Michael Douglas

by Marc Eliot

  ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

  Steve McQueen: A Biography

  Paul Simon: A Life

  American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood

  Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America’s Favorite Borough

  Reagan: The Hollywood Years

  Jimmy Stewart: A Biography

  Cary Grant: A Biography

  Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World

  Take It from Me: Life’s a Struggle, but You Can Win (with Erin Brockovich)

  To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles

  Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs

  Kato Kaelin: The Whole Truth (The Real Story of O.J., Nicole, and Kato from the Actual Tapes)

  Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince

  Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music

  Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen

  Copyright © 2012 by Rebel Road, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95238-7

  Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon

  Jacket photography © Greg Gorman/Icon International

  v3.1

  DEDICATED TO DAVID MILLER,

  MY RUSSIAN IMMIGRANT GRANDFATHER,

  WHO WAS THE BRAVEST, WISEST, AND STRONGEST

  MAN I EVER KNEW. HE WAS MY FIRST TEACHER AND

  MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION. HE DIED WHEN

  I WAS TEN AND REMAINS MY GREATEST HERO.

  THANK YOU, GRANDPA.

  AND TO ANDREW SARRIS, WHO LED ME OUT OF

  THE DARKNESS AND INTO THE CINEMATIC LIGHT.

  I AM ETERNALLY GRATEFUL FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE,

  GUIDANCE, ENCOURAGEMENT, AND FRIENDSHIP.

  MAY YOU REST IN HEAVENLY PEACE, IN CINEMA’S

  ULTIMATE REVIVAL HOUSE.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE: PARENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  PART TWO: CONNECTICUT TO SANTA BARBARA TO NEW YORK

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART THREE: INTO THE CUCKOO’S NEST

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART FOUR: ACTION STAR

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART FIVE: SEX SYMBOL

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 15

  PART SIX: THE FLAWED CONTEMPORARY MALE

  Chapter 16

  PART SEVEN: RADIANCE AND RADIATION

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Filmography, Including Television and Awards

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  [MY FATHER] TOLD ME, “MICHAEL, I WAS WATCHING ONE OF MY OLD MOVIES ON TELEVISION LAST NIGHT AND, YOU KNOW, I COULDN’T REMEMBER THE MOVIE AT ALL. I COULDN’T REMEMBER MAKING IT. AND THEN I REALIZED, HEY, IT WASN’T ME. IT WAS YOU.”

  — MICHAEL DOUGLAS

  EVERY KID HAS TO KICK HIS FATHER IN THE BALLS.

  — KIRK DOUGLAS

  INTRODUCTION

  Christ, I saw my father as a gladiator, nailed to a cross, as an artist who cut his ear off—and he would be shown doing these superhuman things. I’d think, how can I possibly be a man? How can I be the man this man was?

  —MICHAEL DOUGLAS

  BEING THE SON OR DAUGHTER OF A HOLLYWOOD icon can be the greatest blessing or the deepest curse. For a child of famous parents who lives in that shadow, the struggle to step into the light of one’s own identity often carries a heavy price.

  Paul Newman’s son, Scott, blessed with his father’s good looks but void of his unique talent lived in the shadow of the elder Newman’s fame and died of an overdose at the age of twenty-eight. Gregory Peck’s son also could not overcome his father’s fame and eventually shot himself. Charles Boyer’s son, too, committed suicide. Marlon Brando’s daughter killed herself after her brother, Marlon’s son, another failed actor, fatally shot her boyfriend (and went to prison for it).

  There are numerous less dramatic instances. Sydney Earle Chaplin, Charlie’s son, although a fine actor and an ambitious one, was unable to compete with his father’s old-as-film-itself talent and failed to make it as a box office star either on the screen or stage. It was the same story for Sydney’s half sister, Geraldine, who had similar performing ambitions but whose career goals, too, were overwhelmed by the reach and heights of her father’s enormous worldwide fame. And despite his singular contribution to 1969’s Easy Rider, Peter Fonda never achieved the star status or the prestige of his legendary father, Henry. Although both were alive during the making of Easy Rider, Henry never expressed any real desire to work with his son (except for a brief appearance in Wanda Nevada, an independent film that disappeared almost as soon as it opened, in June 1979, and which may have been the senior Fonda’s long-overdue and failed attempt to acknowledge his son’s talent and abilities). Peter’s sister Jane did fare a little better. Although she shot her own career in the foot with her “Hanoi Jane” real-life episode, she finally did get to share the screen with Henry in Mark Rydell’s 1981 On Golden Pond, the dying senior Fonda’s Academy Award–winning swan song. Jane went on to have a long and successful career, a two-time Oscar winner, but nevertheless had to battle forever the demons of her own politics and Daddy’s long legend. Gender, looks, and her canny ability to choose vehicles that were perfectly suited to her talents helped her to escape the worst of Hollywood’s dreaded dynastic curse. And the fact that she was a much bigger star than Peter didn’t hurt. By 1981, Henry needed their reconciliation on film as much as Jane did.

  Canadian-born Donald Sutherland, who came to prominence in Robert Altman’s 1970 M*A*S*H and went on to make more than 160 movies and win a cartful of awards (but no Oscar), is the father of Kiefer Sutherland, a successful TV and film actor limited by his range and hampered by his quick temper and substance-abuse battles, as well as by a lack of breakthrough big-screen roles. Kiefer made his name on the TV series 24, which ran in serial spurts for nearly nine years.

  Tom Hanks made himself a force in Hollywood as an actor and producer in film and TV, yet his son Colin has yet to make a solid name in the movies. Sean Connery, film’s original James Bond, has a son, Jason, who remains relatively unknown as an actor. To the long list add John Wayne and his actor son Patrick; Lana Turner and her daughter, Cheryl; and the Sheens: relatively sane father Martin, relatively crazy son Charlie, and Charlie’s brother, Emilio Estevez, best known as a member of the cinematically inconsequential 1980s “Brat Pack.” There are yet dozens more examples of children of filmland famously overshadowed by their more famous parents. Naming them becomes a grim parlor game that could easily last all night.

  There are notable exceptions, of course. Jeff Bridges and his brother, Beau, are the sons of affable TV and screen star Lloyd Bridges, a family man and by all accounts a good father, best remembered for his performance on the tube as Mike Nelson in the low-b
udget independent TV series Sea Hunt (1958–61) and on the big screen as the smoldering, immature deputy in Fred Zinnemann’s stellar 1952 High Noon and in his comic roles in the 1980 Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker) and the 1982 Airplane II (Ken Finkleman). Eventually both brothers were able to surface from Lloyd’s shadow—which, admittedly, was not as long as those of bigger Hollywood legends—and Jeff, relatively late in his career, emerged from the cult film star status he acquired after his memorable performance in Joel Coen’s 1998 The Big Lebowski.1 Jeff’s bravura Oscar-winning Best Actor performance some years later as Bad Blake in Scott Cooper’s 2009 Crazy Heart finally made him a bankable star.

  Ben Stiller became a superstar, eclipsing both the small-screen success of his stand-up comedian parents, Stiller and Meara, and Jerry Stiller’s late-in-the-day sitcom and commercial spokesman career. James Brolin was a minor-league actor; his son Josh is one of the hottest Hollywood leading men of the decade. But far more often in Hollywood, the exceptions prove the rule.

  Let us now meet the Douglas dynasty, beginning with Kirk, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who went on to international fame and glory and by doing so cast a shadow from which all his progeny, with varying degrees of success, tried to emerge. Perhaps without meaning to, he nonetheless laid down a complex set of twists and turns on their particular yellow brick road of movie dreams of fame, fortune, and glory.

  Kirk married his first wife, socialite Diana Love Dill, while he was still an unknown actor trying to make it on Broadway. He was ruthlessly and singularly ambitious, and what he may have lacked in raw talent, he more than made up for with a fierce determination that perhaps only the child of poor immigrants can truly comprehend.

  At the same time, he showed little interest in domesticity. He fathered two boys with Diana—Michael was born in 1944, Joel in 1947—and to both he remained distant, mostly physically unavailable, and emotionally unavailable to his wife, while craving the affection and approval of his Russian-born father. After a middling career on the boards, Kirk took off for Hollywood alone, leaving his wife behind with two-year-old Michael. A self-confessed notorious womanizer, Kirk’s arrival in Hollywood was not unlike that of a child with an insatiable sweet tooth given the keys to the best candy store in the world.

  After the release of his first film, Lewis Milestone’s 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Kirk found regular work in bigger and better movies. After several heated affairs, he and Diana began talking divorce. Diana “had some inkling that something was going on with him and his various leading ladies, one in particular.” Kirk never denied any of it: “Yes, I liked women. I liked Marilyn Maxwell, she was beautiful.… I was a bad boy, yes, I had lots of women.”

  Diana repeatedly pleaded with him to stop his incessant womanizing, and when Kirk wouldn’t, or couldn’t, in 1950 Diana went ahead and filed for divorce.

  Michael, six years old at the time of his parents’ split, was profoundly affected by what he could not help perceiving as his father’s abandonment. He drew ever closer to and more dependent on his mother. In his first memoir, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk describes a scene just prior to the divorce while visiting his wife and two children in New York: “When Diana and I were having an intense argument in the kitchen, we saw Michael, who was about six, walking toward us. We stopped immediately, before he entered, but he burst out crying.… That’s when we realized that staying together for the sake of the children wouldn’t work.”

  Michael recalls, “I think my earliest memory was about three and it was them fighting. Not physically fighting, but arguing. Voices being raised.” Those voices would reverberate in Michael’s head for years, even as Kirk’s absence turned him into something of an invisible god. Michael’s most frequent contact with his father was watching his giant image on the screen performing heroics and making love to other women. Kirk was there and not there, real and not real, an object of worship and an object of longing. These feelings would grow inside Michael until, as a young man trying to find his place in the world, he realized he wanted to be just like his father, and at the same time, nothing like him.

  The divorce was finalized in January 1951. Diana received sole custody of the children, with liberal visitation rights for Kirk. That February, she moved into an apartment on Central Park West. As Diana recalled not long after, “Michael … was showing signs of deep anger since the divorce and from being a compatible, tractable child, had suddenly become very stubborn and rebellious. He challenged me at every turn. I took him to a child psychologist who observed him in play therapy and then lectured me gently. ‘This is not a deeply disturbed child at all. He has suffered a great loss and blames you for it.’ [He advised me to] ease up on the discipline and give him loads of love.”

  The “loads of love” was meant to deflect what was a not uncommon reaction of young children whose parents divorce: that it is somehow their fault. As a child, Michael struggled with whom to blame for his parents’ breakup, his mother, his father, or himself. At times he blamed his father for abandoning the family. Other times he blamed his mother for somehow driving his father away. And still other times he blamed himself and, later, younger brother Joel for not being good enough children. Michael’s guilt and anger expressed itself in outbursts and mini-rebellions. (Joel handled the trauma differently. He put on weight that he carried on his frame his entire life, as if wishing to insulate himself from his own emotional needs.)

  Michael would carry his childhood emotional baggage into his first marriage, which in many ways mirrored his father’s. Kirk had married a moneyed sophisticate; so did Michael. Kirk was a serial cheater; Michael, too, loved women. Eventually Michael left his first wife and remarried a woman who closely resembled his father’s second wife. The duality of Michael’s identity struggle is vivid; it is as if, on the one hand, he strove to become a better version of his dad, while on the other, he feared he was destined to exactly follow in his father’s heavy footsteps.

  Diana got the message from the psychiatrist, and this early counseling helped Michael improve his social skills and lessen the periodic traumatic flashes that would occur whenever his father came back to New York City to visit the two boys. On one visit to the West Side apartment, Kirk recalls in his memoir, he “walked in and kissed Diana on the cheek. Michael started to cry. Thirty-five years later, he told me it bewildered him. He thought Mommy and Daddy were angry at each other.… [T]here was a wall between us. Maybe [the boys] felt that I had abandoned them. We never discussed it.”

  It was a wall that was to remain up for nearly a lifetime. Michael, the more obviously sensitive of the two boys, would avoid expressing anger and arguing in his marriages, the passive Jekyll to the aggressive Hyde of his movie characters. The ghost of his father’s philandering (and the shadow of his own) would emerge in such films as Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure. All three characters he played in those films were sexually troubled men, and with the exception of Fatal Attraction’s Dan Gallagher they had no apparent connection to or desire to care for their children. According to film critic and historian David Thomson, troubled men became Michael’s best roles. He was “capable of playing characters who were weak, culpable, morally indolent, compromised, and greedy for illicit sensation without losing that basic probity or potential for ethical character that we require of a hero.”

  ALTHOUGH IT IS not unusual for sons to follow in the professional footsteps of their father, Michael always maintained he just sort of wandered into the profession: “I went into theater because I didn’t have a major.… It was my junior year in college [University of California, Santa Barbara] and I really didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do. I really had never thought about acting at all. So when I jumped in, I hadn’t done any high school plays or anything. Earlier in my career … I was basically someone who was struggling for confidence.… I was withdrawn.”

  Perhaps Michael’s greatest satisfaction was being able to accomplish what his father could not: at the
age of thirty-one, after a middling film and TV career, Michael managed to get a movie made out of Ken Kesey’s semi-autobiographical Beat-influenced novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kirk had originally purchased rights to the book in 1962, before its publication, for $47,000, and he brought it to the Broadway stage in 1963. Kirk played the lead role, Randle McMurphy, a symbolically sane man trapped in a metaphorical insane asylum, surrounded by other inmates he eventually realizes are all the sane victims of a crazy world, whose authority figures are sadistically insane. The Broadway production was intended as a showcase for what Kirk hoped would be his greatest film achievement and win him an Academy Award, an accolade that had eluded him despite his enormously successful film career.

  Cuckoo’s Nest opened on November 13, nine days before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In the immediate aftermath of those dark days, the last thing anyone wanted to see was a downcast play about injustice, manipulation, and the misuse of power and murder. Kirk reluctantly closed it on January 25, 1964, confidently believing that the next step, bringing it to the screen, was a cinch.

  It wasn’t. By the mid-sixties, Kirk’s film career had peaked and was on a downslope. Ten frustrating years later, in a last-ditch effort, he handed the rights over to Michael and gave him his blessing to run with it. Michael ran, all right, and, with his producing partner, Saul Zaentz, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1975. Over Michael’s initial objections, his friend Jack Nicholson, rather than his father Kirk Douglas, played McMurphy. Nicholson also took an Oscar home, the Oscar that Kirk never won.2

  Cuckoo’s Nest marked the moment when Michael changed places with his father and became the more powerful figure in Hollywood. It signaled the beginning of Michael’s great run as a producer, actor, and sometimes both in a series of top-grossing, award-winning films that would culminate in his winning a second Oscar, this one for Best Actor for his memorable portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street.