As soon as I get into the Beemer with Erin, I say, “I hope you have cheeva for me.” I do a shot before we’re out of the parking lot.
I ultimately plead to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct.
Erin tells me that TMZ has posted my mug shot side-by-side with a headshot of Rachel Maddow under a headline wondering whether she is “Michael Douglas’ Son?”
* * *
—
Dad calls to say that he’s heard I’m being investigated by the DEA.
“Get out of your house immediately, they’re coming for you.”
He’s in town and staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When I get there, I see that he’s with a man I don’t recognize. Mom is here too. Uh-oh. This is their second double-team in two years.
Dad sighs.
“Jesus, Cameron, you’re dealing now? This needs to stop. What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that you guys cut me off, and before that you gave me just enough money to barely get by, and this is what’s allowed me to come back in the last few years.”
How about getting a real job? I didn’t graduate from high school. I could pump gas, but I guess my ego’s too big for that. Maybe I think I’m better than that.
The guy Dad is with extends a hand. “Earl Hightower,” he says. He explains that he’s a drug interventionist, but he’s here because he’s heard that the feds are watching me.
Dad pleads with me to get out of the country.
“This is a federal case, Dad. If they want to get me, they’ll get me anywhere. But the investigation is about crystal meth, and I’m not selling it.”
I’m not. I’m selling coke. But the jig’s up with Dad. Clearly he now knows that I’m not making a living organizing events, and I doubt he still thinks I’m taking Suboxone.
19
1998–2004: False Spring
There was a moment, after my juvenile legal troubles ended, when the future didn’t look so bad. Galen and I had been in love since I was fifteen, staying in touch by letter and phone call and seeing each other during the summers. After I got out of county jail, I moved to London with her and Jay but had trouble finding DJ work. Then I had a health scare—a painful lump on one of my balls—and flew to New York to deal with it. It turned out to be benign, an overlooked war wound from a brawl with some bouncers at a nightclub in Palma, but then I just stayed in New York, because things started going well for me.
In November 1998, Limelight, the Chelsea nightclub housed in a former Episcopal church, reopened two years after being closed by police following a grisly murder of one Club Kid by another. Amanda was in charge of booking acts, and on the strength of a Drum & Bass mixtape I gave to one of her promoters, she hired me to play in the club’s H. R. Giger Room, a VIP lounge on the third floor decorated with the Swiss artist’s phantasmagoric sculpture and furniture. D&B was huge in the U.K. but hadn’t blown up in New York yet.
At the time, I had spiked, bleached-blond, Eminem-like hair and wore saggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans and a gold chain, and Amanda didn’t seem to take me seriously when we first met. I was acting goofy, break dancing, showing off, and I went over and said: “Do you want some yayo?” Yayo was coke.
“What?”
“Do you want some yay?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”
Clearly, she didn’t party.
“I said, do you want some champagne?”
I’d learn that despite having grown up around clubs, Amanda had never done any drugs. She was only four years older than me, but she was an adult, and a responsible citizen. Maybe that’s what drew me to her. I wanted this DJ thing really bad, and I made the young, selfish move of just ignoring the relationship I was supposedly still in with Galen in London, where I’d left all my clothes as well as my best friend.
When Dad filmed Wonder Boys in Pittsburgh in 1999, he got me and my old friend John jobs as production assistants on the three-month shoot. Limelight was willing to pay my airfare to return to New York every weekend to spin at the club, which gave me a rare feeling of being valued for my talent, and fueled my sense that I was carving out a path of my own. Then Limelight hired me to play a second night and started flying me back and forth twice a week. Then I added a third night, playing house music at a Sunday gay party in the Chapel, Limelight’s second-biggest room. For John, who’d go on to become a successful film producer, the Wonder Boys gig was a step toward his dream. But my heart was in DJing. I left the production before it had wrapped, and through Amanda I picked up Saturday night at another club, the Tunnel.
Once I was back in New York full-time, living in Dad’s apartment on Central Park West, my old home, my DJ career really took off. I was playing at all the big clubs then—Tunnel, Limelight, Centro-Fly, Halo. I played 2 a.m. to closing at Spa, which made stickers with my name on them. When Galen visited from London, we saw each other, and the feelings were still there between us, but I was too attached to my professional aspirations, and by then in an unhappy relationship with Amanda that I was afraid to end. Eventually Galen got tired of waiting for me and returned to the U.K. For the first time in my life, it seemed like people were paying attention to me for something other than who my father was.
* * *
—
I was doing coke pretty much daily. It was inextricable from the club/DJ lifestyle that had me staying up all night and sleeping all day. Amanda and I moved in together, into her friend’s sublet in an apartment building on lower Fifth Avenue, but it took her a while to realize I was using. I was hiding it, and at first she attributed my all-nighters to my having a lot of energy. But as she realized what was going on, we started fighting about it.
“Don’t knock what you haven’t tried.”
“Well, only losers do drugs.”
“Really? What’s going on in your life that’s so great?”
Soon she was doing coke with me. She took to it, and would go on multiday benders. Our relationship was stagnant, and the coke made Amanda more sexual. But the whole thing felt awkward, something she was doing in order to connect with me but which wasn’t true to who she was. And I was being manipulative: her doing coke made it okay for me to keep doing coke.
I still felt in control, despite the occasional hiccup. In October 1999, I lent my car to a coke-dealer friend who was under police surveillance. When he returned the car to me, outside of the Fifth Avenue building, I was arrested in the lobby and charged with possession. It was the first time I’d been arrested in New York City and led to my first experience with the New York Post: “Michael Douglas’ Son in Coke Arrest.”
Amanda called the lawyer Ben Brafman, whom she knew, to represent me, and he said: “Boy, did you luck out.” The Post could be unpredictable in its cover choices, but the Yankees had won the World Series the night before, so my bust ended up buried inside the paper. It was embarrassing, and Amanda was horrified, and Mom and Dad were worried, but Amanda and I placated them.
My relationship with Dad was filled with unspoken tensions. Pappy had created a trust for each of his grandchildren, and on my twenty-first birthday I was supposed to come into mine. But Dad would use my arrest, two months before I’d gain access to the money, to convince me to sign over control of it to him. Dad was such a monumental figure to me that he held major sway over my life. At the same time, I chafed at his hypocrisies. One day, when he was researching his part in Traffic, in which he’d play a judge whose daughter was an addict, he asked me: “So, what’s it like?”
* * *
—
Amanda and I moved to an apartment in a loft building on West Thirty-Seventh Street called the Glass Farmhouse. Every now and then, something would happen to remind me of the hazards of the path I was on. One night in 2000, I got a call from the sister of my old friend Paul from Santa Barbara. There was panic in her voice.
“It’s Paul,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. His lips are turning blue!”
Why is she calling me first? “Call a fucking ambu
lance!”
She hung up and called back a few minutes later.
“The ambulance is on its way, but he’s not waking up.”
The next day, another friend of ours called to say that Paul had died. I knew I should be sad and upset, and I acted as if I was, and on some level I must have been, but I didn’t really feel anything. I wondered why that was. It worried me. But that was what having a drug addiction did for me, taking the bite out of everything else by substituting its own rote mood patterns for the vagaries of authentic emotion. It might be ugly, but it was predictable. That was its allure.
* * *
—
When Dad married Catherine in November 2000, he asked me to be his best man. It made me so happy. The whole thing was planned with the precision of a film production. At the post-ceremony dinner, I would be third in line to give a toast. I intended to write something the night before, but then I stayed out partying and never got around to it. All right. I’d speak from the heart and trust that I’d land on my feet. But a couple of hours before the wedding, I started getting nervous. I was in my room at the Plaza, and the only paper I could find was a receipt roll. I started writing out a toast, which grew longer and longer. I planned to unscroll the paper as I read it.
Then, at the dinner, the two people who gave toasts before me spoke off the cuff. Both were practiced public speakers, including Catherine’s maid of honor, Anna Walker, a British television personality. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t follow them by reading my chicken scratch off a receipt roll. Instead, I got up and just spoke from the heart. It was a clutch moment, addressing a crowd of three hundred people who included some of the biggest personalities out there—Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Stone, Steven Spielberg—all quietly waiting to hear what I had to say. I felt pretty loose, and it went really well. I got some laughs. I made Dad proud.
* * *
—
If I’d been inclined to acknowledge it, there was no shortage of evidence that coke was taking a toll on my life. I played a private party at MAGIC, the clothing trade show in Las Vegas. The next night, I was supposed to play at Avalon, a club in Boston, but I didn’t want to interrupt my partying, so I sent my friend Serebe to handle the technical DJing, and Jay to pretend he was me. Then I took my $8,000 payment from the MAGIC gig and played blackjack at a casino; up $16,000, I bet the whole $24,000 on a single hand, which I lost. The episode ended with Curtis and me doing mushrooms, flying back to L.A., and emptying the pool at the downtown Standard of other guests when we jumped in naked.
* * *
—
Then my friend Isaac, who was getting married to Carmina, a girl I’d gone to high school with, asked me to be his best man. I was honored. The wedding was in Santa Barbara, and I flew out from New York with Abby, a sweetheart who joined me at the last minute. I went to the rehearsal. But on the wedding day, I was on a coke bender and too paranoid to leave Mom’s house and go to the ceremony. Instead, I sat in my room all afternoon, my head in my hands, looking at my watch in turmoil, hating myself, struggling to grasp my inaction as the phone kept ringing, and I kept not answering it.
Eventually, when it was too late, I called and apologized profusely. Isaac wasn’t mean about it, but I knew Carmina was really upset. I was eaten up about my failure to show. I was so ashamed. This was the first time I thought that maybe I did have a drug problem.
* * *
—
I was already realizing that I didn’t want to be with Amanda long-term. I depended on her in a number of ways. I was afraid that without her, my career would fall apart; she was my executive function, guiding me in every decision, making sure I was booking jobs and following through. She was my emotional anchor, too.
At the same time, I was miserable, resenting her and cheating on her. This yielded predictable results. When I’d stay out all night and get home late the next morning, having ignored repeated calls to my cell from Amanda, she’d hit me and slap me and scratch me. Sometimes she did it in public. I didn’t know how to handle her violence other than to grab her and hold her until she stopped.
Occasionally, I’d work up the nerve to break up with her, only to become unmoored when she was gone and beg her to come back. Once, to convince her of my sincerity, I put out a cigarette on my chest, over my heart.
Four years into the relationship, I hated her, mainly because I also loved her and hated myself—for lacking the courage to break up with her and for constantly lying to her and for unfairly letting her keep believing we were going to be together forever. I was so afraid to break up with her that over the next year I kept psyching myself up to say something. Every time I hugged her, I told myself, “I can’t stand this woman, I can’t be with her.”
* * *
—
My fights with Amanda had gotten so bad that after I came home at seven one morning, and we had another screaming confrontation, she convinced Mom and Dad, and even me, that I’d reached some kind of bottom and needed to go to rehab.
Dad also made rehab a condition of my being considered for a role in a film he was going to do with Pappy. For years, they’d talked about making a movie together, and one was finally coming together. A Few Good Years was a comedic drama that echoed some of Dad’s personal history, focusing on a middle-aged son struggling to escape the shadow of his successful but neglectful father. Dad, trying to steer me away from the club scene, mentioned that there might be a part in it for me.
I spent a month at Crossroads, the drug treatment center started by Eric Clapton on Antigua. It would have been a great place to get sober long-term, had I wanted to get sober long-term. Instead, I played a lot of beach volleyball, had a fling with a starlet who was also in rehab, and let my nose take a break from drugs, knowing I’d soon go back to my normal routine.
When I came back from Crossroads, I auditioned for the role in A Few Good Years. Other actors, including Casey Affleck, read for the part, but it was obviously mine to lose, given that this was a Douglas family affair. Granny, with whom Pappy was still very friendly, was cast as his wife in the movie too.
Then I went to Japan to tour as a DJ, and at a club gig in Osaka I ended up smoking crystal and eating mushrooms. I was over there when I got a call to let me know I had the part. I was thrilled, but I can’t say that I fully appreciated my position of privilege. Instead of simply being grateful and humbled by my great luck, I saw any acting opportunities that came my way through the narrow prism of my family. Pappy had done a lot for Dad. I felt that I was entitled to as much, if not more. Dad owed me.
Having had thirty days of clarity during my rehab, and with a surge of confidence from being cast in A Few Good Years, when I got back to New York I found the courage to finally end things with Amanda. We’d been together for nearly five years. She deserved to move on with her life. I deserved not to feel like a piece of shit. She moved out of our apartment on Thirty-Seventh Street.
I vowed never to put myself in that position again. I would never have a girlfriend. Even as I was making this vow, the post-breakup dysfunction with Amanda, which would go on for years, was already beginning.
* * *
—
Making the movie, which was eventually released as It Runs in the Family, was an amazing experience. During the two-month shoot in New York in the spring of 2002, I learned so much watching Dad and Pappy work—about acting, of course, but also how to carry yourself and interact with coworkers and treat people. In one scene, the three of us were jammed together fishing from a little boat in the middle of a lake. It felt so good to be their colleague, and to feel their pride, and to spend so much time together.
Doing well on the movie was a priority, but there was a day when I hadn’t slept and had to do a scene in which my character was late to pick up his grandmother from her dialysis at the hospital and felt guilty. It was a demanding scene, calling for a wide range of emotions. I was nervous that this would be the moment when I was revealed as a fraud who couldn’t perfo
rm and was wasting everyone’s time. Instead I sailed through, and for the first time in my life I began to think of acting as a real option for me.
* * *
—
In the years since I’d left California, when I was eighteen, my relationship with Mom had been off-and-on. She was still cultivating drama with men. On Mallorca, once a year, we threw a full-moon party at S’Estaca and attended a second one at Son Marroig, another mansion that had belonged to a Habsburg. One year, when Mom was dating Sacha Newley, the son of Joan Collins, Sacha came over to me, upset because Mom seemed to be ignoring him while flirting with another guy by the fire. I went over and told the guy, “This is my mother; she’s spoken for,” and then said to Mom, nodding toward Sacha, “C’mon, you’ve got this guy over here, who you brought to Spain.”
I don’t recall Mom’s response on that occasion, but I think she always appreciated that I was protective of her and willing to set clear boundaries with grown men. I think it made her feel loved and cared for.
Another time at S’Estaca, Mom and I got into an argument in front of one of her gentlemen friends, who stepped in and said I needed to not speak to her that way. We were standing on a pier.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Mom told him, trying to lower the temperature. She knew which way this was headed.
The guy edged forward on the pier until he was in my face, and I threw him into the water. I said, “Don’t ever get between me and my mother again.” By the time I was making It Runs in the Family, Mom was consumed by her relationship with Zack Bacon.
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