Kirk Douglas: 100 years old and still in love
In a revealing interview, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas and his beloved wife Anne talk to Chrissy Iley about how they met, coped with infidelity and the secrets to 62 years of married bliss.
When I first arrived at the house, I thought this house is too small, too nondescript, too unshowy. It can’t be the house where “The Spartacuses” live. Then I spot the mezuzah on the door – Kirk Douglas is a dedicated Jew – and then a nurse with gently slippered feet lets me in. I knew I was in the right place. The Douglases are old and need full-time care.
The house feels alive when you get in. Cosy but with exquisite art, like the Picasso vase at the entrance bought by Anne Douglas when she worked for the Cannes Film Festival so many years ago.
Anne is fully made up, fully coiffed, in a blue long-sleeved T-shirt and navy slacks. Her feet in orthopaedic velcroed shoes. Kirk comes in on his walker. He looks fragile, of course, who wouldn’t? He’s 100. But as he stares out at me, his glinty eyes still look to charm. There is something fierce about him still. He has white hair, but he has hair. He speaks with a mighty slur – a remnant of a stroke in 1996. He was pretty depressed about being rendered speechless. Not much an actor can do without speech unless silent movies are making a comeback, he would joke. Except it wasn’t a joke. He contemplated suicide but knew it was too selfish an act and Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch, is a survivor. He knows how to pick himself up. He is the last living legend, the last screen hero of the golden years. The action hero that started it all. He was a viking and he was Spartacus. He did his own stunts and had a personal trainer until well into his 90s and all this is in him still.
“I found out when you reach 100 they forget about you. I think 100 is a very lonely age because all my friends are gone, all the ones from the movies. If you’re Marilyn, you will always be remembered as 36 but if you’re old … I don’t know.”
He was born in 1916, the only boy, with six sisters. His mother told him he was born in a golden box delivered by angels and for many years he believed that – he must have always felt he was special? He shrugs. “Yes. I had six sisters and only one of them now lives. I was brought up more by my mother because my father was busy drinking in the saloons.” His father, Herschel, was a ragman, which means he had a cart that pulled rags door to door, bought and sold in the poor neighbourhood of Amsterdam, New York. His parents had emigrated from Russia. They were illiterate and they were Jews. There weren’t great opportunities for them in this time of great prejudice. He was distant and discouraging, and even though the young Issur/Kirk wanted to please him, he rarely did. He admired him because he was his father, yet he was absent both physically and emotionally.
“Of course I think about my father a lot and I realise that my best friends were always women, maybe because my mother was wonderful. We were poor. We were living in a terrible house. We had nearly nothing and if my mother saw a hobo – they would come to the house, knock on the door – and while we didn’t have much food, my mother always saved something for them, so yes, I was closer to my mother. I called my company ‘Bryna’ after my mother.” And because of her he found it easier to become closer to women? “Yes,” he beams.
Kirk had four sons of his own: Oscar-winning Michael, Joel, Peter and Eric. For years Kirk blamed himself for youngest son Eric’s death from a
drug overdose at 46. Eric was always the wild one. Even as a child he had anger issues. He was a talented actor and in later years a stand-up comedian. I saw his act at the Edinburgh Festival. It was based on jokes about his father and his more famous brother, Michael. Kirk for years agonised over it and wondered if it was because he wasn’t there enough or because he was too big an act to follow. Eric had been an addict and his parents had paid for many rehabs but he was too far gone. In 2004 he was found in his New York apartment, dead from an overdose. He had gone into rehab a month before with renewed efforts at sobriety.
Kirk and Anne used to visit his grave twice a week. They did that for as long as they could easily walk. Anne, who is strong and clever and self-controlled, was inconsolable. She says she was born in Germany around 1930. She doesn’t give her exact age. As a little girl she was extremely close to her father. “My parents were not too great together. My mother was a beautiful woman and we always had a governess. My mother was away a lot. She got the best dresses, the best cars.
“We had a big silk manufacturing place and my father had a saleslady there he wanted me to become friends with, so we formed a close friendship. My parents divorced. I had an extremely close relationship with my father. We told each other everything. One day he said, ‘I’m goingg on a short business trip.’ I trusted himm and relied on him. When he came backck I ran to meet him and he was with my friend the sales agent and he saidd ‘This is your new mother.’ I cried my eyes out. He betrayed me. I started rted work very young and wentt to Berlin where my mother was.”
Anne ended up in Paris under Nazi occupation. “I was putting German subtitles on French movies because I spoke three languages. It was tedious. It looked like I was writing code and my maid gave my translation sheet to the Nazis so they arrested me. It was difficult to explain what I was doing but eventually they let me go.” She must have been terrified. “That was an understatement. I was brought up during the regime of a dictator and a persecutor and now I feel that in America. People should have lived in Germany where they thought Hitler was okay. They thought Hitler was a buffoon, and people should realise Donald Trump is a dictator! It scares me.” She speaks with certainty and passion.
After the war, Anne started working in public relations for a film company. “And that’s where I come into the story.” Kirk grins and his eyes flash. It’s almost as if they’re flirting with each other. Anne was assigned to a Kirk Douglas movie. “I went to the studio and a friend of mine who was working on set said, ‘I will take you into the lion’s den.’ And that was it.”
I look at Kirk. So … he was the lion? He smiles rather sweetly, not even nostalgically, because he still thinks he is a lion.
“He asked me if I could do secretarial work for him and I said no, but I’ll find somebodyody for you.”
Kirk adds, s, “This beautiful girlirl was in the lion’s den. en. I tried to get her to work for me and I was amazed when she said no. I escorted her to her car and asked her to have dinner with me at Tour d’Argent – the fanciest restaurant in Paris – and she said she was going home to make scrambled eggs.” Kirk was obsessed with what he couldn’t have – but Kirk was also engaged to Pier Angeli. “Well, yes,” Kirk admits. “She was 18 when we met and 21 when we were engaged.”
But Angeli was touring the world and Anne was in Paris, as was Kirk. Eventually Anne and Kirk went on a date to the circus. “I was surprised when she said yes,” says Kirk. “I made her laugh and then we became good friends that night.” How good friends? “Well …” he gestures. “We kissed that night,” explains Anne. “And that was a little more than a friendly kiss and that’s how it started and every so often when we got in the most passionate way he reminded me he was engaged to Pier. It was a secret engagement. It hadn’t been announced.”
Anne was hired to work on Kirk’s next film, Ulysses, which was shot in Italy and they saw each other every night, but somehow Pier found out.
“She was a little devil. She was devious,” says Anne, clearly still irritated after all these years. “The last straw ww was I was driving him to the airport a and a stewardess comes to the car and says to Kirk, ‘Miss Pier Angeli is waitin waiting for you on the plane.’ That did it. I b broke up with him and I told him I’d n never see him again.”
But K Kirk couldn’t stop thinking about Anne and after breaking off with A Angeli pestered Anne’s maid to te tell him where she was. “I got my passport and went to her.”
A Anne continues, “Somehow he got me to go skiing with him in Sw Switzerland. I went to Paris and he went back to America and ask asked if I would come and visit for t two weeks. I told everybody in Paris, e either he’s going to marry me or I co come back for good. We had a wonde wonderful time and then he said to me, ‘M ‘My ex-wife and children are comin coming in 10 days.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry worry, I will have left’. Then one
“This beautiful girl was in the lion’s den.”
day he came home a little bit late, went down on his knees and asked me to marry him and tried to give me Pier Angeli’s ring.” She raises her eyebrows.
“That’s nothing compared to what she did to me when we were in Paris and she made a birthday party …” adds Kirk. Anne finishes the story because she’s proud of it. “Every girl, including the one from the night before when he said he was seeing rushes – he never sees rushes – was invited to that party. Every woman he’d had an affair with in Paris that I knew of, and that line was very long already – and I’m sure I missed a few – was there to greet him. I was at the end and he turned to me and said, ‘You bitch’.” We all laugh.
It’s obvious Anne’s humour, fighting spirit and ability to brush things off, just like she brushed off a Nazi interrogation, made her probably the only woman strong enough for Kirk. They went to Vegas to get married.
Anne recalls, “Because I didn’t know the word ‘lawful’ I said I’d take him to be my ‘awful’ wedded husband. As soon as we were married, Frank Sinatra was in one room performing, Mickey Rooney was in another. We were in a suite in the Sahara Hotel but we went from one place to another. I said to Kirk, ‘Come on, now to bed.’ He said, ‘We’ve been sleeping together for a year, tonight we’re gambling’.”
Kirk and Anne refer to Kirk’s first wife, Diana, the woman he married on leave from the Navy, and Michael and Joel’s mother, as “our ex-wife”. Anne says, “We became instant friends and we never called her by her name – always ‘our ex-wife’.” Anne was never jealous. “Not of her. I said to him if it happens, you tell me. If I hear it from other people it hurts me deeply. If you tell me what you’re up to I can get by with it. Maybe I missed a few hundred.”
I ask Kirk how many affairs he’s had. “Oh I don’t know,” he says, suddenly put on the spot. “I’m not very good at keeping secrets.” Anne reminds me, “We were fantastic lovers and better friends. That is what gives us serenity and a great attachment. And now we are, I suppose it’s corny to say, but now we are one.”
They look at each other, their eyes both lock, it’s a sly exchange rather than an adoring one. She catches me observing that. “It has been that way for a long time.”
They have written a book together, Kirk and Anne, Letters of Love, Laughter and a Lifetime in Hollywood. Letters from when they first met, when Anne was at home looking after the children, and Kirk was on location.
While they were separated on different continents they wrote to one another. It’s interesting to see their exchanges. In one letter Kirk was excited when he got financing for The Vikings but Tony Curtis wanted to be in it and take the role Kirk had earmarked for himself, so he and Anne worked out the decision through letters. Anne encouraging, “Give it to Curtis. It will be good for box office.” And in another letter Laurence Olivier said that he wanted to play Spartacus, which obviously didn’t happen.
Kirk held out for Dalton Trumbo to write the script of Spartacus even though at the time he was blacklisted. Douglas was the catalyst that ended the cruel blacklisting in the McCarthy era. It was the era of the Cold War and anyone in the film industry who was suspected, rightly or wrongly, of being a communist was blacklisted.
I wonder if all this swooping up of memories is him preparing to die. He doesn’t want to talk about it and changes the subject to Michael.
“Michael is a good son. I never paid attention to him when he was growing up. I said, ‘Michael, I want you to be a doctor or a lawyer’ and suddenly he got this part in a play. I told him, ‘Michael, you were terrible’.”
Michael Douglas has referred to this often. It must have hurt him. “No,” says Kirk, “because two months later I went to see him in another play and he was wonderful. I said, ‘Michael, you were really good,’ and he’s been really good in everything he’s done.” It’s been written that one close-up of Kirk Douglas’s face in Spartacus is more powerful than the whole of Laurence Olivier’s acting career. That’s a very tough act to follow. But Kirk talks about Michael with pride and with love, something which his own father was never able to do about him. If his father had loved him maybe he wouldn’t have needed the world to love him so much.
Kirk Douglas is the last remaining star of the golden age and seeing him, this 100-year-old man who has struggles with his knees, with hearing, seeing, talking, you see a spirit that wants to not only survive, not only conquer, but charm. In a couple of hours he has totally charmed me, a man who can barely speak has utterly seduced me.
“It’s corny to say, but now we are one.”