Dancing Naked With the Rolling Stones (Winoca Press, $18.95) is the new volume of memoirs by Bill McIlwain, one of the great gonzo journalists who lived to tell the tale. A legendary editor for Long Island's Newsday, McIlwain had helped launch the paper's New York edition and had been on the team that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize.

Once a self-described workaholic and alcoholic - A Farewell, he reveals, wasn't the end of his battle with the bottle - the 81-year-old McIlwain has settled down a bit into a raconteur and kamikaze tennis player. Although born in South Carolina, McIlwain moved with his family to Wilmington when he was in the sixth grade. He played football and baseball for New Hanover High School and always considered the Port City home. During World War II, he worked briefly at the N.C. Shipyard in Wilmington before joining the Marines. He moved back to Wrightsville Beach in 1990 and has been here ever since, working as a consultant to editors and as a mentor to Star-News staffers.

McIlwain will talk about his book in a Q&A session at 7 p.m. Monday in the WHQR Gallery, 254 N. Front St. To warm up for the event, we caught up with the energetic 81-year-old between playing tennis and squiring young beauties around town.

A. Yep, I didn't know much about journalism, but I was. It was my senior year of high school, before I went in the service. So many guys were in the war by then, you had a good chance of getting a job.

A.I had a good time. The Star had a couple of good editors back then - one of them went on to the Washington Star, and of course, Al Dixon was here for a long, long time. The newspaper offices were downtown then (in the Murchison Building at Front and Chestnut streets). I remember walking in there and thinking, "Man, I'm a man now."

Wilmington built up all of a sudden during the war, what with Camp Davis, Camp Lejeune, the Coast Guard cutter and the shipyard. It was wild. I remember walking downtown, and somebody just knocked somebody else through a plate-glass window and killed him.

A.Yeah, I had a job with the Twin City Sentinel up in Winston-Salem, just a 35,000-circulation paper at the time, but they gave me an easy kind of beat, and basically let me go where I wanted to go. I covered an awful lot of stills being busted. Of course, people up there were always cordial to me.

A.Probably when they started using computers in the newsroom. The smaller papers did this earlier, because the big papers had so much invested in hot-type press equipment.

I missed computers when I was at Newsday in the '70s, but they were there when I came back. Stan Asimov - he was Isaac Asimov's brother - he was my main man about helping me with the technology. I begged them to let me have a typewriter, and Stan said, "If you won't start now you won't ever learn."

Of course, there were some guys who were just grandfathered in. Here and there in the newsroom, you'd see one old guy in a corner with a typewriter.

Q.In Dancing Naked, you talk about your drinking, about going through rehab at the center in Butner, and about the failure of your marriages. What was it like, confronting old ghosts in the writing process?

A.You can't worry about it too much. Barbara (Winoca Press publisher Barbara Brannon) told me, "This doesn't put you in too good a light." Well, if you're going to put the good stuff about yourself in your book, you have to put the bad stuff, too.

The process brought back a lot of happy memories, too - and it never hurts to remember your failures. It's sort of like setting your mind right.

I hope it will be some help for some people. After A Farewell to Alcohol came out, people would talk to me about it. Gordon Bell, who's an expert on alcoholism, says the thing about stories like these is, they give people hope. You might not stop drinking the first time you try to quit, or the second time, but it can be done.

A.No. Never. Actually, I was a little old for the Rolling Stones. I've never seen them, although my cousin Kelly Jewell - the young Kelly Jewell - went to their show in Raleigh and said it was great.

It's like I wrote in the book: A lady gave me this Stones tape, and I figured out that dancing in the buff to the music - or to Beethoven's Fifth or anything like that - would help me shake the blues.

Q.You always seem to be surrounded by a coterie of beautiful women, most of them young enough to be your granddaughter. Lots of men around here would like to know your secret.

A.(Laughs) I do feel fortunate about that. I must say it's gotten more that way with age. I tell people that at 81, I'm like Blanche DuBois, who said she always relied on the kindness of strangers. I rely on the kindness of husbands and boyfriends.

I think it started playing tennis. When I got back to town, I played a lot of mixed doubles. Later, we'd arrange things so it was three women and me. The women could beat me anytime. Then it just got to be a lot of fun.

A.That started with tennis, too. I was playing five, six times a week, there, probably more than I should have. John McEnroe was the first to start wearing them on the court. I wasn't crazy about everything he did, but he was one hell of a tennis player.

Anyway, I started wearing them on the court, and then I had them on all the time, and I kind of liked them. Then my grandchildren started getting them for me in all these different colors, so by now I'd feel kind of strange without one. I don't wear neckties, so I guess it's my necktie substitute.

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