Los Angeles Times

Magazine extols editor's unabashed love of booze

Jan. 1 2005

By David Kelly

Every hour is happy hour at Modern Drunkard magazine.

It's barely 3 p.m., and editor Frank Kelly Rich is draining his gin and tonic and eyeing a whiskey bottle on the top shelf. Moments later, he's drinking that as well.

A huge bar dominates the office, the fridge is stocked with beer and the handful of employees of the bimonthly publication are invited to drink. Smoking is OK, too.

As the booze flows, Rich, 41, extols the virtues of alcohol, calling it a boon to mankind while claiming that drunks are an "oppressed minority."

Nothing knocks him off message.

What about cirrhosis of the liver? "There's a tidal wave of new evidence that drinking is actually good for you," he insisted.

Alcohol's effect on families? "I think drinking is conducive to a happy family life," he countered.

Rich lit a cigarette and smiled as the ice melted in his cocktail. His downtown Denver office is decorated with posters of Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason and other famous tipplers of yesteryear.

"The most accomplished people have been drinkers," he said. "Hemingway was a great literary drunk, and I think a lot of teetotalers would trade their lives for his in a second. Alcohol is the great socializer. Can you imagine a world without it? Well, I guess you can — it's called the Middle East."

Modern Drunkard is an irreverent, 50,000-circulation glossy magazine full of pinup girls and macho men alongside articles on drinking, getting drunk and hiding a hangover from "the Man," i.e., the boss. It also includes serious examinations of liquor, biographies of history's great drunks and selected odes to the drinking life. The magazine sells for $4.50 in bookstores across the United States and Europe, and free copies are available in many bars.

A recent issue included the feature "You know you're a drunkard when ... (you fall down a well and send Lassie to the liquor store)"; a dictionary of bar slang: "pal tax n. — the act of covertly ordering a drink on a friend's tab"; and a story titled "Booze Is My Copilot," on how drinking cured one man's fear of flying.

Those in the business of battling alcohol abuse find such sentiments appalling.

"Drinking at the level they promote and saying it's good for you is baloney," said Sam Zakhari of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Md. "Some people benefit from moderate drinking — one drink a day for a woman, two for a man — but you can achieve the same result through good nutrition and exercise."

Rich shrugs off the naysayers and routinely savages groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, whom he sees as neo-prohibitionist killjoys secretly bent on banning alcohol.

"We don't advocate drinking and driving; that's a dumb thing to do," he said. "But they have gone too far."

MADD National President Wendy Hamilton says her group is anti-drunken driving, not anti-alcohol. She calls Modern Drunkard "just plain stupid."

Reared in Las Vegas, Rich says he started drinking while in the Army. After being discharged, he headed to Europe — seeking a romantic life of writing and drinking. He spent four years in pub-friendly London. "If you want to learn about a new culture," he advised, "don't go to museums, go to the bars."

Rich returned to the United States and wrote "Jake Strait Bogeyman." He lived out of his Pinto in Los Angeles, trying to sell the futuristic action novel.

The book spawned a four-part series and eventually earned him $150,000. He ended up in Denver eight years ago.

"I immediately recognized it as a great drinking town," he said.

In fact, Men's Health magazine this year listed the city as the most "intoxicated" in the country — based on numbers of alcohol-related accidents and deaths due to alcoholism. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper owns seven bars, and Republican Pete Coors, whose beer factory sprawls in a suburb, made an unsuccessful run for the Senate in November.

Rich wanted to start a magazine, and he wanted it to be about the subject he knew best.

"The magazine was going to be about drinking and only about drinking — and not just drinking, but heavy drinking," he said. "I was going to distill every bit of alcoholic knowledge in the world and put it in one magazine."

He published his first edition in 1996 for about $500, inserting fake ads from beer companies to make it look professional. He paid alcoholics living on the streets $20 for boozing advice.

With the magazine now making money thanks to copious bar and club ads, he has hired five staffers and 20 part-time contributors. Rich also is writing "The Modern Drunkard Manifesto," due to be released in November. A Modern Drunkard convention is planned for Denver in May.

Rich freely admits he's an alcoholic and frequently blacks out. Regular exercise and vitamins, he said, keep him fit.

"I drink about eight drinks a day and maybe 30 on a heavy day," he said cheerfully. "But as long as I remain healthy and happy, I have no intention of slowing down. I mean, when you have something good going you stick with it, right?"