Michael Douglas: ‘It’s Time To Tell My Real Story’
It’s not only the fact that Michael Douglas parents were two of the most recognizable film stars and a movie career that has brought him fame over the last 200 years, but these things, coupled with a long life as well, have provided him with a unique and very amusing set of events for which he can talk about.
However, fans have found some shocking revelations in his memoir, the aptly named One Helluva
Ride, where Michael Douglas recounts that his father physically abused him as a boy; he ultimately admits to the affair he had, and he settles on the rumor that he is a womanizer.
To be 82 years old and yet tell all your personal experiences in a book like this shows courage. It’s something he was planning for a long time, so it’s time to talk about his experiences on his own. In explaining why he felt this was a time to come clean, he insisted on the fact of sharing not just the highlight reel, not the version shaped by headlines or box office numbers, but the real one. So, the actor continued:
I have lived a life that happened in public while at the same time being deeply private, and there’s a difference. That is, this is the chapter in my life where it started. What I did fight against. My ultimate decisions. This was very much like the double life that was my reality. When you become a celebrity, you think it’s the real you; you can lose yourself through fame.
It is this very thought of getting one’s truth back to one’s hands that has led to the decision. So, besides all his public life, what does Douglas divulge in the book One Hell of a Ride?
Michael Douglas: On Physical Abuse by Father Kirk Douglas
Michael Douglas said one of the reasons he was so late publishing his memoir is that he could not possibly have written the memoir with his father, Kirk, living. The Academy Award winner passed away in 2020 at the ripe old age of 103, and Douglas has admitted that for most of his life, he spent energy trying to live up to his father and also trying to rebuild the shattered relationship. In his book, he disclosed that he and his youngest brother Joel were terrified of Kirk as they were raised and wrote, ‘If we upset Dad, he hit us… Dad came from the time when hitting was acceptable, and when my dad started to rage, I used to stay away and be quiet very fast.’ ‘My work was focused entirely on staying under Dad’s radar to avoid any further anger when my mood was wrong. He also mentioned that when he became a successful actor, he still couldn’t reconcile the relationship, adding that he faced an ‘ongoing internal conflict… I wanted to be the one who would make my differences from the father; I wanted to be close to him. ‘Kirk’s presence was a source of anxiety while his presence was a comfort,’ Douglas concluded.
Douglas said to AP that he wouldn’t have ever published his autobiography if Kirk were still alive and added, “Talking about some things that happened in our childhood and some physical abuse,I don’t like being the one to bring the conversation around.” He was also one of those who hit; Mum would sometimes use the hairbrush.
‘I thought that this part of my childhood, the years of the beatings and being the object of Dad’s anger, was not something anyone would want to know about their child.
‘That’s what prevented us from warming up in an older phase of our lives and also letting us go on beyond forgiving him.’
How Michael Funded College: Selling 44 kg of Marijuana
After briefly thinking about a law career, Douglas decided to follow acting instead. He enrolled in a drama program at the University of California. While he was there, his father gave him a $10,000 trust fund, which, however, turned out to be less than sufficient to cover his tuition and living costs.
Consequently, Michael Douglas started drug dealing. He filled two suitcases with about 44 kg of ganja, which he bought at the rate of $75 per kilo in California and sold at around $500 per piece of the same size when he went to visit his parents in New York. He said, “At least part of me felt guilty, but it was the late Sixties to early Seventies period after all. Drug users had been so easy to pick that no one had really needed my guidance in finding their way to them.
“That’s exactly how I got my last two years financed in college and ended up going on graduating without a single penny of debt. “I am, after all, not suggesting that everyone should follow this method, but one can argue that taking out a student loan would have been a more responsible and legal course of action.
‘I Was Knocked Sideways’: Michael Douglas On Affair With Kathleen Turner
After many years of denying, Douglas finally admits to having an affair with Kathleen Turner while married to Diandra Luker, whom he shares their son, Cameron.
It was while working on the 1984 action-comedy Romancing the Stone that they met. According to Douglas, Kathleen was clever, funny, and sexy, with a deep, sultry kind of voice that eventually became her signature. I just liked her, and we were sexually drawn to each other almost immediately. He further explained, “It was not a casual affair; it was simply growing from the fact that we were so close working together, the pressures we were under, the mutual respect and care that we felt for each other, and naturally, that was also reflected in how attracted we were to each other.”
I can say I too am just like every other guy there. She is absolutely wonderful to me. He then stated that through this way his relationship with Luker was pretty sour at the time, which was not helping. He had also been carrying out an affair with Diane Thomas, the woman behind the script of Romancing The Stone, before meeting Kathleen.
Even when they were at the peak of the Hollywood gossip, Douglas’ then-wife, Diandra, flew to the Mexican set to find out what was going on, a confrontation that the two denied happening. Besides, they also kept their affair a secret between them, apart from their co-star Danny DeVito and their director Robert Zemeckis; however, the couple eventually got a divorce in 2000 when Douglas remarried Catherine Zeta-Jones that same year.
On the other hand, Douglas and Turner had a mutual pact, or so to speak, a gentleman’s agreement. They decided that they would never talk about their affair for the next 40 years, and both kept their promise.
Michael Douglas Battles Crippling Stage Fright Living Up To Kirk
Though Douglas has been able to command both the stage and the screen, he says he had been suffering from a fear of public speaking to such an extent that it paralyzed him as a newcomer in the local plays.
Being afraid to match the level of his father, Michael Douglas admitted he used to go physical as he was getting ready for a performance. He shared, ‘Seeing me, you probably have doubted that lack of confidence could have been a problem. Not until I got on my father’s stage. Right before the curtain went down on me, I’d still get thrown up into a bucket.”
Although he had been a veteran performer for some time, Douglas confessed that in certain situations he could not have overcome the anxiety, such as in the case of filming one of the most intimate scenes of Glenn Close, when she was a star of the 1987 film Fatal Attraction. That’s when he would probably have been quite nervous to do a little more acting than a little drinking, if you know what I mean.
Michael Douglas Reveals Rehab Ultimatum After Hotel Affair
In 1992, Douglas went through a rehabilitation program for drug and alcohol problems after his first wife, Luker, found him in a hotel room in LA with another woman and forced him to choose between rehab and divorce. Until he was admitted to the program, Douglas really didn’t see that he had any kind of problem, but he admitted that in that era drugs were really normalized in Hollywood.
Although Douglas decided to do a rehab for alcohol and substance abuse, the other party (his wife) filed for divorce three years later. After that he was dating different women one after the other. He said he used to leave $100 in his car before a meeting at a talent agency, and the valet service would get a gram of cocaine and tuck it into the central console.
At the same time, Douglas said that he would take drugs together with OJ Simpson during his playing career and that he also remembered being asleep once with a straw attached to his nose and still in his nostril. He has also admitted that at some point he was drunk enough at a Golden Globe party that he told Julia Roberts to put her award ‘where the sun doesn’t shine.’
He Denies Being a Womanizer Despite Revealing a String of Affairs
Michael Douglas does not hide from the sexual nature of his adventures in the book. He writes at the beginning of the work, “Among the secrets of our close relationships that you will encounter here are some that will disclose the details of our affair. All the ladies concerned were telephoned, and they gave us permission to publish the stories. Apart from work at that time, he says, his first exposure to sex came when he was working at Universal’s editing department and would have lunch in the very room where Toxic was being edited.
Douglas explained, ‘My editing bay was also the one that had an outtake projection screen so that we could have watched Janet Leigh in the shower. In fact, one had her not covered. She was on the floor.’ “It’s not very flattering if Janet Leigh is only your next-door neighbor. I would like you to tell me why I didn’t get uncomfortable spending such a lot of lunch hours on the footage of a scene, a bit of a girl being shown being naked, going frame by frame.
At the time he was trying to establish himself as an actor, he and Danny DeVito were sharing a one-bedroom flat in NYC. They would hang a sock on the doorknob so that the other knew there was a girlfriend inside. “In the long run, it turned out that in some parts he actually stayed more outdoors than indoors,” Douglas said, referring to Danny’s living patterns.
Although Douglas’s romantic and sexual life is a main aspect of their biography, they say that he has been the victim of a number of myths. He was quoted: ‘Even a Womanizer I was not’. The statement comes after he was reported in the nineties that he was in a treatment center of a sex addiction program.’
I Didn’t Sleep With That Many Women
With the author of the book telling about his many love affairs throughout the years, and also an old joke when he was asked by Zeta-Jones to ‘make five quick calls’ when she said that she would only date him if he was monogamous, Douglas was questioned if he had ever been contemplating about why he went to bed with so many Women. Douglas answered: ‘I don’t know if I was with as many women as they say. Anyway, I don’t see it like this! Me? No, I was a good healthy Sixties product.’
Later, he added, supposedly in an accusatory voice, ‘Curious is more like it: why, out of all countries and at all times that I do press, why exactly now in the UK have you so much about sex issues?’ It was commented that his autobiography was ‘lusty in content’ at which he replied: ‘Well, that never really crossed my mind. But I do name a couple of my dates in the book.’
Douglas was asked to elaborate about an anecdote of breaking five commitments before marrying Catherine Zeta-Jones at 57, so he told The Sunday Times Magazine: ‘No, no, that’s not it!’
‘Catherine has asked me that if what we already have is to go forward then you want things to be strictly monogamous. So right that same evening, you understand, I had to get rid of one to five girl friends or partners, I remember, that was the last time. Come to that, Douglas was asked if Catherine was worried of the book appearing: ‘Well she is yet to read the book,’ but he was determined to point out that their marriage was ’sound.’
Michael Douglas: I Have A Right To Live My Own Life Beyond My Kids
In echoes of his relationship with his own father, Douglas’ eldest son Cameron has spoken about their frosty relationship previously. It is possible that he is setting himself up for more trouble, but Douglas says that he got more joy out of parenting his second wife.
He was asked whether Cameron would find reading the book painful, and he replied: ‘I love Cam, but we passed through very difficult times.’
In 2004, Douglas’ half-brother Eric fell victim to an accidental overdose at the age of 46. This was the end result of a prolonged fight against Addiction. Douglas’ son, Kirk, went for counselling sessions in family therapy during these years.
“To think of your father being in his eighties and having the therapy session, with other participants, that’s the father and son situation, not being able to communicate openly?”, Douglas remembered, describing it as something completely unnatural for the two of us. “I said I don’t want to live like that. I’m not even going to the point of my seventies and eighties when I still need to go to the facility for my problem,” he said at that time.
What Douglas meant in that situation with the group therapy and with rehab sessions in general, he continued, is that one is a victim of some sort to addiction and to the circumstances, but one also has a basic right to choose how one wants to lead a life. And, while I love my children, he said, “you know, I have the freedom, if not the right, to live my life however I choose.”
Michael Douglas Rejects Nepo Baby Tag As ‘Horrific’
He could have talked in his memoir about his errors, apologies, and misbehaviors, but he will never admit to it- he was a nepo baby. He has described the term as ‘snotty ‘, which is an indication of his strong feelings, and he insisted it must not happen in the other industry that parents are being criticised for ‘helping their kids’.
Douglas declared, ‘In all other fields, the parents assist their children. The names of the businesses are ‘so and so’s son, or daughter’ so we all know.’ The reason he took a swipe at this word, a term derived from the word nephew, is usually a term used to refer to the children of famous actors and musicians, is that just a few weeks after Zeta-Jones, his wife, called it ‘horrific’.
‘This awful term ‘nepo baby’ is so bad since they weren’t even consulted, these kids, about entering this life; they are figuring out their paths,’ Zeta-Jones said.
‘Yet they love it, and they’re capable. Otherwise, Michael and I, of course, would have been the first in line to say, “Hmm, law school may be a really good option.”
