MAC’S FOLLY : Baby Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Whiskey, Advises Star of ‘The Will Rogers Follies’

Mac Davis is the first to tell you he never met a bottle of whiskey he didn’t like--until he climbed on the wagon.

“When I began doing this show, I was only four months into sobriety,” Davis said, recalling the time he first stepped onto a Broadway stage for a nine-month run as the star of “The Will Rogers Follies.”

“There’s an old joke in the show that a million people have told over the years. I used to tell it myself: If you can’t get drunk by 4 in the afternoon, then you ain’t tryin’.

“Well, I felt a little uncomfortable saying that,” Davis recounted in a recent interview. “I said, ‘I’ll do what’s written, but I’ve got to add my own thing.’ I wanted to let people know I’m a recovering alcoholic (in a curtain speech). I didn’t want it to seem like I was encouraging people to go out and get drunk.”

Davis, who is reprising his role as Will Rogers in a national tour of “Follies” (through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center), sounds at times like a dead-ringer for the Oklahoma cowboy philosopher with the homespun credo: I never met a man I didn’t like.

“I really do try to emulate him as much as possible,” the Texas-born Davis acknowledged with a drawl he has never lost despite living in Los Angeles for much of his life.

“I like his attitude about walking in the other guy’s shoes and having patience with people. That’s something I didn’t have back in my drinking days.”

In fact, millions of people once took inspiration from Rogers.

Part Cherokee, Rogers was born in 1879 in Oolagah, Indian Territory (before Oklahoma became a state) and started out in Wild West shows. He eventually become a vaudeville legend, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies, and went on to even greater fame as the common man’s pundit, offering wit and wisdom on radio, in movies and in a daily column that ran in 350 newspapers for a dozen years. He died in a plane crash in 1935.

Davis, who turns 53 in January, hails from Lubbock, Tex. He’s best known for his many pop and country hits of the ‘70s (“Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” “Stop and Smell the Roses,” “I Believe in Music”) and for hits he wrote for Elvis Presley (“In the Ghetto”), Bobby Goldsboro (“Watching Scotty Grow”), Kenny Rogers (“Something’s Burning”) and other artists from Glen Campbell to Barbra Streisand.

The singer-songwriter was offered the title role in “The Will Rogers Follies” before it opened on Broadway in May, 1991. But he turned it down--not exactly a smart career move considering the show went on to win six Tony Awards (including the one for best musical) with Keith Carradine as its star.

“The whiskey said no,” Davis explained. “I was still out there drinking. I felt I couldn’t handle New York. I didn’t have the confidence in myself. I just didn’t have the desire to fight that battle, work that hard. But after I got sober, the whole world looked different.”

Davis recalled that he’d quit performing during the late ‘80s, a victim of burn-out and booze: “I thought I’d rather play golf and drink whiskey. I let the blues get to me. I didn’t need to work anymore, and I’d lost my patience with audiences.

“After three years of retirement, I thought, ‘Whoa, I don’t like this.’ I did get to play golf everyday, and my handicap went down to a two. But that’s only because I was out there all the time on autopilot.”

Deciding he needed help, Davis checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for about four weeks and sobered up. Four months later, the producers came to him again, this time asking him to replace Carradine, who was going to leave the show in the summer of ’92.

As before, Davis turned them down. He thought it was too early to test his newfound sobriety in the pressure cooker of eight Broadway performances a week. It was his wife, Lise, who persuaded him to reconsider.

“She said, ‘You know, Mac? Why not make it a challenge?” he recounted. “ ‘You’ve made records. You’ve done movies. You’ve done television. You’ve done Vegas. Broadway is the one thing you’ve never done. If you do this, you can say you’ve done it all.’ ”

And not incidentally, he also could revive a moribund recording career.

“Money’s not the thing,” Davis insisted. “I always paid my taxes. I don’t have any skeletons in the closet. It’s pride, I guess. I wanted our kids to see me working instead of just playing golf all the time.”

Looking back to his days as a teen-ager, he said he always loved the attention that came with performing. Nevertheless, he didn’t give much thought to a career in show business until he saw Buddy Holly driving down the street one day in Lubbock, a turning point he memorialized in the 1980 song “Texas in My Rear View Mirror.”

“I was sitting on my front porch,” Davis recalled, “and here comes this big white Pontiac Catalina convertible with Buddy and four blond babes in it. Buddy was a local yokel, like I was. All of a sudden he left town and came back a year later in that car with those babes. This thoroughly impressed me. He was 18, and I was about 15. I thought if Buddy Holly can do it, I can do it.”

Now that Davis is on stage again and touring with “The Will Rogers Follies,” which features a leggy chorus line of showgirls, he seems to be more in his element than ever.

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He has not only begun writing songs again, he is planning to make a new album in Nashville, Tenn.--as yet untitled--when the tour ends. (It will go on to Palm Desert, Tucson, Phoenix, Dallas and then to Washington, D.C., for a six-week engagement at the Kennedy Center.) Even while starring in “Follies” on Broadway, he wrote “Slow Dancing With the Moon,” the title song of Dolly Parton’s current album.

But songs aren’t all the writing he does. Davis said he pens the opening monologue delivered by Will Rogers each night at the top of the show.

“They allowed me the leeway to do that, because that’s what gets me into the role,” he said. “I get up in the morning with my cup of coffee and go through the newspaper looking for things to comment on. It’s one of the most enjoyable things about doing this play.”

What sort of news items catch Davis’ eye?

“I’ve had a lot of fun with Tammy Faye Bakker getting married again,” he said. “But I roll with the headlines. Up in Seattle, where we ran for four weeks, they were having this big tax initiative. I looked up what Will might have said about that.

“One headline went: BACKERS OF TAX INITIATIVE 601 ACCUSED OF DECEIT . Boom! Out comes a line from one of Will’s books: ‘Taxes have made liars out of more Americans than golf and fishing put together.’ So I used it. I got a big laugh with it, too.”

Still, Davis feels he’s playing Will Rogers for more than laughs.

“I become him for about two hours and 40 minutes every night, and I tell you it gives me back a feeling of tolerance. I see him as somebody who lived an honest life, somebody who maintained his humility. Those are things I’m seeking out now.”