Michael Douglas on ‘immortality,’ Kirk Douglas and the memories he once avoided

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Douglas, the award-winning actor and producer, recently turned 82. He is a cancer survivor, a recovered addict, a married man, the father and son of actors. He is also an author, who begins his memoir with a message of thanks to his family — past and present and future — for the “sense of immortality.”

Immortality.

“Many times my father was asked, ‘Kirk, are you jealous of your son?’” he said during a recent interview at a Manhattan hotel, referring to his late father, fellow actor and sometime combatant Kirk Douglas. “And he said, ‘Jealous?’ This is a sense of immortality, a continuity of generations.’”

Family is how Douglas anchors his legacy and his place in a world he fears is breaking down. But there are other ways to live on past your own time: starring in cultural touchstones like “Fatal Attraction” or “Basic Instinct,” or writing a 500-page book that is called “One Helluva Ride,” a famous man’s journey from rebellion and coming-of-age, to midlife success and transgression to the inevitable reckoning with mortality and past mistakes.

Publishing on Tuesday, his memoir is framed around the making of some of his most notable movies, including “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Falling Down,” “Romancing the Stone” and two films that brought him Oscars: as a producer of best picture winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and as star of “Wall Street,” when his turn as corporate raider Gordon Gekko brought him the prize for best actor and helped make “Greed is good” a catch phrase for the late 1980s.

Douglas himself was once enough a symbol of hedonism that he was rumored to be undergoing treatment for sex addiction. False, he says, but in his memoir he acknowledges that at the time he met Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he married in 2000, he was dating five other women. They were all in different cities, he explained during his interview, and “as long as you weren’t seeing somebody else in the same city that might embarrass her, they were all right.”

He is now well settled with Zeta-Jones and satisfied enough with his career that he no longer has any great drive to top himself; he’s just as happy taking a walk in the garden. But Douglas also sees the book as a baring of dilthe most painful moments of his life: his near-archetypal quest to forge an identity apart from his father; a childhood damaged by violence and divorce that only was resolved in the latter part of Kirk’s life; Douglas’ own divorce from first wife, Diandra Luker; the substance abuse battles of Michael and son Cameron Douglas, who spent seven years in prison on drug charges; and the diagnosis of Stage IV tongue cancer in 2010 that he at first assumed would kill him.

Wearing a dark blazer, blue shirt and no tie, Douglas is a warm and open conversationalist. During his interview, he spoke of the awesome burdens and privileges of being Kirk Douglas’ son, his improbable decision to become an actor, too, and the single line of dialogue he says comes closest to the truth about himself.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

The way you describe your father in this book, it feels like something larger than just the two of you: the king and the heir who only wants to live up to him.

DOUGLAS: I looked at dad as just Superman. He was so dynamic. He was so strong. He has such tenacity. I watched him on the screen as Spartacus, saw him as Ulysses … I never thought I could be the man my father was. I didn’t think it was in the cards. It took me a long time to gain confidence and then to make a lot of the same mistakes he made.

AP: And still, perhaps against all common sense, you decide to become an actor.

DOUGLAS: I never thought about being an actor until I was in college. I had no major. And they called me into the office, “You got to declare a major. You can’t just take general education courses.” I was a bit of a hippie at the time. And I thought, “Well, my mother (Diana Douglas) is an actress, and I had seen her doing stage productions. And my father ….” So I thought it would be an easy course.

I started then performing in school. I had terrible, terrible stage fright, you know, (vomiting in) wastebaskets off stage.

AP: What made you decide to stick with it?

DOUGLAS: I wanted to overcome my stage fright. I wanted to fight the uncomfortable feeling I had of being in front of a camera.

AP: In so much of the book, it seems like you’re at war with yourself.

DOUGLAS: I think that’s probably true. I think I inherited my father’s tenacity, my father’s ambition, and his rage. He had a big temper growing up. There must have been this desire to feel like I was somebody. Because growing up, I was always the son of ….

AP: Your father used to say that the most personal words he ever spoke on screen were in “Lonely Are the Brave,” when he said “I’m a loner clear down deep to my very guts.” What a line. A two-part question: Do you think that was true of him? And is there a line from one of your movies that says the same about yourself?

DOUGLAS: They (his parents) had good friends and everything, but there was always an isolation about him. And I find I have a bit of that, too.

As far as a line for myself, I always love in “Falling Down,” when he (an unemployed defense worker who turns violent) says “I’m the bad guy?”

AP: Why do you relate to that?

DOUGLAS: I’m fairly tough on myself in the book and, you know, honest. I tried to do the right thing but have found myself in situations where it appears that I am the bad guy.

AP: You write about how you regretted spending so much time away from home during your first marriage. But seeing all the movies you made and everything else you did, would you have done it differently if you had the chance?

DOUGLAS: I can’t say I would. I do not believe that you can balance career with family. You just can’t balance it. So I’m always saying to my kids or anybody else that will listen — get your career out of the way before you think about marrying and having kids. That affected my first marriage, because I was consumed.

AP: Could you have written this book if your father was still alive?

DOUGLAS: No.

AP: Why not?

DOUGLAS: Because I was very uncomfortable talking about the early years and his physical abuse. He was of a generation that hit; my mother used the hairbrush. He was tough. That was also one of the reasons why it took a little time to warm up as we got older, and to forgive him.

AP: What was that process like? There’s a lot to forgive.

DOUGLAS: Time heals, you know. Hopefully. Life moves on. Dad had that great line right after I won (the Oscar) for “Wall Street.” He said to me, “You know, I would have been nicer to you if I knew how successful you were going to be.”