Kirk and Anne (Turner Classic Movies)

by Kirk Douglas

  Copyright

  © 2017 The Bryna Company

  Published by Running Press,

  An Imprint of Perseus Books, LLC,

  A Subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

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  ISBN 978-0-7624-6217-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931956

  E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-6218-6

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Designed by Susan Van Horn

  Edited by Cindy De La Hoz

  Typography: Neutra, Bauer Bodoni, and ITC New Baskerville

  Running Press Book Publishers

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  Contents

  cover

  title page

  copyright

  epigraph

  foreword by Michael Douglas

  introduction

  CHAPTER ONE: WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  CHAPTER TWO: OUR COMPLICATED COURTSHIP

  CHAPTER THREE: 1954: OUR ROMANCE GOES TRANSATLANTIC

  CHAPTER FOUR: TOGETHER AT LAST

  CHAPTER FIVE: BRYNA’S EARLY YEARS

  CHAPTER SIX: 1957: ON LOCATION IN ARIZONA, GERMANY, AND NORWAY

  CHAPTER SEVEN: FACING DIFFICULTIES AT HOME

  CHAPTER EIGHT: BECOMING SPARTACUS

  CHAPTER NINE: OUR HOLLYWOOD LIFE

  CHAPTER TEN: A LIFE BEYOND HOLLYWOOD

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

  CHAPTER TWELVE: FRIENDS AND FAMILY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CARING IS SHARING

  afterword

  photos

  acknowledgments

  photo credits

  If you’re a movie star you get all the credit. But my wife deserves more than half. To my wife Anne, this book is dedicated to you.

  —KD

  This is the story of an unending love affair. For my husband and friend, Kirk.

  —AD

  foreword

  by MICHAEL DOUGLAS

  THE SECRET TO A GREAT PLAY IS ITS THIRD ACT. If the audience is still engaged by the story, enthralled with the characters, and surprised by what it sees, the playwright has created magic.

  Kirk and Anne is a book overflowing with magical stories. Their life together has been filled with romance and drama, great triumphs and heartbreaking tragedies, and a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle. If their letters reveal anything about Kirk and Anne Douglas, it is that from the very beginning they were opposites who could not help but attract. Each of them brings out the very best in the other.

  My father Kirk wears his heart on his sleeve, while Anne protects hers with a caution borne of bearing life’s burdens with dignity and strength. Yet it is that very protective quality that makes her the lioness that she is. She’s used it to take care of all of us, especially my father. I remember as a young boy, after my father and my mother Diana divorced, not only did Anne treat my brother Joel and I as though we were always a family, she invariably showed great love and respect to our mother. With Anne’s characteristic dry wit, she referred to her as “our ex-wife.”

  In their third act, Kirk is still enthralled by Anne, as she is by him. My father recently told me, “Cole Porter loved Anne.” Think of it: a young woman from France, newly arrived in Hollywood in the early ’50s and married to one of the world’s biggest movie stars, is invited to accompany her husband to a dinner party hosted by the legendary lyricist/composer. It is the star’s young wife, with her European style and effortless grace, who delights their host. She is invited back and told, “You may bring your husband too, if you must.”

  This book begins with the passionate and poignant story of their courtship as revealed through their never-before-published letters. It then follows their seven-decade journey through happiness and hardship, annotated by their correspondence with the influential and remarkable people who have shared that journey with them.

  If this book is the curtain for their third act, I can’t wait for their fourth.

  —Michael Douglas, January, 2017

  introduction

  MOVIE DIRECTORS CALL THE FLEETING MOMENTS when sunset approaches the “magic hour.” Some of the most memorable moments in film history have been shot in the last light of day. In our house, we celebrate it as the “golden hour”—a time to reflect and connect, to recall and relive some of the magic hours that have filled our enduring union of more than sixty years.

  When we reminisce about our courtship, we could never have imagined our new love growing into a lifetime of these golden hours. Some of them have followed painful, heartbreaking days. We made it through even the hardest of them because, at the end, we had each other.

  One evening when we were sitting in front of the fire in the great room of our Montecito home, I, Kirk, asked my wife if I had ever sent her love letters. She smiled mysteriously at me. “Would you like to see them?” she asked. “I’ll be right back.” She returned with a battered-looking manila file folder filled with flimsy air mail envelopes, letters on pages from the yellow-lined legal pads we used at home, and dashed-off notes on odd slips of paper—some of them the kind of billets-doux that lovers write “just because.”

  I, Anne, have very few mementos from my early life before Kirk. In the turbulent years before and during World War II, I moved from Hannover to Brussels and then to Paris, taking only essentials each time. As a result, the letters and memorabilia of our life together were even more important to me.

  My main repository for the collection has been the climate-controlled wine cellar of our Beverly Hills home, which I call the “dungeon.” It is filled with boxes of letters and photographs from friends and fans, from Hollywood royalty and political leaders all over the world. Most harken back to a kinder, gentler time, when writing notes in one’s own handwriting was considered a mark of courtesy. I admit the handwriting on some of them is hard to decipher, mine included.

  The intimate letters of our courtship and marriage have been hidden for many years—in a secret spot in my Montecito bedroom. I haven’t looked at them since I put them there, but they are very precious to me. I saved whatever Kirk wrote me, of course, but over the years I also collected my letters to him. I would find them in the suitcases I unpacked when he came home from locations. I was happy to share them again with Kirk.

  As the golden hour faded into darkness that evening, we read a few of them aloud to each other in front of the fire. We both had forgotten how intensely we communicated after we fell in love in Paris in 1953, married in Las Vegas in 1954, and endured subsequent separations because of film commitments. In addition to the long newsy letters, there were cables, notes scribbled in airplanes and between takes, and a few X-rated ramblings about how much we missed each other. It was like seeing them for the first time all these years later.

  I, Kirk, have written eleven books over the years, some of them autobiogra
phical and three since I turned ninety. Now in the beginning of my one hundredth year, I felt there was nothing new to say about my life or the people in it. For several years I had toyed with the idea of writing a book of letters, based on the ones Anne had stashed in the dungeon. I couldn’t find the right thread for a cohesive narrative and lost interest. Suddenly I knew the missing ingredient: it was Anne. I had written about her many times, but how extraordinary to read how she felt about her life with me—its opportunities, its drawbacks, its pleasures and pains.

  I looked at my wife. “I’ll tell you what’s in here,” I said, tapping on the precious file before me. “It’s our book.”

  —Anne and Kirk Douglas, April 2016

  CHAPTER ONE

  When We Were Young

  KIRK:

  I know little about my immigrant parents’ early life in Russia. Fiddler on the Roof is a sanitized version of their shtetl world at the dawn of the twentieth century. During a pogrom, my mother, Bryna Sanglel, saw a Cossack murder her brother. She had no pleasant memories of the Old Country—at least none that she ever shared. After I became the Hollywood star, Kirk Douglas, and Ma was living comfortably in the Jewish Home for the Aged in Troy, New York, she worried I would go to Russia. Her reaction was strong and immediate. This is from her letter of April 8, 1958, which she dictated to my sister:

  Dear Anne and Kirk,

  I have heard from several people that they have heard about your (Kirk) being invited by Russia to make a picture there. This came as a big shock to me and I pray to God that while I am alive you will not go to Russia. I do not mind whenever and wherever you go elsewhere but not to Russia. Please keep this in mind as I am not young nor too well any longer and these are my feelings. We are happy and proud of whatever you do and we have heard too much unfavorable news about Russia to have you embroiled there.

  Stay well and happy and write again soon.

  My dear son, God bless you.

  Love, Mother

  We had no relatives in America except for my uncle Avram. He arrived a year before my father, and changed his name from Danielovitch to Demsky. Pa—Herschel Danielovitch the horse trader—became Harry Demsky the ragman after joining his brother in Amsterdam, New York. Pa was very strong, but the thriving local factories would not hire Jews. He bought a horse named Bill and a cart so he could buy old rags, scrap metal, and any other junk lying around people’s homes. He took the day’s haul to a dealer for pennies on the pound. The next year he sent a steerage ticket for his young bride. Whether he paid for it himself I highly doubt. My father spent his earnings on drink in the nearest saloon. Without that ticket, my sisters and I would never have been born.

  I don’t know if my parents loved each other or whether their marriage was the work of the local shadchen (matchmaker). I never saw a sign of affection between them. Pa never addressed my mother by her name, Bryna. It was usually, “Hey you.” All I know for sure is that Ma bore him seven children between 1912 and 1924. I, Issur Danielovitch, fourth in line and the only boy, was born on December 9, 1916—one hundred years ago. The others were Pesha (Betty), Kaleh (Kay), Tamara (Marion), Rachel (Ruth), and the twins, Hashka and Siffra (Fritzi and Ida). When I reached school age, I was enrolled as Isadore (Izzy) Demsky—a name I always hated.

  Yiddish was the only language I heard in the house. Until I was old enough for kindergarten, I did not play with other kids on the street. They were a polyglot mix from many countries. Their fathers worked in the factories. During the days, Ma and I inhabited a world of our own. I liked it that way. With only cold water in the kitchen, a washboard for her laundry, and no icebox (not that we ever had much to store in one), Ma was constantly cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and worrying about paying the bills. Pa was no help. Almost all his daily take was spent at his favorite bar, Bogie’s. He rarely came home for dinner. He never seemed to care whether we had food on the table or went to bed hungry.

  We lived in abject poverty. My wife always tells people, “Kirk hates to hear anyone say they were poorer than he was.” She’s right. I am proud of it, because it made me hungry to achieve success. I told my sons, “You didn’t have my advantage. From the bottom there’s only one place to go. Up!”

  Isadore and Bryna Demsky in Amsterdam

  But as a toddler, with no other experience to judge our living standards by, I was content to bask in Ma’s delight with me. She loved her daughters, but I was her prince. My sisters never seemed to mind, because my mother told them not to expect too much of life. “Girls are dreck (shit),” I heard her say more than once. For sure, Pa reinforced that belief. Then again, he didn’t treat me, his son, any better.

  By the time my fourth birthday rolled around on December 9, 1920, women had just cast votes for the first time in an American election. The nineteenth amendment to the Constitution had finally been ratified by Congress that August. It didn’t mean anything to my mother, who couldn’t read a newspaper, even in Yiddish. It wouldn’t have changed her view on a woman’s role in the universe. In Amsterdam’s small Orthodox synagogue, she prayed with others of her sex in the tiny upstairs balcony where she could barely see the Holy Ark below.

  Baby Izzy

  Baby Issur, 1916; “Outstanding pupil” Izzy (top left) with other kindergarten classmates; Izzy’s

  Outstanding Pupils

  Production - Christopher Columbus

  stage debut as a sailor in the kindergarten play Christopher Columbus

  While my three older sisters were at school, I had Ma all to myself. I loved being in the warm kitchen on a cold winter day, watching her roll out the challah dough. On Friday night, the braided loaf would sit on the Shabbos table alongside the candlesticks that had been passed to her from her mother. I own them now. This ritual ushered in Ma’s only day of rest, a sacred interval from dusk on Friday until three stars could be seen in the sky on Saturday.

  In the kitchen at age four, I plied her with important questions while she worked:

  “Ma, how was I born?”

  “Issur, you arrived in a gold box from heaven.”

  “Wow! What did you do?”

  “I ran outside and wrapped you in my shawl.”

  “Did you take the gold box, Ma?”

  “No. I only wanted what was inside, myne kind.”

  In kindergarten I entered a strange new world with an unfamiliar language. I enjoyed being there and having friends my own age. Before I knew it, I was speaking English. When I recited a poem about the red robin of spring, everyone clapped. I took my first bow before an audience. I loved it. By second grade I was a seasoned pro, milking my title role of the shoemaker in The Shoemaker and the Elves. My mother and my sisters, of course, were there. My father said he would not come. Pa took zero interest in any of us children. But I was surprised. There he was, standing with his back against the exit doors. He didn’t say much, but he bought me a loganberry juice before taking me home. The memory is as fresh to me more than ninety years later as the night it happened. I had longed for him to give me a pat on the back. This was the closest he ever came to it. Even when I was a famous movie star, he never told me he saw any of my films. I heard later that he bragged about me to his drinking friends.

  Why was he like that? I can only guess. Perhaps he had believed the myth that American streets were paved with gold bricks. I saw another side of him one night at Bogie’s. Looking into the window of the saloon, I watched him. He was in his element, a natural actor with a rapt audience of bar cronies hanging on his every word.

  When I had my Bar Mitzvah at thirteen—impressing the small congregation with my delivery of the Hebrew text and my speech in Yiddish—I got a few gold pieces as presents. I had been earning money by delivering the Schenectady newspaper to subscribers scattered all over town. It would have been much easier to deliver the Amsterdam Evening Recorder. I couldn’t get a route because I was Jewish.

  Together with what I had saved from my job and my Bar Mitzvah, I now had a college fund of $313. I handed i
t over to my father when he asked to borrow it, even though my mother begged me not to. I think I wanted him in my debt. Pa bought a lot of metal he was going to sell for a good profit. It was just before Black Tuesday, on October 29, 1929. The price of metal plummeted. My college fund was gone, and I never heard another word from him about it.

  By the time I was in high school, I was sure I wanted to be an actor. My English teacher, Mrs. Livingston, befriended me and didn’t belittle my dreams. “To be a great actor, you have to be a great person. You must be educated. You must be trained,” she said. I sent away for college and drama school catalogs.

  I began to write poetry and had good roles in the school plays. In my junior year, I won the Gold Medal in the Sanford Prize-Speaking Contest. My sister Marion had won it two years earlier. My oldest sister, Betty, never had a chance to enter. She left school in the ninth grade to go to work. She was our sole support during the leanest years of the Depression.

  In my senior year, Mrs. Schuyler, the drama teacher, organized a class trip to see Katharine Cornell in Albany, starring in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Who could have predicted that the first time I stepped on a Broadway stage I would deliver a singing telegram to Grace George in Spring Again, a drama produced by Guthrie McClintic, Katharine Cornell’s husband. I was included in the cast invitation to their grand home off Beekman Place for Thanksgiving. It was the first time I tasted champagne and caviar.

  There were 322 of us in my graduating class of 1934. I won the Best Acting and Best Speech Prizes as well as one for my essay, “The Play’s the Thing.” My mother and sisters were there. My father was not. With no money for college, I worked for a year in men’s ready-to-wear at the M. Lurie department store. Then, with $164 in my pocket, I hitchhiked to St. Lawrence University with my friend Pete Riccio, who was going into his sophomore year.