Kirk Douglas was driving to Palm Springs one day when he stopped to give a sailor a lift. The sailor saw the dimple in his driver`s chin, recognized something vaguely familiar around the jaw, noticed the blue eyes and the sandy blond hair and said, ”Hey! Do you know who you are?”
”It`s a wonderful question,” says Kirk Douglas, 72, sitting in the office of his production company (named Bryna, after his mother), drinking coffee from a cup marked ”Pappy.”
He`s smaller than one expects, thinner, even wiry. He`s wearing beige jeans and a matching jacket, black Reeboks and white socks that keep falling down. His hair is wheat-colored and when he runs his hand through it, pulling it straight back from his forehead, he looks a little-just a little-like Michael Douglas in ”Wall Street.” When he tenses his jaw and bares his teeth, which he does often, he looks like impressionist Frank Gorshin doing a so-so Kirk Douglas imitation. The way his skin is stretched taut over his skull, with the cheek bones jutting against the thin flesh, he looks like an old Vincent van Gogh.
He doesn`t sit still for a minute. He`s a restless, unsatisfied, impatient man. Always has been. Always will be. He tucks his legs under him and sits on them. Then he perches on the edge of his chair, rests his hands on his knees and rocks back and forth. Then he maneuvers his heels until they form a straight line. Constant motion. He answers questions that no one asks. He talks, talks, talks. Frequently about ”Sparatacus,” a movie he made 28 years ago. Sometimes about ”Champion,” a movie nearly 40 years old.
Back to the sailor.
”When he said that, I thought, `Who do I think I am?` When I`m playing a character, it`s easy to know who I am. But the more you deal with imaginary characters, the more they take you away from who you are. You deal so often with make-believe that reality doesn`t seem very clear. You can become confused. That question really got me probing. I wanted to find out who I am, put all the pieces together, and see what the hell comes out. It`s amazing how many things you can uncover. And I was in the part of my life where I wanted to take inventory.”
Almost everything Douglas unearthed is in his autobiography, ”The Ragman`s Son” (Simon and Schuster, $21.95):
– The bitter days in Amsterdam, N.Y., when he was little Issur Danielovitch, later Izzy Demsky, the only son of illiterate Russian Jews. On good days, he and his six sisters and his mother ate eggs scrambled with water for dinner while his father, the ragman, was off on a drunk. On bad days, they didn`t eat.
”Even on Eagle Street,” he writes, ”in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman`s son.” He admits, ”I loved my father, but I hated him, too.”
– The exhilarating years in New York. During the day he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship, wearing a cast-off coat that swept the streets. At night he waited tables at Schrafft`s, stuffing leftover sandwiches in his mouth. On Thanksgiving Day, he waited in line at the Salvation Army for a free meal. In his first Broadway show, he deliverd a singing telegram onstage, worked backstage as stage manager, understudied four roles, directed rehearsals and managed the office.
– The heady Hollywood years when he was turning out three pictures a year: ”Lust for Life,” ”Lonely Are the Brave,” ”2,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” ”The Vikings,” ”Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” He traveled around the world as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. government-at his own expense- and dated the most beautiful, most desirable women: Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Ann Sothern, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Pier Angeli.
– The present, where he`s known in New Hollywood as Michael Douglas`
father and his movies are shown in ”retrospectives.” He recently had a pacemaker installed. He calls it his ”music box.” He ran into Burt Lancaster in the cardiologist`s office, saw his old friend`s huge medical file and wondered what his prognosis was.
It`s a story full of pain and anger. The first word of the book is
”nobody.” Fitting. ”Nobody” is what Kirk Douglas felt like most, if not all, of his life.
”Sure, there`s pain and anger in it,” says Douglas, in that familiar gravel voice. ”That`s because there`s pain and anger in me. It`s something I have to live with. There`s always a certain unhappiness that`s with me.” It was that unhappiness that led him into analysis years ago. ”I`m a star, why aren`t I happy?” he wondered. After five years he left analysis, not because he found the answer, but because he realized ”my doctor had more problems than I had. I figured what the hell . . . . ”
–
All his life Kirk Douglas waited for his father to acknowledge him: to put a comforting arm around him and call him ”Son,” to rescue him from that suffocating world of women and initiate him into the dark, mysterious world of men, to give him ”a pat on the back.” He never got it. Not as a child. Not as a man. It`s a wound that continues to fester. When his dying father asked him to visit a little longer, he refused. He didn`t attend the old man`s funeral. He says he has forgiven his father, but he hasn`t forgotten the years of neglect.
”He couldn`t help it,” says Douglas. ”He was what he was. He had his own problems. He struggled to provide for six girls and one boy. I understand a lot of those things, intellectually. Nevertheless, emotionally, I so desperately needed his approval. When I read over the book, it surprised me how strong that feeling was.”
Douglas got four chances to be the father he never had. He has been married twice, first to actress Diana Dill, and for the last 34 years to Anne Buydens, a German whom he refers to as his ”European wife.” As a Jew who has suffered anti-Semitism his whole life, he can`t bear to call her German. In the early stories about their marriage, she was identified as either Belgian or French. He has two sons with Dill: Michael, 43, and Joel, 40; and two sons with Buydens: Peter, 32, and Eric, 27. Against their father`s advice, all four sons have gone into show business, acting or producing. Joel lives in France, Peter in California. Eric and Michael have homes in both California and New York.
”I had fantasies of the father I wanted to be,” Douglas says. ”I`d be leaning back in my chair, puffing on my pipe. But it wasn`t that way at all. I was never that father. A lot of times I was uptight, emotional. Michael says, `Dad, sometimes you were looney!` I always felt one thing, with children, you have to show that you care. A lot of times it`s by discipline-bawling them out.”
Michael Douglas once said he remembers his father`s ”rage.” He would tell him, ” `I yell and scream because I care.` . . . I think he had a lot of mixed feelngs about his role as a father. His father was not around a lot when he was growing up, and I think he felt guilty for the time he was away from us.”
When Michael Douglas received an Oscar for ”Wall Street,” he thanked his father, who ”never missed a performance that I gave when I was in college.”
”What surprised me,” says Kirk Douglas, ”was that he was aware of it. That was a way of being a father that obviously had a big impact on him.”
Kirk Douglas was so poor when he was growing up that cornflakes were a luxury. His sons were raised with the kinds of things that only a million-dollar-a-movie salary can buy. Yet, unlike so many second-generation Hollywood children, they`re all productive-in Douglas` favorite word,
”functioning.” How did that happen?
”I never made the mistake of saying to my kids, `When I was a poor boy . . . ` I said just the opposite. I said, `You kids don`t have my advantages. I had the advantage of being born in abject poverty. I had nowhere to go but up. If my father had been Kirk Douglas, I might have become a polo player.`
But they`ve had their own problems. Sometimes financial problems aren`t the most difficult ones to deal with. They had, `Oh, your father`s Kirk Douglas`
to overcome.”
Michael Douglas once said he used to wonder, ” `How can I be the man this man was? Look at the guy! . . . He was larger than life.` . . . It took me a long time to get through all of that to a sense of myself.”
Of his four sons, the youngest, Eric, is most like him. He is an actor and Douglas feels has the strongest Jewish roots. ”That relationship gets very difficult because he`s too much like me. He`s hyperactive. I sometimes say to him, `Loving and hating you is like loving and hating myself.` ”
Eric agrees that they`re alike. ”We`re both perfectionists, energetic, passionate, intense, we make things happen. We`re constantly working on projects. It makes us difficult to be around.” Eric was struck when he read his father`s book-much of which was new to him-by how much his relationship to Kirk mirrors Kirk`s relationship to his father.
”I saw a lot of comparisons,” says Eric. ”His calling out to his father for understanding and attention. It`s all there. What`s the old saying? `You become your father`? There`s no son that doesn`t want more pats on the back.”
Both Eric and Kirk Douglas are driven men who need to prove themselves, constantly. ”I`m not trying to show my father, I`m trying to show myself,”
says Kirk Douglas. He does most of his own stunts-juggling, playing the trumpet, flying on a trapeze, riding. Even in the recent ”Tough Guys” he walked atop a moving train.
Eric Douglas insisted on taking five courses his first semester in college and working three part-time jobs. ”My father said, `I worked my way through college so you wouldn`t have to.` But I did have to. I had to prove I could do it.” When Eric was a child, his parents spoke French at the dinner table-Kirk had learned the language for a movie-when they didn`t want him to know what they were saying. So he learned French to show them. He says he`d be ”honored” if he were asked to play his father in a movie of his life.
Another thing Kirk and Eric share is an inability to ”savor the moment,” in Kirk`s words. ”We all have that problem,” says Eric. ”We`re always reaching. We`re very competitive, looking ahead to the next project.” Throughout his life, Douglas always asked himself, ”Now why aren`t I happy?” After his first hit move, ”Champion,” he returned to New York a star and fulfilled one of his dreams, staying in a suite on the 25th floor of the Hampshire House Hotel.
”Alone, I walked to the window and looked down on the park,” he writes. ”Kids were sledding, tobogganing on trash-can lids. They all seemed happy. Everybody was happy but me.” Later he told Michael, ”If something good happens to you, stop. Enjoy it. Savor it.”
”It`s still hard for me,” says Douglas. ” `Spartacus` was the biggest picture of its time, but I wasn`t thinking about that. I was already thinking about `The Vikings` or `Seven Days in May.` It`s part of my makeup. I don`t even know that I`m looking for happiness anymore. I need to always have something creative to work on. It would be difficult for me to do nothing. I think it would be wonderful to have the capacity to do nothing-to sit, look at the sky-I have moments like that, but they`re very short. . . . Michael said to me recently, `Dad, relax. You`ve got four sons, we didn`t turn out so badly, did we?`
”My relationship with my sons is much better now that they`re men. They`re men I like to be with. Nothing pleases me more than to have my four sons together at one time. We have a lot of laughs, there`s a lot of imitations of Kirk Douglas. I enjoy them and I think they enjoy me. They like the old man. They find him funny.”
Back when Kirk Douglas was a skinny little boy, in the days when he was dirty-faced little Issur Danielovitch, dressed in rags, his belly empty, his soul aching, all he had to sustain him was his imagination. He`d dream about the future.
”My God,” says Kirk Douglas today, ”when I was a little kid leaning on the fence, dreaming what my life would be like, I wasn`t even capable of dreaming of things like this. I`ve met queens and kings, emperors, I`ve become a worldwide movie star, I`ve traveled. You`ve got to be careful what you dream. It may come true.”
