Tragic Lines From Real Life

In the old days, he boozed with the best of them--William Holden, Robert Preston, Alan Ladd.

And Macdonald Carey kept right on drinking through 17 years of portraying Dr. Tom Horton on television’s “The Days of Our Lives,” he confessed last week at the Balboa Bay Club.

Then, nine years ago, it happened. “I discovered I had to drink to go on stage,” he said. “And then I would drink while I was on. I knew that was it.”

So he joined a “little club” (Alcoholics Anonymous).

“My name is Mac and I’m alcoholic,” Carey intoned, beginning to read from his new book “The Days of My Life.” “This is my ninth birthday. I can’t believe where I am now from where I was nine years ago . . . as disengaged with life as a man can be and still be alive.”

Dr. Tom Horton an alcoholic? A hush fell over the room. Not the affable, lovable doctor who soothed the sick and counseled the star-crossed. Not the bespectacled physician who had been a member of the family for 26 years.

It was a touching insight for members of Round Table West, a forum for authors founded by the late journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns and pals Marilyn Hudson and Margaret Burk.

Truth is, the monthly get-together has gained a reputation for revelations such as these, moments when celebs spill their secrets. (Who can forget Carol Lawrence’s stunning confession last year about her rotten marriage to Robert Goulet?) It has become important to be seen here. These two-hour gatherings offer the social set something they can’t always get at black-tie galas--the chance to be real.

There was more. Carey read on: “This week my daughter is beginning to come out of her madness. She can take the bus herself now, and no longer cuts her wrists. Today she said, ‘People aren’t really marionettes, are they’ . . . I tell her yes, Lisa, yes they’re really real people.” The audience was spellbound. There were tears.

His daughter is schizophrenic, Carey confided during lunch. Alcoholism and schizophrenia are two of his 300-page book’s themes. “Both are diseases. Both are curable,” he said. “There is hope for people with both.”

The Balboa Bay Club was familiar turf for the 78-year-old star who has snagged two Emmys for Best Daytime Actor. “I used to play in celebrity tennis tournaments here,” he said, wistfully. “I love this place. It’s as beautiful as ever.”

Also on the Round Table agenda: beauty writer Catherine Harris, substituting for hair designer Jose Eber, author of “Beyond Hair--The Ultimate Makeover Book.” Harris arrived at the Bay Club via sleek blue limo, hauling the stylist’s books from its huge trunk.

Eber--who poufs the coifs of Elizabeth Taylor, Cher and Farrah Fawcett--decided to “redefine beauty in his new book,” Harris said, after he got discouraged about women always wanting to look like movie stars.

“Nobody who came to Jose wanted to look like themselves ,” Harris wailed. “So now he tells them: ‘I’ll help you look the best you can. After that, relax and enjoy yourself.’ ”

Whitney Otto, author of “How to Make an American Quilt,” told the crowd she could neither quilt nor sew. “But I can write,” she said. “So it was natural for me to write a quilt rather than stitch a quilt.” The graduate of UC Irvine’s Program in Writing uses a quilt theme to weave a story of a group of women and the significant events of their lives.

Last up at the podium was Vincent Bugliosi, the attorney who helped put Charles Manson behind bars and recounted the experience in his best-selling, “Helter Skelter.”

His new bestseller, “The Sea Will Tell,” is the haunting, true-crime story of two couples who seek the serenity of deserted Palmyra Island--located 1,000 miles south of Hawaii.

“Both Truman Capote and Joseph Wambaugh, greats of the true-crime genre, had thought about doing this book,” said Bugliosi.

“The book has two primary couples. One is from San Diego. They are upper middle class yachting people with a magnificent boat, the Sea Wind.

“It has state-of-the-art equipment, heirlooms, sterling silver. They traveled the Seven Seas in it; it was their pride and joy. They wanted to escape, get away from it all--crime, smog--for a year or two, so they went to a deserted island in the South Pacific that was only discovered in the last century.”

The audience was riveted. Bugliosi continued: “The wife of the boat owner never did care to travel. She preferred life in San Diego. But she loved her husband, forsook having children to spend her life on the sea with him.

“But she had a strange premonition about this trip, a premonition of tragedy. She had purchased a figurine of the Virgin Mary that had developed an ugly crack in its forehead. Before she left for the island, she gave it to a friend, crying that she was afraid that that was the way she was going to end up.”

The other couple was made up of an ex-con and a naive young woman. They also went to the island to escape (the authorities).

By the end of summer, the couple from San Diego had disappeared, Bugliosi said. And eventually, the ex-con and his girlfriend ended up in Hawaii, riding the Sea Wind.

Years later, a woman from South Africa walked along the beaches of Palmyra and saw something glistening in the sun. She got a little closer, then recoiled. It was a gold filling in a scorched human skull, identified from dental records as the woman from San Diego.

Beside her skeleton lay the aluminum coffin used by her murderer to bury her at sea.

Thus, the title of the book: “If the sea had not set free that container,” Bugliosi said, “washed it ashore--told the story as it were--there would not have been a prosecution for murder.”