by Marc Eliot
He was enjoying a doob one day when a visitor came to call.
It was Kirk, banging on the door. When Michael let him in, Kirk screamed bloody murder about how his son was living his life. Michael reacted by not reacting. He calmly watched as his father finished his rant and bolted down the road, pushing aside anyone and anything that got in his way.
DESPITE BEING a stoner and seriously injured, Michael managed to attend some classes and did fairly well. When he returned to Connecticut that summer he was together enough, with Bill Darrid intervening, to land a position at the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. Michael did backstage work and served as a gofer, both unpaid positions, all for the promise of a small part in one of that season’s plays. In many ways, to Michael the O’Neill was not all that dissimilar to the commune, except here everyone put on plays every night instead of getting stoned.
He wasn’t enjoying himself all that much, and was thinking about bailing and returning to the West Coast when he met another backstage member of the company, a balding, pug-size young man to whom he took an instant liking. The fellow’s name was Danny DeVito, the unlikeliest of wanna-be actors.
The intense, gnomish five-foot DeVito and the laid-back, five-foot-ten Michael quickly became inseparable. They kept their distance from the coffee-drenched neo-esoterica that filled the smoky nights of most of the other actors in the company; Danny and Michael preferred pushing wheelbarrows filled with dirt, cutting wood, pouring concrete. Alone it was drudge work, together it was fun.
The dynamic of their friendship is not all that difficult to understand. Michael was a silver-spoon baby without any pressing need to make a living. Being a nameless member of a commune fit him perfectly, even if (or perhaps because) it enraged his famous and famously intense father. DeVito, Italian and Catholic, was the child of an immigrant mother and was burning with ambition. He was a working-class Jersey boy who had to survive on his own wits and talent. He was rough-hewn, small in size but large in stature. Their mutual attraction was complementary; if Michael desired to be accepted as one of the workers-of-the-world-united, DeVito longed to get off the mean streets and move among the socially elite. Each envied the other. And there was something else: girls. Both were crazy for them. With his good looks, Michael could always get all the women he wanted, while DeVito wanted anything he could get. To that end, Michael was happy to share, and DeVito was happy to take.
DEVITO WAS BORN in Neptune City and grew up in Asbury Park, not far from where a young Bruce Springsteen was honing his craft and where, a few generations down the road, a couple of shore kids would chronicle the vapidity of their lives on MTV.
Although he spent much of his childhood at the Jersey shore, DeVito’s heart belonged to Brooklyn. Every week he looked forward to traveling with his parents to see his grandmother, who still lived there. As he remembers, “On Sundays we’d take the Staten Island Ferry, get on the Belt Parkway, and drive to Flatbush. I always loved driving through the streets. But I also loved living at the shore. It was a resort, and every summer the city girls would come down.… There were six or seven movie theaters that were constantly changing their programs. Until Labor Day, when everything would change and it would become Bergmanesque.… Beautiful light, not a lot of people, family. Really a beautiful place to grow up.”
DeVito quickly became addicted to movies and wanted to be in them, but he believed it was simply impossible for a guy who looked like he did to get from here to there. After graduating from high school, he lowered his sights and let his sister pay his tuition at the Wilfred Beauty Academy. Not long after, DeVito took a job in her parlor. After a while, he decided he wanted to expand his realm and get into makeup. He thought it would be a great way to get even closer to the women who had quickly become his regulars. The only problem was, he had no idea where to go to study makeup.
Then he saw an ad in a New York newspaper for the Academy of Dramatic Arts (the same acting school that Kirk had attended), which offered a course in makeup technique. “One night, I was eighteen or nineteen, I went down [to the Academy] and said I want to enroll in makeup. They told me I couldn’t enroll just to learn makeup, I had to enroll as an acting student. So my dream was forced upon me! I did a monologue, from Teahouse of the August Moon, because that was how you got in. I’d never seen a play before, except Mr. Roberts done in a tent out in Neptune, New Jersey. But I got in and I enrolled in night classes.”
DeVito proved something of a natural, and despite his height of only five feet (some sources list him at four feet eleven inches), he was able to find work quite easily as a rather distinctive character actor in several summer stock companies, including a 1966 summer residency at the O’Neill, where he met and befriended Michael.
WHEN THE SUMMER ENDED, DeVito went back to Manhattan and resumed looking for acting work, while Michael drove his motorbike cross-country all the way to Santa Barbara, ostensibly to resume classes but really to take up residence once more at Mountain Drive. “I got into the Maharishi, and was doing some meditation.… You had your motorcycle or whatever, and your renaissance velour shirts. It was fun. Marijuana and psychedelics had a real influence … that had to do with rhythm and perspective. I was not, in that period, career-conscious at all.”
Only a few days had passed before Michael next heard from DeVito, who called to say he’d landed a big-break audition in Hollywood for a film role he desperately wanted. Michael wished him luck, and told him he was welcome to stay at the commune as long as he wanted or needed to. DeVito took him up on his offer. Despite the distance between Hollywood and Santa Barbara, the price of a round-trip bus back and forth would be cheaper than finding a place in Hollywood.
DeVito arrived in Santa Barbara wearing a black full-length coat, white sneakers, and a beret. It was Method preparation, DeVito explained to Michael, his way of fitting into the part prior to the audition, which was set for the following week. In the interim, he took a great deal of pleasure from admiring the naked, pot-smoking women who lounged around the commune like it was a poor man’s Playboy Mansion.
DeVito thought he had a real shot at playing the dark and merciless killer Perry Edward Smith, one of the two subjects of the movie Richard Brooks was making based on Truman Capote’s bestselling self-described “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, about the murder of the middle-American Clutter family by Smith and his partner, Richard “Dick” Hickock.
He did not get the part; it went instead to Robert Blake. DeVito lingered for a while in Los Angeles before heading back east.
MEANWHILE, PERHAPS feeling some of DeVito’s energy and determination, Michael finally began to grow weary of the lifestyle he was living. Plus, more and more strangers were showing up, either to try to get laid or to sell drugs to the group. The idealism of Mountain Drive, like the sixties themselves, was fast devolving into slippery hustling, fake hippies, and a legal mire of narcs and cops. Feeling he’d had enough, in the fall of 1967 Michael decided to return to regular classes at UCSB to try to salvage his academic career.
He once more quickly became a familiar and likeable presence on campus. He was known partly for being the son of a celebrity, partly for his natural good looks (including flowing blond hair and a soft chin made firmer looking by the family’s trademark cleft), partly for his acting, and partly for his robust liberal political activism.
In June 1967, the end of his junior year, Michael returned for another go-round at the National Playwrights Conference. He was hired as an actor and was determined this time to concentrate more on performing than on girls.
For this season, the O’Neill focused on newer playwrights. Among them was Michael’s assigned roommate, Cincinnati-born Ron Cowen, a self-styled playwright. He had managed to get the theater company to produce an early version of one of his plays, Summertree, a vivid antiwar story about an all-American young man determined to avoid the draft. When his number is called, he decides to flee to Canada, only
to have a last-minute patriotic change of heart; he allows himself to be conscripted, winds up in Vietnam, and is killed. Michael loved the play, seeing a lot of himself in the main character. Cowen cast him in the leading role.
IN MAY 1968, with his parents in attendance, Michael received his BA from UCSB. The next day he left for New York City, intent on becoming a Broadway actor. Upon his arrival, he immediately called DeVito, who offered to let Michael stay with him at his apartment on West Eighty-Ninth Street, for only half the rent.
DeVito remembered, “Our apartment in New York City was $150 a month. I think I was struggling more than he was. But he did the laundry. He fluffed and folded really well. He left me when he went to do The Streets of San Francisco, but he still paid half the rent when he was away. Now we often talk about how stupid we were to let this low-rent apartment go.”
No sooner had he unpacked his bags than Michael headed for the Neighborhood Playhouse, one of the more prestigious acting schools in Manhattan. He had scheduled a fall audition for the Playhouse’s acting guru, Sanford Meisner. Michael’s goal was to secure a place in the next semester’s roster.
Evenings Michael and DeVito became regulars of the Greenwich Village bar and Soho nightlife circuits, where the food was lousy, the pot plentiful, and the women easy. They often piled into DeVito’s old Chevy, a muscle car “which Danny drove with total authority,” Michael recalled. “You know, ticking the side-view mirrors of the double-parked cars, never moving a muscle, never easing off.” “Ya can’t worry about it,” DeVito told a reporter. “Just go through, like Zen.” This was the era when bombing around Manhattan in a car and driving downtown was still feasible, especially in Soho, where DeVito could pull up on almost any street, get out, and leave his car there and it would remain safe and unticketed. In those days, the police stayed away from Soho as if it were Siberia, and the oversize illegally converted lofts and lax street security made it the perfect locale for New York’s anything-goes art community of the late 1960s.
When taking a break from picking up girls (their favorite pastime), they loved to play practical jokes on the uptown crowd. A typical stunt involved DeVito accompanying Michael to a party in one of Madison Avenue’s snootier neighborhoods wearing a pair of grotesque stage teeth and imitating a hunchback. They noted carefully how the room warmed up only when Michael smoothly, and falsely, introduced his friend as the star of the new Richard Brooks movie.
That fall, Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni was in New York searching for the lead in his next film, Zabriskie Point, about the American sixties as seen through the eyes of the outside world, meaning Antonioni. Michael, still waiting for his audition call at the Neighborhood Playhouse, decided to try out for the film. As he remembered, “This talent scout hunt was a big event in New York. Antonioni was looking over people at the Cheetah Club [one of the hottest disco clubs in New York City at the time]. I remember there were crowds stretching all the way around the block. They had us come in three at a time, like a lineup.”
In a pre-interview with an assistant, Michael related a Vietnam “war game” exercise he had done in one of his drama classes at UCSB. When he was finally brought before Antonioni, that same assistant asked him to repeat the story to the director. “I’m talking about it,” Douglas recalled, “and Antonioni’s looking at the guy next to me. He’s not interested in me at all, but he lets me go on talking. So I’m telling him about this one gory time, and he’s ignoring me, so I said in the same voice, ‘And of course, all Italians eat meatballs.’ Antonioni didn’t even notice. There I was spilling my guts, so I said, ‘Fuck this,’ and walked out.”
Michael was more certain than ever that he was never going to be the next Kirk Douglas.
1 Michael is listed in the credits of the 1965 release as assistant director.
CHAPTER 5
I don’t think Kirk ever learned to enjoy money. He’s got a big house in Beverly Hills and a big fence around it—and himself. Money doesn’t mean that much to me.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
AS IT TURNED OUT, THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE was not Michael’s thing. At least part of the problem was the regimentation—too academic, too much lecture-and-listen, too much like regular school.
He soon quit the Playhouse in favor of studying at Wynn Handman’s American Place Theatre. In the fifties and sixties, because so much of live television and radio dramas, and some movies, were produced on location in New York City, Manhattan was thick with training grounds for actors, and the American Place Theatre was one of the newer and more dynamic ones. It was founded in 1963 by Handman, Sidney Lanier, and Michael Tolan.
A Manhattan native, Handman was less interested in training actors than in incorporating them into a community of writers, directors, and performers to discover and produce new American plays. Training included teaching actors how to perform in full-length scripts in front of the public rather than doing individual scenes for the classroom. Among his better-known students in the 1960s were Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin, James Caan, Christopher Walken, Joanne Woodward, and … M. K. Douglas.
Upon landing his first paying job in New York City, Michael discovered he could not use his real name on stage. In 1969, after almost two years of looking for acting work, Michael had landed a part in the CBS Playhouse production of Ellen M. Violett’s The Experiment, playing a scientist who compromises his liberal views to accept a job with a major corporation. It was a theme he was familiar with, youthful rebels against the corporation, and a character he knew he could play. The other two principal players in the cast were John Astin and Barry Brown. All three, including Michael, were relatively unknown, but when he applied for mandatory membership in AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) he discovered that television was considered a closed shop and actors had to be members of AFTRA in order to get work, though the conundrum for most was that they couldn’t get a card without a job and they couldn’t get a job without a card. AFTRA informed him he couldn’t use the name Michael Douglas professionally, even though it was his real name, because it was already registered to a popular Cleveland-based daytime variety host, Mike (Michael) Douglas.1
The videotaped broadcast of The Experiment aired on February 25, 1969, and the next day Jack Gould, then the New York Times’s television critic, wrote that “Mr. Douglas gave a remarkably lucid and attractively relaxed performance.” That much was great. He then continued, “[He] could easily go as far as his father; he has a promising knack for intuitive versatility.” That part wasn’t. This would be the first of many reviews that would compare him to Kirk. Michael knew now that he would need to push to have his work recognized before his heredity.
AFTER THE CRITICAL and ratings success of The Experiment, CBS approached Michael about joining the rotating acting roster of the network’s new feature-film unit, Cinema Center Films, which would create product for both the little and big screens. Before the ink was dry on the deal, Bob Thomas, the nationally syndicated Associated Press journalist, interviewed Michael for his April column and later wrote that the public should “add Michael Douglas to the ever-growing list of movie stars’ children who are making it in films.” It was the last thing Michael wanted to read; he had hoped that Thomas wouldn’t go there. The rest of the piece wasn’t as bad. “He also is an instant star, thanks to the recent CBS Playhouse drama, The Experiment.… Mike himself wears his brown [sic] hair in the fashionable long style, though he appears to have passed through the hippie stage. That happened in his university days. Mike went the whole route: guru, pot, LSD. His experience with narcotics proved worthwhile, he believes, ‘because it taught me about rhythm in living. You know how some days you feel dull and listless and other days you feel alive? Everyone has certain rhythms and using narcotics dulls the senses and you need the sharp edges for acting.’ ”
And just like that, via official anointment by influential Hollywood scribe Bob Thomas, the laid-back, anti-authoritarian former free-love hippie and political and so
cial activist swam from the outer shores of the counterculture into the show business mainstream.
IN THE SPRING OF 1969, Cinema Center Films put Michael up for the role of Carl Dixon in a new big-screen feature to be called Hail, Hero! But his star status wasn’t quite there yet, and he was forced to stand in line with other company contract players in what amounted to a cattle-call audition. At first the film’s director, David Miller, passed on Michael until, without Michael’s knowledge, and believing it would help get him the part, his agent called to let Miller know that in case he wasn’t aware of it, M. K. Douglas was Kirk Douglas’s son.
That resonated with Miller, and not necessarily in a positive way. In 1962 he had directed Kirk Douglas in the Bryna production Lonely Are the Brave, which Kirk often cited as the favorite among all his films. (Michael worked on the film for eight days as an assistant cutter.) However, as with most directors who worked with Kirk, things had not gone smoothly. Here is Kirk’s rather cold description of his experience being directed by Miller: “I took David Miller as a director, and regretted it. I felt that he did a far from brilliant job. He was unhappy on location. I played pimp and introduced him to a girl. Anything to keep him happy and get him through the picture. I thought he was the only one who didn’t come up to the high standards of all the other elements in the picture.”
Miller had directed only two big-screen features between Lonely Are the Brave and Hail, Hero!, neither of which was successful. Perhaps to make amends, perhaps to end what he might have felt was some kind of industry-wide ban against him instigated by Kirk, or maybe because he suddenly realized Michael was the best actor for the film, Miller reversed himself and gave Michael the role.2
THE SCREENPLAY FOR Hail, Hero! was an adaptation of John Weston’s popular, controversial 1968 antiwar novel of the same name. In it, Carl Dixon is a pacifist with conservative parents; it was another in an increasingly long line of Hollywood films depicting America’s generational divide during the Vietnam years.