HOLLYWOOD’S FORGOTTEN SON
Fresh out of prison, former druggie Cameron Douglas wants big screen fame
IT’S a hot June day, and photographer Steven Ekerovich is snapping headshots for a buff Cameron Douglas on West 56th Street. He smiles coyly, draping his leather jacket over one shoulder.
You’d be smiling, too, if you were Douglas. It’s the third day of freedom for the 37-year-old son of famed actor Michael Douglas. He’s just been released to a halfway house in The Bronx after serving a seven-year-long federal prison sentence.
“He said, ‘I’m not going to get back into acting. I am an actor,’ ” Ekerovich, who was introduced to Cameron via a mutual friend, tells The Post. “‘I want to show them what I can do.’ ”
The photos are a stark contrast to the last public image of Cameron: a mug shot of the drug-addled Hollywood heir when he was arrested in the summer of 2009 at the Hotel Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District for dealing meth after two decades of substance abuse.
How Cameron — who has appeared in four movies, most recently 2008’s “Loaded” — went from hobnobbing among Tinseltown A-listers to living in a decrepit, 100-plus-person halfway house in Fordham Heights is a tale of neglect and addiction.
Cameron was raised an only child by two absentee parents — his mother, Diandra, caught up in society life, and his father, Michael, busy with his own rising stardom — and yearned for stability, especially once his parents separated in 1995 and divorced five years later. He was close with his movie-star grandfather, Kirk Douglas, but in his early teens, Cameron turned to drugs and alcohol for solace.
“The Douglas family was one of the icon families of the community, but it’s a lot of pressure when your last name is Douglas,” says George Schlatter, producer of the 2005 documentary “A Father. . . A Son ... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” about Michael and Kirk Douglas, with whom he is close. He has monthly dinners with Michael and his second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones. “[It’s] a lot to live up to.”
Right now, Cameron is just trying to live.
According to a man who works the front desk of the Bronx Community Reentry Center, where Cameron is shacked up, residents are not allowed to have smartphones, can be gone for only 12 hours each day, and must take a Breathalyzer when they enter the building. Computers are available only for job searches, not e-mails.
“He’s one of us. He’s a convict,” says Kenny, a 38-year-old man living at the halfway house.
“He’s a cool dude. Respectful, you know? You don’t talk about jail. You try to put it in the back of your mind so you don’t go back there . . . I think he’s on the road to recovery. He’s trying to take a different path.”
When approached outside the center early Friday, Cameron gently turned down an interview request.
“I really can’t,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
THINGS seem to be looking up. About a year ago, while in prison, he snagged a stunning girlfriend, Brazilian yoga instructor Viviane Thibes, 38, whom friends say Cameron knew before he was locked up. He’s currently working downtown at a production company and penning a book about his stint in prison. Friend and nightclub honcho Noel Ashman tells The Post that Cameron is also “starting a charity that he’s very passionate about to help others who are drugaddicted.”
Some may say it’s the most structure he’s had his whole life.
A family friend, who asked to remain anonymous, tells The Post that his parents’ marriage was acri- monious from the get-go. Michael’s career took off right around the time Cameron was born and Diandra, not content at home, shirked her parental responsibilities.
“She loved to go to parties and be social. She just didn’t understand the gravity of raising children. She wasn’t very present,” says the family friend, adding that a “lonely” Cameron spent most of his time with the family’s caretaker, Joaquin.
An associate of Cameron tells The Post that when the bad boy was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child in Los Angeles, his parents did nothing to aid their struggling son.
“The school called in his parents and told them,” says the associate. “And I asked [Diandra and Michael], ‘ What did you do when you found out Cameron was dyslexic?’ And his father said, ‘ Oh, we just thought the school would deal with it.’ They never took him to a specialist or doctor or anything.”
(Michael’s rep said the actor had no comment. Diandra did not return calls or e-mails for comment.)
When Cameron was in the seventh grade, Michael pushed him to enroll at his alma mater, Eaglebrook School, a boarding school in Deerfield, Mass. According to court documents obtained by The Post, Cameron was expelled within a year for selling marijuana. He attended a substance-abuse program in Idaho before being shipped off to California, where he dropped out of his blue-collar, public high school.
In 1999, Cameron moved back to NYC to kick off his DJ career, but trouble followed him. His first year back in Manhattan, Cameron was arrested for cocaine possession. Friends began to worry that the Hollywood scion was taking the good life too far.
“Everyone would take it to an 8, and Cameron would take it to an 11,” says a party pal. “He really operated with no fear . . . He was so f--king dazed and in the clouds.”
He dated Jen Gatien, daughter of Limelight impresario Peter Gatien, but the two split in 2003. Soon, Cameron began seeing his personal assistant Kelly Sott. He also started shooting cocaine. While vacationing in Mallorca, where the Douglases built an estate, Diandra and Michael found needles in their son’s room, according to court documents. They gave Cameron an ultimatum: Clean up or get out. He chose the drugs.
IN 2005, Cameron moved back to Los Angeles and began using heroin regularly. According to court documents, he lived off a $700-a-week stipend from his trust fund. Two years later, he was arrested after a syringe with liquid cocaine was found in a car with Cameron.
Things took a turn for the worse when he got hooked up with Mexican drug dealers to transport meth from LA to NYC for Cameron’s former David Barton trainer-turned-drug client. In 2009, Cameron was arrested in Manhattan with a half pound of meth on him.
The judge placed Cameron under house arrest. Michael and Catherine Zeta-Jones told the judge that
there was no room for Cameron at their NYC abode, according to the associate, so Cameron stayed at his mother’s $9.2 million Upper East Side townhouse.
“She was in Spain. She didn’t come home [when he was arrested] and she had him released to her house. There was some sort of security that Michael hired, but they didn’t know who to let in and who to keep out,” laments the family friend. “That put her son, who was an addict, in a position of power.”
Sott, his personal assistant, took advantage of the leniency, smuggling Cameron heroin inside an electric toothbrush. Cameron got caught and was transferred to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.
In January 2010, he pleaded guilty to heroin possession and conspiracy to distribute drugs. That April, he was sentenced to five years.
While Cameron was bullied and beaten throughout his nearly seven years in various slammers — he even had his leg broken in 2012 — some inmates treated him like royalty, according to the associate.
She says that while at MCC, certain jailbirds would buy him gifts and custom-tailor his jumpsuits. “The Italians,” as Cameron called them, took a particular liking to the silver-screen legacy.
CAMERON certainly has an ability to charm. He even managed to seduce his own lawyer, Jennifer Ridha, convincing her to slip him a total of 30 Xanax pills on three occasions while incarcerated.
The associate recalls visiting Cameron once at MCC and watching him stare at her hand “like a dog looks at a turkey leg,” she says.
“He was like, ‘You have really nice veins in your hand. It would be really easy to shoot up those veins.’ ”
Perhaps to no one’s surprise, in 2011, Cameron was slapped with an additional 4½ years for possessing items that tested positive for cocaine and heroin in jail. In 2013, his urine tested positive for drugs.
Now out of jail, friends say Douglas is clean — for good — and embracing his fresh start.
In a statement passed along via pal-cum-publicist Ashman, he said:
“Cameron is spending this time healing with his family . . . He feels blessed to have an opportunity to give back and contribute positively to society. And he is extremely grateful for the staunch support and encouragement that he has received.
“He learned his lesson and he’s now laser-focused,” says Ashman, adding that Cameron has an acting coach and is eager to get back on the big screen.
“The whole experience taught him how important time is — and he doesn’t want to waste any more of it.”