Dixie Carter: When Hollywood Went To Sea

With saltwater in her hair, makeup-free skin, and comfortable clothing, Dixie Carter sits on the captain's chair, looking at the photographer, her husband Hal Holbrook.

She never looked less Hollywood, or more beautiful. The actress, who died at age 70 in April, had a whole other less-glamorous and outdoorsy life, which most of her fans knew little about, far from the smell of the greasepaint and roar of the crowd. Besides each other, Carter and Holbrook had a third member in their marriage for whom they shared a passion, their 42-foot sloop Yankee Tar, the boat that had been there since the beginning of their relationship.

On a personal level, 1980 was a big year for Holbrook. Besides buying Yankee Tar and meeting Carter, the acclaimed actor and seasoned sailor, who'd found global fame a few years earlier as Deep Throat in "All The President's Men," had just completed the adventure of a lifetime, the single-handed Transpac Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Hawaii, an accomplishment that would stay with him forever.

"The experience of being out there on my own, coping with the sea and myself, is a memory which has never grown old," he's said. "Its lessons have come back to me again and again." Lucky to arrive in one piece after a final race night of 40- to 50-knot winds and angry 18-foot seas, Yankee Tar had been slammed for several days, and Holbrook was badly in need of sleep. "I was desperate for even just a five-minute nap. Before lying down, I forced myself to climb up the companionway hatch to take a look around. Before I turned my head more than 90 degrees, a big white light swept across me. It was the Kilauea Light about 20 degrees off my port bow! I'd been on course, but was closer than I thought, and was heading right for the rocks!" Holbrook eventually made it safely into Hanalei, "wet and 20 pounds lighter than when I left California."

None of that deterred Dixie Carter, a woman Holbrook described as making "every adventure glamorous and [a] great sport." Carter was a well-established TV actress when she arrived, as planned, at the race end to meet Holbrook; he'd invited her to "go cruising" for a couple of weeks. She got off the plane, with a bottle of Dom Perignon, only to be greeted by a rather rangy-looking and exhausted Holbrook. When he saw her, dressed to the nines, he remembered thinking she'd never be up for the boating life, but Carter took her cramped digs and unkempt captain all in stride and the pair went on to have many adventures, taking Yankee Tar to Tahiti, Samoa, and New Zealand, among other places.

The couple's shared love of the sea was so ingrained in Yankee Tar that they donated the boat to The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, in 2006. Not yet on view to the public, the boat is being prepared as an exhibit in tribute to the couple's sense of adventure, and to the love they had for each other and for the boating life. The museum asked the couple to leave their personal effects on board after they delivered it, so charts, log books, photographs, drawers stuffed with clothes, a pair of Sperry Topsiders in the closet, and cassette tapes of their music are still in place on the boat. Bottles of spice sit on the counter. A kettle rests on the stove. Perhaps the most intimate of their belongings is a plaque they made that still hangs in the boat, bearing a quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "Searching my heart for its true sorrow; this is the thing I find to be; That I am weary of words and people; sick of the city, wanting the sea."

Dixie Carter is best remembered for her portrayal of Southerner Julia Sugarbaker in the television comedy "Designing Women" from 1986 to 1993. More recently she starred in "Desperate Housewives" for which she was nominated for an Emmy. Hal Holbrook, who for the past 55 years has been considered one of America's great craftsmen on stage and screen, was nominated for an Academy Award for "Into The Wild" in 2008, but is perhaps best known for his 2,000-plus one-man shows playing Mark Twain, which he still performs, at age 85, to great acclaim across the country. This year happens to be the 100-year anniversary of Samuel Clemens's (aka Mark Twain) death; in tribute, read about how much boaters have in common with Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn in "Great Books of the Sea".