Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1950)

sick for the city, and his old friends, and the theater, particularly for Diana. “He knows her,” his buddy scoffed. “But I do,” Kirk insisted. He wrote to her that night, asked her to save a date for him on his first furlough. That furlough was like nothing Kirk had ever experienced before. He was newly an ensign, with a resplendent new uniform. He had $189, more “eating money” than he had ever had in his pocket at one time. Diana looked like a dream. “Much too good for Schrafft’s,” he said, and he whirled her off on the biggest night of both of their lives. They had dinner at the Starlight Roof, saw a play, sat at a front row table at the Copacabana, rode the length of Fifth Avenue on a bus top, held hands, and then, strangely moved and shaken, said goodbye. The $189 was gone. Kirk had to borrow money from friends to get to Albany. Kirk, his furlough over, was ordered to New Orleans. Diana’s modelling job took her to Phoenix for desert fashion pictures. New Orleans was on her way home, sort of. She never got home, at least for a month, for on the third day of her visit in the old French city, Diana and Kirk were married by a Chaplain in the Naval Chapel on the post with Kirk’s fellow officers in attendance. The ring was Kirk’s sister Marion’s, air-mailed for the ceremony. Their swift romance, the romantic marriage, “all pure dream stuff,” Kirk recalls almost wistfully. At the end of the month Kirk shipped out for the South Pacific. Diana went back to New York. They wrote every day, but letters were slow moving then. It was months after Kirk was seriously wounded that Diana heard he was in a hosnital, waiting for his medical discharge. And Kirk was in that hospital before the news reached him that he was soon to be a father. Michael Douglas’s first impression of his father must have been of a man who slept until noon and stayed out late, for by the time he was born Kirk was back on Broadway. They had settled down in quaint old St. John’s colony on Eleventh Street, and life was good. There were times when there wasn’t enough money. He appeared in “Alice in Arms,” but it ran only briefly. The occasional radio jobs with which Kirk tried to balance the budget were too occasional, sometimes. There was always Hollywood, but Kirk and Diana had ruled out Hollywood. Tinsel and sham, they agreed, in chorus with many other serious young actors. Kirk was content to Be Somebody in the Theater. When Kirk landed a part in “The Wind Is Ninety,” and faced the usual three weeks’ rehearsal period, he agreed that this was an opportune time for Diana to take little Michael to Bermuda for his first visit with his grandparents. “The Wind Is Ninety” closed after a few months’ run, but not before Producer Hal Wallis, who had been urged by Lauren Bacall to have a look at her old friend, Kirk Douglas, saw the show and offered Kirk a film contract. “I don’t want to go to Hollywood,” Kirk told him, “I’m afraid of the place. But I’m broke, and in no position to deliver a lecture on integrity.” He wired Diana and Michael from his westbound train, “Get me. I’m on my way to that awful place called Hollywood.” Kirk didn’t go soft in Hollywood. He worked as hard at keeping his “values” as he did at his first juicy part as Barbara Stanwyck’s alcoholic husband in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” He and Diana bought a seamy old house “with atmosphere and rusty plumbing,” in an unfashionable section of the Hollywood Hills. He cleared an acre of hilly, overgrown land with his own hands. A new baby was coming, so Kirk had to build an extra room. The hills resounded to the clatter of a cement mixer and saw and hammer every Sunday. KIRK made one picture after another; his work was distinguished, but not yet star stuff. Diana, when their second son Joel was a few months old, had a fling at pictures, too, and did very well in “Sign of the Ram.” Came “Champion,” but not easily. It was to be the initial film-making effort of a new and untried, skimpily financed producing company. Its producer, director, and writer were comparatively unknown. The cast, except for Kirk, was equally uncelebrated. Kirk’s agent and advisers were unanimous in insisting that he turn the offer down. He protested in vain that the story was good, the part was great, that it didn’t matter if the picture had to be shot in three weeks at a budget of less than a half million dollars. He protested in vain, that was, to everyone except Diana. “It’s your big chance,” she said, “you’ll be awfully sorry if you don’t do it.” “Champion” was, of course, an immediate sensation, and it catapulted everyone connected with it into the top money brackets in Hollywood. As for Kirk, he had done it now. The dream, at last, had come true. “This is it,” he said. “This is what I’ve always wanted.” He was rich and famous now. His mother could come out to visit them. (Lwlb took, Hwwl o But if you send your vote in now you may see your favorite star in Photoplay's color pages. Send to: PORTRAIT POLL EDITOR c/o PHOTOPLAY 205 E. 42 St., New York 17, N. Y. My choice “What a kick she’ll get,” he said. But Bryna was not well enough to come; she had had a heart attack. Kirk rushed east to visit her, and his sisters. He went to Amsterdam, too, to see his father, joined him on his nightly pilgrimage to DiCaprio’s diner. Harry presented Kirk proudly to his old friends. “This is my son, Kirk Douglas, of Hollywood,” he said. And the bartender, after wiping his hands on a clean white towel, shoved out a fist. “I’m glad to know you,” he said. But he had known him for years. He was that skinny kid, remember? The uneasiness he felt there stayed with him, even after he returned to the warm, homey house on the hill in Hollywood. Diana was restless. Her career was at a stalemate. It enraged Kirk that he, that she, now that all the old problems were solved, the old insecurity gone, should be unhappy. The refrigerator was full, wasn’t it? There was more to life than work, wasn’t there? Didn’t they marry to have a home, a family . . .? “But,” said Diana, “I have my ambitions, too.” Her dream, too. Kirk understood. He almost understood. “The Kirk Douglases have separated.” The item in the papers was so usual, so unsurprising in Hollywood, that no one paid much attention. Except the Douglases. The four Douglases. And probably, back in Amsterdam and Albany and Syracuse, the seven women, who, before Diana, had been the only really important women in Kirk Douglas’s life. “It wasn’t just ‘career trouble,’ ” Kirk declares. “And it wasn’t just ‘another Hollywood marriage.’ It’s never as simple as that, when two people decide not to go on living together.” And there wasn’t Someone Else, for either of them. It would have been easier to face, if there had been. Kirk is busy. He has finished the part of the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie,” having voluntarily stepped out of the fatter part, that of the brother, to make room for a man he worships as “sheer genius,” Arthur Kennedy. With Kennedy, and a few other close friends, he had rich, satisfying relationships. But of the hordes of other people who pursue him now, the beautiful women, the important men, he is a little afraid. “Is it just because I’m a star?” he wonders. “Would they like me for myself?” “I want to be admired, sure,” he says, “I want to be loved. Everyone wants to be loved. But there’s a hitch. I want to be loved, just, I guess, for myself.” There was no “myself” in the dream. Only Somebody. And Somebody, once arrived, was not just Kirk. It was his father’s rebellion, Betty’s job at fourteen, the suitcase from Kay, the overcoat, the great country of his mother’s fulfillment. If kll these made Somebody, then who, what, is Kirk Douglas? Asking his questions, seeking his answers, Kirk Douglas is struggling to adjust himself to an unfamiliar reality. It would be easier for him, probably, to go on dreaming, but no one can give back a dream which has come true. “I’m not sure where I’m going now,” he says. “I’m not even sure who I am, Issur Danielovitch, the skinny kid, or Kirk Douglas, the star. But I know this much. You have to make peace with yourself as you are. Not just as you might have been, or are going to be. “I’ll make my peace with reality, and then . . . then we’ll see.” The End 126