How He Spends the Days of His Life : Macdonald Carey Donating His Book Collection to UCLA

To millions of soap opera watchers Macdonald Carey is lovable, grandfatherly Dr. Tom Horton, for 20 years a central character on internationally syndicated “Days of Our Lives.” All over the world, people call out “Dr. Horton” when they see him on the street or say such things as, “The first time I saw you, you were speaking Farsi.”

To millions fewer, he is also known as a man with a money-gobbling fixation that has afflicted him since his youth in the Midwest.

Yes, it can now be told. Macdonald Carey is a book collector.

For most of the last five or six decades, Carey, 70, has been amassing a private library that numbers about 6,000 volumes, including, by his estimate, 4,000 to 5,000 first editions of modern literary masters. His rough guess is that the collection is worth $150,000 in mere money. But to Carey, it’s clearly priceless.

Nonetheless, he is parting with it--a little at a time because he can’t bear to give it away all at once. The recipient is UCLA, which is about to receive for the third time in the last two years a batch of 350 volumes--in large part the works of Anais Nin--that Carey has culled from his shelves.

“It hurts sometimes, it really does,” he said. “I gave all my (Aldous) Huxley to them but one. I didn’t give it because it’s autographed to me. We both took this eye-training course together. He had eyes that were absolutely impenetrable (to light). He was able to distinguish objects but that’s about all.”

Third Consignment

After a moment, he added, “Somebody told me recently, the only way you can tell if somebody really loves books is if they’re wearing glasses.” Carey does now indeed wear glasses, although the eye-training course allowed him to dispense with them for 15 years.

This third consignment Carey is giving to the university is part of a 10-year plan to turn over the cream of the collection while using the tax write-off to (what else?) help buy more books. The acquisitions will fill in the gaps so that his future gifts will be more comprehensive, he said in an interview at his Beverly Hills home.

“It (the tax deduction) is only 50% of the value of what I give, but added to what I squander from my own pockets, it comes to a good lot,” he remarked.

UCLA snapped up the offer of his collection after one look, Carey said, a fact confirmed by the university’s special collections library. Craig Graham, owner of the Vagabond Bookstore in Westwood where Carey spends a fair amount of cash, also rated the collection highly. “He has a really fine library specializing in 20th-Century first editions,” Graham said. “I wish somebody would give me something like that.” He also noted that Carey “remembers books he read 30, 40, 50 years ago.”

The first thing Carey showed a visitor the other day was the library, of course. It is a big, comfortable room lined with packed bookshelves, cluttered with chairs, a desk, stacks of papers, a typewriter, a computer and a general air of chaos waiting to break out. Only a few steps from a brightly lighted but also book-stuffed living room where the pillows bear the faces of Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman, the library is windowless and seems a world removed from show business and the traffic whizzing down the canyon road just beyond the walls.

Carey, who has starred or appeared in more than 60 movies, achieved the isolation effect by replacing the windows with sturdy ash bookshelves.

A quick glance over the bookcases revealed that Carey’s collection includes many of the big names of 20th-Century literature--William Faulkner, James Joyce, Graham Greene, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Virginia Woolf, to name a few.

A few of the volumes, such as Faulkner’s novel “Sartoris” and Greene’s “This Gun for Hire” are valued at several hundred dollars each. Offhand, Carey couldn’t recall his most expensive purchase but showed an early, limited edition work by Faulkner priced at $600 and an oversized edition of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” that cost him $400.

Collects for Pleasure

Carey said he collects for pleasure, generally buying only writers that he likes. But he will occasionally complete a set of first editions even though his infatuation with a writer has waned.

“I have some writers that I lost interest in,” he said. “(Christopher) Isherwood wore out for me very quickly and so did (Andre) Gide, but I had started and it was a question of completing them. Those I’m completing so I can give away.”

For that reason, plus the pressure of too little time, Carey frankly admits that he hasn’t read every book in his library, although he devotes several hours a day to reading.

As far back as he can remember, Carey said he has been a collector and a reader. His father introduced him to the work of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe when he was growing up in Sioux City, Iowa. He also took up collecting early, filling his room with cigar bands, chipmunk and squirrel skins, rocks, marbles and stamps.

“I started (book) collecting, God Almighty, when I was in junior high school,” he said. “I continued it through school and everywhere I went.”

Dust Jackets Discarded

During the Depression he sold part of his collection to help pay his way through college, he added. Some years ago his library took another beating when a well-meaning house-cleaner unpacked the books after a move and threw away the dust jackets. That disaster reduced the value of his library by 30%, Carey said.

In fact, Carey sees his passion as one that is thoroughly grounded in human nature. “The acquisitiveness, the collecting, that pack-rat instinct is a primal one,” he said. “There’s nothing unusual about it.”

Despite the cost of avocation, Carey also said it is a common sense enterprise.

“I’ve found that the more you get into collecting anything, your limit goes higher and higher because your greed increases proportionately,” he said. “It’s bound by how much money I’ve got in the bank, that’s my range, usually just from the checking account. I figure it’s a good investment. They’re hard to steal for one thing. It’s like stealing the Mona Lisa. Where are you going to sell it, where are you going to pawn it? All these books have some imprimatur on them that identifies them as mine. And once they’re mishandled, the value is gone.”

For the past few years, Carey, who is divorced and has six grown children, has twinned his collecting and reading with writing. A book of verse, “A Day in the Life,” was published in 1982 by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. He is currently trying to sell a second book of poems but he acknowledged that the poetry market is dismal. His agent told him, “My best friend (an editor at a publishing house) was just fired for bringing in a new poet.”

Poetry Reading Slated

Some of his latest poetry will find and audience Dec. 14 when he gives a reading at a Hollywood nightspot, the Lhasa Club.

The poetry also fulfills a long-delayed ambition. In his youth Carey wanted to be a writer, even shipped on freighter with three friends “because we all wanted to be Jack Londons,” he recalled.

But now it is a constant battle to find the time to write, he said, especially over the last three years as his life took on new dimensions, including one that echoes his television character.

In that period he returned to the Catholic Church, he explained.

“I’m a lector and I administer the Eucharist, take it to people on Sunday who are sick,” he said. “It’s very interesting because it’s got me in touch with the dying. That doesn’t sound like a very cheerful thought but for a writer it’s very interesting and it’s strangely heartwarming at the same time to make connections with people who are on their way out. To be able to give them something, of course that’s very rewarding. But from a clinical point of view, a writer’s point of view, it’s great.”