by Marc Eliot
When asked later about which Oscar meant more to him, the one for Best Film for his producing work on Cuckoo’s Nest or this one for Best Actor, he said, “They’re both hugely important to me, of course, but I guess the fact that the one for Cuckoo’s Nest came so early on in my career meant I didn’t feel I’d earned it as much as the one for Wall Street. Actually, though, I probably had a better night the time I won the Golden Globes [earlier that year] for Wall Street. I was staying in the Hotel Bel-Air”—it was the Beverly Hilton—“and as I was leaving with my mother to go to the ceremony we passed George Harrison.… [Later that night after] I won and went through the whole press thing afterwards and came out the end of it and there was nobody there … I went to Trader Vic’s for a drink [the Hilton’s legendary bar and restaurant], then went back to the hotel, kind of excited but feeling a little sorry for myself.
“Anyway, I’m in my room around 12:30 a.m. and the phone rings and it’s George Harrison saying, ‘Hello, Michael. I just got back to the hotel and my mate and I thought we’d come by and say hi.’ I was like, ‘Wow, George Harrison’s coming round!’ And a couple of minutes later, there’s a knock on my door and in he walks. Following him is the biggest dog I’ve ever seen. And following the dog was Bob Dylan. Man, that was one of the most amazing nights of my life.”
AT FORTY-THREE, eleven years after Cuckoo’s Nest swept the big four in 1976, Gordon Gekko finally gave Michael something his father had never received: a Best Actor Academy Award.
Once again, Kirk didn’t attend the awards ceremony where his son was being honored, but this time he handled it with style and class. Having just returned from a European promo tour for his latest film, Jeff Kanew’s Tough Guys, co-starring his good friend Burt Lancaster, he threw a small post-Oscar party for the entire Douglas clan at his Beverly Hills home. On this night, the patriarch of one of Hollywood’s royal families graciously deferred to his son.
Everyone was there waiting to congratulate Michael: his brother, Joel, forty-one, a successful producer who often worked with his big brother; his half brother Peter, thirty-one, the eldest son of Kirk and Anne, a voting producer of the Academy, a voice dubber on several films, and the writer/director/producer of A Tiger’s Tale (1987), starring Ann-Margret and C. Thomas Howell; and his half brother Eric, twenty-nine, the second of Kirk’s sons from his second marriage, an actor who had appeared in several small roles in films, including Michael Ritchie’s 1986 hit vehicle for Eddie Murphy, Golden Child.
When Michael and Diandra arrived, the champagne was popped, followed by hugs and kisses for all. According to someone in attendance, later that night Kirk took Michael aside and wanted to talk about, of all things, fatherhood. Kirk reportedly asked Michael what kind of father Michael thought he had been. Michael smiled and told him he was always “loopy” and uptight, never there for his family, always jumping from one picture to the other.
Kirk smiled back and said, “You mean just like you now?”
1 In an interview, Michael joked about his long association with Lansing: “I always tease, about when they used to have meetings, and she’d suggest, ‘Well, what about Michael Douglas?’ One day somebody said, ‘Can I ask you something? Are you fucking him?’ and she said, ‘No.’ ” Michael Douglas, interviewed by Fred Schruers, Rolling Stone, January 14, 1988.
2 As part of the deal, Michael was paid for the rights to Virgin Kisses.
3 Lyne had worked with Michael for about a year on Starman but didn’t direct the movie that was finally made (which Michael eventually co-produced but did not star in).
4 Misty is a lean, dark, and cynical film—Clint’s first feature-length directorial effort—dealing with a woman’s can’t-let-go obsession after a brief affair with a disk jockey who already has a girlfriend. The picture builds to a brutally violent climax. The premise proved a career-changer for Eastwood: it was made for $900,000 and earned $5 million in its initial theatrical release.
5 That year, Close and Michael were asked to present at the Oscar ceremonies. Close: “I was very pregnant at the time, and we walked out onstage together and the audience just fell apart! They started laughing! I’d forgotten that in the movie I say I am pregnant. It was a great moment.” From Stephen Galloway’s profile of Michael Douglas, Hollywood Reporter, January 23, 2004.
6 Preview audiences rejected the suicide/framed-for-murder ending as unsatisfying, and at the insistence of marketing executive Joseph Farrell, Paramount Pictures had Lyne reshoot it.
7 The other eight films are Tony Scott’s Beverly Hills Cop II ($154 million), Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam ($124 million), Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck ($80 million), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables ($76 million), Herbert Ross’s The Secret of My Success ($67 million), John Badham’s Stakeout ($66 million), Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon ($65 million), and George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick ($64 million).
8 The six nominations Fatal Attraction received were Best Picture (Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing); Best Director (Adrian Lyne); Best Actress (Glenn Close—her fourth nomination without a win); Best Supporting Actress (Anne Archer); Best Editing (Michael Kahn and Peter E. Berger); and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (James Dearden). The other four nominees for Best Actor were William Hurt, Broadcast News; Marcello Mastroianni, Nikita Mikhalkov’s Dark Eyes; Jack Nicholson, Hector Babenco’s Ironweed; and Robin Williams, Good Morning, Vietnam.
CHAPTER 14
I’m very, very lucky. I got married relatively late in life. It would have been a mess if it had happened earlier. I had the usual troubled adolescence and lots of career and personal lows in my twenties. But now I have my health. There have been no major tragedies in my life. Like I said, life’s been sort of nice this year.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
AFTER THE DOUBLE WHAMMY OF FATAL ATTRACTION and Wall Street, Hollywood rolled over on its back for Michael. Where once he was considered not strong or hot enough to carry a picture on his own, he was now being offered the leadership of three different studios, all of which he turned down. He was too smart for that game. To Michael, running a studio had to be a losing proposition on all counts, mostly for him, because it meant he would have to move back to Los Angeles permanently, and that was simply not possible if he wanted to stay married. Even though he and Diandra were hanging together by a thread and everyone seemed to know it, for the time being, at least, he was going to have to be an independent Hollywood moviemaker based in New York City.
TWO YEARS AFTER Michael joined Mercury, the partnership had not produced a single film, and in July 1988 he and Phillips announced a “revamping.” In Hollywoodese that meant that Michael had decided to withdraw from the company.1 His reason? According to Phillips, “We needed to introduce more flexibility in the [Mercury/Douglas] relationship so that Michael can pursue the opportunities he has now,” Phillips announced to the public.
Michael split from Mercury because, after carefully studying the details of the deal and the potential of the company, he decided it wasn’t going anywhere with stalled TV movies starring over-the-hill actors like John Travolta. Also, from this post-Oscar vantage point, the structure of the original deal was not right, with monies flowing the wrong way. Michael had partnered with Phillips and bought into Mercury with a percentage of rights shares from all the past films he had produced, reaching all the way back to Cuckoo’s Nest. After the split, Michael returned 3,000,000 shares of Mercury common stock, kept about half a million (equal to a 4.6 percent interest in the company), and reacquired all the production rights to his own films.
Instead of working with Mercury, Michael told Phillips, he wanted to expand his involvement in the many liberal political causes he backed. He had already done considerable fund-raising for several charities, an interest that had begun even before the consciousness awareness he had experienced making The China Syndrome, reaching all the way back to his college days. The causes and the commitment were no doubt real and meaningful to Michael, but Hollywood insiders ins
isted the real reason for the in-and-out situation was that Michael discovered early on that personally he didn’t like Phillips, or the deal, felt their chemistry didn’t match, and didn’t want to get in any deeper than he already was.
As if to underscore it was Mercury and not Michael, although he insisted to Phillips and everyone else he had no interest in making any more movies that year, Michael quickly and quietly took suite 719 at the Beverly Wilshire as his new production offices so he would not have to spend so much time flying across the country to pursue new deals. Even the ninety-minute commute to Santa Barbara, where he stayed in his house whenever he was going to be on the West Coast for more than a few days, was exhausting him.
The Beverly Wilshire appeared to be the hotel of choice for either unhappily married movie stars or perennially single ones: both Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen kept high-floor suites there. Beatty did it because he was a bachelor; McQueen said he needed office space apart from the North Malibu home he shared with his second wife, Ali MacGraw (McQueen met his next wife in the hotel’s lobby).
Not coincidentally, while Michael was in Hollywood, Jaffe and Lansing approached him about a new project, this one back at Columbia, where Dawn Steel had been elevated to its head after the studio’s former top chief, David Puttnam, had resigned. At the same time, Danny DeVito wanted Michael to star in a film DeVito was going to direct. Also, Paramount and Fox wanted him to travel to Europe to promote Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, respectively. And that May, he was scheduled to make an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival in the southeast of France. Being the ever-dutiful company man, he agreed to all of the promotion necessary for both pictures. At least part of his decision was based on his wanting to sever all remaining ties with Mercury, which was proving a long and difficult separation to effect. As he was preparing to take off for the festival, he told both Jaffe and Lansing and his friend DeVito that he would think over all their offers.
At the British premiere of Fatal Attraction, the tabloid press surrounded Michael, firing questions at him as if he were a captured criminal—not about the film or his role in it, but about the state of his marriage to Diandra, following escalating rumors they were splitting up for real this time. After one particularly obnoxious reporter got into Michael’s face, he turned the tables and asked the reporter, “How long have you been married? Do you fool around?”
The reporter declined to answer.
IT WAS IN Cannes 1988 that the cracks in his marriage, which he had so vehemently denied to the press, became visible to the public for the first time.
Her name was Loredana Romito, and she was an Italian B-movie starlet, the kind that flock to the European film festival circuit in the hopes of being discovered, or at least photographed on the Croisette, preferably in as little clothing as possible. She was officially there for the out-of-competition screening of her movie, Fatal Temptation, a cheap rip-off of Fatal Attraction in which she played the Glenn Close–type character. Some called it a satire, but it was not that good; cheap exploitation, or soft-core porn, would be was a more accurate description.
At an afterparty that both had attended, she was formally introduced to Michael. She insisted they be photographed together, and Michael graciously consented. She was squeezed into a tight, low-cut black dress, and leaned into Michael for the camera. Less than twenty-four hours later, the photo showed up in American newspapers. And in Diandra’s hands. She had declined to attend Cannes with Michael, and now here she was looking at her husband as he clutched some big-breasted actress tightly against him, his arm around her hips, a big fat grin on his face.
Romito later told the European press, and anybody else who cared, that she had had a brief two-day affair with Michael at the festival. Although Michael later denied any involvement with her, he was photographed with her again after Cannes in Paris, Rome, and later that year in Japan. After Cannes, he left by himself for Hawaii for a much-needed extended holiday.
Back home, Diandra suffered a miscarriage.
What especially galled her was how in every interview he had sat for during this period, such as the one he gave to the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1988, he talked with extra-sensitive empathy about the importance of the family unit and the added pressure women faced: “It is a very difficult time for women right now.… The women’s movement has been effective in terms of equal rights, but it puts undue pressure on women’s personal lives and takes away the art of homemaking as a valid alternative.”
Michael was reportedly devastated by the miscarriage—apparently not enough, though, to fly to her side. Instead he flew to Hollywood to sign the final dissolution papers with Mercury and to meet with Dawn Steel at Columbia and then with Sam Jaffe and Sherry Lansing about their new project. He never made it back east to see Diandra.
STEEL WAS ABLE to convince Michael to return to Columbia, the studio he had vowed never to work for again, by assuring him things would be different this time with her at the helm. David Begelman was old Hollywood; she was new—and so was Michael.
The key to the deal was Steel’s offer of a three-picture non-exclusive producing deal that did not require him to star in any of the films but allowed him to do so if he wanted. It also didn’t prohibit him from dealing separate and apart with Jaffe-Lansing. To seal the deal, Michael was made chairman of a new company, Stonebridge Productions, and given offices at Columbia’s Burbank studios and, at his insistence, a branch office in New York. Additional setup costs for the New York office ran $1 million, which Columbia was happy to pay.2 To make the deal even sweeter, Michael was allowed to take on a new partner, Rick Bieber, to handle Stonebridge’s day-to-day operations; “allowed” meaning the studio would pay for his salary. Bieber had a strong pedigree, having recently been the head of Home Box Office Pictures. However, unlike with Phillips, it was made clear that Michael was the only one in charge.
The new deal was set to start on August 1, 1988.
Meanwhile, Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe had an independent cop thriller set with Paramount they wanted Michael to star in called Black Rain, to be filmed on location in Japan; they would produce, he would act. He enthusiastically said yes, even if it meant giving up some creative control: “Acting is tunnel vision,” he said. “Producing is 360-degree vision. To do both at once is almost a contradiction in terms. To be the producer is to be part policeman, part nanny. To be the star is to be the cherished and gifted child. Producer slash actor is very awkward for people. They don’t know how to deal with you. You’ve hired everybody who does everything. You’ve signed the contracts. People don’t like to applaud the employer.… I love being an actor for hire. No one cherishes that more than I do.”
IN BLACK RAIN, two New York City police officers (Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia) capture a member of the yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicates, and have to deliver him to the Japanese police. While in Japan, the criminal escapes, and the two cops are drawn deeper into the murky nightside fringes of the Japanese underworld. It was a glossy action film, shimmery, rough, tough, neo-noir, entertaining, and utterly meaningless, set against the underbelly of Japan’s neon nightlife. To prepare himself for the role, Michael rode around with the New York police in midnight patrols and worked with a trainer to build up his body for the highly physical role of the rough and tough I-don’t-give-a-damn anti-Japanese detective Nick Conklin.
It was while filming Black Rain that Michael reconnoitered with Romito, allowing himself once again to be openly photographed with her in places and ways that did not suggest they were going to church together.
After Black Rain, Michael went directly into The War of the Roses at Fox, a film that reunited him with Kathleen Turner under the direction of his old pal Danny DeVito, the reason he had agreed to do the film. DeVito played a divorce lawyer who narrated one long argument between a couple who are in the midst of a terrible divorce but are forced to share the same house during the proceedings. The film ends, after an especially brutal battle, with a rather gruesome
dénouement. (The family is named Rose, to suggest, perhaps, the magnitude of the other War of the Roses, between the Houses of York and Lancaster in fifteenth-century England.) It was supposed to be a comedy.
The film echoes one of the staples of Hollywood in the 1940s, the tragic divorce, usually handled in comic form and with a “happy” resolution to satisfy the censors (in those days the Production Code still considered couples divorcing taboo). The best of the lot was Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Suffice it to say, DeVito is no McCarey, Kathleen Turner no Irene Dunne, and Michael no Cary Grant. And the film was truly awful. The physical comedy was stunt riddled and clunky, with overtones of Romancing the Stone—light on the romance, heavy on the stone.
It was DeVito’s second feature-length directorial effort, following his 1987’s Throw Momma from the Train. As he was much better known for his acting than for his direction, and a star nowhere near the power and box-office clout of Michael-as-producer, in order to get his films made, he also had to star in them. In Throw Momma, DeVito’s role was essential; in War of the Roses, it was superfluous. Smartly, he had gone to his two good friends Michael and Kathleen and asked them to be in the picture as a personal favor to him, but as he quickly learned, favors rarely exist in Hollywood when there is a bottom line involved. The two insisted on big salaries plus healthy percentages of the gross that pushed the production budget to $50 million, which made the film a bigger risk for Twentieth Century Fox than it had anticipated, even with (or because it had) two of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
BLACK RAIN OPENED on September 22, 1989, to mostly positive reviews. Michael Wilmington, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said, “In Black Rain director Ridley Scott and his team pump in so much pyrotechnic razzle-dazzle that the movie becomes a triumph of matter over mind. It’s a blast of pure sensation, shallow but scintillating, like a great rock melody, superbly produced, where the music pumps you up even as the lyrics drag you down.”
