Michael Douglas' jailed son DAD AND CATHERINE WERE MY SAVIOURS
How they got the addict through seven years of hell
Dressed in regulation khaki overalls, prisoner 70707-054 was escorted into the soulless visiting room. In a grey, institutional space containing a few battered metal tables and hard plastic chairs, he sat down to greet the first visitors he had seen in weeks.
Surrounded by other inmates, some guilty of robbery, rape and murder, even the most hardened criminal or jaded guard could not have failed to cast a sideways glance at the glamorous couple waiting for him.
For there, sitting across the table, were two of the most famous people on the planet – Oscar winner
Michael Douglas, 73, star of blockbusters such as Fatal
Attraction and Basic Instinct, and his stunning wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, 48, proud possessor of her own Academy Award for her performance in Chicago.
The shuffling prisoner was Cameron Douglas, 39, Michael’s eldest son, who recalls it as a “surreal” moment, but also one of the most poignant of his life.
“My family never gave up on me, not for one second,” he tells Woman’s Day in his first interview since leaving jail after serving seven years for drugs offences.
“Catherine is a scrapper. She’s someone who came from Wales, and clawed her way up to the very top through sheer talent and determination. She never gives up on anything and she didn’t quit on me. The love of my family got me through my darkest days.”
As a scion of Hollywood royalty – his grandfather is
Spartacus screen legend Kirk Douglas – Cameron has the easy charm, trademark cleft chin and rugged good looks that should have offered him easy entry into the rarefied world of the super-famous.
Drugdaze
Yet for most of his adult life, he has been the black sheep of the Douglas clan – a man who made lurid headlines for constant drug arrests and trips to rehab, and who hit rock bottom in 2010, when he was sentenced to five years in jail for dealing in crystal meth and possessing heroin.
His sentence was almost doubled in 2011, when he was found trying to sell prescription-only drugs to other inmates.
His life could have ended tragically, like so many others trapped in the grip of addiction. Yet today, Cameron is bursting with health and happiness. His once-bloated body has been honed, thanks to hours working out in prison gyms “to keep my sanity”.
Clean and sober, he has a new baby daughter, Lua Izzy, with his Brazilian girlfriend Viviane Thibes, who stood by him throughout his incarceration in a romance that grew stronger through writing letters.
He also credits his yoga instructor for helping steadily rebuild his life and, not least, the love and support of a family he admits he has “tested to the limits”.
Today, the prison jumpsuit has been replaced by a bright shirt and jeans as he relaxes in a rented home high in the
Hollywood Hills. As he talks, he strokes his beloved dog Truck.
“I know how lucky I am to be sitting here, talking to you,” he says, flashing a dimpled smile that instantly reminds us of his father. “When that cell door slammed shut on the first night of my incarceration, I felt like I was in a bad dream, that I would wake up. But the dream carried on and got worse. I lived a nightmare for seven years, but the love of my family never wavered.”
Screen idol Kirk, 101, visited his grandson early on during his time at the high-security Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Later, when he became too frail to travel, he sent at least two letters a month reminding Cameron, “You are not forgotten.”
Cameron, who has tattoos of both his father and grandfather, recalls, “Grandpa came and he wore shades the whole time, like a proper Hollywood star. He asked me, ‘How many fights have you been in – and are you winning?’ He’s from tough stock.”
Kirk told his grandson, “Never give up the fight.”
In contrast with many in his position, Cameron refuses to blame anyone but himself
for his woes. “I made bad decisions,” he says. “I had little regard for my own life.”
Yet it is also true that during Cameron's formative years, his father was at the height of his career making blockbuster films, including WallStreet and Romancing the Stone. And Michael has admitted to not being the best father to Cameron, whose mother Diandra was “young and did the best she could”.
Michael married Diandra in 1977, when he was 32 and she was 19. Cameron, their only child, was born in 1978 and his parents split in 1995.
Troubled youth
As a kid, Cameron found himself shunted between his father's palatial $40 million home in Santa Barbara, a $25 million New York penthouse and a succession of nannies. He was expelled from boarding school for selling marijuana.
By 16, he was “a fully fledged addict”. At 17, he dropped out of school and became a DJ, which only encouraged his growing cocaine and heroin use.
After the mistakes he made with Cameron, Michael vowed to do things differently during his 17-year marriage to Catherine, which has produced children Dylan, 17, and Carys, 14. “My marriage and my family come before my career now,” Michael asserts.
And perhaps to teach them the price of bad decisions, Catherine brought Dylan and Carys on regular prison visits.
Cameron says, “She didn't want to sugar-coat what I was going through. I made mistakes and there were consequences. The kids barely could remember me outside a jail setting.”
He describes his prison experience as “like being in a war zone”. The famous name, of course, did nothing to help. “If anything, it put a target on my back,” he says quietly. “Celebrity means nothing inside. I found people I wanted to hang out with. They had my back and I had theirs. I have kept in touch with those guys. When you go through things in jail, it bonds you in a way a war bonds men together.”
But Cameron is clear about one thing – he never considered suicide. “There were dark moments, many rock bottoms,” he says, “but I knew I had to use prison to change my life.”
A year into his original sentence, he was found in possession of the prescription pill Xanax, a commonly abused anti-anxiety medication that was smuggled into the jail by his lawyer Jennifer Ridha, who hid the drug in her bra.
When Cameron tried to sell some of the pills to other inmates, he was charged with possession and dealing behind bars, then sentenced to another four and a half years – two of those in solitary confinement.
“'There were two years where no-one could visit me,” he recalls. “I would look out the window and look for the moon. Sometimes I saw it, many times I didn't. When I saw it, it gave me hope and comfort.”
That's why he called his
baby daughter Lua, which means “moon” in Portuguese. Her second name is Izzy in honour of his grandfather, who changed his name from Issur Danielovitch to Kirk Douglas when he started his Hollywood career in the 1940s.
Cameron stayed sane inside jail by focusing on books, devouring the classics like “Dickens, Oscar Wilde and everything by Hemingway”, and also volunteering for intensive anti-addiction counselling.
“I’ve wasted enough time in life to addiction,” he says. “Every day in jail, I woke up thinking, ‘What can I do today to prepare for when I finally get out?’ I knew this was my last chance. I could get sober or wind up dead.”
Prison life was brutal. For example, the time he broke his leg and finger during a game of handball. “The bone was sticking out of my leg,” he recalls. “The nurse put a brace on it, gave me some ibuprofen and sent me back to my cell.”
Five days later, his cellmate called the warden and, with his leg swollen to twice its normal size, he was moved to a civilian hospital. “I had a massive blood clot in my leg which could have killed me had I not got treatment.”
For all that, Cameron – who is now writing a book about his experiences – credits jail with “making me a man”. He was released in August 2016 and spent nine months in a Manhattan halfway house.
At first, it was tough, he explains, recalling how he went through waves of euphoria mixed with panic. Then he threw himself into the “family business” – acting.
Cameron, who’d already appeared in six movies including 2003’s ItRunsin
theFamily, is now attending auditions and describes himself as “desperate” to land a role. “It’s my passion. When I’m acting, I feel free and honest. I want to show people what I can do.”
Does he dream of winning an Oscar to add to the family’s clutch? His ambitions, he insists, are more modest.
“I just want to work. When I got out of jail, no agent or manager would touch me because of my reputation.”
Baby Lua was born shortly before Christmas. Cameron and his girlfriend Viviane knew each other before he was incarcerated, but “bonded the old-fashioned way, through letters” while he was inside. Their child is Michael and Catherine’s first grandchild. Cameron grins, “Catherine says she wants to be called ‘ZeeZee’ and Dad wants to be ‘Baba’ for some reason.”
Cameron says he now appreciates every day of freedom, even though he is still on parole and needed a judge’s permission to move from New York to Los Angeles to pursue his acting dream.
“Life stops in prison,” he tells. “People take freedom for granted. I don’t. I went through a very dark time, but it didn’t break me. The one thing that got me off the rack every morning was to do one thing that day to prepare for being free. I will never take freedom for granted again.
“Now I want to be the best dad, man and actor I can be. I finally have my priorities in the right order. I want to make my family proud.”