Michael Douglas: Acting on Instinct by Michael Douglas, John Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

début in Burt Lancaster’s
The Kentuckian
. Anne worked as casting director, her involvement notable for two reasons: it was she who chose the unknown Italian beauty
     Elsa Martinelli, a model with no previous acting experience, as Kirk’s female co-star, and it was she who suggested that Kirk’s
     ex-wife Diana should play one of the leading supporting roles.
    Diana had arrived back in California in the hope of reviving her own career. She had brought the boys with her, and they were
     enrolled temporarily in a public state school. Diana had to test for the role first, and there was one other problem: the
     film would be shot on location in Oregon and Diana did not want to take the boys from their new school.
    Anne offered to look after the boys while they were filming. At holiday time they all went to Oregon to watch Kirk and Diana
     Douglas – as she was listed in the credits – working together for the first time. Kirk made it a family affair by putting
     Michael and Joel in front of the cameras for a couple of bit parts which actually ended up on the cutting-room floor. But
     for both it was a first introduction to moviemaking. ‘It was typical of Kirk,’ said Anne, ‘that he should include Diana in
     his first major production. She had been with him through the tough times and it would not need a psychiatrist to identify
     that he had a sense of loyalty and responsibility towards his family that bordered on a guilt complex. I think it was also
     a throw-back to his own father’s lack of loyalty.’
    The Douglas sons’ own introduction to a semi-permanent life in Los Angeles was traumatic. Though their father’s life had been
     anchored by his marriage to Anne, they themselves faced adifficult period. They had visited the West Coast often, of course, to stay with their dad, who surrounded them with the trappings
     of movieland: swimming pools, limos and the good life made possible by his wealth and his need to show them a good time. The
     boys were faced with perpetual movement, from one side of the country to the other, around the world and back again. As Michael
     once said: ‘I had jet lag at the age of nine.’
    Now it was different. Their confrontation with the reality of a public junior high school, even one in West Hollywood, after
     the cloistered halls of all-boys private tuition in Manhattan was nothing less than a culture shock, especially for Michael.
    Because of his advanced abilities and educational standards, Michael found himself shunted up from fifth to seventh grade
     overnight, an eleven-year-old boy in a class full of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. It was a little fast for him. He had
     never been exposed to that kind of schooling. Back in New York, his had been a stiff and rigid English-type school. He found
     himself facing the novel experience of mixed classes. There was the usual boisterous rough and tumble, gangs which he had
     never encountered, ‘and the first girl I ever kissed had her mouth wide open!’
    Diana realised the problems. Michael was taken out of the state school, and for the rest of 1955 went from the one extreme
     of a liberal system into the strictest school discipline of the Black Fox Military Academy in Los Angeles.
    In November that year he and Joel were presented with another situation which in some families might have given rise to later
     jealousies – though not in their case – when Anne gave birth to a son, Peter Vincent (the second name being associatedwith the picture Kirk was working on at the time – the acclaimed
Lust for Life
, the story of Vincent Van Gogh, which was another milestone in Kirk’s career). Eighteen months later, the Douglas clan was
     completed when Anne produced a second son, Eric, and it is worth recording that in spite of the age difference and growing
     up apart, the four boys – Michael, Joel, Peter and Eric – eventually became bonded by a healthy brotherly relationship which
     was forged in part by the clenched-jaw