Even in jail, Catherine and dad were my rocks
Michael Douglas’s troubled son comes clean about his drugs shame, his prison hell – and the superstar stepmum he says has helped save his life Grandpa came to visit me in his shades, like a proper star
DRESSED in regulation khaki prison overalls, prisoner 70707054 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 prison guard could not have failed to cast a sideways glance at the glamorous couple waiting for him.
For there, sitting side-by-side 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, Basic Instinct and Wall Street, and his glamorous wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, 48, proud possessor of her own Academy Award for her performance in Chicago.
The shuffling prisoner was Cameron Douglas, 39 and Michael’s eldest son – and he 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 says 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 screen legend Kirk Douglas, hero of Spartacus – Cameron has the easy charm, trademark cleft chin and rugged good looks that should have offered him easy entry into the rarified world of the super famous. Yet for most of his adult life, he has been branded the ‘black sheep’ of the Douglas clan, a man who made lurid headlines for constant drug arrests and trips to rehab, 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 through 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 khaki prison jumpsuit has been replaced by a bright yellow shirt and blue jeans as he relaxes in a serene rented home high in the Hollywood Hills filled with Buddha statues.
As he talks, he strokes his beloved chocolate labrador called Truck.
‘I know how lucky I am to be sitting here talking to you,’ he says, flashing a dimpled smile which instantly reminds you 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 visited him early on during his grandson’s 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 on his torso, says of Kirk’s visit: ‘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. I had little regard for my own life,’ he says.
Yet it is also true that during Cameron’s formative years, his father was at the height of his career, making blockbuster films
She’s a Welsh scrapper who never gives up – even on me
including Basic Instinct and Wall Street. Michael has admitted not being the best father to Cameron, whose mother Diandra was ‘young and did the best she could’.
Douglas married Diandra, a diplomat’s daughter, in 1977 when he was 32 and she was 19. Cameron, their only child, was born in 1978 and his parents split in 1995.
As a child, Cameron found himself shunted between his father’s palatial $27million home in Santa Barbara, a $16million New York penthouse and a succession of nannies. He was expelled from boarding school for selling marijuana. By the age of 16, he was ‘a fullyfledged addict’.
At 17, he dropped out of school and became a DJ, a pursuit 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 Zeta-Jones, which has produced children Dylan, 17, and Carys, 14.
‘My marriage and my family come before my career now,’ Michael promised. And perhaps to teach them the price of bad decisions, Zeta-Jones brought Dylan and Carys on regular jail 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 the experience of jail 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. Celebrity means nothing inside. I found people I wanted to hang out with and they had my back and I had theirs,’ he says quietly. ‘I have kept in touch with some of those guys. When you go through things in jail it bonds you in a way a war bonds men together.’
And he is clear about this: 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 which was, almost unbelievably, smuggled into the jail by his thenlawyer Jennifer Ridha, who hid the drugs in her bra.
When Cameron tried to sell some of the pills to other inmates, he was charged with possession and deal- ing behind bars and sentenced to another four and a half years – two of those in solitary confinement. ‘There were two years where no one could visit me. I was in solitary. 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, Portuguese for ‘moon’. Her second name is Izzy in honour of his grandfather who changed his name to Kirk Douglas from Issur Danielovitch when he started his Hollywood career in the 1940s. Cameron says he stayed sane inside jail by focusing on books, devouring the classics: ‘Dickens, Oscar Wilde, everything by Hemingway.’ He also volunteered for intensive anti-addiction counselling. ‘I’ve wasted enough time in life to addiction. 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. Take 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,’ he calmly explains. 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 had already appeared in six films, including 2003’s It Runs In The Family and is now attending auditions, describing 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 says 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. He and the baby’s mother Viviane knew each other before he was incarcerated but ‘bonded the old-fashioned way through letters’ while he was inside. She is Michael and Catherine’s first grandchild. ‘Catherine says she wants to be called ZeeZee and dad wants to be ‘Baba’ for some reason,’ Cameron grins.
He 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 LA to pursue his acting dream.
‘Life stops in prison. 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,’ he says.
‘I finally have my priorities in the right order. I want to make my family proud.’