Kirk Douglas signs his latest book, "Let's Face It: 90 Years Of Living, Loving and Learning."

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Two rows of long-legged palms, the Rockettes of Beverly Hills, Calif., flank the street on which Kirk Douglas lives, and outside his house recently, a team of baseball-hatted gardeners groomed the hedges to equal standards of precision. All was in order, as it was here one afternoon 10 years ago when, in the middle of a manicure, the then-80-year-old actor suffered a "vascular incident."

The term sounds merely inconvenient, a ripple in the pond of everyday life, and looking at him now as he strides into his living room and sits on a plump, striped sofa, whatever occurred then seems hardly to have left a visual souvenir.

His fingernails are still manicured, his trademark chin cleft is still there when the light falls the right way. For a man whose bones have been knocked around for decades, performing his own stunts in more than 85 movies, his body looks trim, his back erect, his gaze steady.

But when he speaks, the seriousness of what happened is obvious. It was a stroke, a vicious, unexpected blow, and it threatened to shut down his speech, a verbal power not only wielded professionally through the words of screenwriters but also essential to the private man who relishes spinning a story, sharing a thought, snapping a wisecrack.

"You have to make the effort," said Douglas, not difficult to understand but clearly hard at work wrapping his mouth, lips, cheeks and tongue around the language that once flowed so easily. "If I didn't make the effort to talk slowly and distinctly, no one would understand me."

Douglas' new book, "Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning" (Wiley, $22.95), is his ninth, a palatable goulash of personal advice, global concern, showbiz memories, religious philosophy and favorite jokes. What it doesn't dwell on is his own depression, which by his own reckoning was his worst post-stroke challenge.

Having determined that caring about the state of the world was therapeutic, Douglas dove in. As the actor had embraced physical challenge, the philosopher-writer-raconteur doesn't fear deep water, in print or conversation.

Sharing hopes and findings in print is intended to be useful to young readers, Douglas said, but the activity of putting them into words also was a gift to himself, a way to refocus his considerable energy on expressing himself in writing.

"We take everything for granted, even speech," he said. "You have a thought, and you express it. I have a thought, and I have to make sure I use my tongue correctly and my teeth. … Sometimes it's very frustrating. …"

"But things could be worse," and here the actor speaks of his "best friend, Jack Valenti," the movie czar who wrote the foreword to the new book and who died April 26. "He helped me all through my rehabilitation, and then he died from a stroke."

Other pals — Burt Lancaster, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau — are gone, too.

"It's lonely," Douglas said. "That's why I think I'm here to help people who are much younger than I." Douglas lives with Anne, his wife of more than 50 years. He has three living children (a fourth, Eric, died from a drug overdose at 46), seven grandchildren, and Foxy and Danny, Labrador retrievers who look considerably less svelte than he does.

He goes out to restaurants, sees his grandchildren, works out with a personal trainer every morning and still meets periodically with a speech therapist.

The movie warrior who starred in "Spartacus" and "Champion" is gone, but he's still working, having made several movies since his stroke and right now adding to a collection of his poems.

When he goes to his house in Santa Barbara, Calif., which he bought years ago to be near his children, "I love to live on the patio, the beautiful patio near the sea. It's an almost religious experience. And for many years, I didn't see it."