Michael Douglas

by Marc Eliot

  When it was announced in the trades that Michael was going to co-star with Malden, rumors began to spread that Kirk must have had a hand in getting his son on the show to play opposite his close friend. Once again the nasty shadow of nepotism hung over Michael’s career.3

  Michael was cast as twenty-eight-year-old college graduate and assistant inspector Steve Keller. He was already nervous about having to co-star in a weekly series with an actor as revered as Karl Malden. It didn’t make things any easier when Kirk called to congratulate Michael and told him, “Michael, you’re going to learn a lot but you’re never going to be able to keep up the pace that Karl will set.”

  If Michael was already insecure about playing Steve Keller, Kirk’s words of “encouragement” didn’t help. Michael recalls, “When I started out, I hated acting [on television]. I had a bucket off-camera because I got so sick with nerves. When I used to look at the camera, it used to look to me like an X-ray machine because somebody told me that the camera can tell when you’re lying. And then one day I realized that was bullshit, that acting was about looking people in the eye and lying your brains out. After that I was fine.”

  That “one day” was when Karl Malden gave him some advice Michael never forgot: “I said, ‘Michael, when you do crap, do it fast. And we’re doing crap.’ ”

  The show debuted on September 16, 1972, using the pilot as its opening episode, and clicked immediately with audiences.

  Because the show’s location was crucial to the series, with many scenes shot literally on the streets of San Francisco, both Malden and Michael decided to move into the city itself to save on commuting time. Michael took an apartment at the top of exclusive Russian Hill that overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge. He could see Alcatraz from his living room window and hear the signature foghorns that sounded regularly from the barges and ships out on San Francisco Bay.

  Brenda, with whom he had been living in Los Angeles in a beautiful rented house in Benedict Canyon, decided to stay put. Michael had naturally assumed she was going to come with him, but despite a temporarily flagging career, or because of it, she said she needed to be in L.A., where the work was. They fought over it, but the real argument was the unspoken one: Brenda wanted to get married and Michael didn’t. Not long after, during a short break in his schedule, he took Brenda away with him to Bali. When the press found out, they wanted to know if this was an elopement. Michael assured them it wasn’t and had little more to say about it, but Brenda wasn’t as reticent. Possibly as a way to push Michael closer to the aisle, she sat for a long interview with Dorothy Manners of the Los Angeles Times, who then wrote that Michael “has fallen in love with a young actress, Brenda Vaccaro, who is just as immersed in the love of acting as he is. They have a fine relationship in their private life, which he does not talk about. She does. ‘Ever since we made Summertree together we have been in love, together constantly and we talk about everything—except marriage!’ ”

  Back on the set, Michael saw the show’s success reflected in the increased number of guest stars, a signature of Quinn Martin’s style. As Michael put it, “Streets is good because the stories are good and because Quinn Martin never stints on the budget.… He pays top salaries to get good guest stars and except for the mockup of police headquarters, sets are never used. Everything is shot on location, even the interiors of apartments.” Among the stars who appeared in the course of the series were Robert Wagner, Andrew Duggan, Tom Bosley, John Rubinstein, Carmen Mathews, Kim Darby, Brad Davis, Mako, Naomi Stevens, Bill Quinn, Leslie Nielsen, James Woods, Nick Nolte, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stefanie Powers, and Martin Sheen. Even Michael’s mother, Diana, was given a guest shot, as was Brenda Vaccaro, even though their relationship was by now effectively over.

  Michael grew to love being in San Francisco without Brenda. There was still a strong feel of the hippie generation, most notably at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, and no end to the supply of women happy to make his acquaintance. During the shooting of The Streets of San Francisco, he lived the life of a wealthy young bachelor and had no intention, as he saw it, of putting a noose around his own neck by putting a ring on Brenda’s finger.

  The show was drawing a healthy twenty-five million viewers a week, and Michael’s star continued to rise. He was happy on it, except he could never forget it was television, where sex and politics—in an era where the two filled the air, and Michael’s interest in both was fundamental to him—simply did not exist beyond the narrow range of crook and cop, with no social background to explain why these crimes were committed and no compassion for the criminals. It made him realize he had no interest in staying in the inherent artificiality of series television. He wanted to get back to making movies as soon as possible, and so, no matter how busy he was, he still found time to regularly fly down to Los Angeles and continue to go through his father’s Cuckoo’s Nest files, to search for some overlooked tidbit that would allow him to move the project forward.

  One day in December 1972, while the show was on its holiday break and he was in L.A. searching Kirk’s Cuckoo’s Nest files, he came across the name of Saul Zaentz, and everything in Michael’s world was about to change.

  1 The Snake Pit was Anatole Litvak’s 1948 award-winning drama of life inside an insane asylum, the “snake pit” of the title. Historically, American films that dealt with mental illness did not do especially well.

  2 Many TV stars in the 1960s and 1970s had difficulties making the transition to the big screen. David Janssen, the biggest star on TV after a four-season stint in Quinn Martin’s The Fugitive, failed in his attempt to become a big-screen star and eventually returned to TV series.

  3 John Parker, in his biography of Michael, suggests, without attribution or source, that despite a number of other actors that were being considered for the role, Karl pushed Martin to choose Michael because he wanted to support the son of his good friend Kirk. Everyone involved with the show, including Quinn Martin, has always denied that Kirk had anything to do with Michael’s being cast in The Streets of San Francisco. Martin maintained it was Michael’s stint on The FBI that had got him the part.

  CHAPTER 7

  Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

  Apple seed and apple thorn,

  Wire, briar, limber lock

  Three geese in a flock

  One flew east

  One flew west

  And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

  —OLD-TIME CHILDREN’S NURSERY RHYME

  MICHAEL BELIEVED HE COULD SUCCEED WHERE his father had failed and get Saul Zaentz to put some money in Cuckoo’s Nest. Zaentz, although several years older than Michael, was nonetheless a product of the same California sixties hippie scene of sex, drugs, and especially rock and roll. He was also an extremely wealthy and canny businessman.

  To Michael, Zaentz represented the best of both worlds: he was one of “them” and one of “us,” a hippie honcho who was equally at home listening to Jefferson Airplane and reading the Wall Street Journal (often at the same time). Michael contacted Zaentz and discovered that he had already tried many times to secure the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest from Kirk, which was why his name was in the files, but he had never been able to strike a deal, because Kirk always insisted that he had to play McMurphy and Zaentz thought he wasn’t right for the part. As Michael discovered, Zaentz was still interested, even more so after he had seen the long-running San Francisco version of the play, which for six years had attracted a steady stream of sympathetic liberal Berkeley students and others to the theater in Jackson Square.

  When Michael first got in touch with Zaentz, he was in the midst of his takeover of the small, independent Berkeley-based Fantasy Records, founded by Sol and Max Weiss, who had operated a record-pressing plant before deciding to get into the talent and retail side of the business. Fantasy hit it big in the late 1940s and 1950s, mostly with recordings by jazz greats Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, and Vince Guaraldi, and several live albums by the late, legendary comedian Lenny Bruce, whose rec
ordings made the tiny label not just cool but edgy and ultra-hip.

  By the mid-fifties, Fantasy had prestige to burn but not a lot of money. In 1955 the Weisses hired thirty-four-year-old Saul Zaentz to help increase the label’s revenues. Zaentz had a solid background in booking tours for such jazz greats as Duke Ellington and Stan Getz, and was in charge of distribution for several small jazz labels. The Weisses’ goal was a major expansion of Fantasy, and they believed that Zaentz was the person to get it done.

  They were right. By 1967, he had turned Fantasy into the largest independent jazz label in the world, and then, along with a couple of newly acquired partners, with Zaentz maintaining a controlling interest, they bought out the Weisses, and together they took ownership of the company. Almost immediately Zaentz added rock and roll to the label and signed several acts, one of which, San Francisco–based Creedence Clearwater Revival, fronted by John Fogerty, became Fantasy’s all-time biggest-selling act. Zaentz, balancing his cultural awareness with his business acumen, also signed Creedence to a management contract and assigned Fantasy the publishing rights to Creedence’s songs, thereby effectively partnering himself with every one of the group’s income streams. (This would eventually lead to a highly acrimonious split between Fogerty and Zaentz.)

  Zaentz continued to diversify his company, buying several small jazz and R&B labels as he built Fantasy into a giant money machine, complete with a new, modern office headquarters in San Francisco. By the early 1970s, Zaentz wanted to expand Fantasy into film; when he saw the local revival of Cuckoo’s Nest, he tracked down the rights and tried to buy them from Kirk. After Kirk said no, Zaentz went on to make another movie that made no money but turned him into a legitimate player in the film business

  Everything Kirk had disliked about Zaentz, Michael loved—his hippie veneer, his pushiness, his know-it-all attitude, and his always needing to be in charge. Michael was content to let Zaentz be the up-front man and offered him a full partnership between Fantasy Films and Bigstick to make Cuckoo’s Nest. Zaentz agreed and, to seal the deal, put up the film’s entire $2 million budget.1

  What followed was eighteen months of preproduction, all done while Michael was still starring in The Streets of San Francisco. One of the first things Zaentz suggested was that they go directly to Kesey and commission him to adapt his own novel into a screenplay. Michael hesitated. While he loved Cuckoo’s Nest, he sensed that Kesey might be something of a one-trick pony. He hadn’t written anything after Cuckoo’s Nest that was comparable to it, and besides, he had no experience as a screenwriter. Nonetheless, Zaentz insisted they should at least meet with Kesey, and Michael agreed.

  Their new production company opened an office in Los Angeles, where the meeting took place. They offered Kesey a percentage of the film’s earnings to write the screenplay. Michael remembers, “Ken came in not believing in agents and contracts and all that, so we shook hands. He went ahead and we paid him more than members of the Writers Guild get, plus a percentage.”

  Four months later, Kesey delivered a script that both Michael and Zaentz hated. “It was too surreal,” Michael said. “There was one scene that had a nurse, wearing a Vularian helmet, and she reached her arms out between two walls and scraped her hands, and blood ran down the walls.”

  The original viewpoint of the novel and the play is that of the silent Indian chief Bromden, a kind of sacred totem come to life. In the novel, characters change shapes and forms, time stands still, the walls sprout arms that try to grab inmates as they walk by, and there are other surrealistic touches that seemed, if not impossible, at least not in synch with what Zaentz and Michael wanted, an accessible, commercial mainstream film. They eliminated the chief’s unseen narration. And they wanted to alter the war-of-the-sexes theme of the battle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched and elevate it to what they felt was a much stronger and more dramatic power struggle between the empowered nurse and her prisoner/patient—a war for justice and humanity.

  They not only wanted to deemphasize the psychedelia, they wanted McMurphy to be a less cynical symbol of freedom and creative individuality, while portraying Nurse Ratched as one of institutional (corporate) repression. All of these changes Michael discussed by phone with Kesey, whose reaction worried Michael. He told Zaentz Kesey wouldn’t go for any of it, but Zaentz told him not to worry. They would fly up to Oregon, where Kesey lived, go over their changes, and get him to agree to them. However, when they arrived at Kesey’s home, he refused to even talk to them directly. He had since hired someone to represent him, and the script talks quickly devolved into a four-way shouting match.

  Michael and Zaentz flew back to L.A. with the same version of the script they had brought with them, and with Kesey now threatening to sue. They then hired a relatively unknown screenwriter, Bo Goldman, to write an entirely new script. Goldman’s only previous screenwriting credits were for a TV remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1947 courtroom melodrama The Paradine Case, a 1956 episode of the TV series Playhouse 90, and a 1964 episode of TV’s The Defenders. Zaentz liked his style, and the price was right. They also brought in Larry Hauben to help with the rewrite.

  When Kesey heard about what was being done to his script, he threatened to publicly discredit the movie when it came out and call for a general boycott of it. Zaentz and Michael decided to pay Kesey $10,000 plus expenses and 2½ percent of the net to go away. As Zaentz knew he would, Kesey took the money and faded from the scene.

  Next, Zaentz and Michael began to look for a director, another step that proved more difficult than either had anticipated. Michael returned once more to his father’s files to see who had previously been up for the job and noticed the name Miloš Forman underlined and with cross-outs and exclamation marks. As it turned out, in 1966 Kirk had taken Anne with him on a trip to the Soviet Union and Prague, Czechoslovakia, as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Kirk loved the still-Soviet-dominated burgeoning film industry in Czechoslovakia. There was one director he especially wanted to meet, a young man by the name of Miloš Forman, who had made a name for himself in 1965 with Loves of a Blonde and was considered a leading proponent of the Czech New Wave. A year later Forman’s reputation grew international when Loves was nominated for a 1967 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.2

  Kirk, still actively looking for a director to helm Cuckoo’s Nest, asked Forman if he would be willing to read Kesey’s book and consider making a movie out of it. Forman agreed. When he returned to the States, Kirk promptly sent Forman the book, but he never heard from the director again. Offended by what he thought was the director’s rudeness, Kirk angrily crossed him off his list.

  In 1967 Forman made The Firemen’s Ball, a Czech and Italian co-production, and that film, too, was nominated by the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film.3

  Forman’s first post-Czech-liberation American film was 1971’s Taking Off, a comedy directed and co-written by Forman, John Guare, Jean-Claude Carrière, and John Klein about a group of parents whose children have run away, setting off a series of self-evaluations by the befuddled parents, who eventually turn into adult versions of their rebellious children. The film was a little late in dealing with the contentious nature of the children and parents of the sixties and did not find an audience at the box office. It wasn’t a total disaster, as it helped to further establish Forman as a director with international reach and universal appeal.

  By the time Michael approached him about directing Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman had become a bankable Hollywood director. “I met with three or four directors who held their cards very close to their chest. Miloš Forman came and sat down, opened the script on the first page and told us page by page what his vision was for the movie. You could just close your eyes and picture that movie in your head,” Michael remembers. “We wanted Forman because he is a realistic and a funny director. We knew we needed someone to handle the comedy. He has a very delicate eye: a great ability to go from humor to pathos, sometimes in
the same frame. He’s been living in the States long enough to understand the peculiarly American aspects of the book but he still has that profound Central European sensibility.” That he was a foreigner brought him closer to the sensibilities of both Zaentz and Michael, each of whom had immigrant backgrounds. As Michael remembers, he and Zaentz were so happy to have found Forman, “we turned to each other and started crying.”

  Forman added another layer to the film: that of the outsider. McMurphy is an outsider, an immigrant if you will, in the world of the prison hospital to which he is confined, a world he can never really be a part of because he is not truly insane. The notion of the outsider, or the immigrant—the foreigner—played right into Forman’s hands. Michael and Zaentz believed he could make McMurphy come alive in a way no other director could. As far as Forman was concerned, the script also evoked the political repression he had lived through: “This was a Czech movie … about a society I lived in … everything I knew.”

  All they needed now was the right actor to play McMurphy. And as far as Forman was concerned, like Zaentz, he insisted it wasn’t going to be Kirk Douglas. Michael put up a valiant fight for his father, but in the end he was outvoted by Forman and the ever-practical Zaentz. In his heart, Michael knew they were right—at fifty-seven, his father was far too old to play McMurphy.

  Michael insisted he be the one to break the bad news, knowing all too well what his father’s reaction was going to be. Sure enough, Kirk angrily blamed Michael for betraying him. Others were surprised that Michael didn’t step into the role himself. He always insisted he wasn’t a big enough star, but it is hard to turn away from the obvious conclusion that Michael didn’t want to directly compete with his father or be compared to him (or show him up). He didn’t want to read in the reviews that his McMurphy was so much better (or so much worse) than his father’s. It was bad enough that Michael had to take the role away from him; he didn’t need to be told for the rest of his father’s life how awful he was in it. He’d been through that before. He would produce and let someone else play McMurphy.