How Kirk Douglas created a dynasty that became Hollywood royalty
Mick Brown reflects on the man who turned his life from rags to riches – changing the fortunes of the film industry and his family at the same time
One of the most resonant lines in Hollywood cinema history is spoken by the actress Gloria Swanson, in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film
Sunset Boulevard. The film tells the story of a faded silent movie actress, confronted by a young screenwriter, who tells her “you used to be big”. “I am big!” she declares. “It’s the pictures that got small.”
Kirk Douglas, who died this week aged 103, was as big as they get. For almost 50 years he bestrode Hollywood, a cleft-chinned colossus, whether punching out opponents in the boxing ring or walking the oars of Viking longboats – the last of the great stars from Hollywood’s postwar golden era.
Douglas was movie royalty, who rose – quite literally – from rags to riches, to create a dynasty, and whose story can also be read as a parable for the rise of Hollywood itself.
He was born in 1916, the year that DW Griffith made the silent epic
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through
the Ages, and Mary Pickford became Hollywood’s highest-earning female star, signing a contract worth more than $1million a year.
His real name was Issur Danielovitch, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who adopted the name Demsky when Douglas was a young boy. He grew up speaking Yiddish at home. In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, he talked about his upbringing in Amsterdam, New York, where his alcoholic and violent father scraped a living buying old rags and junk for pennies, nickels and dimes. “Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman’s son.”
It is the classic Hollywood tale. The movie industry was built by impoverished Jewish immigrants with big dreams, “marginal men trying to punch into the American mainstream”, as the American author Neal Gabler once put it, who in their determination to assimilate fabricated an idealised version of the life they aspired to – an America of sunny skies, solid family values, and white picket fences. “Our object was to escape reality,” the director George Cukor once said. “We were quite conscious of that.” It was an object that came to fruition in the years of the Depression – at a time when Izzy Demsky was selling snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread to feed his family – when Hollywood rose to become the factory of dreams.
The paradox is that the Jews of Hollywood – the most zealous propagandists for the American way of life – were also objects of discrimination and suspicion. For some, Jewishness was synonymous with Communism. Douglas, who wrote of how as a child “kids on every street corner beat you up”, never forgot the anti-semitism he’d been exposed to, and was a lifelong supporter of liberal causes.
His defining role was as Spartacus, the Thracian slave who leads a rebellion against the Romans, and for which Douglas was also executive producer. The script was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the “Hollywood Ten”, who had been blacklisted after refusing to answer questions before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, investigating Communist infiltration in Hollywood. (The famous “I’m Spartacus” scene can be read as a metaphor of solidarity and defiance against the oppressor.) Douglas’s decision to name Trumbo in the film credits, rather than one of the pseudonyms he had been using, was an act of defiance that would effectively end blacklisting. He described it as the proudest moment of his film career.
In their pursuit of the American dream, the Hollywood moguls built mansions and behaved as emperors of their own kingdom. Their power was dynastic – exactly the life that Douglas shaped for himself.
One of the last photographs of Douglas, taken last August, shows him as the indomitable patriarch seated with his wife Anne and four generations of his family around a table at his Beverly Hills home. All four of his sons followed him into the movie business, Michael as an award-winning actor and producer,
Joel and Peter as producers. Eric who died in 2004, was an actor and stand-up comedian. One might also include his daughter in-law, Catherine Zeta-jones, the wife of Michael. In Hollywood, acting is often a family business: think Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr; Lloyd Bridges and his actor sons Jeff and Beau – even Jon Voight and Angelina Jolie.
But the Douglases were a dynasty apart as Kirk Douglas was a man apart – a man of iron determination and a volcanic temperament – as daunting a presence off-screen as he was on it. When, some years ago, I interviewed Michael Douglas, he spoke of how “intimidating” a figure his father had been when he was growing up.
“On-screen he was leading armies and all of that – my God!” he said. “But this was a man who was larger than life in real life.” Was he scared of him, I asked. “I think more than being scared of him you just wondered how you could ever be a man comparable to your father.”
For years, Michael had to face the accusations often levelled against sons and daughters of famous stars, that any success they achieved was due to their parents. It’s the dynastic curse. In Michael Douglas’s case it would be complicated when he produced the film One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. Kirk Douglas had acquired the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel in 1963, but never managed to bring it to film. When Michael took over the film rights, his father wanted to play the lead role of Randle Mcmurphy, the roustabout who finds himself wrongly incarcerated in a mental hospital. It fell to Michael to tell him he was too old for the part. “Not easy,” he remembered. Although through the production partnership, he was quick to point out, his father “made more money from that than any other movie he’d made in his life”.
Reflecting on the moguls who had made Hollywood – the Mayers, the Thalbergs, the Warners and the Cohns – modern-day mogul David Geffen once remarked that “they were remarkable guys, but they were monsters”. Hard-nosed, calculating, often cruel. Peddlers of sentimentality who possessed not an ounce of the stuff themselves.
The most valuable lesson his father ever taught him, Michael Douglas told me, was that the film business is precisely that – a business. “Sitting around as a kid listening to my dad, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, the glamour was out of it. There was no sparkle; just a real sense of how hard the work was.” No one worked harder – or punched harder – than Izzy Demsky to get to the top. And few sparkled as brightly.
“You see,” the character of Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard,
“this is my life! It always will be! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!” Spellbound, awestruck, and now mourning the passing of a legend.