A LOVE SHARED VIA LETTERS
Douglases’ memoir spans 63- year marriage
A romantic interlude with Kirk Douglas or a night in with a plate of eggs?
The woman who captured Spartacus’ heart opted for the eggs.
Douglas, who turned 100 in December, and his wife, Anne, 98, have been married for 63 years. But when they met on the Paris set of Act of Love ( she a film publicist, he a film star), “she was terrible!” he recalls, sitting for a joint interview with Anne in their stylish living room.
“She was the most difficult woman I ever met. I mean, I was a big movie star! And I invited her to dinner and she said, ‘ Oh thank you very much, but I’m so tired.’ ”
Their sour meet- up is
detailed in Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood ( Running Press). The book is “my last,” says Kirk. Co- written with his wife, it reveals candid letters the couple sent each other during their courtship and marriage.
Today, Anne, a colorful silk scarf wrapped around her neck, remembers their fateful meeting differently. With Kirk on the lookout for a bilingual press aide ( Anne was fluent in German, French and English), she was led to his dressing room, coined “the lion’s den” by her cinematographer guide.
The movie star “took a look at me and then he said, ‘ Would you like to have dinner tonight with my friends at some chic restaurant?’ And I said, ‘ No, thank you, I think I’ll go home and make myself some scrambled eggs.’ ”
“Well,” she adds, “that was not what he expected.”
Kirk jumps in. “And to myself I said, ‘ You b - - - - !’ ” he says. Everyone — the couple’s aides gathered in a corner, the onlookers from the publishing house — breaks out in surprised laughter.
Kirk hired Anne, but things stayed platonic. “With no romance in the picture, I stopped trying to impress Anne,” Kirk writes in their book. “Instead, I stopped talking about myself and began to listen to her.”
Anne devilishly invited all his latest Parisian conquests over to his apartment on his birthday. Weeks later they attended a charity gala held at a circus, and Anne watched Kirk willingly jump into the fray, scooping elephant dung while wearing his tuxedo.
“That’s what got me,” says Anne today. “It was not only funny, it was showing me that he was able to do things that are not expected from him.”
But the lesson, to be blunt? Anne didn’t take any crap. “That’s right,” Kirk nods. “And she still doesn’t.”
Writing Kirk and Anne, the legendary actor’s 11th book, was not the original plan. The star intended to publish a book full of letters he received from celebrities and dignitaries all over the world, including Frank Sinatra, Henry Kissinger, Tony Curtis and Barack Obama. Anne retrieved a box in which she kept important documents — including their old love letters.
“Darling,” Kirk writes in the spring of their courtship, after a fight. “I have a feeling you’re not coming back tonight. I
Letters are “so personal, something that touches you or disappoints you.” Anne Douglas