by Marc Eliot
Still, to the outside world, they appeared to have a solid marriage. Their Village apartment was the frequent locale for parties filled with actors and artists and writers, and their love life was as strong as ever, no matter how many additional sexual adventures Kirk was having.
The appearance, however, was not enough to mask their increasingly difficult relationship. For one thing, Diana felt she needed more in her life than motherhood. If Kirk could work, she wanted to as well, and leave the gilded cage of her marriage. In what was considered an unusual move at the time for a newlywed mother, and something of a compromise to her, she decided to go back to school part-time, to take a short-story writing course at New York University.
This led to a whole new level of tension between her and Kirk. One night they had a down-and-out about, of all things, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, their opposite positions underscored by their ethnic differences. Although Sacco and Vanzetti were heroes to the working class, Kirk was against them, while to Diana they were innocent and should not be made to pay the price for any so-called crimes.1
The Sacco and Vanzetti case was the first time in their marriage Diana stood up to Kirk and dared to openly disagree with him, despite his insistence that he was (always) right, and it put another layer of tension on what should have been simply a family discussion. The fact was, Kirk wanted her to be a stay-at-home mother. It was an era when married women who worked were viewed as either economically deprived or unhappy at home. Kirk did not want people to think his wife had to work, that he couldn’t support his family on his own.
Late in 1944, against Kirk’s wishes, Diana resumed her acting career while he successfully auditioned for a role in Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s upcoming musical On the Town, with a score by Leonard Bernstein. Kirk was given one of the leads until he suddenly lost his voice. The show was postponed twice while he went to see a series of specialists, but finally it went on without him. His part was given to actor John Battles, and the show opened on December 29, 1944, without Kirk.
EARLY IN 1945, after finishing a brief run in Measure for Measure, Diana took off for an extended stay in Bermuda at the family compound, a jovial retreat where, after serving dinner, the staff would gather around a piano and entertain the guests by singing old familiar tunes.
She took Michael with her. Because of the Dill family wealth, rumors had surfaced that the boy might be the target of an impending kidnapping. Not wanting to leave Michael with Kirk, who worked six evenings and two matinees a week, Diana felt safer having her son by her side.
Meanwhile, on Broadway and alone in New York, Kirk became re-acquainted with a young actress by the name of Lauren Bacall, whom he had dated when both were students at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, and who would play a pivotal role in his becoming a movie star. As a favor to Kirk, she recommended him to her friend, film producer Hal Wallis, who had been complaining about the shortage of young male actors in Hollywood and was looking for one to star in his new picture, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Wallis tested Kirk, liked him for the part, and offered it to him.
Kirk had never thought much of Hollywood as a place where he could seriously practice his craft—an attitude not unusual among New York–trained actors, who preferred the continuous nature of stage performance to the chopped-up mechanics of film acting. But with Diana away and nothing new showing up on the boards for him, he took Bacall’s advice and that of his good friend David Merrick, a Broadway producer and future impresario, both of whom urged him to accept Wallis’s offer. Merrick also set him up with big-time talent agent Charles Feldman to close the deal.
Early in 1945, Kirk boarded the fabled Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago and from there traveled on to Hollywood by himself, while his wife and son remained in Bermuda.
Diana eventually decided she wanted to be with Kirk while he made his movie, and so she surprised him by showing up that winter without advance warning, with Michael and her mother in tow. Diana, no stranger to Hollywood, knew all too well what a playground it was for good-looking young men like her husband, whose philandering had been one of the reasons she had unofficially separated from him.
He was caught off guard by Diana’s arrival, especially since, in her absence, he had decided not to return to New York—Wallis, pleased with Kirk’s work on Martha Ivers, had offered him a five-picture deal. Now, he would have to put a damper on his living it up and revert, at least for the time being, to playing the dutiful husband and father, until he broke the news of his new deal to Diana. She had a surprise for him as well. She was pregnant with their second child.
UPON HER ARRIVAL, Diana set about finding a place in L.A. for them and settled on a small Swiss-chalet-style cottage on Vado Place in Laurel Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills.
On January 23, 1947, one day after her twenty-fourth birthday, she gave birth to Joel Andrew Douglas. As soon as she could, she moved both boys into the guesthouse and hired a full-time nanny.
Almost from the start, Diana saw a troubling sibling rivalry develop between the two boys. Michael was proving to be increasingly insecure with a need for constant attention, and he was not much of a sharer, especially when it came to the affections of his mother. One of the first times Diana held baby Joel in her arms in front of Michael, he started crying and screaming, “No, Mommy! No, Mommy!” Diana quickly handed Joel to the nanny and tried to comfort Michael. “It’s okay, Mikey, it’s okay … that’s your little brother and you can help me take care of him.”
AS KIRK BECAME more successful on his way to major stardom, his marriage continued to deteriorate. At one point, after a series of arguments that had been going on for weeks (and were really one long argument about who-knows-what), Diana angrily suggested he needed to see a psychiatrist, which Kirk took as an insult. And if he didn’t, she added, they would have to separate again, this time for good.
It set off one of the worst fights they had ever had. So involved were they in this argument they didn’t notice young Michael standing right in front of them, crying, while he stared at his parents screaming at each other.
DIANA KEPT a busy social calendar while Kirk ground out one movie after another, often staying at a studio bungalow, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of an eager young starlet. One evening Diana went alone to a party at the home of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neill. Oona, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill, was a longtime friend of Diana’s, from before Oona’s marriage to the much older film great. At the time, Chaplin was considering Diana for the role of the dancer in Limelight but ultimately gave it to Claire Bloom. After this latest disappointment, Diana had had enough of both Hollywood and her husband and decided to return alone to New York City. Early in 1949, Katharine Hepburn, another good friend, recommended her for Philip Barry’s new play, Second Threshold. Diana was happy to have this excuse to leave L.A., fed up with Kirk’s increasing self-absorption, constant philandering, and, perhaps worst of all, his almost lackadaisical attitude about cheating. He had even gone so far as to introduce to Diana at dinner one night a woman he had been seeing in New York and whom he had newly relocated to L.A. This was Kirk’s version of one big happy family.
Diana flew to Manhattan, leaving the boys with Kirk and the nanny until she was settled. A few weeks later, while living in a Midtown hotel, she decided early one evening to call and let Kirk know she was okay. A woman answered the phone. Diana asked to speak to Michael. When he came to the phone she asked him who that was. “Oh,” he said, “that was Auntie Irene. She’s living here now.”
Auntie Irene was Irene Wrightsman, a twenty-year-old beauty who was the daughter of the president of Standard Oil of Kansas. Kirk had been seeing her secretly before Diana left; once Diana was gone, Kirk moved Irene into the house. Diana hung up, called her lawyer, and told him she wanted a divorce.
Kirk refused to accept the fact that Diana was serious. In one last, desperate attempt to save his marriage, at Diana’s insistence he agreed to see a psychiatrist, but only for a week. (He would st
ay in analysis for five years.) However, to Diana, it was a showy, empty gesture that came too late. In 1951, she went forward with the divorce. Diana would keep the boys with her on the East Coast, which meant among other things that Michael would have to be uprooted once again, this time with little brother tagging along.
The divorce came just as Kirk was hitting the stratosphere. The year before (1950), he had been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Mark Robson’s 1949 surprise hit boxing saga, Champion, based on a short story by Ring Lardner, in which he gave a performance of conflicted ferocity as a man whose moral strength erodes as his professional career rises.2 At one point, he begins an affair with a hot blonde and throws over everyone who has helped him get to where he is. It is a stinging fight film with a convenient Hollywood ending dictated as much by the censors as by the story. In this, his eighth film, Kirk was able to show more of his real inner self than he ever had before, playing a mean, self-centered, enraged, and hard-ass character he felt completely at home in. As the 1950s arrived, Kirk had become a star, and the last thing on his mind was domestic family life.
DIANA, NOW twenty-seven years old, managed to find an apartment in the postwar housing crunch that had hit Manhattan. When a family friend died, she was able to grab his place before it was listed on the open market. The two-bedroom apartment with maid’s room was located on Central Park West and Eighty-Fifth Street, not very far from her old apartment. Diana especially liked that now each of the boys could have his own room.
Once settled in, she decided to take the increasingly withdrawn six-year-old Michael to see a child psychiatrist. He was constantly crying and begging his mother to get back together with his father. He felt the emotional pain of the divorce intensely and broke out in tears over the smallest of things. When these outbursts eventually stopped, they were replaced by shyness and a resistance to showing any type of affection. The surface passivity and the inner turmoil were traits that would stay with Michael for the rest of his life.
After several visits, the doctor concluded that Michael was not deeply disturbed or especially antisocial. He was simply acting out the anger he felt at the loss of his father’s presence. He told Diana that Michael had developed a “core of sensitivity that he guarded jealously.”
Joel, whose natural temperament was somewhat milder than Michael’s, appeared less bothered by the divorce, or by anything. He was apparently a happy, if increasingly overweight, little boy. Diana put him into a morning nursery program while Michael attended an ultra-exclusive all-boys private school on the Upper East Side, Allen-Stevenson, where every student was required to wear a blazer and flannel pants. She also hired a full-time governess so she could continue to pursue her career as an actress. However, the more she left the boys with their governess, the more mischievous they got, and they soon took to physically fighting with each other all over the house. After seeing the psychiatrist, Diana was no longer worried that this was abnormal. This behavior, she now believed, was what all boys did.
IN JUNE 1951, Kirk called and asked if he could have the boys with him in Hollywood for the summer. Diana agreed. As it happened, she had been offered the leading role in Light Up the Sky with a summer stock company in Ohio, and Kirk’s offer made it possible for her to take it. An actor in the company, Bill Darrid, would eventually become Diana’s second husband.
Kirk often brought Michael and Joel to the set so they could watch their father work. He was putting the finishing touches on what would be one of the more important films of his career, Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful. While there, Michael liked to roam around the studio exploring, enjoying getting lost in the small spaces between walls and flats. One time he happened to return to the sound stage just as Kirk was filming a love scene with Lana Turner, with whom he was allegedly having an offscreen affair (he has always denied this).
Kirk saw him, called “Cut,” and waved Michael to go away until the scene was finished, but Michael snuck back and watched. “I was very shocked. I remember looking at my father doing this love scene, and his catching my eye (as if to say, embarrassed, ‘Move out of my sight’).” Afterward Michael asked his father why he was kissing another woman.
For Kirk, the question, as well as the answer, was both complicated and simple. He didn’t know what to say, nor did he feel comfortable talking to Michael about such things. About anything, really.
KIRK NOW DECIDED he wanted to buy a bigger apartment in Manhattan for Diana and the kids, and put it in the boys’ names so that if they ever needed cash they could sell it. Diana rejected the notion out of hand, not wanting any of Kirk’s guilt money. She really wanted nothing more to do with him at all, other than sharing custody of the children. She had moved on. After her summer stint in Ohio, she continued seeing Darrid, and their relationship deepened. A relatively unknown actor with a normal-size ego, Darrid wanted to marry Diana and was willing to take her two children as part of the package.
For Diana, it was a difficult proposition, and not something she wanted to rush into. Being Mrs. Kirk Douglas had been a nightmare, as she saw her once-unknown husband grow famous, distant, increasingly insecure, and, by his own admission, serially attracted (if not addicted) to sex with other women. The only lasting bright spot from their union was her two boys. Diana was sure she loved Darrid, but she was also aware of the disruption that marrying a new man might cause for Michael and Joel.
1 Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused of armed robbery and murder in Braintree, Mass., in 1920. They were tried twice and were executed in 1927. The trial became a showcase for everything from class division in America and anti-immigration sentiment to anarchy. The evidence was flimsy, and the case remains controversial to this day. Kirk and Diana were arguing about it in 1945, and they were not alone. Several movies and plays have been made about the two men, their trials, and their execution.
2 The other nominees that year were Broderick Crawford, who won for his performance in Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men; Gregory Peck in Henry King’s 12 o’Clock High; Richard Todd in Vincent Sherman’s The Hasty Heart; and John Wayne in Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima. It was Kirk’s first nomination. He would receive two more, one in 1953 for Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and one in 1957 for Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956). He lost both times.
CHAPTER 3
I was able to watch my father live in the limelight with all the publicity.… [B]eing the second generation takes the joy away from any success you may achieve … What do you do about kids born with silver spoons in their mouths?… Most kids of successful parents … are usually late bloomers.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
DURING THE 1953 EASTER HOLIDAYS, KIRK WAS filming Anatole Litvak’s Act of Love on location in Paris and invited his two boys and Diana to visit. Besides seeing his sons, he had another reason for asking them all to join him. He said he had someone he wanted them all to meet. Kirk had recently fallen in love with Anne Buydens, a public relations woman working on the film. He was enthralled by her Germanic beauty and deeply moved by her life story. She had somehow survived despite having suffered mightily during the war at the hands of the Nazis. Kirk had asked her to marry him, even though she was married at the time to someone else and Kirk was engaged to actress Pier Angeli. He asked Anne shortly after Angeli dumped him.
Before they arrived in Paris, Michael and Joel came down with chicken pox, and then Diana succumbed while they were in the City of Light. By the time they finally recovered, they had just enough time left to attend the opera and, on their last day, finally meet up with Kirk, who explained his situation to them. After Diana congratulated him, they all walked together along the Bois de Boulogne; Michael took his father’s hand and put it in his mother’s. “Now the family is together,” he announced happily.
Kirk and the newly divorced Anne Buydens were married on May 29, 1954.
AFTER THE WEDDING, Anne quickly became good friends with Diana, a development t
hat was key in helping to reduce Michael’s anxiety about his new stepmother—a word that frightened him at first because it reminded him of the evil characters in Cinderella.
Both boys were overjoyed when Diana decided to move the family back to the West Coast for the summer of 1955 so that they could see their father and she could once again try to revive her acting career. She had done well enough on the stage in New York City, but now she wanted to make another stab at the big screen.
Kirk, meanwhile, had started his own production company, Bryna Productions (named after his mother), in the hopes of making more money with his acting and gaining greater creative control over his projects. With a reputation for being difficult—quick on the trigger with his directors and line producers, according to one who knew and worked with him—he had developed a reputation as being “a talented but stubborn prick. Nobody liked him in Hollywood. He treated everyone like they were servants, and no one looked forward to working with him. He always had to be right about everything.” Perhaps because he simply couldn’t work for anyone else, he decided to work for himself, and continue his quest to find the one role that would deliver him an Oscar and confirm to himself his place in Hollywood’s acting pantheon.
In 1955 The Indian Fighter was Bryna’s first production, an action Western shot in Cinemascope on location in Oregon and written by Frank Davis and Ben Hecht, veteran writers with solid credentials. The script was based on a story by Robert L. Richards, writing as Ben Kadish, due to the blacklist, and directed by Andre de Toth. Production began when Diana and the boys returned to L.A. Now that he was the boss, Kirk wanted to help Diana out, and after talking it over with Anne and getting her okay, he offered her a part in the film. Anne, who was pregnant at the time, volunteered to keep the boys with her while Diana filmed on location with Kirk up in Oregon. During the final weeks of shooting, Diana brought the boys up north to be with her, and Kirk wrote in a few lines for each of them (“The Indians are coming! The Indians are coming”), so the film would be a true Douglas family affair (minus Anne).1
