In Houston's case we have to hope that when she did those handstands beside the hotel swimming pool she was wearing clean undies.
This, from a woman once known for her consummate dignity, is an image hard to shake from your mind.
Thank goodness most of us grow out of the first years of getting drunk, perhaps because of vivid recall of what a fool we made of ourselves the night before.
You can do that a few times too often, even a lot too often, and then with any luck you grow up.
If the Kardashians and airhead socialites like Nicole Ritchie are any guide, being very rich can make you inane.
If you make enormous sums of money by doing very little, what do you do with the long hours between waking and sleeping?
You can be like Elton John or Andy Warhol and become a shopping addict.
You can buy a dozen cars, homes everywhere you like to be seen, which you decorate at enormous expense, and perhaps a hundred pairs of shoes made from lizards that only live in the Amazon - and then what?
I guess you challenge yourself with infidelities, like some jaded gourmand trying to work up an appetite for dinner, then divorce, which is kind of exciting, and start the whole routine again.
Even George Harrison, whose widow says he was desperately spiritual, was another famous and adored star who kept asking, along with the great Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?"
I only wish they'd throw a bit of their misery my way. I've got a mortgage.
There is an art to living well, and most of us know that money and success, however useful, aren't the whole answer.
You have to enjoy what you do, surely, and you have to know what makes true friendship.
If you're buying the drinks, or the cocaine, you'll have a million friends, but they'll last for only a few hours before moving on to whoever else is paying.
You could feel bad about that, or you could go on thinking that every passing acquaintance's flattery was heartfelt devotion - and that way lies madness.
Living well is a more subdued art, I think, and when you meet people who have a talent for it, you know.
I think of my grandmother's pleasure in her garden, her honest exhaustion after a day's weeding, and the pleasure she took in eating the vegetables she grew.
Even when she could only get around with the aid of two sticks she'd take you on a slow tour to show you the first miniature cyclamens of spring under the laundry window.
She'd been through a lot in her life, and had her share of suffering, but such small pleasures made her day.
Maybe you have to grow old to really know how fortunate you are to be living in a world that is only as wicked or beautiful as you make it, and how sad it is to be careless with the best gift you ever get, your one and only life.
