NEW YORK -- Mercedes McCambridge, the Oscar-winning actress, takes an honest look at herself in a mirror every morning and night.
'An honest look,' she said, 'because one of the things a recovered alcoholic must learn is honesty. I have to live with myself.'
Miss McCambridge has been a recovered alcoholic for several years. She doesn't like to say how many years because recovery was a struggle 'and I might discourage someone who's just starting treatment of the disease.'
And a disease it is, she contends, just as heart disease and diabetes are -- and treatable.
'I think there is a genetic factor involved,' she continued. 'If there is a history of alcoholism in your family, watch it ...
'I am convinced that I was born with a predisposition to the disease. Eighty-four percent of all alcoholics come from families with a history of abnormal drinking ...'
She does find, however, that the public attitude is changing, that the 'public is beginning to talk about it (alcoholism) with new understanding.'
'Why,' she asked at a speech the other day in Buffalo, N.Y., 'should I be looked at any differently from my friend Mary Tyler Moore, who has diabetes?'
Miss McCambridge spoke at a public hearing at the State Research Institute on Alcoholism.
She speaks out constantly and one of her most notable appearances was in 1969 when she agreed to testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on alcoholism and narcatics. She was one of the first celebrities to come forward about her disease, despite the fact that it later damaged her work opportunities.
Her voluntary appearance before the senate hearing forced an end to her association with Alcoholics Anonymous. 'I'm just not anonymous,' she said, 'but I bow very low (in admiration) for what they are doing.'
At present, Miss McCambridge is president of the Livengrin Foundation, in Bensalem, Bucks County, Pa., a treatment center for alcoholics. It can care for 72 -- 'both men and women and all ages,' she said.
Now, the actress has written her autobiography, 'The Quality of Mercy' (Times Books) with the candor that marks an interview with her. 'Most people call me 'Mercy',' she said. 'I like it. It's difficult to sound cross when you say that word.'
Miss McCambridge writes of her deep emotional involvement with the late Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson, who twice ran for president, the court paid her by Billy Rose, of her professional admiration for Orson Welles, her friendship with Marlene Dietrich and the late Jimmy Dean, and her active dislike for Joan Crawford.
She wrote the book, she said, 'because the publishers came to me ... I would never have done it otherwise.' It is not ghosted, she said.
The actress has been on a round of personal appearance tours to promote the book but comments, 'This is a role I don't know how to play.'
Her life began on St. Patrick's Day in 1918 in Joliet, Ill., but early on her parents, of Irish descent, moved to Chicago where she attended Catholic schools. She was graduated from Mundelein College and was playing radio saop opera leads and mystery roles by the early 1930s.
Orson Welles called her 'the world's greatest living radio actress'. She worked with him in the old Mercury Theater days.
She made many movies, but it was for the classic 'All the King's Men' that she won an Oscar as best supporting actress in 1950. She was nominated for Oscars twice more and also for the Tony (Broadway stage) award in 1972. Radio and the movies, however, remained her best metier, although she appeared in several stage shows. She won plaudits for her voice as the devil heard in 'The Exorcist.'
Her relationship with Adlai Stevenson began when she campaigned with the former Illinois governor. 'He knew I worshipped the ground on which he walked ... I told him so often. But the relationship was platonic ... not anything of physical nature.'
She wears a Stevenson gift, an alexandrite ring he brought her from Russia. She calls it her good luck ring.
Billy Rose gave her a ring also, a bejewelled gold number he suggested could be a defense weapon if she ever needed it.
The artist skirts definition of her relationship with Rose. 'Everything in life is not platonic,' she said. 'Billy was fun.'
The watch she wears is a gift from her longtime friend Marlene Dietrich, who offered her anything from the Dietrich wardrobe to wear at the Oscar presentation. She chose a Galanos-designed black chiffon which Dietrich refused to take back.
She worked with Jimmy Dean in the movie 'Giant' from Edna Ferber's book about Texas. Dean, she said, was 'a gifted, blazing comet who came speeding across the sky and, in fiery light, fell off the world as suddenly as he had come.'
Miss McCambridge worked with Joan Crawford in the western 'Johnny Guitar' in 1954 and spends quite a few pages on what it's like to be a coddled superstar versus a supporting actress like McCambridge.
Her description of Crawford is the only really nasty section in the autobiography. She writes, '... she was a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady. I'm still not going to tell what she did to me. Other people have written some of it, but they don't know it all and they never will because I am a very nice person and I don't like to talk about the dead even if they were rotten eggs.'
Miss McCambridge, married and divorced twice, has a son, John, who's a banker in Little Rock, Ark., and two granddaughters, Suzanne, 3, and Amy, 7.
The actress recently completed shooting in Honolulu of a movie. She has a lecture engagement book as full as she can schedule it and keep up with her job at Livengrin, she will be honored in May with a doctorate from her alma mater, and will be the commencement speaker at the University of Portland.
She speaks clinically of her alcoholism. 'I believe I had little chance of avoiding my disease. For me, caffeine, nicotine, Novocain, codeine, aspirin, Valium, Librium and alcohol are all not the magic that eases pain for other people. For me, the results are disastrous. I lose all control after two drinks of anything ... waking up was often in a hospital in California, in New York, in Peru ...'
'Finally,' she writes, 'it was adoctor in New York, Stanley N. Gitlow (a non-alcoholic pioneer in treating the addicted) who got through to me. I was in Mount Sinai Hospital with severe bronchitis.'
Dr. Gitlow told her he believed she was an alcoholic but she was not bad -- 'I was sick and I could be treated and be well! ... I am not anti-alcohol, but I am anti the abuse of alcohol ...'
When her March 17 birthday arrived this year, Miss McCambridge was in New York in a hotel suite overlooking Fifth Avenue where she could see the St. Patrick's Day Parade. She wore an emerald green dress (what other color!)
She was appalled at what the parade had come to, the rowdy teenage drunks among the spectators, many of them to pass out later in the debris of beer cans, broken beer and liquor bottles, many to land in hospital emergency wards.
Then she cheered up. A call came from her headquarters at Livengrin. All 72 occupants of the rehabilitation center gathered in the conference rom and sang, 'Happy Birthday.'
