Until Now, It’s Been One Trip After Another

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. â€”  OK, sports fans, for the prize behind Door No. 3, what’s a “Muffin Spencer-Devlin?â€�

I’ll give you a clue: it’s not a new breakfast short order from the chain that gave you the Big Mac. It’s not a poodle with “Ch.� in front of its name that just won best-in-show at Westminster.

It’s a woman golfer, one of the best, and one of the favorites down here this week at the $430,000 Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament at Mission Hills.

Women athletes usually get hyphens in their names so they can keep track of their husbands. Some tennis players had so many dashes tacked onto their last names that they looked in print like a chain of freight cars crossing a grade. But Muffin’s are in honor of her parents, not spouses.

She hasn’t had a career, she’s had an Italian opera. Her life story unfolds like the plot of one of those old Irene Dunne movies of the ‘30s, “Theodora Goes Wild� or “The Bride Wore Black,� the kind they advertised as “wacky, zany madcap, that Theodora girl is back.� Lubitsch would have known how to script it:

Establishing shot-- The interior of the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue, early afternoon. As we look in, this beautiful girl with the doe’s eyes, obviously a Long Island debutante, is creating a scene. She is incensed because the room clerk (see Fefe Ferry about the part) will not book her a suite even though she has no money, credit or identification. The house detectives are called. The cops come. The men in the white coats follow. She is hauled off to Bellevue in a strait jacket, shrieking. The handsome intern (Cary Grant) sees through the charade. “You look beautiful when you’re angry,� he sighs.

Only, this is not romantic farce. This is not celluloid hi-jinks. This is real life. Muffin Spencer-Devlin is not just a playing a high-spirited, mixed-up young sub-deb from the Hamptons, she is really a sick girl. This is not just a John Held Jr. cartoon. This is manic-depression. Muffin’s mood swings are not schoolgirl larks. They are dark ailments of the soul.

They begin when she’s in finishing school in Switzerland and she is almost finished, all right. They continue through enrollment at Rollins College in Florida, where she tries to drown her anxieties in pot, vodka, cigarettes, cocaine, Quaaludes and leave-blank-name-of-addiction. Muffin doesn’t lose weekends, she loses months. She wakes up searching through airline bags to see where she’s been and what she’s done.

She goes through mental hospitals like some women go through Lord and Taylors. She is constantly waking up in the company of bag ladies, hallucinators, people who think they are Napoleon and people who talk to people nobody else can see. Muffin flies over this cuckoo’s nest repeatedly, a gorgeous coed in the grip of demons she cannot shake.

She is doused in lithium carbonate, a dangerous salt that produces the illusion of sanity if not the substance. She becomes a young woman-of-Manhattan. She wears a hat and smart frock and dabbles in artist management. “I couldn’t get myself a job, never mind them,� she recalls ruefully.

She had a sleep-till-4, show-up-at-Elaine’s-for-cocktails existence, but her life was direction-less. She tried modeling and acting. She had the looks and figure for both but not the discipline. “I got labeled ‘irresponsible,’ which I sure was,� she admits.

Her life changed first when she went on a family excursion to the golf capital of Pinehurst, N.C., where the bluff guru of the fairways, Bob Drum, growled at her, “Why don’t you play golf? You’re not doing anything else with your life.�

Muffin did. She loved it. She had played golf as a child--her mother was a 7-handicapper--but Muffin rejected it in favor of more sophisticated--and destructive--pursuits.

Golf did not exactly replace lithium. But Muffin followed the mini-tour to California and found herself in a backwater like Cupertino, where she unlocked the door again for her company of phantoms. Driving drunk, she sideswiped parked cars and careened into stationary objects until she was in a drunk tank again, charged with hit-and-run driving and assorted felonies. Remanded to a mental health clinic, she rejected offers of therapy. “I’ve already had therapy. Just give me the pills,� she snapped.

Life was hardly a blueberry for this Muffin. Until one day in Santa Barbara she came under the care of a nutritionist, Dr. Arthur Kaslow.

Kaslow skipped the chemicals and gave her a glucose test instead. He suspected her “manic-depressive� symptoms were not cerebral but organic. She was hypoglycemic. Her mood swings were triggered by sugar imbalance, not cortical.

She threw away the lithium, stopped the drinking, and life became a par-five she could handle. Muffin made the golf school qualifying grade, a not inconsiderable achievement for one who took up the game seriously in adulthood. And, last year, she was 12th on the money list and won the Master Card International with a 64 on the final round and a 28 on the final nine.

Muffin is still not your card-carrying Young Republican suburbanite in cleats. Theodora has not gone completely square. She believes, for example, that she was King Arthur in a previous reincarnation. That’s a good thing to be. If he could putt.