by Marc Eliot
JUST AFTER the new year, Paramount, which was distributing Wonder Boys, announced that it was moving up the release date from early spring to February 2000, hoping to beat the rest of the Easter holiday films that year. It opened on February 25 with great fanfare and little box office, the audience apparently turned off by Michael’s disheveled look, which was featured prominently in the promotion posters. Joe Morgenstern, writing for the Wall Street Journal, praised Douglas’s acting but specifically criticized the poster, which featured a headshot of Douglas and the slug line “A raffishly eccentric role, and he’s never been so appealing!” Morgenstern warned audiences not to be put off by it, which, he said, made Michael look like Michael J. Pollard from Bonnie and Clyde, or by the fact that the story was about campus life, a not-very-sexy subject, especially for its targeted audience, that was younger and presumably college-bound.3
The film, which couldn’t find an audience, was not helped by the lack of enthusiasm in the major reviews. A. O. Scott complained in the New York Times about the film’s lack of cinematic qualities: “The problem [with the film] is that everyone involved seems to have agreed that it was a great idea for a movie and pretty much left it at that.” Richard Corliss, writing for Time, was a little more insightful but did not write a money review either: “Wonder Boys reminds us of a distant age (the 1970s) when bad movies were better: not stupid teen romps but sad, off-kilter studies of adults adrift. It is a rare current example of that endangered species, the honorable failure.” And finally Owen Gleiberman, a post-auteurist, highly opinionated contemporary critic, said in Entertainment Weekly, “Curtis Hanson may have wanted to make a movie that gleamed with humanity as much as L.A. Confidential burned with malevolence, but he’s so intent on getting us to like his characters that he didn’t give them enough juice.” Owen gave the film a C+ rating.
With its release coming just a week after the Academy Award nominees for the previous year’s films had been announced, and the studios putting all their promotional muscle into those campaigns, Wonder Boys was left without a studio champion. The film died, too quickly for former studio golden boy Hanson. Michael was quick to defend Hanson and the film: “It’s the most unique release experience I’ve ever had. Wonder Boys was supposed to come out this time last year, it was the reason we all cut our prices, and it didn’t for whatever reason. The person who’s been most instrumental is Hanson. He insisted in his diplomatic but stubborn way that the movie deserved another look.”
The film grossed $6 million its opening weekend and only $33 million total worldwide (including receipts from a second-chance November 2000 release, with an ensemble cast poster and advertising campaign). If it marked a downturn in the arc of Michael’s commercial popularity, released two years after his last feature, A Perfect Murder, Michael didn’t seem concerned. He had other matters to deal with.
In March 2000, Michael and Catherine announced they were expecting a baby and planned to be married that November, probably in Majorca. “I feel blessed,” Michael said at the prospect of becoming a father again, “because I didn’t think it could happen to me again. But it did.”
Dylan Michael Douglas was born just before 6:00 p.m. on August 8 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces and was 21 inches long. Both Catherine and Michael had agreed on the name Dylan Michael Douglas: Catherine wanted her son to be named after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and Michael also liked the name, not so much for the poet as for the singer-songwriter who had written the Oscar-winning song used as the theme for Wonder Boys.
On June 4, 2000, Michael decided it was time to quietly and officially end his twenty-three-year marriage to Diandra, who was now dating Sacha Newley, the artist son of Joan Collins and Anthony Newley. Michael signed off on the revised $45 million one-time settlement, with Diandra’s original financial demands and property division remaining unchanged.4 After twenty-three years he was officially single again.
That November, he married Catherine.
1 At the time, unconfirmed rumors flew everywhere that the unmarried Dowd’s “romance” with Michael was intended to get her to briefly stop her intense criticism of Bill Clinton.
2 Dylan’s song “Things Have Changed” won an Oscar for Best Song of the Year; both Dede Allen and Steve Kloves were nominated for Oscars, for Best Editing and Best Screenplay, respectively. Both lost.
3 Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times also slammed the ad campaign in his review: “The film’s ad poster brings Elmer Fudd to mind.” Even director Curtis Hanson later criticized it, saying the poster made Douglas look “like he was trying to be Robin Williams.”
4 Some sources put the cash settlement as high as $60 million.
CHAPTER 18
If you have a void, you fill it with something. And love is a valuable stone that one can’t necessarily find. I feel blessed.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
“MICHAEL IS EVERYTHING I WANTED,” THE THIRTY-one-year-old bride said of her fifty-six-year-old groom on her wedding day. “I don’t take any of this for granted. When I look at Michael, I run around like a little girl. I can’t believe I came into his life and he came into mine.”
The weekend festivities began on Friday, November 17, 2000, with a lavish buffet-style rehearsal dinner of chicken Kiev, shrimp, beluga caviar, and chocolate-covered strawberries served to 165 guests, held at the Russian Tea Room in midtown Manhattan to acknowledge Michael’s Russian roots. The wedding was scheduled for the next day, Saturday, November 18, 2000, at New York’s grand old Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It was a combination of Old World glamour and New World glitz.
The bride looked radiant as she walked down the aisle in her $100,000-plus cream-colored, diamond-encrusted gown, designed by Parisian designer Christian Lacroix. The cost of the wedding was estimated by Celebrity Bride Guide to be in excess of $1.5 million. One hundred fifty rooms were reserved for guests; Catherine’s suite cost $5,000 a night, others considerably less.
The guest list was large. Besides her mother and father, her uncles and aunts, and her first dance teacher, Hazel Johnson, all flown in from Wales on a private jet courtesy of Michael, and his family, gathered from New York and Hollywood, the list of invitees read like a Hollywood dream casting. Among the more notable of the 350 guests were Danny DeVito and his wife, Rhea Perlman; Russell Crowe with Meg Ryan—their first date in what would be a short but impassioned relationship; Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle; Karl Malden; Goldie Hawn (without Kurt Russell); composer Jimmy Webb; U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan; U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke; Martha Stewart; Anthony Hopkins; Steven Spielberg; Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston; Sir Michael Caine; Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson (the singing-songwriting duo were neighbors who also owned a restaurant and bar on Seventy-Second Street, where Michael liked to hang); Oliver Stone (who proclaimed that on this night Michael was Sir Lancelot and Catherine Lady Guinevere, and threw in a Snow White reference as well); Art Garfunkel; Stephen Stills; Gladys Knight; Mick Hucknall; Barbara Walters (with whom a white-haired, stroke-impaired Kirk Douglas flirted all night); telecommunications executive George Blumenthal; Christopher Reeve, hairless and wheelchair-bound, accompanied by his wife, Dana; and Zack Norman and his wife, Nancy. Each guest received a silver Welsh love spoon engraved with the bride and groom’s initials and were asked not to give gifts but, if they wished, to donate to a trust fund set up for baby Dylan. A Welsh dragon was hung above the hotel’s main entrance.
The ceremony began at precisely seven thirty in the hotel’s Terrace Room. A twenty-foot magnolia tree decorated with seven hundred white tulips stood at the entrance. Magnolia-shaped table assignments for the upcoming dinner hung from its branches, held there by silk ribbons. Dinner would follow the ceremony.
Down a path leading up to a raised platform, accompanied by glorious organ music, two flower girls came draped in Lacroix, followed by a ring bearer and page boy (all relatives of the couple). Four bridesmaids followed.
Catherine’s maid of honor was British TV host Anna Walker. Next came Michael’s mother, Diana, walking down the aisle carrying baby Dylan, dressed in a sailor outfit. When Catherine appeared, the wedding march began with organ and trumpets, accompanied by a forty-member Welsh choir singing “Watching the White Wheat,” a traditional Welsh song.
The altar where Michael and Catherine were about to exchange wedding vows was surrounded by grass; a garden made of lady slippers, larkspur, and delphiniums; and the aroma of twelve varieties of roses, including twenty thousand cream-colored ones beneath a twelve-foot gardenia-strewn canopy. All of it was conceived and executed by event designer David Beahm and coordinator Simone Martel, who had arrived at four o’clock that morning to begin final preparations for the elaborate setting.
Michael’s best man was Cameron, twenty-one, out of rehab and looking healthy and happy.
Although Catherine had asked him not to cry when they exchanged vows and wedding rings (designed by Catherine’s family jeweler in the tiny Welsh town of Aberystwyth), Michael burst into tears, and that started the waters flowing. According to one who was there, “Everyone was crying, the men even more than the women.” After the twenty-five-minute nondenominational ceremony, Catherine and Michael went into in an adjacent private room to sign their marriage certificate. Chief Judge Judith Kaye gave the newlyweds her best wishes: “May they love one another forever and smile always as radiantly as they do today.”
The menu included a choice of New England clam chowder or a terrine of foie gras, and then rack of roasted Welsh lamb with rosemary, or lobster. Dessert included cheesecake, apple pie, and a cheese board that included Caerphilly. The wines and beers were all picked by Michael, including Brains Mild, an ale from Cardiff, which carried the nickname “Skull Attack.” Kirk, eighty-three and ever the spotlight grabber, made a special entrance with his wife, Anne, and recited a Hebrew prayer just before dinner was served. When asked how he felt about his new daughter-in-law, Kirk repeated his wince-inducing joke about wanting to marry her himself but his wife not letting him. The guests were serenaded during dinner by a dozen violinists playing classical music.
During dinner, the newlyweds made toasts declaring their love for each other, and then had their first dance to Gladys Knight singing “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” Knight sang live for another hour, followed by Art Garfunkel, who did “Bridge over Troubled Water”; Mick Jones, of Foreigner, who did “I Want to Know What Love Is” backed by Stephen Stills and, in an incredibly civilized touch, Catherine’s ex-boyfriend Mick Hucknall. Ashford and Simpson sang their hit “Solid as a Rock,” and Bonnie Tyler concluded the show with a rousing version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” The whole musical presentation was arranged by Jimmy Webb. After its conclusion, dessert was served.
The centerpiece was a six-foot, ten-tier vanilla and buttercream wedding cake created by Sylvia Weinstock, covered with thousands of edible sugar flowers. The top two tiers had to be removed to fit through the doors of the ballroom, where the cake was reassembled. After dinner, trumpets signaled it was time for everyone to move to the grand ballroom. Dance music played until five in the morning, followed by an informal early-morning sing-along in the piano bar.
The next afternoon Michael and Catherine, carrying the baby, stepped out of the hotel and were greeted by dozens of cheering fans who had been waiting since the wedding had begun for a glimpse of the new bride and groom. The newlyweds then flew by private jet to Aspen for their honeymoon, a sentimental journey back to the very site where, on New Year’s Eve, Michael had proposed to Catherine.
EXCLUSIVE PHOTO RIGHTS to the wedding were sold by Michael and Catherine to Britain’s OK! magazine, as good a way as any to pay for the wedding extravaganza, but trouble soon erupted when rival mag Hello! published pictures it had somehow gotten hold of, in a case that wound up in the high courts of Great Britain. After a lower court ordered the confiscation of 740,000 copies of Hello!, a higher one amended Hello!’s penalty to a full reimbursement of OK!’s expenses, including the full cost of the photos, with no confiscation but no right to sell any magazine containing photos of the wedding.1
THEY INSTANTLY BECAME Hollywood’s newest “It” couple, this year’s model of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the movie capital’s millennium prince and princess, occupiers of the palace of the film-going public’s romantic imagination.
Later on, Catherine confirmed to Vanity Fair that there was a prenup. When asked for details, she would only say, “I think prenups are brilliant,” and admitted that in hers with Michael, “I get taken care of very well.”
1 To Hilary de Vries in Los Angeles Times Magazine (January 21, 2001) Michael defended the decision to sell the exclusive photo rights to OK!: “The reason we did is the control you get from it. The fact that they pay you is a luxury, but by working with an organization deciding that only one magazine in Britain and one in America [People] gets the photos, it stops the feeding frenzy of the paparazzi.” He refused to confirm the $1.5 million price and the additional $800,000 he reportedly received from People for the American rights, and insisted the photo money did not pay for the wedding and that he gave much of it to charity.
CHAPTER 19
Look, I’d love to have made more films. I know most of the movies I’ve done are pretty good, but I’ve made many fewer movies than everybody else.… [T]here’s no better gig than being the star who gets $20 million a picture and a piece of the back end … but there’s nothing more important than being with Catherine.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
THEY SETTLED INTO MARRIED LIFE IN NEW YORK City. Catherine insisted they hire a nanny from her native Wales so that young Dylan would not grow up with a New York accent, a way of speaking Catherine particularly detested. Michael, whose familiar Connecticut accent with its broken-back a’s still lingered, had no problem being surrounded by Welsh women.
The previous winter, Michael and Catherine, who was pregnant at the time with Dylan Michael, had signed on to do Traffic for director Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies and Videotape, 1989; Erin Brockovich, 2000; and others), written by Stephen Gaghan. Soderbergh had long wanted to make a film about the drug problem in America, but he was not interested in doing a movie about junkies. Instead, he wanted to explore the effects of drugs on a middle-class family. He had long admired the British TV series Traffik, drawn to it because of the way it used parallel structures to delve into the literal journey drugs take on their way to becoming a valuable commodity, as well as to view the victims who make the drug cartels wealthy.
Soderbergh originally had had a deal at Fox to develop the project, but the studio threatened to back away if the director didn’t use Harrison Ford as the father, a conservative Ohio judge who is appointed to head the President’s Office of National Drug Control and whose teenage all-American daughter is hopelessly hooked on crack cocaine. Soderbergh, however, wanted no part of Harrison Ford, preferring Michael instead. When the studio called in its chips, Soderbergh shopped the film elsewhere and wound up making a deal with the independent USA Films, as long as he could be his own cameraman.
USA Films agreed to all of Soderbergh’s conditions, even to the three-hour length of the film, the amount of time he insisted he needed to tell the story the right way. Michael initially turned down Soderbergh’s offer to star in the film, perhaps feeling that playing a judge who is also the father of a drug-addicted teenager was a little too close to home. Soderbergh then offered the female lead to Catherine. Michael remembers, “When Steven presented it to me, the character on the page was kind of two-dimensional and I said, ‘I love this but there’s not enough here for me to do.’ When he came to Catherine for her part, I looked at the [revised] script and thought, ‘Hey, this has really gotten good’ and I agreed to play the judge.… Catherine and I never actually had any scenes together—she shot down in San Diego and I was mostly in Ohio. She was supposed to have two kids in the film, but she was pregnant at the time, so I suggested to Steve tha
t she play her character pregnant. He thought it really upped the stakes.” Later on, Michael, reflecting on Soderbergh’s making of the movie, said, “It was just fun to see the style it was shot in. It was a refreshing time to see how Steven [films], how quickly he could move, how mobile he was. [My role] was a small part in really a trilogy. A three-way story, and I was very proud to be part of it.” Catherine’s role was that of Helena Ayala, the wife of a drug dealer, who desperately tries to get the key witness to the upcoming trial killed. She is ruthless, cold, and frightening.
Made on a solid $48 million budget, Traffic feels like Soderbergh’s Grand Guignol, filmed with myriad major cinematic influences, from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) to a quartet of Richard Lester films—A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), How I Won the War (1967), and Petulia (1968)—and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 Breathless. One also sees touches of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 semidocumentary The Battle of Algiers and even Alan J. Pakula’s 1976’s All the President’s Men.
Soderbergh elicited a terrific, unexpectedly supercharged performance from Michael as a frustrated father battling his beautiful but addicted teenage daughter, played by Erika Christensen, and a menacingly convincing one from Catherine.
The film was eventually (and sensibly) trimmed to two hours and twenty-seven minutes and given a limited run on December 27, 2000, to qualify for the Oscars, prior to a January nationwide release. It proved the biggest sleeper of the year, grossing $124 million domestically and $208 million worldwide. It received great reviews and equally strong word of mouth, which helped bring mainstream audiences to what was, essentially, a ferociously dark film about the disintegration of the American family and the government’s losing battle against the international illegal drug industry.