Brimming with passion, the love letters that finally tamed serial seducer Kirk Douglas
And led to a marriage still going strong after 63 years
My darling wife,’ wrote Kirk douglas almost 60 years ago, ‘at this moment you are thousands of feet above the earth, sleeping peacefully i hope but racing towards me. airplanes fly so fast.
‘why am i writing? you will be here soon. But i know that when you get here, we will not have time to say all the things we want to say to each other. in fact, if we live to be 100, there will still be so many unsaid things — which is just as well, perhaps, because then, if there is a life after death, we will have many things to talk about later.’
That heartfelt letter was remarkably prescient. douglas, the star of Spartacus and lust for life, turned 100 last december. His wife anne is 98. They have been married for 63 years — though when they met, Kirk was frantically in love with another woman, and anne was married to the man who helped her to escape from the nazis during world war ii.
How they became devoted to each other, and evolved one of the most lasting marriages Hollywood has ever seen, is revealed in Kirk and anne, a collection of letters between them with commentary from both. it’s a unique piece of memorabilia, that shows how even the closest couples can have very different perspectives on the past.
They agree on the really important matters — their unconditional love and support for each other and their children. everything else is open for debate. it makes for a touching and refreshingly honest take on history.
in that 1958 letter, written hours before she flew in to meet him in london on the set of a movie called The devil’s disciple, Kirk was bold enough to pinpoint the moment when he believed anne, whom he first met in 1953 as his translator and language coach in france, had fallen in love with him. it had been his conversation, he said, that bewitched her.
‘you fell in love with me on an afternoon in Paris in my apartment near the Bois de Boulogne while i talked. i did most of the talking, you listened, and i felt that parts of you that had been closed for so long opened up, until it seemed that all of your pores were open, too — and every part of you was ready to receive me.’
Kirk, it should be noted, did not lack confidence with the opposite sex. a divorced father (whose son, Michael, would go on to be a film star, too), douglas was known in the film world as a voracious ladies’ man. La Cheri Brute, they called him — the darling Brute. Anne
has no hesitation in contradicting him. She remembered thinking how dangerous it would be to fall in love with him: ‘i had seen too many young women enter into intense affairs with visiting movie stars — dean Martin, Marlon Brando, Cary grant among them. Then the film wrapped and the men returned to their wives and families.’
it was at a charity gala later that evening where anne lost her heart. Kirk had been invited to the winter Circus in Paris, where, for one night, celebrities joined the acts.
Kirk was asked to step into the ring: he had recently performed a trapeze routine with italian starlet Pier angeli in The Story Of Three loves, and the organisers were hoping for aerial acrobatics.
anne sat at the ringside, wondering what he would do with no time to prepare. The ringmaster led out the elephants ... and behind them, in an immaculate tuxedo, was the barrel- chested, cleft- chinned demi- god of Hollywood, Kirk douglas. and he was ‘ pushing a giant pooper-scooper of a broom, to great hilarity’.
‘How could i resist a man,’ anne asks, ‘who could laugh at himself? we went back to his place for a nightcap, which turned into something more.’
But if she was not ready for a serious relationship, neither was he. Kirk was engaged to his former co-star Pier angeli, who at just 21 years old, was 16 years his junior.
Since his divorce from Michael’s mother, diane, two years earlier in 1951, he had been involved in outrageously lurid affairs, including one with movie queen gene Tierney — who was ‘ so neurotic that she insisted i arrive for our nocturnal dates by climbing the tree outside her bedroom window’.
no less problematic was the oil heiress irene wrightsman. Kirk’s affair with her ended abruptly when he returned home early one day to find her in bed with Charlie Chaplin’s brother, Sydney.
angeli was different. a virgin, she took her mother as chaperone on all her dates with Kirk. He was so blind with love that he refused to acknowledge magazine reports that the starlet was seeing several other men.
while angeli was abroad, Kirk spent time with anne in the South of france and then italy, where he was to shoot the Homeric legend of Ulysses. They stayed in amalfi: ‘ we had a wonderful, romantic holiday,’ Kirk writes.
‘during that magical week, anne and i would set off in a little row-boat. She would row, i would sing her italian love songs. anne said: “we are so happy with each other.”
‘“But don’t forget,” i reminded her gently, “i’m going to marry Pier.” ’
‘i cannot believe how insensitive i was,’ Kirk says now. ‘i asked anne to come to Bulgari the jewellers, to help me choose an engagement ring for Pier.’
The calm way anne dealt with this is a clue to the real secret of their marriage. She seems to have understood instinctively that, if she thwarted Kirk’s amorous adventuring, he would break away from her. lots of women were willing to love him, after all. He needed one who was prepared to love him no matter what. as they got to know each other, he would tell her stories of his childhood, growing up in abject poverty in new york. His mother had escaped the Jewish genocide in russia at the turn of the last century, and never forgot the horrors: her brother had been slaughtered in front of her. Kirk’s father was a drunkard who abandoned them. They were often hungry, but Kirk’s mother Bryna doted on her boy: he had been sent to her from heaven in a golden casket, she would say — but she had thrown away the gold, because all she wanted was the child.
Kirk was a star in his mid-30s by the time he met anne, but he still yearned for that all-forgiving, never- ending love. and anne quickly saw that he wasn’t going to get it from Pier angeli.
‘Kirk never tried to hide his dalliances from me,’ anne says. ‘He told me about them himself because i wanted to hear it from him directly, not via an idle piece of gossip.
‘as a european, i understood it was unrealistic to expect total fidelity in a marriage. Only the americans found this outrageous.’
Her relaxed sophistication was rooted in her own past. Born in Hanover, germany, to a wealthy Jewish couple in 1918, she fled the nazis at the outbreak of war and was obliged to marry her protector, the Belgian albert Buydens. at the time, she believed
Infatuation: But Kirk broke off his engagement to Pier Angeli she would be able to get a divorce after a year. But Buydens demanded to be paid off, which Anne could not afford to do. By the early Fifties, she had become the mistress of a well- o f f industrialist, in a loveless affair as well as a loveless marriage. As ever worldlywise, she remained convinced that Kirk’s infatuation with Angeli would fizzle out. And so it did, in Paris on New Year’s eve, over dinner at the historic La tour d’Argent restaurant on the banks of the Seine. It was meant to be a night of physical passion, because Pier arrived alone: ‘Just the two of us — no Mama!’ says Kirk. ‘Over dinner, knowing there were no obstacles to a night of passion, I fell out of love with her. I was bored with the conversation. there was no chemistry when we kissed as the clock struck midnight. I broke off our engagement. She returned my ring. I couldn’t wait to tell Anne.’
Over the next few months, Anne told Kirk what he needed most to hear — that she loved him, without reservation.
‘Sweetheart, write to me, call me, come over — do anything,’ she pleaded. ‘I want to be close to you. I want to be loved and loved — and loved again and again!’
And Anne wasn’t shy about it: she said she often imagined Kirk ‘taking me in your arms — let’s say in a horizontal position’.
When he was away filming, she cleverly arranged for female friends to keep him company.
‘to show you how I trust you,’ she wrote when he was filming twenty thousand Leagues under the Sea, ‘ I gave your phone number to a very pretty girlfriend of mine, Micheline Muselie. She is a lawyer — don’t feel frightened — only 29 and very much ooh-la-la. So look, but don’t touch!’
When a year had passed, and there was still no proposal from Kirk, Anne unexpectedly threatened to cut off this source of unstinting love. ‘I will take you out of my life,’ she warned. ‘I am a woman — not a little girl ... I allowed you to push me around emotionally, and if I don’t want to get hurt for good, I have to stop.
‘One and one does not always make two. It can also make nothing.’ her bluff worked. Kirk begged her to stay and, in May 1954, they flew to Las Vegas, where they were married. Anne got her vows slightly wrong, and said: ‘I take thee, Kirk, for my awful wedded husband.’ She later explained: ‘I thought it meant “full of awe”.’
they had two sons, Peter and eric, and Anne made sure she was a loving stepmother to Kirk’s children from his first marriage. She befriended Kirk’s first bride, Diana, calling her ‘our ex-wife’.
At first, Kirk chafed whenever Anne tried to control any part of his life. But she was persistent and patient, and she knew her mind.
his therapist was a flatterer and a fraud, so she persuaded him to quit analysis. his financial adviser was a crook: she talked her husband into firing him, though not before he had siphoned off almost all their money.
But it was a moment of almost supernatural intuition that finally persuaded Kirk to trust his wife in all things. In March 1958, she was six months’ pregnant when he announced he was flying to New York from their home in Palm Springs on a business trip with actress elizabeth taylor’s husband, Mike todd, in his friend’s private plane.
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she says, ‘but I had a strange feeling. “Absolutely not, Kirk,” I told him. ‘I don’t want you on that plane.”’
Kirk argued, and resisted, and sulked, but he could not refuse his pregnant wife’s plea. ‘he stomped off to bed without kissing me goodnight,’ she said.
Next morning, they switched on the radio to the news that todd’s plane had crashed in the New Mexico desert, killing all those on board.
they continued to send each other love letters whenever Kirk was away.
During the filming of Spartacus, he wrote: ‘how often I think that if I weren’t married to you, I’d be in awful shape. I’d be a bum and a drunkard without you. And the awful thing is I keep needing you more and more as I get older.’
For the next 50 years and more, they have continued to need each other. even now, the couple impress everyone they meet with their affection for each other.
ONe of their pet projects in recent years has been a charity to build safe playgrounds for underprivileged children in Los Angeles. they opened more in Israel, where Arab and Jewish youngsters can play together.
ever the daredevil, Kirk’s favourite photo-opportunity was to scoot down the slide. he kept that up till he was 91: ‘Actors never grow up,’ he says. Perhaps that’s why he still adores Anne the way a boy worships his mother.
It was Anne who preserved their love letters, carefully folding away the ones he sent her, and rescuing those she wrote to him from the bottom of his suitcases when he returned home from a shoot.
But it was Kirk who hit upon the idea of publishing them after recognising that, in this era of text messages, we have lost the love notes and billets doux of a more romantic era.
‘I hope our grandchildren won’t be shocked by the intensity of the letters,’ he says. ‘Perhaps they will come to value, even in this world of instant communication, the joy of writing and receiving nonelectronic letters — particularly when it comes to love.’