Daisy asks for help getting sober and tries to enter rehab

Daisy asks for help getting sober and tries to enter rehab at a moment when the public image of her confidence and command contrasts sharply with her private exhaustion. Billy Dunne responds by offering practical help, but Teddy Price’s sudden death interrupts their plan. Daisy does not enter rehab then; after leaving Chicago, she turns to Simone Jackson, and identifies that later decision as the beginning of the sober life she built.

Public image and private crisis

The attempt takes place after Daisy’s fame has become inseparable from the image she projects. During the photo session for the album later titled Aurora, photographer Freddie Mendoza first imagined the cover in the desert mountains. On the Santa Monica Mountains shoot, he caught Daisy and Billy looking toward one another while the rest of the band faced his camera. The resulting image became more than a record sleeve: biographer Elaine Chang describes its impact on young listeners, particularly girls, as an image of Daisy’s self-possession rather than a performance designed to please someone else. Daisy’s visibility and apparent fearlessness made her a figure of aspiration, but they did not mean that she felt free of addiction.

Her later appearance accepting the Grammy for Record of the Year extended that public impression. Chang recalls Daisy in a cream silk dress and bangles, seeming confident in her talent and in control of the band. In Daisy’s account of the period, however, the glamour of success did not resolve the private repetition of drug use. At the Saturday Night Live party, she sat beside Rod Reyes while other women went to use cocaine. The familiar scene left her profoundly bored: she knew the cycle and could anticipate its turns. Her desire to leave was not a rejection of fame so much as a refusal, for that night, to continue through an experience she felt she had already lived too many times.

Asking Billy for help

Daisy left the party, took a cab back to the hotel, and went to Billy’s room. Billy initially did not answer the knocking, assuming the visitor could wait until morning; Daisy persisted because she knew he was there and felt she could not put off saying what she needed to say. She told him that she wanted to get clean. The decision was direct, but it did not make the next step feel simple: Daisy later described rehab as daunting and wondered whether she truly meant to go through with it.

Billy immediately brought her inside and asked whether she was sure. When she confirmed that she was, he proposed getting her into rehab at once. His response drew on his own recovery: Teddy had helped him enter rehab, and Billy wanted to offer someone else the kind of help he had received. He wanted Daisy to be safe and healthy. But Daisy stopped him from moving straight to the phone. Rather than begin arrangements immediately, she asked him to sit with her and help her understand what she was doing. Their exchange therefore held two different needs at once: Billy was ready to act, while Daisy needed company and space to make sense of a decision she was afraid she might not sustain.

A plan interrupted by loss

They talked through what rehab would involve. Billy asked whether Daisy was sober at that moment, and she tried to believe that she could follow through. Her private reasoning remained divided: she imagined going away for a while as a break, without committing herself to quitting forever. Looking back, she recognizes this as a form of self-deception. The request for help was sincere, but sincerity did not erase her uncertainty about lasting change.

When morning came, Billy raised rehab again and began trying to find the number for the treatment center he had attended. Before he could complete the call, a concierge put through Artie Snyder, the band’s sound engineer. Artie had called with news that Teddy had suffered a heart attack. Billy learned that Teddy was gone. The news changed the immediate course of the night’s decision: the person who had made Billy’s own recovery possible was suddenly dead, and the two planned next steps—the call and the entry into rehab—were displaced by grief.

Daisy later describes Teddy’s death as the point at which she abandoned the idea of getting sober for the time being. She used the loss to justify her conclusion that there was no point in trying, interpreting the death as evidence against recovery. Her account makes clear that this was a rationale she constructed, not proof that Teddy’s death made sobriety impossible. The sequence exposes how quickly a real intention can be overtaken by grief and by the stories a person tells herself to avoid a frightening commitment. Billy’s willingness to help remains important, but this first attempt does not lead directly to treatment.

The later decision and its significance

Daisy eventually did seek treatment, but only after the band’s final Chicago period. When she left Chicago, she went straight to Simone, told her everything, and Simone got her into rehab. Daisy dates her sobriety to July 17, 1979. She describes the decision to get clean as the condition that made later changes possible, including leaving the music business, publishing books, traveling, adopting her sons, and opening the Wild Flower Initiative. Those outcomes belong to the longer aftermath, not to the interrupted hotel-room plan; their connection lies in Daisy’s own account of sobriety as the turning point that made them possible.

The episode is therefore neither a completed recovery nor an empty plea. Daisy names what she wants, accepts Billy’s offer, and lets him stay with her while she confronts the scale of the choice. The attempt falters when Teddy dies and grief gives her a reason to retreat. Her eventual return to the effort, through Simone rather than Billy, gives the first request its full significance: asking for help marks a genuine opening, but the later sober life begins only when Daisy makes the decision again and enters treatment.