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Michael Douglas, firmly committed to his silver fox days, opened the door to the secret compartments of his life. Douglas, 82, has just published an incredibly flat, wildly entertaining, at times both hilarious and painful new memoir, A hell of a ride. It’s a story that spans generations of Hollywood royalty, from his father Kirk’s rise to stardom to his own series of classic films as a producer and actor: We flew over a cuckoo’s nest (1975), The Chinese syndrome (1979), Romance the stone (1984), Wall Street (1987), Fatal attraction (1987), Basic instinct (1992), And To fall (1993), to name just a few of the most important. Written with Shane Salerno, the book is one of those rare memoirs that both entertains and illuminates a lost Hollywood world of glamor and decadence, with lots of sex and drugs and even a little rock & roll.
To discuss all this, Douglas invited me to his lavish apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park, one of many homes he owns and enjoys. He is a welcoming and gracious host, with no busy servants or assistants. Just Douglas walking around in his socks, looking slim and handsome and charming as ever. Douglas makes me coffee and we sit in a living room overlooking his two Oscars, an Emmy and other awards. Between Douglas and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, the trophy case is so large that it fills a corner of the huge living room.
Sometimes when he looks back during our conversation, Douglas’s eyes widen. He’s an emotional guy, especially when he talks about his family. Yet Douglas is unflinching in the book about how his father was physically abusive and terrifying towards him and his brother. As his parents’ divorce (his mother was the actress Diana Dill) was traumatic. In a way, he was a quirky latchkey kid, except his parents’ apartments were across the country and worlds apart.
Much of the book is about this elemental relationship with his father and how it was impossible to escape Kirk’s shadow given Douglas’ chosen career. Battles against addiction also continue. They cost his father one of his sons, Michael’s half-brother Eric, who died of a drug overdose in 2004, and almost cost Michael his eldest son Cameron, whose heroin problem led him to spend seven years in a federal penitentiary. (Cameron Douglas wrote his own book, Long Way Home: A Memoir of Fame, Family and Redemption, in 2019.) Michael speaks openly about his own time in rehab, his battle with cancer, and his many, many adventures.
But above all, he is there, as he always has been, to entertain, and the book is an uninterrupted stroll through more than 80 years of showbiz. It’s a look at one of the great lives of the late 20th century. He still has a few quarrels and scores to settle (Brian De Palma and Joe Eszterhas, watch out) but also a lot of thanks to give. This man has experienced so much and he is ready to tell us everything.
What inspired you to write the book?
I said, “Well, Dad did a really good biography,” and he had written other books. I had some time with cancer to take inventory and I said, “Fuck, between my dad and I, we have 80 years in the business and 120 films, and I can’t really think of anyone else…” I’m the first super-nepo baby type. This is a true story of this heritage. And I realized that memory and family are all you have left. So I started to like the fact that I could retrieve information about the past and I said, “Let’s do it.”
You’ve been quite candid about your father and your childhood. Was it difficult to operate?
The best part was knowing how it all ended, which meant a lot of love and immense respect. But I had to be honest about the abuse or just the fear factor of going out to visit him, and understanding as you grew up and then saw your own actions very similar to your father’s. (Douglas cries.) Dad was overwhelmed and he was sort of stuck between his father, who never gave him a pat on the back, ignored him. His father was an immigrant, spoke no English, Russian Jew, arrived here in 1902.
He had seven children. Dad had six sisters and his father was a rag picker. So he said, “If I ever have children, I will be a father.” » And there you have it, he is divorced from his wife. He has two children. So when we went out to see him, he had good intentions, but he was so swamped with work – it was the time when they were making five films a year.
It was so intense. There was a drive in him, a strength, a rage, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to be a good father, but he was also the generation of hard knocks. You hit your children. My mother had a hairbrush.
There is also the tension in this marriage, that of a first generation Jewish immigrant marrying this big WASP. It’s a bit of a culture shock, isn’t it?
It was opposites attracting. And my mother was 16 and she lied about her age when she got into the American Academy (of Dramatic Arts). Dad was a Russian Ashkenazi Jew. And my mother was Protestant, a member of the Anglican Church. His father was Attorney General of Bermuda and all that. (Show his coat.) It’s actually a Life my mother’s magazine cover. She was a beautiful woman. It was at the time when, after the academy, my father had entered the Navy. Mom’s cover came out and he told his friend, “I’m going to marry this woman.” »
And he did it.
Which he did, which was so weird because that’s exactly what I told Catherine.
You really could have called this book “Fathers and Sons.” A lot of it is about your relationship with your father, and then with you and Cameron as well. You really feel it on the page. Especially with your own pain of being a father.
It’s hard. It’s hard. And I made a lot of mistakes. I fought with Shane for starting (the story) so early, but I realized a lot of it was the result of (my mom and dad) combining. She was diplomatic and gentle and tried to make everything work out, which I tend to think that way. And then also my father with this intensity and this rage. For me, the magic happened when they got divorced, because I remember the fighting and the yelling, but the first time he came back to us in that apartment on 85th Street, we were so nervous, and he came in and he hugged my mother, “Hello, hello.”
Douglas (far right), circa 1965, with his family: his brother Joel, his half-brother Peter, his mother-in-law Anne, his half-brother Eric and his father Kirk (left to right)
Hulton Archives/Getty Images
And I remember breaking down crying because the tension was so high. I was lucky that they respected each other and got along well. So I saw them both not making the children take sides on one side or the other. And then they moved on and Dad married Anne (Buydens), a French woman who had been an ad man in one of his photos. And mom married Bill Darrid. And I had these great in-laws. There was no friction. I had a wonderful middle-class upbringing with Mom and Bill, and Anne was lovely too. And all four of them loved to have dinner together. So there was a comfort factor there.
Which was rare for this generation.
Very rare, even for this one (one). That’s what I kind of preach, which is “please don’t drag kids into these things.”
Your book chronicles the evolution of the baby boomer generation. I mean, you’ve accomplished so much, and some of it is great, but some of it is pretty selfish and profligate.
I had to be honest about the alcohol and drug abuse during those years. It didn’t help anyone. But the 60s, 70s, 80s, it’s just a whole different time.
GOOD, rolling stone isn’t it rolling stone without all that too, right? We flew over a cuckoo’s nest and Ken Kesey or Hunter Thompson, none of this happens without substances. So do you look back on that and say, “That was part of the culture and we were creating the culture”?
Yeah. But for me, again, I grew up on the East Coast and I went to private schools here in New York, all boys. I went to Choate, a very good prep school. And looking back, my first big decision was when I decided to go to college and realized my butt was so tight. The best decision I made at the time was to go to the University of California Santa Barbara, I guess for all the wrong reasons: there were girls. This is when the UC system really took off. I went there in 1963 and discovered the hippie culture. I just thought it was magical. First of all, it wasn’t monetary. Everyone was really based on a sense of familiarity, on sharing and giving. It was a spiritual life and just beautiful and magical.
One of the things that struck me in the book is, and forgive me, I just thought that Kirk Douglas’s son, well, he was going to be raised in privilege, but he was really middle class. They didn’t give you much and you ended up selling weed to pay for college.
Yeah. All the “Hollywood royalty” like daddy descended from the sky. He was struggling. And my mother was in a soap opera and a play. My stepfather was an actor and he produced a few plays on Broadway. It was a theatrical and artistic culture. But artists make good dinner companions.
Without fail.
They have good stories. So I loved, when I was young, spending time with them and their friends. Or when I was out with Dad and they were having dinner and Don Rickles was there, and Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, Tony Curtis. And you just see everyone with their own insecurities and weaknesses. You saw it as a job and what they had to do. So it took away some of our imagination of what show business was because you saw the hard work. I became a theater…
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