CHAPTER 4

I think having a famous father was a pain in the ass for him.… Michael, of all my four sons, had the least ambition.

—KIRK DOUGLAS

IN THE FALL OF 1963, UCSB WELCOMED NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD English major Michael with open arms and loving, bikini-clad coeds. Music filled the air alongside the pungent clouds of pot smoke and other assorted social accessories of physical pleasure that filled this campus-by-the-sea, reassuring Michael he had made the right decision.

Not long after classes began, his frequent communiqués home to his mother were filled with descriptions of his great new life, lots about the weather, the ocean, and of course much about the girls, but hardly any news of his academic achievements. A red flag went up for Diana when Michael wrote to say he was moving in with a girl, but not to worry because they were still going to date other people.

It was, indeed, that now-fabled dawning of the age of Aquarius, and everyone under twenty-five wanted entrée to the anything-goes Youth Club of America. And at UCSB Michael stood at the head of the line. He let his hair grow long, wore dirty ripped jeans and tie-dyed shirts, was having far too much fun enjoying himself with the pleasures of excess, and missed most of his classes.

By the end of his first year, Diana and Kirk each received letters from the dean regarding Michael’s failing status. His grades had fallen below the minimum acceptable level. The dean strongly suggested Michael take a year off to find himself and to make sure he was ready and willing to take on the responsibilities of full-time college studies.

Michael agreed, dropped out, and returned to Westport. To pass the time, he picked up some day work in a local Mobil gas station. “I was into hot-rods,” Michael said later, and in his after-hours he tried to build himself a racing car in the family garage. That July, he was named “Mobil Man of the Month.”

When Kirk heard about the honor, he called Michael, asked him if he intended to work in a gas station for the rest of his life, and then hung up. He wasn’t pleased.

KIRK WAS, at the time, licking his wounds over the failure of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his attempt to bring his movie-star magic to Broadway.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was based on Ken Kesey’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same title about a so-called sane man who gets himself imprisoned in a mental institution to escape criminal prosecution. Kirk had optioned Kesey’s 1962 novel after reading it in galleys prior to its official release and had hired Dale Wasserman, the screenwriter for The Vikings, to turn it into a stage play. Kirk intended the Broadway run to be a tune-up for what he hoped would make a terrific, Oscar-worthy movie. The show opened on November 13, 1963, despite the poor to mixed reception it had received in its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston.

Unfortunately, the New York reviews for Cuckoo’s Nest were not very good (“murderous” was how Kirk described them). Everyone had advised him to get out as soon as he could, not to throw good money after bad, but Kirk, always a stubborn man, believed the play would eventually find an audience.

It wouldn’t. Nine days into the show’s Broadway run, President Kennedy was assassinated. In the months that followed the awful deed, no one was in the mood to be entertained by a play about someone who might be dangerous and crazy and was stuck in a metaphorical mental prison. Kirk managed to keep it going for two more months on sheer star power but finally pulled the plug on January 25, 1964.

AFTER THAT, Kirk returned to the commercial sanctuary of the big screen and made John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, co-starring his good friend Burt Lancaster. Based on a popular novel of the day by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, it is a paranoid thriller about an attempted military overthrow of the American government. He followed that immediately with Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way, a star-studded ensemble reenactment of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Besides Kirk, John Wayne was in it, along with Patricia Neal (whom Kirk had dated briefly a few years earlier but could not pry out of the bed of Gary Cooper, the self-proclaimed love of her life), Tom Tryon, Brandon DeWilde, Burgess Meredith, and dozens of other up-and-coming, here-and-now, and over-the-hill Hollywood stars.

Kirk had decided to bring along Anne and their children, Peter and Eric, to Hawaii, where the on-location film was being shot. Neither of the boys from his first marriage was invited. Joel, Kirk decided, was too emotionally frail to make the long trip, and he was still angry at Michael for becoming an award-winning gas station attendant.

Kirk’s next picture was Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark. By then, he had finally gotten over his anger at Michael and took him along on location in Norway, where he got him a job in the wardrobe department. Kirk figured if the boy wasn’t going to complete his education, maybe he could learn something about the film business.¹ Kirk took Mann aside and told him to work the boy as hard as he could. Mann, known for his directorial toughness that at times seemed to border on the sadistic, promised Kirk he would make sure Michael didn’t think he was on some kind of a picnic.

To everyone’s surprise, no one’s more than Kirk’s, Michael proved he could take whatever Mann dished out. He did anything and everything he was told to, including assignments no one else wanted—sloppy, dirty work, physically demanding but dull jobs—and he liked it. He was energized by being around film people, especially his father, and began to think that this was a world he wanted to belong to.

Meanwhile, impressed with his son’s work ethic, Kirk invited Michael to join the next production, an American film shot almost entirely in Israel. Melville Shavelson’s Cast a Giant Shadow was the true story (Hollywood style) of American colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, who helped Israel fight for its independence. It was another cameo-fest, with Kirk’s cronies John Wayne (whose Batjac Productions financed the film), Frank Sinatra, and Yul Brynner making appearances.

This time Kirk assigned Michael to a specific position, production assistant, and also let him do some stunt driving, all of which Michael loved. Kirk also brought along Joel, who had pushed through his puberty and in doing so lost some of his emotional confusion. He was now a strapping, husky six-footer. Kirk made him his bodyguard.

The film was completed early in the summer of 1965, just in time for Michael to enroll in UCSB’s summer session. Kirk was elated that Michael had decided to go back to school, but he made it clear he wanted to see some positive results this time.

HE NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED. Michael couldn’t wait to get back to school, and the first thing he did upon his return was to change his major from English to drama. He tried out for UCSB’s summer production, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and landed a small role and threw himself into it.

When it came time for the performance, Michael invited both Kirk and Diana to see him act in it. Both accepted, and each arrived separately. Kirk viewed the production as something of a test. Knowing of Michael’s decision to want to become an actor, Kirk decided that if his son did a good job, he would encourage him to pursue his new dream, maybe even give a helping hand. There were a lot of doors Kirk could open.

But as it turned out, Kirk hated Michael in the play. “You were terrible,” he told him backstage afterward, and walked away, leaving his son speechless. Diana was much more positive after seeing him perform in a school production of Escurial, but it was Kirk’s opnion that meant the most to Michael.

AFTER THAT, Michael quickly fell back into his campus-style hippie living. He once more took up pot smoking, and now became an enthusiastic user of LSD. In the spring of 1966, he moved out of his dorm and into a commune situated in a bunch of abandoned buildings near Mountain Drive, high in the hills of Santa Barbara, with its heady views of the beautiful aqua-blue Pacific.

The members of the commune busied themselves rejecting “straight” society and nourishing their minds by growing their own pot and taking daily doses of acid. Not surprisingly, they had no interest at all in doing anything that smacked of tradition. “There were, I suppose, between 100 and 150 of us at any one time,” David Garsite, another member of the commune, later remembered. “We were the ‘Smile on your brother’ brigade.… I have this vision of Michael in torn jeans and velour shirt flashing around on his big motorcycle, with his long hair trailing in the wind, and a blonde with the most fulsome bosoms you ever saw riding behind him.”

Michael was content to live in a no-running-water shack on the edge of the commune, his bike parked at the front door, dreaming of putting on agitprop street shows with the commune to protest the war in Vietnam. Only he couldn’t get himself off his mattress long enough to organize any of it. Besides always being stoned, a rare venture out on a ski trip had resulted in an accident that left Michael with an injured vertebra, forcing him to wear a back brace (despite doctor’s orders, he only wore it occasionally). The injury left him ineligible for the draft, which may be why he wore it at all, although he insisted at the time that if drafted he would not go into the army but would instead flee to Canada for the duration of the war.

He was enjoying a doob one day when a visitor came to call.

It was Kirk, banging on the door. When Michael let him in, Kirk screamed bloody murder about how his son was living his life. Michael reacted by not reacting. He calmly watched as his father finished his rant and bolted down the road, pushing aside anyone and anything that got in his way.

DESPITE BEING a stoner and seriously injured, Michael managed to attend some classes and did fairly well. When he returned to Connecticut that summer he was together enough, with Bill Darrid intervening, to land a position at the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. Michael did backstage work and served as a gofer, both unpaid positions, all for the promise of a small part in one of that season’s plays. In many ways, to Michael the O’Neill was not all that dissimilar to the commune, except here everyone put on plays every night instead of getting stoned.

He wasn’t enjoying himself all that much, and was thinking about bailing and returning to the West Coast when he met another backstage member of the company, a balding, pug-size young man to whom he took an instant liking. The fellow’s name was Danny DeVito, the unlikeliest of wanna-be actors.

The intense, gnomish five-foot DeVito and the laid-back, five-foot-ten Michael quickly became inseparable. They kept their distance from the coffee-drenched neo-esoterica that filled the smoky nights of most of the other actors in the company; Danny and Michael preferred pushing wheelbarrows filled with dirt, cutting wood, pouring concrete. Alone it was drudge work, together it was fun.

The dynamic of their friendship is not all that difficult to understand. Michael was a silver-spoon baby without any pressing need to make a living. Being a nameless member of a commune fit him perfectly, even if (or perhaps because) it enraged his famous and famously intense father. DeVito, Italian and Catholic, was the child of an immigrant mother and was burning with ambition. He was a working-class Jersey boy who had to survive on his own wits and talent. He was rough-hewn, small in size but large in stature. Their mutual attraction was complementary; if Michael desired to be accepted as one of the workers-of-the-world-united, DeVito longed to get off the mean streets and move among the socially elite. Each envied the other. And there was something else: girls. Both were crazy for them. With his good looks, Michael could always get all the women he wanted, while DeVito wanted anything he could get. To that end, Michael was happy to share, and DeVito was happy to take.

DEVITO WAS BORN in Neptune City and grew up in Asbury Park, not far from where a young Bruce Springsteen was honing his craft and where, a few generations down the road, a couple of shore kids would chronicle the vapidity of their lives on MTV.

Although he spent much of his childhood at the Jersey shore, DeVito’s heart belonged to Brooklyn. Every week he looked forward to traveling with his parents to see his grandmother, who still lived there. As he remembers, “On Sundays we’d take the Staten Island Ferry, get on the Belt Parkway, and drive to Flatbush. I always loved driving through the streets. But I also loved living at the shore. It was a resort, and every summer the city girls would come down.… There were six or seven movie theaters that were constantly changing their programs. Until Labor Day, when everything would change and it would become Bergmanesque.… Beautiful light, not a lot of people, family. Really a beautiful place to grow up.”

DeVito quickly became addicted to movies and wanted to be in them, but he believed it was simply impossible for a guy who looked like he did to get from here to there. After graduating from high school, he lowered his sights and let his sister pay his tuition at the Wilfred Beauty Academy. Not long after, DeVito took a job in her parlor. After a while, he decided he wanted to expand his realm and get into makeup. He thought it would be a great way to get even closer to the women who had quickly become his regulars. The only problem was, he had no idea where to go to study makeup.

Then he saw an ad in a New York newspaper for the Academy of Dramatic Arts (the same acting school that Kirk had attended), which offered a course in makeup technique. “One night, I was eighteen or nineteen, I went down [to the Academy] and said I want to enroll in makeup. They told me I couldn’t enroll just to learn makeup, I had to enroll as an acting student. So my dream was forced upon me! I did a monologue, from Teahouse of the August Moon, because that was how you got in. I’d never seen a play before, except Mr. Roberts done in a tent out in Neptune, New Jersey. But I got in and I enrolled in night classes.”

DeVito proved something of a natural, and despite his height of only five feet (some sources list him at four feet eleven inches), he was able to find work quite easily as a rather distinctive character actor in several summer stock companies, including a 1966 summer residency at the O’Neill, where he met and befriended Michael.

WHEN THE SUMMER ENDED, DeVito went back to Manhattan and resumed looking for acting work, while Michael drove his motorbike cross-country all the way to Santa Barbara, ostensibly to resume classes but really to take up residence once more at Mountain Drive. “I got into the Maharishi, and was doing some meditation.… You had your motorcycle or whatever, and your renaissance velour shirts. It was fun. Marijuana and psychedelics had a real influence … that had to do with rhythm and perspective. I was not, in that period, career-conscious at all.”

Only a few days had passed before Michael next heard from DeVito, who called to say he’d landed a big-break audition in Hollywood for a film role he desperately wanted. Michael wished him luck, and told him he was welcome to stay at the commune as long as he wanted or needed to. DeVito took him up on his offer. Despite the distance between Hollywood and Santa Barbara, the price of a round-trip bus back and forth would be cheaper than finding a place in Hollywood.

DeVito arrived in Santa Barbara wearing a black full-length coat, white sneakers, and a beret. It was Method preparation, DeVito explained to Michael, his way of fitting into the part prior to the audition, which was set for the following week. In the interim, he took a great deal of pleasure from admiring the naked, pot-smoking women who lounged around the commune like it was a poor man’s Playboy Mansion.

DeVito thought he had a real shot at playing the dark and merciless killer Perry Edward Smith, one of the two subjects of the movie Richard Brooks was making based on Truman Capote’s bestselling self-described “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, about the murder of the middle-American Clutter family by Smith and his partner, Richard “Dick” Hickock.

He did not get the part; it went instead to Robert Blake. DeVito lingered for a while in Los Angeles before heading back east.

MEANWHILE, PERHAPS feeling some of DeVito’s energy and determination, Michael finally began to grow weary of the lifestyle he was living. Plus, more and more strangers were showing up, either to try to get laid or to sell drugs to the group. The idealism of Mountain Drive, like the sixties themselves, was fast devolving into slippery hustling, fake hippies, and a legal mire of narcs and cops. Feeling he’d had enough, in the fall of 1967 Michael decided to return to regular classes at UCSB to try to salvage his academic career.

He once more quickly became a familiar and likeable presence on campus. He was known partly for being the son of a celebrity, partly for his natural good looks (including flowing blond hair and a soft chin made firmer looking by the family’s trademark cleft), partly for his acting, and partly for his robust liberal political activism.

In June 1967, the end of his junior year, Michael returned for another go-round at the National Playwrights Conference. He was hired as an actor and was determined this time to concentrate more on performing than on girls.

For this season, the O’Neill focused on newer playwrights. Among them was Michael’s assigned roommate, Cincinnati-born Ron Cowen, a self-styled playwright. He had managed to get the theater company to produce an early version of one of his plays, Summertree, a vivid antiwar story about an all-American young man determined to avoid the draft. When his number is called, he decides to flee to Canada, only to have a last-minute patriotic change of heart; he allows himself to be conscripted, winds up in Vietnam, and is killed. Michael loved the play, seeing a lot of himself in the main character. Cowen cast him in the leading role.

IN MAY 1968, with his parents in attendance, Michael received his BA from UCSB. The next day he left for New York City, intent on becoming a Broadway actor. Upon his arrival, he immediately called DeVito, who offered to let Michael stay with him at his apartment on West Eighty-Ninth Street, for only half the rent.

DeVito remembered, “Our apartment in New York City was $150 a month. I think I was struggling more than he was. But he did the laundry. He fluffed and folded really well. He left me when he went to do The Streets of San Francisco, but he still paid half the rent when he was away. Now we often talk about how stupid we were to let this low-rent apartment go.”

No sooner had he unpacked his bags than Michael headed for the Neighborhood Playhouse, one of the more prestigious acting schools in Manhattan. He had scheduled a fall audition for the Playhouse’s acting guru, Sanford Meisner. Michael’s goal was to secure a place in the next semester’s roster.

Evenings Michael and DeVito became regulars of the Greenwich Village bar and Soho nightlife circuits, where the food was lousy, the pot plentiful, and the women easy. They often piled into DeVito’s old Chevy, a muscle car “which Danny drove with total authority,” Michael recalled. “You know, ticking the side-view mirrors of the double-parked cars, never moving a muscle, never easing off.” “Ya can’t worry about it,” DeVito told a reporter. “Just go through, like Zen.” This was the era when bombing around Manhattan in a car and driving downtown was still feasible, especially in Soho, where DeVito could pull up on almost any street, get out, and leave his car there and it would remain safe and unticketed. In those days, the police stayed away from Soho as if it were Siberia, and the oversize illegally converted lofts and lax street security made it the perfect locale for New York’s anything-goes art community of the late 1960s.

When taking a break from picking up girls (their favorite pastime), they loved to play practical jokes on the uptown crowd. A typical stunt involved DeVito accompanying Michael to a party in one of Madison Avenue’s snootier neighborhoods wearing a pair of grotesque stage teeth and imitating a hunchback. They noted carefully how the room warmed up only when Michael smoothly, and falsely, introduced his friend as the star of the new Richard Brooks movie.

That fall, Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni was in New York searching for the lead in his next film, Zabriskie Point, about the American sixties as seen through the eyes of the outside world, meaning Antonioni. Michael, still waiting for his audition call at the Neighborhood Playhouse, decided to try out for the film. As he remembered, “This talent scout hunt was a big event in New York. Antonioni was looking over people at the Cheetah Club [one of the hottest disco clubs in New York City at the time]. I remember there were crowds stretching all the way around the block. They had us come in three at a time, like a lineup.”

In a pre-interview with an assistant, Michael related a Vietnam “war game” exercise he had done in one of his drama classes at UCSB. When he was finally brought before Antonioni, that same assistant asked him to repeat the story to the director. “I’m talking about it,” Douglas recalled, “and Antonioni’s looking at the guy next to me. He’s not interested in me at all, but he lets me go on talking. So I’m telling him about this one gory time, and he’s ignoring me, so I said in the same voice, ‘And of course, all Italians eat meatballs.’ Antonioni didn’t even notice. There I was spilling my guts, so I said, ‘Fuck this,’ and walked out.”

Michael was more certain than ever that he was never going to be the next Kirk Douglas.

1   Michael is listed in the credits of the 1965 release as assistant director.