Poet of the Soaps : ‘Days of Our Lives’ Star Carey Goes From Small Screen to Verse

How does it feel to grow old?

I don’t know.

I guess it makes you

more aware of when you’re wasting your time

or maybe just more aware

and just a little choosier about how you spend it ... --Macdonald Carey

In a cluttered, cozy roost on Benedict Canyon Drive dwells a born griot . In another time or place, the griot --the storyteller, the one with the fine, resonant voice--would spin his yarns under the baobab tree, or in the agora. This being America of the ‘80s, some of the griot ‘s tales are told daily, noon to 1, to the millions who watch the wildly popular soap opera called “Days of Our Lives.” He does that for profit, and fun.

The griot --Macdonald Carey--tells his other tales for joy, for release, possibly for expiation. For these, his medium is poetry. His village is Beverly Hills. His metier is the word.

As a working actor, Carey, 75, is one of few who can still, legitimately, lay claim to the mellow old epithet of “Star of Stage, Screen and Radio.” To that add television. “Days” was built around Carey, around Dr. Tom Horton and his family. But that was 23 years ago, and plot upon plot later, the role of Horton--”still the umbrella character from which everything else spins”--has diminished.

Though the show is still “great fun,” Carey does not complain. There are more days now for singing lessons. For dancing. Mostly for poetry.

As a poet, Carey is no mere dabbler. During and after a fine, feisty fight against alcoholism, Carey wrote, took poetry lessons, wrote, and wrote some more.

Good poetry? Good enough for three published volumes.

The first, “A Day in the Life,” was printed by Coward McCann. “It was published, I think, mostly because I was Macdonald Carey,” he concedes.

‘A Vanity Book, to Be Sure’

“The second book, ‘That Further Hill,’ I published with Jack Grapes, my teacher, my guru. A vanity book, to be sure, but I did it because by then I thought I was a good poet.”

The third, as yet untitled, will be published by the press of the University of South Carolina. “I like to think that this time it’s because I am a good poet,” Carey says.

His guarded optimism--poets are never really sure--is bolstered by last month’s Ph.D., a doctorate in fine arts, awarded by the University of South Carolina. “They’ve asked me back to South Carolina to teach,” Carey says from a great height. “To teach poetry, not acting! I won’t have the time, not now, but just the idea of it! That, of course, is why I’m floating on air.”

Why poetry, though? Why choose such a demanding medium? Not “because it’s there,” Carey suggests. More because he’s there.

Where he is, by and large, is in that house on Benedict Canyon, a splendid potpourri of print. Carey’s six grown children have moved out. So has his wife. The place obviously lacks a woman’s touch, though it does not lack for heroines. It is a house filled with more books, in more unexpected places, than “Fahrenheit 451” before the bonfire.

Once inside, it is most comfortable. A nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there. The street curve, despite sentinels of signal lights, is dangerous enough to have rated at least two of Carey’s poems.

So have been the days of Carey’s life. Not dangerous perhaps in the accepted sense--excluding three years in the South Pacific during World War II--they have been perilous, though, in a show-biz sense: Hollywood, it is still said, can rob your soul if you’re not wary. Carey for the most part has been wary enough. A poet--a good one--must be.

Charles Bukowski, the brash bard of San Pedro, confirms Carey’s resistance in a letter the actor/poet prizes. “It’s amazing to me,” Bukowski wrote, “that you’ve retained a good amount of humanity--humanness is a better word--in spite of working in the movie and TV industries.

“I suppose that if a man doesn’t want to be destroyed he won’t be.

“Keep the ribbon spinning.”

... the rancid emptiness

of being rich is

living with others rich as you

equally deprived ...

It is suggested to Carey that actors, at least the more sensitive among them, have been known to harbor guilt feelings over doing so little for so much.

“Everyone goes through that guilt stage,” Carey concedes, “but hardly about money. That’s the purest bull . . . I couldn’t make enough money. If you’re any sort of a human being at all you’ve got places to spend it. There are plenty of people out there who are poor, who could use your help. . . .

“I’ll tell you what it is, though. It’s the guilt that goes with being a member of the servant class. An actor is at the beck and call of other people. The times that you swallow your pride never stop in this business.”

Would Carey, then, rather be remembered as as a poet?

“That’s the first time I’ve had to face that question,” he says. “No, I can’t deny the actor part. I could be a little pretentious about it and say I’d like to be remembered as a poet, but no, I want to be remembered for what I am--a poet/actor. I’d like to be the best I can at both of them.”

Poet Continues to Grow

But as Carey the actor recedes, ever so slightly, Carey the poet continues to grow.

“Hell yes, I’m getting better at it,” he says. “At anything. Even my tennis improves, and I’ve had two hip replacements.

“In poetry, as in life, you learn a lot of tricks. Mostly you get rid of the dross . . . That’s why I write poetry instead of prose.”

Regarding the writing of poetry, Carey says his mentor, Grapes’, attack on that “is for you to sit down and write, just write, not necessarily poetry. If it falls into a cadence, that’s when it becomes poetry, though the difference is arguable.”

Pomposity, of course, remains the enemy of poetry, a foe best recognized, perhaps, by an actor.

“The worst thing you can do,” Carey says, “is listen to the sound of your own voice. You’ve heard actors who do this. David Janssen--I worked with him on a show--once stopped short and said, ‘Oh God, I’m getting to the point where I’m hearing myself.’

“When you do, you hear that terrible cadence, over and over. You’re emoting. It’s fake, it’s phony. And it’s the same thing in writing.

“When it’s going well, though, I enjoy the search. I think I have something to say because of all the things I’ve seen, read, experienced, and because of all the little epiphanies that come to me and that I want to tell you about.

“I’m like a guy at the bar who gets hold of your ear and says, ‘Hey, you know what happened to me today?’ ”

The griot ‘s art is in the telling, and what happened to Carey today, and yesterday and the day before is generally worth hearing:

--Growing up in Sioux City across the street from the Friedman twins (who grew up to be Abby van Buren and Ann Landers).

--Radio days. “I did ‘em all: ‘John’s Other Wife,’ ‘Young Widder Brown,’ ‘Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons’ . . . ‘Stella Dallas’ was a steady income. I was ‘Dick Grovenor, the wealthy son-in-law.’ ”

--Broadway days. “I debuted in ‘Lady in the Dark’ with Gertrude Lawrence. One night I was singing at a party and Kurt (Weill) and Ira (Gershwin) said, ‘My God, we didn’t know you could sing. We’d have given you the part instead of Vic.’ Victor Mature, a dear guy, a big hunk of man, but he was tone-deaf. Couldn’t sing a note. . . .”

--Movie days. Tales of Marlon Brando and Lotte Lehman and Alexis Smith and Jimmy Stewart. Of William Holden, who fell down drunk one night, and died. . . .

TIME

WHITTLING THE STICK

OF MY LIFE

LOOKS UP TO SPIT NOW AND THEN

It’s been a long run and, like all long runs, it’s had its successes and more than its share of failures: a broken marriage; a daughter in the hospital, possibly permanently; the bottle. . . .

“I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous for six years now,” Carey says, “and it’s helped my poetry.

“I know, I know ,” he allows, “the Edgar Allan Poe syndrome; Brendan Behan; Dylan Thomas. ‘You write better under the influence.’ (But) it ain’t true. It greases the skids in the beginning, but you can’t do anything long and well unless your are disciplined--and sober. Epiphanies don’t come by prescription. If you can’t communicate completely, purely, truly unimpaired, then screw it.”

Unimpaired, Carey has climbed back up the ladder. For “Days of Our Lives,” the writers have crafted a new persona for him, a delicious character called Norm de Plume who dons a goatee and shades and reads in a coffeehouse as a closet poet. “A stroke of genius,” Carey says. “I read my own poems. Best stuff I’ve ever had to play on TV.”

Taking Singing Lessons

For his own satisfaction--”and who knows, maybe I’ll take another musical on the road”--Carey is taking singing lessons. “I ran into (veteran singer/actor) Johnny Raitt the other day. He said, ‘You know why we’re healthy? Why we feel so good? It’s because we sing!’ And he’s right. Nobody breathes any more.”

Even Carey’s poetry, increasingly vibrant, now takes an occasional turn toward the light:

When I asked the cab driver in

Mexico City why he speeded up when

he came to intersections, he said

‘Senor, that’s where the accidents are.’

“I ran across his (Carey’s) stuff in the New York Quarterly,” says Bukowski. “Poets for me are very hard to read. Difficult. Dull. Boring.

“I came across his poems and said, ‘This is what we need.’ It’s simple, it’s profound, it’s full of sunlight and humor and reality. It’s all in there.

“How he can retain his inner guts after all these decades in the worst possible place, where they suck you dry; it’s amazing.”

“The (acting) profession teaches you a lot of bad things,” Carey agrees, “but it also teaches you something of great value: ‘Make it fresh every day.’

“I try to live that way--singing, dancing, acting, writing.

“And you know, right now is the most beautiful time of my life. The best time I ever had.”