You might think that Michael Douglas had it easy on the way to becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable film stars. After all, he was born into movie royalty as the son of Kirk Douglas, though his father’s background was far from regal: Kirk’s birth name was Issur Danielovitch Demsky, and he was the son of an alcoholic Russian Jewish ragman in upstate New York.
Michael’s mother, the actress Diana Love Dill, married Kirk in 1943, the ceremony carried out by a naval chaplain as Kirk was serving in the US navy. They were also married by a rabbi and agreed to bring up their children as Jewish. “Dad quietly assured Mom that they could ignore that part,” writes Michael and ignore it they clearly did, as Michael makes no reference to any Jewish upbringing in his fascinating memoir.
On his first visit to Israel, in 1965, where Kirk was making a movie, Michael, then 21, was driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and picked up a hitchhiker, “a beautiful, olive-skinned black-haired Israeli soldier with a long rifle slung over her back… Well, one thing led to another and we had a fling. It was incredible.” This is a recurring story throughout this highly entertaining book.
Like father, like son. Michael’s mother divorced Kirk in 1950, mainly because of his constant unfaithfulness, and Michael and his younger brother Joel lived with her in Connecticut while Kirk became a world-famous star in Hollywood, playing a succession of massive roles perhaps most notably the rebel slave Spartacus.
But Kirk’s shadow lay long over his elder son and a constant theme of the book is Michael’s attempt to get out from under it and make a success of his own life in the movies.
Kirk wanted him to be a lawyer but Michael fell in love with the movies on his holiday visits to his father when he would watch him on set, be given small jobs and inhale the intoxicating aroma of the film world.
His first ambition, understandably, was to be an actor but he suffered severe stage fright, vomiting before every performance as he tried to build a theatre career. His father helped him into the movies but his first five bombed and, as Douglas himself puts it, “the phone didn’t ring. The silence was the judgment.”
His salvation was the long-running TV series The Streets of San Francisco, where he played the young cop to Karl Malden’s older, wiser detective.
But initial movie success came as a producer. Kirk had bought the rights to the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, always visualising himself as playing the central figure, the free-spirited McMurphy. No studio wanted to touch it until Michael asked if he could try to get it made. He did so with huge success, winning the Best Movie Oscar, but alienating his father for decades by casting Jack Nicholson in the main role instead.
It’s an almost biblical tale of the son finally making his name by (metaphorically) killing off the father. More success as a producer came with The China Syndrome and Romancing the Stone, in which he also co-starred with Kathleen Turner, with whom, inevitably, he had an affair that lasted until his wife Diandra turned up on the set in Mexico.
The movie did nothing for his marriage but finally established him as a major movie star and he went on to worldwide fame with some of the most controversial films of their era, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street and, perhaps the most notorious, Basic Instinct, whose sex scenes had it rated in the same category as hardcore pornography until the frankest encounters were toned down.
Douglas’s detailed and revealing accounts of the making of his movies, whether as producer or actor, will be of interest to both film buffs and the general reader. He is honest too about the cocaine and booze habit that nearly derailed his career and which was mirrored in the life of his son Cameron, who served seven years in prison as a result.
His second marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones clearly provided later-life serenity (with one admitted blip) and two well-adjusted-sounding children, helped by Douglas taking a back seat to her career and bringing them up in the old-fashioned peace of Bermuda rather than the hothouse of Hollywood.
And though Michael appears to remain untouched by religious belief, he reveals that his son Dylan had a barmitzvah while Kirk, who died in 2020, turned to Torah study in his old age.
One Helluva Ride, by Michael Douglas, is published by Headline
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