CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 5I don’t think Kirk ever learned to enjoy money. He’s got a big house in Beverly Hills and a big fence around it—and himself. Money doesn’t mean that much to me.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
AS IT TURNED OUT, THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE was not Michael’s thing. At least part of the problem was the regimentation—too academic, too much lecture-and-listen, too much like regular school.
He soon quit the Playhouse in favor of studying at Wynn Handman’s American Place Theatre. In the fifties and sixties, because so much of live television and radio dramas, and some movies, were produced on location in New York City, Manhattan was thick with training grounds for actors, and the American Place Theatre was one of the newer and more dynamic ones. It was founded in 1963 by Handman, Sidney Lanier, and Michael Tolan.
A Manhattan native, Handman was less interested in training actors than in incorporating them into a community of writers, directors, and performers to discover and produce new American plays. Training included teaching actors how to perform in full-length scripts in front of the public rather than doing individual scenes for the classroom. Among his better-known students in the 1960s were Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin, James Caan, Christopher Walken, Joanne Woodward, and … M. K. Douglas.
Upon landing his first paying job in New York City, Michael discovered he could not use his real name on stage. In 1969, after almost two years of looking for acting work, Michael had landed a part in the CBS Playhouse production of Ellen M. Violett’s The Experiment, playing a scientist who compromises his liberal views to accept a job with a major corporation. It was a theme he was familiar with, youthful rebels against the corporation, and a character he knew he could play. The other two principal players in the cast were John Astin and Barry Brown. All three, including Michael, were relatively unknown, but when he applied for mandatory membership in AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) he discovered that television was considered a closed shop and actors had to be members of AFTRA in order to get work, though the conundrum for most was that they couldn’t get a card without a job and they couldn’t get a job without a card. AFTRA informed him he couldn’t use the name Michael Douglas professionally, even though it was his real name, because it was already registered to a popular Cleveland-based daytime variety host, Mike (Michael) Douglas.1
The videotaped broadcast of The Experiment aired on February 25, 1969, and the next day Jack Gould, then the New York Times’s television critic, wrote that “Mr. Douglas gave a remarkably lucid and attractively relaxed performance.” That much was great. He then continued, “[He] could easily go as far as his father; he has a promising knack for intuitive versatility.” That part wasn’t. This would be the first of many reviews that would compare him to Kirk. Michael knew now that he would need to push to have his work recognized before his heredity.
AFTER THE CRITICAL and ratings success of The Experiment, CBS approached Michael about joining the rotating acting roster of the network’s new feature-film unit, Cinema Center Films, which would create product for both the little and big screens. Before the ink was dry on the deal, Bob Thomas, the nationally syndicated Associated Press journalist, interviewed Michael for his April column and later wrote that the public should “add Michael Douglas to the ever-growing list of movie stars’ children who are making it in films.” It was the last thing Michael wanted to read; he had hoped that Thomas wouldn’t go there. The rest of the piece wasn’t as bad. “He also is an instant star, thanks to the recent CBS Playhouse drama, The Experiment.… Mike himself wears his brown [sic] hair in the fashionable long style, though he appears to have passed through the hippie stage. That happened in his university days. Mike went the whole route: guru, pot, LSD. His experience with narcotics proved worthwhile, he believes, ‘because it taught me about rhythm in living. You know how some days you feel dull and listless and other days you feel alive? Everyone has certain rhythms and using narcotics dulls the senses and you need the sharp edges for acting.’ ”
And just like that, via official anointment by influential Hollywood scribe Bob Thomas, the laid-back, anti-authoritarian former free-love hippie and political and social activist swam from the outer shores of the counterculture into the show business mainstream.
IN THE SPRING OF 1969, Cinema Center Films put Michael up for the role of Carl Dixon in a new big-screen feature to be called Hail, Hero! But his star status wasn’t quite there yet, and he was forced to stand in line with other company contract players in what amounted to a cattle-call audition. At first the film’s director, David Miller, passed on Michael until, without Michael’s knowledge, and believing it would help get him the part, his agent called to let Miller know that in case he wasn’t aware of it, M. K. Douglas was Kirk Douglas’s son.
That resonated with Miller, and not necessarily in a positive way. In 1962 he had directed Kirk Douglas in the Bryna production Lonely Are the Brave, which Kirk often cited as the favorite among all his films. (Michael worked on the film for eight days as an assistant cutter.) However, as with most directors who worked with Kirk, things had not gone smoothly. Here is Kirk’s rather cold description of his experience being directed by Miller: “I took David Miller as a director, and regretted it. I felt that he did a far from brilliant job. He was unhappy on location. I played pimp and introduced him to a girl. Anything to keep him happy and get him through the picture. I thought he was the only one who didn’t come up to the high standards of all the other elements in the picture.”
Miller had directed only two big-screen features between Lonely Are the Brave and Hail, Hero!, neither of which was successful. Perhaps to make amends, perhaps to end what he might have felt was some kind of industry-wide ban against him instigated by Kirk, or maybe because he suddenly realized Michael was the best actor for the film, Miller reversed himself and gave Michael the role.2
THE SCREENPLAY FOR Hail, Hero! was an adaptation of John Weston’s popular, controversial 1968 antiwar novel of the same name. In it, Carl Dixon is a pacifist with conservative parents; it was another in an increasingly long line of Hollywood films depicting America’s generational divide during the Vietnam years.
Although the film opened softly in October 1969 and faded quickly, to those who saw it the surface resemblance between Michael and his famous father was difficult to avoid. They are the same height, and Michael had his father’s Fosdick jaw, only not quite as fearless, as well as that famous trademark dimple. Michael’s eyes, like his father’s, were dark, but cooler and gentler than Kirk’s burning browns. Perhaps the biggest difference between them was what they projected: Michael was at home playing laid-back sixties-type youth, while Kirk was never young nor laid-back on film (or in real life). There had always been a gritty, adult authority to Kirk’s performances, as well as a naturally intense style of talking through clenched teeth and reddened cheeks. He played muscle-bound cowboys on horseback, or quick-fisted characters who had no patience for other men and always a bend-them-back kiss for the women. Kirk’s characters, with one or two notable exceptions (Vincent Van Gogh), resembled his real-life personality—steely, instinctive, sexual, invincible. Michael’s, by comparison, were less heroic, more vulnerable. Seen together, which they rarely were offscreen and never on it until decades later, they were less similar than when each was seen in a film by himself that made audiences recall the other.
Vincent Canby, reviewing Hail, Hero! for the New York Times, acknowledged some individualistic talent in Michael: “It’s not an especially memorable performance, but it’s an energetic one and without Douglas, Hail, Hero! would not even be tolerable.… It is, I suppose, an anti-Vietnam movie, but it’s the sort of neutral anti-Vietnam movie that one might expect to find at Radio City Music Hall, where it opened yesterday.”
Cinema Center promoted the film heavily, and almost every time Michael was interviewed he was asked if Kirk had pulled any strings to get him the part. The question visibly annoyed him, and that was reflected in his answers. Talking to the Hollywood Citizen News, Michael tried to point out the folly of that logic. He had gotten the part in Hail, Hero! because of his work in The Experiment, he said, and in some cases coming from a movie family made it more difficult to gain credibility as an actor. “In Hollywood, when you’re a star’s son, they think, ‘Yeah, for him it’s easy.’ ”
Despite the failure of Hail, Hero! Cinema Center put Michael up for another feature, Robert Scheerer’s 1970 Adam at Six a.m. The character of Adam is a linguistics professor in an unnamed Southern California college who decides to drop out for a summer to be a laborer in Missouri (the film was shot on location in Excelsior Springs, Missouri) to see how “the other half” lives—hence the early wake-up time of the title. There he falls in prole love, and at the end of the picture he remains undecided about in which direction he wants to go with his life.
Adam at Six a.m. was released on September 22, 1970, received almost no distribution, and did nothing at the box office.3 At this point, the question of whether Michael would be able to continue to make films at all if he wasn’t Kirk Douglas’s son became more relevant. When asked by reporter Shaun Considine about it, Michael replied, “Of course it’s helped being the son of Kirk Douglas. It’s made [making movies] easier, but not in the way people assume. It can get you past the front door but it can’t get the job for you. That’s up to you.” And then he added testily, “My mother, Diana, is a wonderful actress.”
THE TRUTH WAS, whether or not any doors had been opened for him, Michael’s career was going nowhere. For that matter, neither was Kirk’s. He had aged out of the big-budget action-and-romance movies that had become his trademark. From 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers to Elia Kazan’s 1969 The Arrangement, Kirk had appeared in forty-nine feature films and some made-for-TV movies, but as the years went on, his box office boffo proved increasingly elusive. He had had high hopes for reviving his career by working with Kazan, but the film was a critical and box office disappointment. In his younger days Kirk had brought an intense sexuality to the screen. In his fifties he came off more sour than sexy.
Indeed, by 1969, Kirk, at fifty-three, had been pushed aside by a younger generation of leading men: Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood. Kirk was reduced to accepting mediocre work like the starring role in Dick Clement’s nondescript To Catch a Spy, which never made it to American commercial movie screens. All of it left him angry and frustrated, and whenever he could, he liked to demonstrate that he still had some clout left in show business.
So when a furious Michael told his father that he had been fired from the long-awaited Broadway stage production of his O’Neill Playhouse buddy Ron Cowen’s antiwar play Summertree (which Michael had appeared in at Waterford in 1967) in favor of up-and-coming actor David Birney, Kirk, who was in New York filming The Brotherhood, angrily had Bryna buy the film rights from Cowen and then gave the starring role in the film version to Michael. It was an unusually generous move for Kirk, and on the surface it had all the markings of a father coming to the rescue of his son. But on a deeper level, there may have been some sense of personal vengeance at work, fury at the director rather than salvation for the son. Kirk remembers, “The director was Jules Irving, and he fired my son. So what did I do? I bought the screen rights and developed it into a movie for Michael … who didn’t want to do it!”
Indeed, Michael was reluctant to make the film precisely because he didn’t want to lend credence to the ongoing talk throughout the industry and in the press of nepotism. He didn’t want anyone (including himself) to believe he couldn’t make it on his own. However, after thinking it over, he realized it was a role he had originated and deserved to play on film, and he agreed to be in the movie.
“A lot of people think that Summertree was what Love Story should have been,” Michael told an interviewer shortly after the film’s disappointing June 6, 1971, opening, suggesting that the characters of Jerry, a reluctant soldier who suffers an untimely death in Vietnam, and his girlfriend, played by Michael’s real-life girlfriend, actress Brenda Vaccaro, did not resonate with audiences the same way Oliver and Jenny did in Love Story, Arthur Hiller’s weepy Ivy League remake of Camille. Love Story had made stars out of its romantic leads, Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw (who were involved with each other during the making of the film). Ironically, Michael had turned down a chance to try out for Love Story to make Summertree.
Besides a curious lack of on-screen chemistry between Michael and Brenda, there were other reasons the film didn’t work, beginning with Kirk’s choice of director, British music-hall singer-songwriter-actor Anthony Newley. Despite having created a couple of offbeat Broadway musical hits (Stop the World—I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd) and having starred in dozens of mostly British movies, Newley had little film-directing experience.
Roger Greenspun, reviewing for the New York Times, said, “ ‘Summertree’ is a bad movie, but its badness proceeds not from its intentions, which seem honorable, or from its stylistic analogies to past modes, which in different hands could have been interesting …”
Another reason for the film’s failure might have been the casting of Vaccaro as Michael’s love interest. Although their lack of heat onscreen was evident, there was plenty of it offscreen, especially since the two decided to share a trailer during the making of the film. “It was a gradual process over two or three months of working with her on the film” was the way Michael described their falling in love. When asked by one reporter on the set about the obvious romance blooming between the two, Michael said, “She is a fantastic actress, a beautiful girl and … ah … well, you know how it is.” When he was asked what he would do if the film didn’t make it, he turned humorously philosophical. “I’ll keep on trying for a while at least. I want to do more plays. You learn more about acting on the stage. There’s talk of a movie to be made in Spain. I may do that. But eventually if I find myself beating my head against the wall continuously, I’ll take my father’s advice. He only ever told me one thing: ‘If all else fails … fuck it.’ ”
As soon as Michael and Vaccaro finished their scenes, they took off together for ten days in Vermont.
KIRK, MEANWHILE, was continuing to search for a way to revitalize his film career. He had been offered TV series fare but had little interest in working on the tube, fearing everyone would believe his film career was over for good. Instead, what he really wanted to do was make one last attempt to film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “I loved the role of Randle P. McMurphy, and I was determined to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the screen.… But I didn’t know it would take more than ten years.”
In 1969, independent film producer Joseph Levine’s Avco Embassy, riding a wave of success after Mike Nichols’s 1967 box office bonanza The Graduate—it grossed over $100 million in its initial domestic release—was looking for new projects. Levine, a smallish, heavyset man who prided himself on bringing in films others thought impossible to make, briefly considered Cuckoo’s Nest before deciding that even he wasn’t enough of a cinematic alchemist to turn this leaden project into box office gold.
In 1970, director Richard Rush, who had made two films with little-known Jack Nicholson prior to the actor’s explosive arrival in Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider, also wanted to make the movie, but he, too, could find no studio or investors willing to take a chance on it.4
By early 1972, nearly ten years had passed since the show had closed on Broadway, and Kirk could still find no interest in Hollywood to turn it into a movie. The response from all the major studios was the same: the material was too downbeat to be turned into a mainstream commercial hit movie. To try to push the deal, Kirk offered the rights to any studio that wanted it for a low-ball package of $150,000, less than his acting fee alone would have been, but found no takers.
And then new problems arose. Dale Wasserman, Kirk’s long-ago partner in the project, sued Kirk over the film rights to Cuckoo’s Nest. The lawsuit didn’t get very far, as it was without merit—no provisions for Wasserman to participate in any ancillary rights had been included in his original deal—but it proved an expensive legal battle for Kirk.
As Michael said later, Kirk “was getting discouraged and the book was showing up on college reading lists and the play was being revived on both coasts with great success.” Michael had read the book several times and loved it. “I said to my father, ‘Why don’t you let me take it over, and I promise that I’ll at least make your original investment back for you.’ ”
Kirk, with no other options on the table, finally and reluctantly agreed to let Michael take his best shot.
As Michael remembers, that was when “My long saga had begun.”
1 For television, Michael was allowed to use M. K. Douglas. Later on, in film, the Screen Actors Guild let him use his real name, as the other Michael Douglas was not a member of that union. Hence, on TV and in live performances, he was M. K. Douglas, and in film he was Michael Douglas. When Mike Douglas left TV, he gave his permission for Michael to use his full name on TV. “I hated being billed as M. K. Douglas,” Michael said later. “It sounds so pretentious, like some old character actor” (Edwin Miller, “Chip Off the Old Block,” undated).
2 Kirk later claimed he had no hand in helping to get Michael the part. John L. Scott wrote in the Los Angeles Times shortly after Michael got the part that “Kirk knew nothing about [Miller’s choosing Michael for the role] and was recuperating from a minor throat operation when he heard the news. Not allowed to use his voice, and not believing his son could actually get the movie on his own, and for Miller, Kirk jokingly scribbled his reaction on a pad—‘I’m speechless!’ ” John L. Scott, “Kirk Douglas’ Son Ready to Start Career in Films,” Los Angeles Times.
3 CBS was unimpressed with the finished product and prior to its release sold off the film’s distribution rights to National General, which was looking for cheap product to play overseas and to warehouse for future videotape inventory. Although several years away from commercial video reaching the market, the video concept was already percolating through Hollywood.
4 The two films are Hell’s Angels on Wheels (1967) and Psych-Out (1968). Rush later directed The Stunt Man in 1980, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director. In 1981, François Truffaut called Rush his favorite American director.