by Marc Eliot
When the picture was finished, Diana enrolled the boys in public school in Westwood. Michael was placed in Emerson Junior High School, a far cry from the privileged halls of Allen-Stevenson. Joel went to Bellagio Road Elementary in Westwood. Because of the differences between New York private schools and California public schools, ten-year-old Michael was jumped into the seventh grade, placing him alongside thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys and girls. It was the first time he had gone to school with girls. He felt awkward and shy among the older L.A. kids until one girl gave him his initial taste of the joys of coeducation. Michael remembered it this way: “The first girl I ever kissed had her mouth wide open!”
That part was great, less so the proliferation of Hollywood gangs that had begun to infiltrate Emerson and set up factions that ruled the hallways, something that Michael, a pampered product of East Coast private schools, had no prior experience with. When he complained to his mother that the gangs scared him, she immediately pulled him from Emerson and enrolled him in what was considered at the time the best private school in California, the Los Angeles Black-Foxe Military Institute. Michael felt relieved, even if it was an all-boys school.
IN 1955, AFTER the commercial success of The Indian Fighter, Kirk was able to produce his second feature. But that’s not all he produced that year. On November 23, 1955, Anne gave birth to a baby boy, Peter Vincent. The child was given his middle name after the talented and tortured painter Vincent Van Gogh, whom Kirk had brilliantly portrayed in Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, Kirk’s newest smash-hit Bryna production.
Both Anne and Diana worked hard to make sure the boys understood that Peter was their new brother. Surprisingly, Michael seemed easier with it than Joel. The younger boy was having problems at Bellagio and continually ran out of his classrooms and all the way back to his mother’s small rented house nearby. Diana decided that it was Joel’s turn to see a psychiatrist.
After several visits, Joel was diagnosed as mildly dyslexic, which manifested in uncontrollable behavior such as running away. This was intensified by the sibling rivalry reinvigorated by the arrival of Peter Vincent.
AT THE SAME TIME, Diana and Bill, who had been communicating by phone, agreed to put an end to their separation by marrying. They set the date for December 1956 so that Diana could take the full year’s tax benefits from her alimony and child support. The alimony would end, of course, on her wedding day, but the $540 a month Kirk paid for child support would continue.
It was a happy time for her but signaled yet another major disruption for the boys. Diana agreed to give up her movie career and move back east with them to a new place Bill had decided to buy, a nineteenth-century farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut. Joel, especially, had difficulty adjusting to the new surroundings. Not long after they moved in, he kept calling for glasses of water at night during what proved to be the most inopportune times for the newlyweds. Diana decided to hire a tutor rather than have Joel try to adapt to another new school. Bill had another, simpler solution: he believed that anything that was wrong with the boy could be fixed by getting him a dog.
Bill also resisted dealing with Michael in any but the most basic, nonthreatening ways. Michael had entered puberty around the time of that first kiss, and his interest in girls had since exploded. Diana pleaded with Bill to explain the birds and the bees to him, as his real father was three thousand miles away making a movie and there was no one else. Bill reluctantly agreed; he asked Diana to fix him a strong scotch, then braced himself for what was to come, and sat down by the fireplace with Michael. What was awkward at first soon turned into an elbow-sticking, roaring hell of a good time, the two of them emerging from the sex education chamber laughing out loud, arms entwined. Mission accomplished.
When it was Joel’s turn, a year or two later, he had a much more difficult time with “the talk,” and did not emerge from it with so much as a trace of any one-of-the-boys camaraderie. Shortly after, Joel had what amounted to something between a breakdown and an extended anxiety attack that required a brief hospitalization.
MICHAEL, MEANWHILE, having hurdled over the awkward stages of puberty, became a prince among princes at the coed junior high school in Westport. All the girls loved him, and he enthusiastically loved them all back. He lost his virginity with “I think it was somebody older … as hard as guys that age are trying to get it and it doesn’t seem possible—there are those girls who just make a decision. No romancing, you know; they just make a decision they’re gonna go for it. And there are a few surprised guys.” Diana fretted about how her “skinny little fourteen-year-old [had become the neighborhood teenage] Lothario.”
Michael went on to attend Choate Rosemary Hall, a private high school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he participated in football, basketball, track, wrestling, weight training, the dance committee (he was chairman), the art club, and the auto club (he was president)—everything and anything except activities related to dramatics.
KIRK, MEANWHILE, was making some of the best, if most controversial, films of his career. In 1957 he hired a still largely unknown Stanley Kubrick to write and direct a new Bryna project, Paths of Glory, which would become one of the most blistering and least commercial antiwar movies ever made. For his next project, Kirk wisely picked an entertaining, noncontroversial big-budget action-adventure picture called The Vikings, directed by Richard Fleischer.
That same year, following The Vikings, Kirk chose to make Spartacus, his mighty film adaptation of Howard Fast’s controversial story of a pre-Christian slave who led an uprising that nearly brought down the republic. Spartacus took three long, hard years to make, and all of Kirk’s time, energy and attention. Later he would quip that the film “took more time than the real-life Spartacus spent waging war against the Roman Empire.”
Kirk saw very little of his children during those years. He missed all of the emotional difficulties the overweight Joel was having, and how Michael was slowly turning into a new, younger version of himself. If Joel’s problems stemmed from his inability to adjust to the absence of his real father and the presence of a new one, Michael went around telling anyone who would listen that his father was Spartacus.
SEVENTEEN MONTHS after Kirk had finished filming Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Walt Disney Studios, he brought the boys out to Hollywood and accepted Walt Disney’s invitation to bring them to his house, where Disney took some home movies of Kirk and the boys riding the backyard train. It was considered a privilege to be invited to Disney’s home and even more special to get to ride his train. However, when Disney ran the footage as part of his weekly TV show, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, Kirk wrote Disney an angry letter demanding that he never again exploit his family in that way. It was Kirk’s understanding that the films had been made for Disney’s home use and not for any personal gain, he wrote, and he had not given Disney the right to use footage of his children and himself as part of that week’s episode. Walt was apologetic and promised Kirk it would never happen again.
Two months later the show was rebroadcast, with the train-riding footage intact. Kirk, now furious, decided to sue Walt Disney, but just as the case was about to go to trial, he withdrew the suit. In a famous moment, Kirk shrugged and told the press, “You can’t sue God.”
Those two TV broadcasts mark the first television appearance of eleven-year-old Michael Douglas.
IN 1958, ANNE gave birth to another child, Eric Anthony, completing a second set of sons for Kirk. Peter and Eric would grow up under the same roof as their famous father but ultimately would not be able to get any closer to him emotionally than either Michael or Joel. Nor would they bond especially well with their half brothers. Each set tended to orbit within the universe of their respective mothers.
BY THE TIME Michael graduated from high school, his mother and stepfather had long been on a campaign to convince him to attend Yale, where he somehow was accepted despite considerably less than Ivy League–level grades.
But he had a different plan. He wanted to head back to the West Coast, to attend the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a lovely coastal town about a hundred miles north of Hollywood. He had discovered through the promotional brochures he had received from the university that the ratio of female students to male students there was four to one.
1 The boys’ footage did not make it into the film’s final cut.
A publicity still from Michael’s TV series The Streets of San Francisco.
REBEL ROAD ARCHIVES
CHAPTER 4
I think having a famous father was a pain in the ass for him.… Michael, of all my four sons, had the least ambition.
—KIRK DOUGLAS
IN THE FALL OF 1963, UCSB WELCOMED NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD English major Michael with open arms and loving, bikini-clad coeds. Music filled the air alongside the pungent clouds of pot smoke and other assorted social accessories of physical pleasure that filled this campus-by-the-sea, reassuring Michael he had made the right decision.
Not long after classes began, his frequent communiqués home to his mother were filled with descriptions of his great new life, lots about the weather, the ocean, and of course much about the girls, but hardly any news of his academic achievements. A red flag went up for Diana when Michael wrote to say he was moving in with a girl, but not to worry because they were still going to date other people.
It was, indeed, that now-fabled dawning of the age of Aquarius, and everyone under twenty-five wanted entrée to the anything-goes Youth Club of America. And at UCSB Michael stood at the head of the line. He let his hair grow long, wore dirty ripped jeans and tie-dyed shirts, was having far too much fun enjoying himself with the pleasures of excess, and missed most of his classes.
By the end of his first year, Diana and Kirk each received letters from the dean regarding Michael’s failing status. His grades had fallen below the minimum acceptable level. The dean strongly suggested Michael take a year off to find himself and to make sure he was ready and willing to take on the responsibilities of full-time college studies.
Michael agreed, dropped out, and returned to Westport. To pass the time, he picked up some day work in a local Mobil gas station. “I was into hot-rods,” Michael said later, and in his after-hours he tried to build himself a racing car in the family garage. That July, he was named “Mobil Man of the Month.”
When Kirk heard about the honor, he called Michael, asked him if he intended to work in a gas station for the rest of his life, and then hung up. He wasn’t pleased.
KIRK WAS, at the time, licking his wounds over the failure of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his attempt to bring his movie-star magic to Broadway.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was based on Ken Kesey’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same title about a so-called sane man who gets himself imprisoned in a mental institution to escape criminal prosecution. Kirk had optioned Kesey’s 1962 novel after reading it in galleys prior to its official release and had hired Dale Wasserman, the screenwriter for The Vikings, to turn it into a stage play. Kirk intended the Broadway run to be a tune-up for what he hoped would make a terrific, Oscar-worthy movie. The show opened on November 13, 1963, despite the poor to mixed reception it had received in its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston.
Unfortunately, the New York reviews for Cuckoo’s Nest were not very good (“murderous” was how Kirk described them). Everyone had advised him to get out as soon as he could, not to throw good money after bad, but Kirk, always a stubborn man, believed the play would eventually find an audience.
It wouldn’t. Nine days into the show’s Broadway run, President Kennedy was assassinated. In the months that followed the awful deed, no one was in the mood to be entertained by a play about someone who might be dangerous and crazy and was stuck in a metaphorical mental prison. Kirk managed to keep it going for two more months on sheer star power but finally pulled the plug on January 25, 1964.
AFTER THAT, Kirk returned to the commercial sanctuary of the big screen and made John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, co-starring his good friend Burt Lancaster. Based on a popular novel of the day by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, it is a paranoid thriller about an attempted military overthrow of the American government. He followed that immediately with Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way, a star-studded ensemble reenactment of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Besides Kirk, John Wayne was in it, along with Patricia Neal (whom Kirk had dated briefly a few years earlier but could not pry out of the bed of Gary Cooper, the self-proclaimed love of her life), Tom Tryon, Brandon DeWilde, Burgess Meredith, and dozens of other up-and-coming, here-and-now, and over-the-hill Hollywood stars.
Kirk had decided to bring along Anne and their children, Peter and Eric, to Hawaii, where the on-location film was being shot. Neither of the boys from his first marriage was invited. Joel, Kirk decided, was too emotionally frail to make the long trip, and he was still angry at Michael for becoming an award-winning gas station attendant.
Kirk’s next picture was Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark. By then, he had finally gotten over his anger at Michael and took him along on location in Norway, where he got him a job in the wardrobe department. Kirk figured if the boy wasn’t going to complete his education, maybe he could learn something about the film business.1 Kirk took Mann aside and told him to work the boy as hard as he could. Mann, known for his directorial toughness that at times seemed to border on the sadistic, promised Kirk he would make sure Michael didn’t think he was on some kind of a picnic.
To everyone’s surprise, no one’s more than Kirk’s, Michael proved he could take whatever Mann dished out. He did anything and everything he was told to, including assignments no one else wanted—sloppy, dirty work, physically demanding but dull jobs—and he liked it. He was energized by being around film people, especially his father, and began to think that this was a world he wanted to belong to.
Meanwhile, impressed with his son’s work ethic, Kirk invited Michael to join the next production, an American film shot almost entirely in Israel. Melville Shavelson’s Cast a Giant Shadow was the true story (Hollywood style) of American colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, who helped Israel fight for its independence. It was another cameo-fest, with Kirk’s cronies John Wayne (whose Batjac Productions financed the film), Frank Sinatra, and Yul Brynner making appearances.
This time Kirk assigned Michael to a specific position, production assistant, and also let him do some stunt driving, all of which Michael loved. Kirk also brought along Joel, who had pushed through his puberty and in doing so lost some of his emotional confusion. He was now a strapping, husky six-footer. Kirk made him his bodyguard.
The film was completed early in the summer of 1965, just in time for Michael to enroll in UCSB’s summer session. Kirk was elated that Michael had decided to go back to school, but he made it clear he wanted to see some positive results this time.
HE NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED. Michael couldn’t wait to get back to school, and the first thing he did upon his return was to change his major from English to drama. He tried out for UCSB’s summer production, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and landed a small role and threw himself into it.
When it came time for the performance, Michael invited both Kirk and Diana to see him act in it. Both accepted, and each arrived separately. Kirk viewed the production as something of a test. Knowing of Michael’s decision to want to become an actor, Kirk decided that if his son did a good job, he would encourage him to pursue his new dream, maybe even give a helping hand. There were a lot of doors Kirk could open.
But as it turned out, Kirk hated Michael in the play. “You were terrible,” he told him backstage afterward, and walked away, leaving his son speechless. Diana was much more positive after seeing him perform in a school production of Escurial, but it was Kirk’s opnion that meant the most to Michael.
AFTER THAT, Michael quickly fell back into his campus-style hippie living. He once more took up pot smoking, and now became an enthusiastic use
r of LSD. In the spring of 1966, he moved out of his dorm and into a commune situated in a bunch of abandoned buildings near Mountain Drive, high in the hills of Santa Barbara, with its heady views of the beautiful aqua-blue Pacific.
The members of the commune busied themselves rejecting “straight” society and nourishing their minds by growing their own pot and taking daily doses of acid. Not surprisingly, they had no interest at all in doing anything that smacked of tradition. “There were, I suppose, between 100 and 150 of us at any one time,” David Garsite, another member of the commune, later remembered. “We were the ‘Smile on your brother’ brigade.… I have this vision of Michael in torn jeans and velour shirt flashing around on his big motorcycle, with his long hair trailing in the wind, and a blonde with the most fulsome bosoms you ever saw riding behind him.”
Michael was content to live in a no-running-water shack on the edge of the commune, his bike parked at the front door, dreaming of putting on agitprop street shows with the commune to protest the war in Vietnam. Only he couldn’t get himself off his mattress long enough to organize any of it. Besides always being stoned, a rare venture out on a ski trip had resulted in an accident that left Michael with an injured vertebra, forcing him to wear a back brace (despite doctor’s orders, he only wore it occasionally). The injury left him ineligible for the draft, which may be why he wore it at all, although he insisted at the time that if drafted he would not go into the army but would instead flee to Canada for the duration of the war.