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

firmness of their father.
    By the end of 1955 Diana Douglas had become disillusioned with Hollywood once again and had decided to return to New York.
     Michael wasn’t sorry. He was never happy with the harsh discipline of the military academy, and his twelve months of schooling
     in California had been an unsettling experience.
    However, the final piece of the Douglas family jigsaw was about to be put in place, which in turn would have a deep and calming
     influence on Michael’s adolescent years. Back in New York, Diana renewed her friendship with William Darrid, a theatrical
     promoter and talented writer who was to give George C. Scott an early opportunity on Broadway in his production of
The Andersonville Trial
(Scott, too, later emigrated to Hollywood and became a star).
    Diana and Bill Darrid were married in December 1956 and set up home in Westport, Connecticut. Here, at the age of twelve,
     Michael went back into the private educational system, first at the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, and then in Choate,
     a co-educational Ivy League preparatory school inWallingford, Connecticut, the Alma Mater of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.
    Whatever talents Michael possessed for a future career, in whatever direction, lay dormant. He was a game but undistinguished
     footballer, played trumpet in the school orchestra and turned in a steady but unremarkable academic performance. He edged
     his way through puberty to his mid-teens with no outstanding merit on his school record. As he got older he became a boy of
     quiet temperament. He admitted later that he was an ‘introverted and uptight kid’ who possessed no particular ambition towards
     either following his father into acting – which Kirk had positively discouraged through the years – or any other career.
    Michael’s home life was, throughout, comfortable and settled. Bill Darrid, his stepfather, became a respected and easy-going
     guide in his teen years, more so than his real father and unlike the stepfather in many maritally split families. There was
     never any animosity among the adults, no great rifts or pulling at the emotional ties from one to the other. Bill and Diana,
     Anne and Kirk all became the best of friends, exchanging visits, staying at each other’s homes and providing an environment
     that was perhaps as good as it could ever be in the circumstances. Kirk continued his high-profile life as his films, some
     brilliant, some less successful, kept him at the top of the Hollywood tree, though that in itself was a constant battle, a
     struggle that Kirk said he would never wish to impose upon any of his sons.
    The anguish and insecurity of remaining a major star is a familiar story in every Hollywood tale. But for Douglas seniorthere was more to it, more to sustain, because of the strong imposing characters he had created on screen, those larger-than-life
     images that were invariably of his choosing and creation, as the producer and motivator and then the actor.
    In those formative years in Connecticut, the media portrait of Michael’s father was as dominating as it ever was. At the time,
     Kirk’s commitment to serious, challenging movies was counter-balanced by swashbuckling roustabouts, best exemplified by
     his own productions of the controversial anti-war drama
Paths of Glory
followed by the brutal but highly entertaining epic
The Vikings
.
    Then came such classics as Stanley Kubrick’s
Spartacus
and the moving cowboy fable
Lonely Are the Brave
, both produced by Douglas’s own company. These two films demonstrated other facets of Kirk’s character, his passion for the
     written word and his integrity, for he insisted on hiring the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo to do the screenplay for both
     movies.
    Both landed him in deep trouble over that most sensitive of issues of the age, communism. The Senate subcommittee’s anti-communist
     hearings had left an open wound, a festering sore on Hollywood’s rump. The Cuban missile