailed in Tijuana with the Harlequin, and Iron Man and she broke you out?

STARK: Not the breakout. Barbara, I almost died in that jail because I got so drunk that I passed out in the street and damaged my chest piece. If Harlequin hadn't been there to help me with my repairs, and summon Iron Man, I would have died. Naturally, I tried to blame it on some conspiracy against me, but Harlequin was honest with me. She looked me in the eye and told me, Tony, you're a drunk. And she was right.

WALTERS: So it was the Harlequin who made you see the error of your ways?

STARK: She saved my life. And she had no reason to. And she was brutally honest with me about the endgame for an alcoholic. She left rehab for one last hurrah, but it was a miracle she lived to do it. She was at death's door when she went in, and some of it was related to, let's say, on the job injuries, but it was the drinking that have driven her to the point of death. I have no reason to be a drunk, and if the reasons I've offered sound like a spoiled rich brat whining around the sliver spoon in my mouth, it's because they are. Harlequin has every reason to be a drunk. I can't reveal them without revealing her identity, which she revealed to me in the jail in strict confidence, out of necessity, but almost everything horrible, unfair, and traumatic that can happen to a person has happened to her. If I lived her life, My God, I would have crawled into the bottom of a bottle and died. But she soldiered on through it all, doing her work. She impressed the Comedian enough that he made her his apprentice, and that's impressive. And she had the courage to put her foot down, and say, that's it, this boozing has to stop. And I thought to myself, my God, Tony, you, well, I'll say moron, if she can tough it out with the world on her shoulders, you can with pebbles on yours. So, through my contacts with the Avengers, via Iron Man, I went to the MORC, with Harlequin, and she finished and I started and completed the S.H.I.E.L.D. Moderation Program, which allows you to have four drinks per day, maximum, and recommends three. I've been out of rehab for thirty days now, I haven't relapsed, and I'm not going to.

WALTERS: It sounds to me like you care about her very deeply.

STARK: I do. But not in the way you think. I'm not in love with her. It's partly narcissism, of course. It's not every day I meet a fellow mad scientist. And under that mask and that Urban Guerrilla Commando Assault costume, she's a beautiful girl. But, seriously, the last thing I need is to fall in love, again. I've been unlucky, when it comes to that. The Harlequin is my friend. My real and true friend.

WALTERS: And you don't seem like the kind of man who has many of those.

STARK: No, Barbara. I don't.

(Tony is crying again. This time, for real. NBC goes to commercial. All over America, people are crying with him. Liv Napier, the Harlequin is one of them.)