“She said, ‘You know, Mac? Why not make it a challenge?” he recounted. It was his wife, Lise, who persuaded him to reconsider. He thought it was too early to test his newfound sobriety in the pressure cooker of eight Broadway performances a week.
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.Īs before, Davis turned them down. But that’s only because I was out there all the time on autopilot.”ĭeciding he needed help, Davis checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for about four weeks and sobered up. “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. I didn’t need to work anymore, and I’d lost my patience with audiences. But after I got sober, the whole world looked different.”ĭavis 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 just didn’t have the desire to fight that battle, work that hard. 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 singer-songwriter was offered the title role in “The Will Rogers Follies” before it opened on Broadway in May, 1991. 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. He died in a plane crash in 1935.ĭavis, who turns 53 in January, hails from Lubbock, Tex. 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. Part Cherokee, Rogers was born in 1879 in Oolagah, Indian Territory (before Oklahoma became a state) and started out in Wild West shows. I didn’t want it to seem like I was encouraging people to go out and get drunk.”ĭavis, 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 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).
“Well, I felt a little uncomfortable saying that,” Davis recounted in a recent interview. I used to tell it myself: If you can’t get drunk by 4 in the afternoon, then you ain’t tryin’. “There’s an old joke in the show that a million people have told over the years. “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.”
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.