Three years ago, Kelsey Grammer claims an English psychic medium named Esther came through with a message from his sister Karen “from the other side”.
“She said, ‘Karen wants you to tell her story.’ And I’m like, ‘Heavens, OK…’ And after about 20 pages of jotting down things I thought, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to write a book.’”
Karen: A Brother Remembers tells the tale of the actor’s 18-year-old sister’s murder in 1975.
“I got to be with her alive again. To mourn Karen with nobility and praise for her was something I was meant to do,” says the 70-year-old Frasier star of his new memoir.
The actor admits he’s been haunted by Karen’s brutal kidnap, rape and murder in Colorado at the hands of serial killer Freddie Glenn and two accomplices, while he was studying acting in New York.
It eventually spilled over into self-destructive behaviour at the height of his TV fame in the 1990s.
“I cursed myself with too much drinking and drug abuse. And some fairly exotic sexual behaviour… It was my way of burying myself along with Karen,” he says.
“Everything I could imagine, I probably tried,” he continues.
“Except I wasn’t ever going to kill myself. I wasn’t interested in that.”
SEEKING HELP
Keen to stop his downward spiral, the star – who played one of TV’s most famous therapists, Frasier Crane – sought therapy himself.
“I quit drinking for a few years. That was helpful. I never abused drugs again,” says the actor, who checked into the famous Betty Ford Center for treatment in 1996 after smashing his sports car while drunk.
“I have a cocktail now. It’s not the same thing as it was… Somebody told me a long time ago that any kind of addiction is really just a symptom of unresolved grief. So I was able to put
my grief where it belonged.”
And while putting pen to paper was cathartic for the star, it also sometimes became too much.
“There were a couple of times I had to stop writing,” he says. “There were just tears spilling from me.”
He pushed on, though, for Karen’s sake.
“I think Karen knew I was ready. It was like a final piece of the puzzle for me to say, ‘This happened. I am not responsible, but I am responsible to keep her memory alive.’”
He says his late sister has looked over him when it comes to his love-life, too.
“I’d get this sort of nudge saying, ‘You’ve done enough here. You don’t need to do this any more,” says the thrice-divorced star, who has been happily married to fourth wife, Kayte Walsh, for 14 years.
A FAMILY CURSE?
Karen’s violent death isn’t the only pain lurking in Kelsey’s past.
Seven years earlier, his father Allen, who left the family when Kelsey was just two, was also murdered, by taxi driver Arthur Bevan Niles, in what was believed to be a racially motivated crime.
He lost his half-brothers Billy and Stephen too – to a shark attack in the Virgin Islands in 1980.
The father-of-seven denies his family is cursed, though.
“No, but that’s what my dad’s dad thought,” he admits.
“But it’s our responsibility to defuse that if such is the case. We were marked historically with a lot of premature death and it does go back generations, so I’d like to put an end to it. I’m going to live to be 160!”
