Top Secret (1954)

Kirk and Irene Wrightsman, the clever and lovely heiress, were making beautiful music together — until the wolf went roving again. his life. He knows how to say the things they like to hear. He knows their little foibles and big desires, and knows how to play up to them. But no woman can be the one and only in the life of Kirk Douglas. There is too much competition. A woman has to compete with Kirk Douglas — because the only person he really loves is himself. The string of romances began with blind dates and adolescent affairs. But even then, over the shoulder of the girl he had in his arms, Kirk looked toward broader vistas. He wanted to be an actor with the same fervent determination that moved him to trample on female hearts. He worked hard, too, to become an actor. At college he became president of the Mummers, the school’s dramatic group. He was First Citizen of the campus, president of the student body and a star athlete. Since he already liked baring his chest, he picked wrestling as his sport. A perfectionist in everything, he won the Intercollegiate Wrestling Championship. Later, when he wrestled with his career, he still liked to bare his chest. During the making of Champion, Kirk always walked around the lot unclad above the waist. It was then that his super sex appeal was established. Today, if anybody dares to question his masculinity, Kirk will promptly rip off his expensive silk shirt and show that chest. What shapely legs or an ample bosom are to a female movie star, his chest is to Kirk. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he has insured it with Lloyd’s for a million bucks. HERO OF WORLD WAR II But masculinity is not mere showmanship with Kirk Douglas. He’s a real he-man in the true heroic mold. During the war, Kirk left Broadway to enlist in the Navy. He was sent to midshipmen’s school at Notre Dame, became an officer and was assigned as communications officer on Antisubmarine Unit 1 1 39. He saw plenty of action in the Pacific and he was as much of a matinee idol to his men, showing them how a man fights, as he was to the girls on the balcony of Broadway theaters where he appeared. He was badly wounded in action and spent five months in a Naval hospital in California. After the war Kirk made a valiant effort to calm down and settle down. He found he wanted (Continued on Page 40) Kirk himself is mighty sophisticated about the problem. He says with a laborious smile on his curly lips, with that faraway look in his eyes which the female members of the audience regard as a personal favor, "Women are a necessary nuisance. Girls everywhere should accept the fact that a man is boss, then they wouldn’t have such a nuisance quotient.’’ Then he thrusts out his chest, flexes his muscles, lifts his shoulders and steels his eyes to say, "A man’s physical superiority is taken for granted {granted, that is, by caveboy Kirk ) and usually he doesn’t need to show it ( but he usually shows it like a Freudian slip). Still, it may be good sometimes to remind a woman that she belongs to the weaker sex ( and Kirk never misses the opportunity).” If ever ladies’ man Kirk was sized up aptly, it was by a fellow star, Janet Leigh, a sweet little charmer with a sizzling way of expressing her thoughts. "Mr. Douglas can have a store window mannequin any time he wants,” she once said on a Hollywood set while watching Kirk’s amorous antics. "And that’s just what he sounds like he wants — certainly not a woman. Kirk reminds me of a song, the one that goes, 'I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own.’ Remember it?” But I don’t think that’s what Kirk really wants. For how far can you go with a paper doll? Restless by nature, a go-getter always on the run, a star-gazer who’s never satisfied with looking but tries to grab them out of the sky, Kirk Douglas is high-strung, irritable and intolerant, a feverish, mercurial man. He can’t keep his emotions still. No girl will last with him — just as none lasted with Midge Kelly, the obnoxious pugilist he presented so convincingly in Champion, the motion picture that skyrocketed him to starhood. LOG OF ROMANCE The romantic log of Kirk Douglas’ romances has many entries. Even as a boy in Amsterdam and Canton, love was strictly a road show for him, a series of one-night stands. Already then, girls liked to cuddle up to him. They gravitated toward him with their mother instincts flapping. But that wasn’t what Kirk wanted. Of the mother instincts he had plenty at home. He wanted girls to bare their hearts and souls. And when he’d had a good look at one, he went off looking for other hearts and souls. He never stood still, not even when he had a girl in his arms. But he has a way with deceptive words which makes a woman think that she’s the only one in Not to be outdone by the gals in bikinis, Kirk Douglas displays some catchy curves of his own for cheesecake photographer as he discusses relativity with Paris star Brigitte Bardot. 17