Douglas finally up where he belongs
As ‘An Officer and a Gentleman: The Musical’ heads to Dublin, Donal Lynch talks to the film’s writer about love, heartbreak and starting a war
YOU can sort of understand, listening to him, why it took Douglas Day Stewart 20 years to get round to writing An Officer and a Gentleman. For while his tumultuous time in officer candidate school was undoubtedly as vivid as its fictionalised screen version, this bronzed and genial Californian has since packed in several lifetimes worth of drama and jaw-dropping anecdotes.
As a young man, he almost lost his life in a motor accident in which several others were killed. He basically started the Vietnam War, he assures me, as my eyebrows hover halfway up my forehead.
He once witnessed a young Brooke Shields being ogled on a Fijian island by locals. He had three marriages, four kids, “and a lot of heartbreak”. You could say he has lived a little.
Fittingly, given the sweeping, swooning romance of Officer, which remains one of the iconic films from the 1980s, the unifying theme of his life and his work, he tells me, has always been “the search for love”.
He grew up in southern California and his parents’ marriage, he says, set an unrealistic standard of what a relationship should be. “The longing I always had, that came from my mom and dad. I saw two parents who were in love with each other and, I thought, I want that for myself — but it seemed to be more elusive for me. They made it look easy and they never told me all the things about marriage that aren’t so great.”
As a child in school he thought of himself as an artist and an outsider, a sense of identity that carried over to college. “As an artist you are more sensitive than you want to be. All my friends thought I wore my heart on my sleeve. I tried hard to be a macho guy. I ran with the top athletes, I played a lot of tennis.”
During his sophomore summer he decided to go travelling in Italy and became involved in a motor accident.
“I was in such a tragic situation, it is so difficult to talk about because there were lives lost,” he explains. “I was in hospital there for quite a while. I nearly lost my own life too. It was really scary. For a while after, I felt a little mad, and I went around just wishing so much that I could undo events, as if I had the power to do that in my mind. I had a sense that I could have died.”
After his long recovery he went to officer candidate school in Rhode Island, an experience that would provide the material for his career-defining hit. “It was the most difficult, nightmarish 13 weeks of my life,” he says. “Nothing could possibly prepare you for what went on. It wasn’t hazing. People talk about boot camp but this was worse than that. There was so much to learn, it was so intellectually demanding, and physically it was so exhausting. I had a drill instructor who seemed to know my psyche better than I knew it myself and it was like this trial by fire. Twenty years later I thought to myself, I have to write all this down, and it became the basis for the movie.”
First, however there would be