by Kirk Douglas
I took all my awards and transcripts with me. Dean Hewlitt interviewed me and took a chance on this insolvent applicant reeking of manure from our last hitch on a fertilizer truck. Today the Dean Hewlitt Building on campus sits directly across from the Kirk Douglas Building. I have never forgotten my debt to the university and to the man responsible for my being there. For many years now I have funded full scholarships for minority students; I feel good to be giving them the chance I had.
I found acceptance at St. Lawrence despite some blatant examples of anti-Semitism. The top fraternity wanted to pledge me when they thought I was Polish. The invitation went away when they discovered I was a Jew. I was elected class president, a really big deal, at the end of junior year. Rich alumni threatened to cancel their checks if the Jew took office. Once again, Dean Hewlitt championed me. I was what they called a BMOC (Big Man on Campus)—class president, undefeated star of the varsity wrestling team, president of the Mummers Club, president of the German Club. I had no trouble getting dates with the most popular coeds.
Meanwhile, my mother and sisters had moved to another house. Pa remained alone on Eagle Street. After my sophomore year, I went to Amsterdam to see them before starting my summer job, wrestling for money in a carnival. I stopped first to say hello to Louise Livingston and to Pa. He was surprised to see me walk in the house. He put down the garlic and herring he was eating; he served me a piece with a glass of vodka. We ate in silence. Then he beckoned me to join him as he headed to his regular haunts. I was thrilled. It was the dream of my childhood to be initiated into his world. By the time he delivered me to Ma hours later, I was drunk and disoriented. She cursed Pa in Yiddish when she saw the state I was in. She worried I would follow in his footsteps.
As I became more and more fixated on being an actor, I spent the next summers at the Tamarack Playhouse on Lake Pleasant in the Adirondacks. I was a stagehand, but pushed to get onstage. I started with a few small parts, with a promise of bigger ones to come.
At first I was billed as Isadore Demsky. “That won’t do,” said my new friends Karl and Mona Malden. “That’s not a proper name for an actor.” Karl had started out as Mladen Sekulovich in the steel town of Gary, Indiana. One boozy night, Karl and Mona convened a group of us in their cabin to look for my new name. I emerged hours later, reborn as Kirk Douglas. It was 1939. A man named Adolph Hitler was sending German armies to conquer countries in Europe. I only wanted to conquer Broadway.
I knew I needed more training and was accepted at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. I made some lasting friendships there. One was Betty Bacall, a stunning seventeen-year-old who had a crush on me. Another was Diana Dill, who was always telling Betty to forget about me.
Betty was renamed Lauren when Howard Hawks brought her to Hollywood to star in To Have and Have Not. And Diana married me after I joined the navy in 1942. We became swept up in the romance of wartime and the fear that I might die in combat.
After four months of training at Notre Dame midshipmen’s school, I was assigned to PC1139, an antisubmarine patrol craft, as a communications officer. I looked great in my dress uniform, but nothing else about my service was distinguished. With a green crew and a captain who had never been to sea, we were one of the most incompetent ships in the navy. Our first time out of port in New Orleans, we backed into another ship and almost sank it. Then, on our first sighting of a Japanese submarine in the Pacific, a nervous sailor released a depth charge instead of a depth charge marker and blew us up. I was bruised and had internal injuries. Then I became deathly ill with severe cramps and a high fever which turned out to be amoebic dysentery. At the San Diego Naval Hospital, I was an inpatient and then an outpatient for several months prior to my honorable discharge in June 1944.
Kirk (left) in Tamarack Playhouse production George Washington Slept Here
Young naval officer in peak shape for war
Before leaving for New York, I was surprised to find out that Lauren Bacall was in Los Angeles. We met for dinner. Betty was still filming To Have and Have Not and was living with her costar, Humphrey Bogart. She told Bogie to take me along to the studio the next morning. I was very impressed as I watched him on set, and he couldn’t have been more charming to me.
But doing live theater was still my goal. I got good roles in a lot of bad plays, so I readily accepted producer Hal Wallis’s offer to costar with Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. He came to see me in The Wind Is Ninety after Lauren Bacall, now the toast of Hollywood, told him I was a great actor who was getting rave reviews. Betty was my first agent—and I didn’t have to pay her a commission.
That’s how I moved west and became a movie star. Diana and I had two sons—Michael and Joel—by the time we divorced and she returned to New York. I worked and played hard and enjoyed liaisons with some of the golden age’s brightest stars, among them Marlene Dietrich and Gene Tierney, as well as a beautiful oil heiress named Irene Wrightsman. Then, I fell in love with a young Italian actress, Pier Angeli, when we were trapeze artists in a film called The Story of Three Loves.
With my family to support and taxes under Eisenhower sky-high, I took my lawyer Sam Norton’s advice to make films abroad for the next eighteen months. One of them was Act of Love, where I met Anne Buydens. Her story is more dramatic than mine. I’ll let her tell it to you.
ANNE:
Kirk was already a famous star when I met him in Paris in 1953. His acting career had taken off in Hollywood, and he had earned Oscar nominations for two of his memorable roles, first in Champion and a few years later in The Bad and the Beautiful.
When Kirk came to Europe to star in Act of Love, I had already turned down Anatole Litvak, the director of the film, to do publicity for it. I went to America instead for the premiere of John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. I had worked closely with the flamboyant director as a location scout and assistant for more than a year and was thrilled to be going to Hollywood. It was a dream come true. Crossing the Atlantic by ship, I saw my first Kirk Douglas film, The Big Trees. I was not impressed. I could not have imagined that within a few months of seeing it, I would meet Kirk and embark on the fascinating relationship that would lead to our happy marriage of sixty-plus years.
Kirk and I could not have come from two more different worlds. He was a poor American boy from a tiny town in upstate New York, speaking only Yiddish until he entered school. In contrast, I was born to Siegfried and Paula Michelle Marx in Hannover, Germany, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the country. We were rich and well-traveled. By the time I was in boarding school in Switzerland, I could speak German, French, and English.
My parents named me Hannelore but called me Peter because they had wanted a boy. When I was three, my English governess—whom I hated—took me to the barber for a haircut. “Cut Peter’s hair,” she said. He obliged, snipping away my bountiful blonde curls and leaving me with a boy’s cut, close to my scalp. Some traumas you never forget. This was my earliest.
Kirk adored his mother, Bryna, who loved him unconditionally. He was largely ignored by his father. My relationship with my parents was just the opposite. My beautiful mother, who was very social, didn’t take much interest in my daily life. On the other hand, my father wanted to know all about my everyday activities. He bought us a special little blue book where we exchanged little notes on the days when he worked late hours and came home past my bedtime. I would leave him a note about my day. In the morning I would immediately look to see what he had written back.
By the time I was four or five, Papa would talk to me about business. He owned large textile stores in the city. He also was the exclusive importer of an unusually strong silk which the government bought to make parachutes. I took our talks very seriously and was thrilled when he would take me along to visit the shops. One of the sales girls, Trude, made a big fuss over me. She made us matching “friendship bows” to wear on our clothes. I thought she was wonderful.
Anne’s parents: Paula Mich
elle (in Switzerland) and Siegfried Marx
We lived in a spacious three-story house in a beautiful neighborhood surrounded by woods. My sister Ingeborg and I shared the third floor, along with whichever governess we hadn’t yet tortured into quitting. But we both liked Trulla, who was more like an older friend. She taught us manners and how to dress and kept us from fighting with each other. Inge was six years my senior. She took after my mother both in looks and her love of luxurious things. I was more like my father.
Kirk was one of seven kids. While he shared a bed with his oldest sister until he was old enough to sleep on the living room couch, Inge and I had spacious bedrooms, a large playroom, and a bathroom with a toilet and two sinks in our private domain. Once a week, Trulla took us for a bath in my mother’s rooms on the second floor. She had the most wonderful bathtub. My mother had exquisite taste and the funds to indulge in the best of the best. I remember the streamlined Packard convertible she drove to her many social engagements.
On Wednesday evenings, my parents entertained at home. All day the household staff—the cook Itze, the laundress, the maids—would prepare for the party. Then decorators came in. I liked to sit at the top of the stairs to watch the guests arrive.
That was before my parents divorced. My mother bought a house in Switzerland and kept a chic apartment in Berlin. Inge was in the Swiss boarding school, which I would also attend within a few years. I didn’t miss them. I had the ones I truly loved, my father and Trulla, in the house.
My relationship with my father was very important and had a lasting effect on my life. Honesty was paramount to him. Once I told a lie and he paddled me on the behind. I never told another one. I felt I had to live up to his very high standards.
I was content with my life. My father would go on business trips, but Trulla and I always had fun and I was also going to the little local school. Then, suddenly, things changed. I have vivid memories of the day it happened. I was so happy. Papa was coming back from his latest trip. Something was odd. No one said anything to me, but with my ears open I could hear the servants saying, “The poor girl. The poor girl.”
Hannelore (Anne), age four, on holiday by the sea
As usual, I was waiting for Papa by the steps that led from the main floor to the entrance. When I heard the car pull up, I flew down the six stairs to throw myself in his arms. Instead, he stood there with his arm around my friend Trude from the store. The first words out of his mouth were, “Meet your new mother.”
I was shocked. I turned around and ran up to the third floor and cried my heart out. Nobody came to console me except Trulla. From that moment my ability to trust was damaged. My father was the man I believed in totally, and he disappointed me completely. Our relationship was never the same because he had lied about Trude and about his business trip. I now felt that, no, you cannot trust anybody.
Kirk and I, once again, are opposites in this. He is all trust, and I am all verify. Over the years, I have suspected some of his closest associates of taking advantage of him. Sadly, I have always been right. Perhaps that’s one good thing that came out of my experience with my father.
From then until I went to school in Switzerland, I shuttled between my mother and father. In my mother’s elegant Berlin apartment, there was only one bedroom, so I slept on a divan in her dressing room. There was always a man in her life, and at one point she married a Swiss citizen. I don’t think it was a love match and it didn’t last long.
I was relieved to be boarding with different children from many countries. I spoke in three languages and learned to get along in any situation. That independence helped me to survive when the privileged world of my childhood disappeared in a world engulfed by war.
My father’s marriage to Trude didn’t last. Nor did his life in Germany. He moved to Switzerland, too, enjoying its neutrality and the money he had prudently placed in one of the banks. Inge had gone on from her Swiss finishing school to become a journalist, writing society gossip for magazines. I didn’t see her much.
Although both my mother and father were now in Switzerland, I would visit them separately. During this time, their best friends from Hannover, two brothers named Wallach, decided to move to neutral Belgium. They were taking their young niece with them, a girl about my age. My father readily agreed that I should go along as her companion. I was so used to being shunted around that I was happy for a new adventure.
I lived comfortably with the well-to-do Wallachs until I was fifteen and they left for America, just ahead of the German invasion. Now that the Nazis had conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia, it was only a matter of time before we were next. In May of 1940 the bombs started falling in Brussels.
It was time to get out of Belgium. I left with my friend Albert Buydens and his older brother Leon, a prominent attorney, and another lawyer. There were four of us in the car. We would cross the border into France and meet Leon’s wife and the rest of her family in La Baule. The plan was to drive down to Hossegor, a little town just before the Spanish border, where the grandmother of Leon’s wife owned a house.
It was chaos on the roads. We weren’t the only ones trying to escape. But I was the only one with German papers, which put all of us in danger. When the survival instinct kicks in, you find in yourself a bravery you could never have imagined. Three times at the Belgian and French borders, I shuffled the passports back and forth so deftly the guards never caught on that mine wasn’t among them. Once we got to Bordeaux, Leon suggested Albert and I marry to alleviate the problem. It was only to be for a year, and then we would divorce. But the German Army arrived just after we did, and it was just weeks later that the whole of France surrendered. It was no time to be alone in the world, and I was grateful to be with Albert and his family. I was now Anne Laure Buydens, a Belgian national.
For a brief time we thought of crossing into Spain, but the grandmother was not well enough to become a refugee. It would be better, we decided, to sit out the war in Paris, where the family owned property. But how would we get there? To travel, we needed official permits. And only the army had gas.
I had had a prior experience with the German general of the region, who was a decent man. One of the soldiers in his command had raped the grandmother’s maid in the woods, and Grandmama insisted I demand his punishment. The general convened a hearing. When the soldier admitted the act, the officer stripped him of his rank and medals.
He wanted to personally apologize to the grandmother.
“What can I bring her?” he asked me.
“She really needs lettuce for her turtle,” I said.
Within hours, he came to call, a large case of green lettuce in his arms. Now I was counting on that spirit of generosity to help us leave Hossegor.
I drove one of the cars, perilously low on petrol, to his headquarters. I explained that we had three vehicles, a great deal of family, plus the maid, a bird, and the well-fed turtle to transport to Paris. Could he give us the proper documents, and could we have enough gas to get there safely? He gallantly filled up the tank in my car, wrote out the travel passes, and had some soldiers load huge jerry cans of fuel into the backseat. We had more than enough for the trip. We reached Paris a few days before the Nazis occupied the city. Until the Allies liberated us four years later, we survived as best we could, trying not to break any of the myriad rules imposed on residents. It was a surreal existence in the midst of privation, fear, and snatches of normalcy.
Here is what I remember: you could recognize the officials and soldiers if they wore uniforms, but there were spies and undercover agents all around. Once again, I thanked my father for inadvertently teaching me to be suspicious of everyone. There were also French citizens who were anxious to be on good terms with the Germans or who sympathized with Nazi beliefs. They could accuse anyone. I learned firsthand how this worked when my cleaning lady denounced me to the Gestapo as a spy. She found all these papers. They looked like code. Every other word was no, maybe, tomorrow. There were figures on them she thought was
a timetable.
At five o’clock in the morning, I was picked up and taken off to be interrogated. I sat in front of the stern German officer, scared to death because I didn’t know why I was there.
“Who are you working for?” he asked.
“A company.”
“No, I mean, who are you really working for?”
“Sonor Pictures.”
Luckily, I could speak German to him directly, without a translator putting a spin on my words. I explained I was in the movie business. Sonor Pictures was an English company that was selling French and foreign movies. I worked for their representative in Paris, writing German subtitles. The Occupation had a restriction that any movie not in German had to be subtitled. I was an absolute beginner who spoke and wrote the languages fluently, so I was well qualified in that sense. But I was poorly equipped for the rest of it. I didn’t know how to type. I didn’t know how to sit alone in a projection room with a stopwatch. I was taught just the basics: you have so much time for the subtitles in this scene. If somebody is just yawning, you write nothing. That sort of thing—tricks of the trade.
It was actually terribly difficult, especially for someone inexperienced. I worked at least ten hours a day. I had wonderful movies to look at, except I had to stop after each scene, write down the few words of description, and then go on to the next. I had taken my work home. The cleaning lady looked at it and rushed off to police headquarters instead of asking me for an explanation.
I was young. I was pretty. I spoke German. I went home. Others who were falsely accused were not so lucky.
So that was the atmosphere—suspicion and fear. Those feelings stay with you even when the danger is over. I lived among people who were as guarded as I was. Everyone was assumed to have a secret. Finding it out was a potent weapon and might help you survive.
