Michael Douglas

by Marc Eliot

  However, Michael was still not quite ready to sign off. “I’m just coming up for air.… I’m really looking forward to a little bit of reflection. I’m trying to simplify, to allow myself time to think about what I want to do.”

  To do so, or to avoid dealing with the present, Michael retreated into the past, revisiting his youth and embarking on a grand do-over by completely overhauling and updating the slowly deteriorating family compound in Bermuda, where he had spent so many days as a boy. But, as he was soon to learn, he had little room for looking back on a life that was relentlessly propelling itself forward. As he quickly came to realize, there were undeniable elements of freedom and renewal about all that had happened recently—Kirk’s stroke, Cameron’s problems, the onset of middle age, and his impending divorce.

  As he prepared to return to Hollywood, he was ready, he believed, for whatever the future might bring. He was a movie star with a solid career and nothing left to prove in that area. He had all the money and creature comforts anyone could ever dream of. And he had his health. As the old song went, all he needed now was the girl.

  The right one.

  1 In 1998 Reuther formed Bel-Air Productions, a co-venture with Warner Bros. and Studio Canal +, and released a number of well-received films. He died of cancer in 2010 at the age of fifty-eight.

  2 Michael was being honored for his acting work in The Jewel of the Nile, Wall Street, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure.

  With Catherine Zeta-Jones at Lincoln Center’s 37th Annual Chaplin Awards, May 24, 2010. AP PHOTO/CHARLES SYKES

  CHAPTER 17

  I believe in love and marriage [but] I’m on my own now and that’s kind of exciting [although] the thought of growing old alone scares me.

  —MICHAEL DOUGLAS

  IN 1998 MICHAEL BEGAN DATING AGAIN. HE WAS ROMANTICALLY linked with a number of attractive, successful women, including Maureen Dowd, the flame-haired, sharp-witted star op-ed columnist for the New York Times; Elizabeth Vargas, the attractive network TV news personality; and the actress Minnie Driver.1 But despite these romantic flare-ups, something remained missing in his life. He understood better now why his father had so quickly remarried after his divorce. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, Michael was on the make for something more than a one-night stand.

  His noticeable weight gain and generally disheveled look were for the lead in a new film, Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. Hanson was hot, coming off his 1997 smash hit L.A. Confidential, based on the novel by James Ellroy. This time Hanson had chosen to adapt another book, one nothing like Ellroy’s neo-noir period piece. Wonder Boys was based on the 1995 cult-hit novel by Michael Chabon, with a screenplay by Steve Kloves (1989’s The Fabulous Baker Boys, screenplay and director). Kloves turned down the chance to direct, preferring to work on his new novel. Wonder Boys is about a middle-aged writer and educator, Professor Grady Tripp, who can’t finish his second novel and continues to teach English in college to pay the bills. Tripp’s third wife has left him, and he’s having an affair with the wife of the school’s chancellor. It is not difficult to see what attracted Michael to Tripp, who is in the midst of a midlife crisis and a crumbling marriage. Tripp’s character was decidedly not a leading man; that role was filled by the talented but confused student (played by Tobey Maguire) whose mentor is Professor Tripp. What they see in each other is what we see in both of them; the heart of the film is their father-son-like relationship (in which Michael gets to play the father figure).

  The shabbiness of the film’s overly convoluted plot—the screenplay’s well-intentioned unfolding of the story’s complexities goes on forever, without a clear line to hold it together—is sharpened considerably by Hanson’s directing. He smartly chose to use a Bob Dylan song that perfectly set the tone for the film, and hired the late, great Dede Allen, whose razor-sharp editing kept the film moving along.2

  Shot mostly in Pittsburgh, the film’s negative was delivered in fifty-two days, but the film wasn’t scheduled for release until 2000. Despite the long delay between its completion and release, Michael was extremely happy with it and was able to joke about what he believed was his successful transition to older character roles, even at the expense of his always well-groomed appearance in previous films. “He’s gonna die when he sees me!” Michael told Variety with his tongue firmly in his cheek, referring to Kirk and his fitness-freak approach to life, which Michael had for a time made his own and used to great advantage. As for the film’s unrelenting 1960s attitude, that too had an autobiographical whiff about it for Michael, as it reminded him of his days at UCSB, when he was filled with rebellious energy and still unsure of how to use it.

  IN AUGUST 1998, Michael met the raven-haired, black-eyed twenty-nine-year-old Welsh-born BBC actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had just co-starred on the big screen opposite Antonio Banderas in Martin Campbell’s 1998 The Mask of Zorro, the film that put her on the big-screen map. She had been a virtual unknown outside of Great Britain, where she had begun her career at the tender age of four learning tap at Hazel Johnson’s Dancing School, before being enrolled by her parents in Swansea’s private Dumbarton House School in 1981. Soon she was shuttling between Swansea and London to star in the West End production of Annie. After a few more runs on the West End, at the age of fifteen she moved permanently to London, where, at seventeen, she won a part in the chorus of the successful revival of 42nd Street. Gorgeous, leggy, and glamorous onstage, off the boards she was still Cathy Jones from Wales who, as she described herself, “liked to chew gum—a tomboy … nothing prissy.”

  Not long afterward, she landed the starring role in the British television series The Darling Buds of May. The part showed off her highly appealing manner and drop-dead good looks and made her Britain’s newest sweetheart. She next appeared topless in a 1992 BBC teleplay. When asked why she did it, she smiled and said, “I wanted to show there was another side of me.”

  In 1995 she starred in Carl Prechezer’s British feature Blue Juice, which bombed with the public and put a halt to the upward momentum of her career in the UK. She then decided to move to Hollywood, where she quickly landed a small role in the American TV miniseries Titanic. Steven Spielberg saw her in it and told Campbell about her. Campbell, who at the time was looking for a fresh face to co-star opposite Banderas, checked her out and cast her in Zorro, in which she all but stole the film from the equally beautiful Banderas.

  Michael met Catherine at the 1998 Deauville American Film Festival near Normandy, France. Film producer David Foster, who was at the August 31 party where they met, recalled that when Michael first saw Catherine in person, “his eyeballs popped out of his head. Just Whoomp!” However, it wasn’t a chance meeting, as has always been reported.

  Michael had been aware of Catherine before that night, having seen a studio screening of The Mask of Zorro. His reaction was visceral; afterward, he searched his body for any signs of arrows. “I first saw her up on the screen the way everybody did,” he said later. “But to my mind I had not seen anybody since Julie Christie who had all that. It wasn’t just her looks but a persona that came through. And I went, ‘Wow,’ and totally went after her.… [B]y the time we met at Deauville, I was looking to get involved.

  “There was a whole group. She had her hairdresser, I had my [PR person]. I had finished all my Deauville promotion for the night before, so I was feeling no pain. I was celebrating, having a good time. Catherine had to work, attend a dinner that night. I waited at the bar, where I was waiting for Danny DeVito to bring her over to meet me.”

  Michael had come to the festival to promote A Perfect Murder and to be honored by the festival for his “producer-actor’s contribution to world cinema.” Later that night, Danny DeVito, acting as the go-between, introduced Michael to Catherine. Michael’s opening line was, “I want to be the father of your children.”

  That got an unamused laugh from Catherine. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. “It’s nice to know it’s all true. Good night.”

  The
next morning Catherine flew to Scotland’s Isle of Mull to begin shooting her next film, Jon Amiel’s Entrapment, co-starring fellow countryman Sean Connery. Waiting for her when she arrived at the hotel was a bouquet of roses from Michael, with a simple but honest note attached: “I apologize if I stepped over the line.”

  Catherine was impressed as much with Michael’s gesture as with his determination. When she returned to the States during a break in filming, she agreed to have dinner with him. If Michael was concerned about the twenty-five-year age difference between them, he didn’t show it: “My first wife was younger than me, and before that I had dated a woman [Brenda Vaccaro] who was six years older, so it’s not like I had any set pattern with women.… [Y]eah I thought about it, but then I had heard Catherine liked older men … so I thought I had a shot.” Later on, Michael mused, “Mike Todd was 25 years older than Elizabeth Taylor when they married in 1957.”

  As far as Catherine was concerned, “he was absolutely different from what I would have expected after buying my ticket to see Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction. He [seemed a] very sensitive person, very loyal, but his sensitivity is never a weakness.” They didn’t begin dating seriously until the following March, 1999, and then kept their relationship as low-key as possible, which was not very possible. Their relationship quickly attracted tabloid headlines. Among the reasons Michael wanted to keep it private was that he didn’t want to do anything to privately offend or publicly embarrass Diandra and threaten the delicate balance of their impending divorce and its long-worked-over agreement.

  His instincts proved correct when the normally press-reticent Diandra suddenly showed up in People magazine. Michael’s affair had set her off. She angrily voiced her opinion of Michael and Catherine’s relationship, and the persistent rumors that they were about to be engaged. “Before Michael can marry,” she told the magazine huffily, “he has to divorce me—or become a Muslim so he can have two wives.”

  If Diandra’s tantrum bothered her, Catherine didn’t show it publicly. Instead, she happily told interviewers she had absolutely no problem dating an older man and that she had no interest in men her own age. It was true. Before Michael she had dated director Nick Hamm, forty-one; actor Paul McGann, thirty-nine; Simply Red lead singer Mick Hucknall, thirty-nine; and Braveheart actor Angus Macfadyen, thirty-six, to whom she had briefly been engaged in 1995. As for Sean Connery, her co-star in Entrapment, she told the production designer of The Haunting that Sean Connery was the most fabulous thing in the world: “He’s a cake. You could eat that.” Moreover, it seemed karmic affirmation to Michael and Catherine when they discovered they were born twenty-five years apart on the same day, September 25.

  IN JUNE 1999, they vacationed together at Michael’s cliffside villa on the Spanish isle of Majorca (which Michael was still able to use because the divorce had not been finalized). An ambitious photographer with a long lens managed to catch a shot of Catherine bathing topless. The photos appeared in newspapers worldwide, and she was outraged, calling them “voyeuristic” and “unnerving.” She also used the opportunity to react to Mel Gibson, of all people, who had openly criticized younger women dating older men, which Catherine felt was a direct shot at Michael and her. “I don’t know quite what the age thing is all about, but let’s wait until Mel Gibson [then forty-three] gets to Sean Connery’s age [sixty-nine] and see if he has that staying power.”

  On July 2, Michael accompanied Catherine to Edinburgh for the world premiere of Entrapment. “Michael is here tonight,” she told reporters, as if to make official what everyone already knew, “because we wanted to publicly say that we are together.” A beaming Michael quickly added, “I am a very lucky man.” Afterward, the press had a nasty-edged field day with the relationship.

  Two months later, in October 1999, twenty-year-old Cameron was arrested for attempting to buy a gram of cocaine from an undercover cop. The police had observed him leaving a black Acura outside 11 Fifth Avenue, a building in Greenwich Village. As it happened, the car was registered to him but driven that night by one Hiro Abreu, who was subsequently arrested with four bags of cocaine in his possession. Cameron later told police he was letting Abreu use the car as a form of payment for $2,000 he owed Abreu and eventually was allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor.

  Michael was devastated. Despite the fact that he had once been something of a druggie himself, he could not understand why Cameron was one now. As hard as it was for Michael to admit it, this was a sad replay of the now-familiar Douglas family saga, an endless wheel-to-nowhere of struggling sons and famous fathers, with Michael playing what had once been Kirk’s role.

  He had, almost from the beginning, not been there for Cameron, treating the boy as an afterthought to his unhappy marriage to Diandra (as Kirk had done to him when he divorced Diana). Commenting on Cameron’s legal troubles in the fall of 2000, Michael said, “My son is going to be twenty-two in December and I look back twenty-two years and my career was in an entirely different position. I was working hard and whatever shortcomings I had as a husband and a father, I’m sure they were based on ambition … now you don’t have that.” It sounded like Michael was making excuses for both Cameron and himself.

  IN AUGUST MICHAEL took Catherine to meet Kirk and Anne at their home in Beverly Hills. “People used to ask me, ‘Is Michael going to marry Catherine?’ ” Kirk told one reporter not long after meeting Michael’s new love. “I would say that I would like to marry Catherine, but my wife won’t let me … oh well, at least the kid is happy.” To another he said, “I’ve never seen Michael so happy … She’s a really intelligent woman, and I am proud.”

  Michael was less than thrilled with Kirk’s remarks about marrying Catherine and privately told him to calm it down.

  Michael and Catherine’s age difference remained a headline topic, fodder for apparently endless evaluation and judgments. The Times of London commented on Michael’s new romance with its signature combination of ironic cattiness: “Douglas must be the only 56-year-old man for whom a whirlwind romance with a throaty starlet 25 years his junior is considered a sign of slowing down.”

  Michael felt the need to respond: “Since the first three weeks, the age difference hasn’t come up.… Early on, any doubts I had were because I realized that I’ve had it all. But the great advantage of that is nothing would make me more excited, prouder than to watch Catherine explode—something a lot of guys couldn’t handle unless they’ve had their own success.”

  He was even eager to work again, especially with Catherine, and gave that tidbit to the press. The Sunday Times of London immediately saw this as a move by Michael to “revive his faltering career by starring opposite his girlfriend, Catherine Zeta-Jones.”

  Michael had indeed come up with an idea to do another sequel to Romancing the Stone, news of which sent Kathleen Turner into something of a public snit that smacked of both professional and personal pique. She claimed she “owned” the character of Joan Wilder and deserved at least first refusal on the project. Michael’s response was quite clear, to Kathleen and to anybody else who might be listening: “I’m crazy about Catherine and want to make a movie with her. She’s the only actress I want to work with right now.”

  To make it happen, Michael turned down a number of films being offered to him, including Frank Oz’s The Score, a heist film that he had originally been eager to make, to search for a suitable project for himself and Catherine. Meanwhile, as the two were constantly being photographed, Diandra once again spoke publicly about the relationship, this time a bit more subdued. When asked about Michael’s relationship with Catherine by the Times of London she said, “He can wed [now] if he wants to. Whatever Michael decides, it will be a good decision, and if he marries because he thinks it is good for him then I will accept it.” The implication was that Diandra was waiting for Michael to sign the divorce papers and that she would give him no more trouble if he did.

  CATHERINE SPENT Christmas 1999 with her parents in Wales because she said she was
needed there for some promotional work on Entrapment. When she arrived without Michael, reports flew that their relationship was over. Some speculated that she had given him an ultimatum—marry or break it off—and that Michael, coming out of his long and unhappy marriage, was gun-shy. At the last minute he flew off to Wales in time to be with Catherine and her family for Christmas Eve.

  From there they flew together to Aspen to spend New Year’s Eve. That evening they had showed up at a star-studded party in Aspen, where everyone was eager to ring in the new millennium. Big doings at the house were planned for the stroke of midnight, but when it came, Michael and Catherine were nowhere to be found. Instead, they had retreated to their own house, and when the clock struck midnight, Michael asked Catherine to marry him.

  She said yes, and immediately called her parents in Wales to tell them the happy news.

  According to a close friend, Broadway and film producer Marty Richards (who would later cast Catherine in his 2002 film version of the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago), “When I found out, I asked Michael, ‘Why didn’t you tell us [that night at the party]? All your friends have been waiting.’ ” The reason, Michael said, was that not even he knew. He had sat down at the party alone, amidst all the activities surrounding him, and had taken stock of his life. According to Richards, Michael said, “I put [Catherine] in comparison to everybody else, and no one compared. Then I thought about how wonderful she is. I decided at the last minute to propose that night.”

  To make it official, Michael had slipped on Catherine’s finger a $250,000 Fred Leighton engagement ring, a ten-carat antique marquis diamond surrounded by eighteen smaller diamonds. He had picked it out in New York and had been carrying it around for some time, waiting for the right moment to give it to Catherine.