White Powder to Grey Ashes: Memoirs of an Addict

By Joanne Pienaar

The struggle is real, the drugs are real, and your emotions as a parent need to be real and not hidden through the visor of the demon.
Talk to your children, be your children, because if you don’t you will lose them. Lose them to things beyond your power; open your eyes before they close theirs for the last time.
Matthew Stewardson rose to fame as a South African child star, but plummeted faster into the hands of drugs, fame, and fortune. He selfishly stole, cheated, lied, and put lives at risk, keeping his psychotic blinkers on with the ongoing destruction unraveling around him.
Finding out that a family member is on drugs is gut wrenching in itself. But seeing words on paper from the mind of a bipolar cocaine addict is painfully surreal.
Being born to British parents, who rose to fame in the South African acting Industry; it seemed inevitable that Matthew would follow in our dad’s footsteps as a talented actor, singer, and an addict on top of that.
Reading his diary entries after he died opened up my mind about an addict, and the power that those demons have over you. Addiction is a disease, getting help is the choice. A stable upbringing that turned into cringing movie scenes at times was all we knew.
But changing that cycle didn’t come easy for some; and Matthew only knew one path.
From the high of the stage to the high that took his life.
This is our story ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Pienaar
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005390747

Book preview

White Powder to Grey Ashes

White Powder to Grey Ashes

Memoirs of an addict

Open your eyes before your child closes theirs for the last time

By Matthew Stewardson and Joanne Stewardson Pienaar

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Stewardson and Joanne Stewardson Pienaar

Published by Matthew Stewardson and Joanne Stewardson Pienaar Publishing at Smashwords

First edition 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the copyright holder.

The Author has made every effort to trace and acknowledge sources/resources/individuals. In the event that any images/information have been incorrectly attributed or credited, the Author will be pleased to rectify these omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Matthew Stewardson and Joanne Stewardson Pienaar

Table of Contents

1. Matthew – The Performing Bipolar Addict

2. Where It All Began

3. Committing A Run-away Addict

4. The Rise and Fall of an Idol

5. The Demons Inside – 2005 Journal

6. Inner Strength

7. The Talented Addict

8. Losing an Angel

9. The Calm Before the Storm

10. Outside Looking In

11. Memoirs From Sterkfontein

12. My Great Escape

13. Jeffreys Bay

14. The Final Curtain Call

A Letter From Matthew

15. Dealing With My Own Battles

Acknowledgements

Messages From Memorial

Chapter 1

Matthew – The Performing Bipolar Addict

Fame came quickly to my child star brother, Matthew Stewardson, which came at a huge price in the end.

Remembered mostly as one of the first K-TV presenters, then later being recognised as the first Idols presenter in South Africa, who was axed for his drug abuse during the show. That became his biggest industry downfall.

But much more than this media stereotype, he was a loving brother, loyal friend and uncle, who suffered terribly at the realms of bipolar disorder and his many addictions during his short life.

Matthew died in December of 2010, and I have wanted to put his story together for others to see that they are not alone when dealing with a drug addict, something which has become a growing death trap for so many. I often knew Matthew was playing Russian roulette with his life, but I never thought that truthfully he would be taken away from us so early in his talented life and before his race had finished.

Losing a sibling is like losing a piece of your childhood. It’s the memories and closeness of growing up together that only you can cherish between you. Something no-one else in your life can replace or experience with you. But, at least I still have those memories to hold onto.

Even though time has not healed this pain and deep sadness I feel for my brother, it has at least helped me learn to cope with this horrendous loss. I don’t think I will ever be able to understand all that went on and why Matthew was like he was, and I don’t think this hollow feeling in my soul will ever go away, but I do feel it is time I write the rest of Matthew’s book which he wanted people to read one day.

Matthew speaks openly and honestly about his manic highs, his depressions, and his drug and alcohol binges. It touches on the emotional roller coaster rides that friends and family go through being part of a bipolar drug addicts’ life.

In the later years of Matthew’s life he became quite desperate to get better but every time he started climbing his ladder of hope and strength, the demons of his disease and addictions would overpower him, and he’d come crashing down again. This is why he wanted people to see and try to understand how ruthless and destructive it was living life as an addict.

This is for you Matt, I miss you.

Chapter 2

Where It All Began

Matthew Joseph Stewardson was born on 11th December 1974, at the Park Lane Clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa, to actor dad, Joe Stewardson, and actress mom, Diane Appleby. Always wanting to be different and the centre of attention, he decided to enter the world way before he should have. Who would have thought that, that hairy, wrinkled rodent was actually exuding talent that would shock everyone who knew him including himself?

From an early age, Matthew was a very outgoing child and loved attention wherever he could get it, often mistaking it for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) in his early schooling career. He was even considered for the learning centre class at school for children with slow learning abilities due to mental or physical problems, as his dismal handwriting and hyper-activeness led him straight into that category.

But our parents reassured the staff that that was just Matthew. He didn’t need to be moved to a class for mentally-challenged pupils. To his own detriment, he was drawing too much attention to himself and not in the positive or accurate ways he had imagined.

Our dad would teach him Frank Sinatra songs and Matthew would belt them out with full force and enthusiasm. I think my parents knew then that Matthew was destined for the stage. Often when we were young he would love to put on little shows or song and dance numbers, and inevitably I was either a swaying tree in the background or his dance partner being flung around the room as Matthew got so caught up in his routine. I was four years younger than Matthew and I idolised my brother. So, if he told me to stand on the top bunk bed and back flip off into his arms, then I did it, whether he caught me or not.

As much as I loved and looked up to him, he too was so protective of me and would shield me against anything. An undertaking we would only realise later, when he would stand up to our father during his alcoholic benders when our mom was away touring with a stage show.

A family friend in the theatre industry once told me a story of when Matthew was a young boy. He had arrived at our house to do a script read through with one of my parents, and as he came through the door he had to pull Matthew off our father, because he was trying to stop our dad who was getting physically abusive with our mom. How a young boy could even be presented with that kind of situation is unfathomable. A situation that certain families endure all over the world, behind closed doors. This prevalence and reality is real. I think all those traumatic events still haunted Matthew to the end.

Although we had such happy memories of when we were growing up, Matthew and I also had quite a troubled childhood with our alcoholic father, as well as our three older half siblings. Dad died in 1997 after a long battle with alcoholism.

Around seven years before his death, he found himself in a dodgy bar on the outskirts of Kensington Johannesburg, during what became a routine bender for him.

Stumbling, jobless drunks, with missing teeth, and dishevelled clothes that stank of old sweat and cigarettes, infested the bar area. Eventually, after probably one intoxicated drunk looked at the other in the wrong way, pointless arguments arose. He probably had a lazy eye and wasn’t looking at him at all, but nevertheless it soon escalated to even drunker testosterone-filled men wanting in on the illogical action.

Beer bottles were thrown; tables clumsily overturned and bar stools became weapons. Unfortunately, our dad was in the middle of it all and was struck over the head with what must have felt like a cement-filled bar stool.

Police arrived and loaded the bar busters, conscious or not into the back of their van. The next day, when they sobered up and woke from their alcohol-induced slumber, they were supposedly released.

Dad never woke up.

He spent a few weeks in a coma from the incident with bleeding on the brain. After coming out of the coma, he was eventually able to walk and talk after some therapy, but the frontal lobe of his brain was damaged and he had lost all short-term memory. The frontal lobe controls all short-term memory, as well as emotions, impulse control, social interaction and motor function. So he was literally an emotionless, corpse sitting on a chair day after day. His long term memory was still there, but heart-wrenchingly for me, I was part of his short-term memory. I was the last born from his three marriages and never formed that bond I had so yearned for from a father.

He ended up in a home next to the Edenvale Hospital. It was a place for ex and struggling alcoholics with nothing left but their few belongings. Hard to believe dad was one of them. No more wealth, no more fancy cars, no lavish house to call his home as he once had. He had nothing left, even when he eventually passed, I went to collect his belongings, which was a black garbage bag containing a few books, reading glasses and Christmas cards from family members overseas.

A very sad and sombre realisation that this once performing legend was no more, he was but a number now in a cold, depressing home, that lent no hope of any of them being able to ever leave the gates to the outside world again. This was their end.

I would try go visit him every month or so, even though he always thought I was my older half-sister Sheryl from his first marriage. Matthew, however, could never bring himself to see our father like that; he went maybe twice in those years.

I’d show him pictures of shows and movies he was in years before, naming him one of South Africa’s most prolific actors. But he would just gaze straight ahead sucking on his spit-soaked cigarette that his toothless mouth enveloped. Bad time to have short-term memory as a smoker, as he would go through two packs in no time, not remembering that he’d just put out a fag.

On one visit while greeting him at the ward door, my hands holding a box of photos of all his movies and stage shows, dad stepped towards me clumsily on his skeletal looking legs, and in a quick forceful move he grabbed my breast. Instinctively I pulled away, horrified at what had just happened. In one swift move my whole perception of what a father should be was shattered into pieces. I was shocked, disgusted and felt sick to my stomach. My own father doing this to me was too overwhelming to comprehend. I sternly asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, but he just frowned and looked at me bewildered and confused.

It took me a while to overcome that day of being touched by my own father, but I had to realise that he was ill and this wasn’t the dad, or the Joe, we had all once known.

I somehow managed, on one or two occasions, to clean up phlegm-filled puke from his lap. He would have coughing fits and vomit up bouts of phlegm. It certainly looked like a whole lung coming up at times. I had to mentally block out what I was cleaning up and focus on cleaning his mess without making a scene about it. It was heart-breaking.

I would clean him up like he was an infant and he had no knowledge that this was happening to him. He had no control of his body anymore. His lungs, liver, stomach, kidneys and, I’m sure, his heart were all so damaged after years of toxic indulgence, that eventually his emaciated body just gave up. He did, however, ask me on his death bed, if the angels would give him cigarettes in heaven.

We let him inhale his last bit of toxic pleasure before dying a few hours later.

He died a few days before my 18th birthday, and short of seeing Matthew make it big in the industry.

For some reason I always thought that after seeing what my father went through and the pain and hurt he put my mom and us through, that no-one else would ever fall into that addictive life style, but I was very wrong.

Matthew and I were born and raised in Parkhurst in Johannesburg; a very well-off area in that time, and started our schooling careers at Parkhurst Primary School, which was within walking distance of our house. Matthew was always right by my side as we made our way to and from school each day.

It was here where Matthew’s talents were brought to light. His outgoing personality drew in many of his teachers; one of those was Shelly Sprenger. She also led the school choir, and soon had Matthew singing every solo possible to show off his crisp innocent voice. He went on to play the very outgoing and cocky Artful Dodger, in Oliver there as well, and the parents were just amazed at his natural talents. So, quite understandably, Matthew became the talk of our small community years after his primary school years. To this day people still remind me of how wonderful they always thought Matthew was back then. I, however, wasn’t always on the same page.

It was during these primary school years that we had our worst experiences with our father, and after realising this man would never change, our mom divorced him and we only saw our dad every now and again, when he was sober. It obviously wasn’t as clean and easy as it sounds. There were the odd occasions when he would just arrive at our house drunk, or even at our school, being abusively loud and falling all over the place. We even had the police come and collect him in a straitjacket once to take him to a sanatorium. But, instead of leaving with the abusive drunk, the cops left with a signed autograph and a handshake as they waved goodbye to their celebrity.

At times, if dad couldn’t get his hands on a bottle of liquor, he would make his poor man’s juice by pouring methylated spirits through a loaf of bread and drink the potent alcohol that was left behind.

Or he would drink bottles of cough syrup that were alcohol-based. Even more disturbing, he resorted to eating shoe polish for a bit of a high.

I always wondered, with a heavy heart, about the story when, before I was born, their gardener was killed in his car with him. Dad had a very lavish house in Illovo with mom, and after a drinking binge he asked their gardener China to go with him in his open top Vintage Cadillac for a drive. Dad was so drunk that he drove the car into a tree on Louis Botha Avenue and a piece of the metal from the window frame pierced China’s heart, killing him instantly; classing it as a freak accident.

Dad was taken off to John Foster Square, which I hear was notorious for the torture of terrorist suspects, several of whom so-called jumped, committing suicide, but were actually thrown from the upper floor windows during interrogations.

Dad was there for two weeks, then allowed out on bail. Mom obviously paid bail after having to sell their upper-class house with dad being charged with manslaughter; with only a suspended sentence and a fine of R200.

The trial was only two years later and dad never went to prison in that time. I believe that was the beginning of the end for our dad. He was never the same after that and he actually wished he had rather gone to prison to serve his time for what he had done. He was full of guilt.

My poor mom then had to endure the wrath from China’s family who demanded money for the funeral and to fund the family. Mom graciously did it.

On one drunken occasion with one of his wives, he drove his Cadillac straight into the garden pool. Then being fuelled by his alcoholic rage, throwing their fridge into the pool thereafter.

Our mother, who became our rock, did everything in her power to keep our dad away from us when he was on a bender. But she could never be there all the time, because of her career as an actress.

I became his hostage at a campsite in Kruger National Park on one occasion.

At five years old I woke up during the night to see the silhouette of my dad sitting up in bed with just the glow of his cigarette catching my eye. Mom and Matthew were fast asleep beside each of us.

Can’t sleep huh? He mumbled from across our caravan.

Suggesting we go for a walk, he tried putting my little blue and white floral dress on with crisscross straps at the back. It ended up inside out, back to front and the straps awkwardly pulling under my armpits.

Hand-in-hand he led me through the caravan park, tripping over cords and bricks in his drunken state, and then cursing at the top of his voice in pain.

I became increasingly terrified as I realised I had just left the safety of our caravan with my drunk dad and realised he was actually looking for more alcohol from other campers. People started coming out of their caravans on hearing the commotion, with mom and Matthew feeling helpless at the sight of it all. His hand clenched harder onto mine with each word my mother uttered to let me go. Eventually, after much coaxing, I was sent back into my mother’s arms. I learnt to always pretend I was sleeping if I ever heard my dad awake after that incident.

Mom flew back from Cape Town once to fetch Matthew and myself from school to take us touring with her on a show. It was announced on the school intercom that Matthew and I needed to go to the office immediately, and quite confused we arrived there to find our mother waiting there with enormous emotional hugs as her body trembled against ours.

This was after our father took us from their best friend’s house one evening, Tammy and Rex Garner.

We were spending the night there while our dad was attending a wedding with Tammy and Rex. He decided that night was a good night to go on a bender and so indulged himself in as much free alcohol as he could at the wedding and then came to fetch Matthew and me from the Garner household. He was adamant we had to go home with him. Their housekeeper Margie was frantically getting my mother on the phone in Cape Town, to try and reason with this incoherent monster, until Tammy arrived home, but nothing would stop him. Rex had stayed on at the wedding, being dropped off later.

I remember the girls, Sally and Kerry, trying to hide us under their duvets on their bunk bed so our dad couldn’t find us, while Tammy stepped in to try and reason with him, but he found us and drove us home drunk. Tammy followed behind to make sure we got home safe, and made sure she wasn’t seen.

It was there that our first nightmare began.

We scurried into our house and headed straight for our separate rooms. Matthew, not being so lucky, was stopped in his tracks. It seemed like hours of shouting and doors slamming as I hid in my dark room. I could hear him threatening to hit Matthew numerous times, but knew Matthew had the upper hand as dad couldn’t even stand or focus to try and even raise his hand. He still ripped his belt off and swung it behind his head trying to overpower Matthew who was firm at standing his ground, but all I could hear was Matthew pleading for him not to hit him. Please daddy, please don’t, please. Like a whimpering toddler.

As I lay dead still in my bed trying to silence my thumping heart in my chest, I peeked through the crack of my door by the hinges, hoping he wouldn’t come down the passage to my room.

I listened fearfully as Matthew screamed at our father to let us go and not to hurt us. Pleading at our dad’s every move. The unknown of what he was going to do that night was petrifying. This was our dad, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t understand why or if he wanted to hurt us.

This was the dad who played in the pool with us, who hid on top of the bunk bed during one of our hide and go seek games. The dad who held my hand so comfortingly whenever we were out, always wrapping his pinkie finger around my tiny wrist. The dad we laughed at when he shaved only one side of his head and face for a laugh, before going totally bald for his role as ‘The King’ in The King and I. But I didn’t know this man that night, and I didn’t want him as my dad anymore.

Our dad had pulled the phone cords out to make sure we couldn’t phone anyone, and he left us alone while he walked up and down our quiet, dark suburban road shouting to the neighbours demanding alcohol. It felt as if they too lay silent in their beds, hoping he would lose interest and move on.

Matthew and I sat there helplessly on the lounge floor prodding the buttons on the phone in a desperate attempt to get it to magically give us a dialling tone.

As we heard him fumble through the front gate, Matthew and I ran back to our bedrooms as if we hadn’t moved. When was this going to end? I just wanted our mom back to fix it all, even just for a while. The fear was becoming unbearable for us.

I heard him making his way down the passage. He passed Matthew’s room and I realised it was my turn. With each heavy step he made becoming louder and louder as he approached my door. In the darkness he stumbled into my room falling into the door, and with a heavy sigh he sank down onto the edge of my bed. He placed his head in his unsteady hands and it seemed as though his elbows fell to rest on his knees in dissatisfaction.

My heart was thumping so loud I was sure he could hear it. He fumbled in his top pocket of his shirt grabbing at his box of cigarettes and finally produced one out of the box after numerous attempts.

Get me an ashtray, finally poured out of his limp lips.

Submitting I ran to the lounge as quickly as I could, not to anger him anymore. I passed Matthew’s room which was so still and deathly quiet now that I could hear the crickets outside his bedroom window.

My breathing was heavy and shaky as I placed the ashtray next to dad and carefully slid back into bed with the covers pulled as high as I could get them with the dead weight of his body holding them down.

It was silent for what seemed like hours until to my astonishment dad started to cry. In an instant I felt a surge of control creep through me as I watched him crumbling before my eyes. He mumbled countless stories of his past and how terrible he was, as he lit cigarette after cigarette as I just sat there watching this show in bewilderment. Nothing he said even registered in my head. I was just hoping he would leave and go to his room to sleep.

Eventually, in mid-sentence, through his tears he sat up dead straight, told me he loved me and left my smoke-filled room without a hint of his breakdown I had just witnessed. What an actor.

I heard our long-time family friend Hal Orlandini arrive at the house, they lived a block away, and I can only imagine my mom or Tammy must have phoned him to try and rescue us from this monster. Hal was here to save us I thought, but after a while of raising their voices at each other, and making no headway with my dad, Hal made sure we were okay and then retreated back to his house. I think my mother, with all her power, was trying desperately to get help to us but with no luck; and being so many miles away, left her feeling helpless and distraught. That’s why she booked herself on the first flight out that next morning to come and get us.

My father’s abusive, drunken behaviour that night has been etched in my mind for life. I will always remember Matthew stepping up to the plate, at the tender age of 9, to face our dad in that situation, and any others going forward. He never should have been faced with that at his age.

Matthew