Michael Douglas

Tonya Mosley (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, Oscar-winning actor and producer Michael Douglas, has spent much of his career playing men consumed by money, ambition, sex and control. As Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, he made greed is good a catchphrase, and fatal attraction and basic instinct, desire turns dangerous. And in The War of the Roses, marriage becomes warfare, and in traffic, the drug war reaches a father's own family.

In his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, Michael Douglas writes that playing these flawed American men wasn't exactly a stretch. He grew up the son of Kirk Douglas, one of the biggest movie stars of his generation. Michael won his first Oscar for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a film his father had spent years trying to make so he could star in it. And when Michael later won an Oscar for acting in Wall Street, he thanked his father for helping a son step out of a shadow.

But the memoir also looks at what was happening off screen. A troubled first marriage, affairs, rehab, stage four cancer, and the addiction and legal troubles of his oldest son Cameron. Michael tells that story through 12 of his films, tracing the moments when his work in his private life collided. And Michael Douglas, welcome to Fresh Air.

Michael Douglas (1:22)

Thank you, Tonya, and thank you so much for a lovely introduction.

Tonya Mosley (1:27)

This was a book that I really enjoyed. Thank you so much for writing it. And for millions of people, your father was larger than life. He was Spartacus. And you spend a big portion of this book talking about what that meant for you. And you write that when you were young, he was just out of reach.

What did that distance actually look like for you when you were a kid?

Michael Douglas (1:54)

Well, dad was overwhelming. He just simply as a person, he had an energy, a physical strength, a tenacity that was very unique. And then as he grew and his career grew and Spartacus led the army and the Vikings, when he walked across the oars and the Westerns, when he drew a gun faster than anybody else, he seemed like an impossible man to match. And I think both of my brother and I, there was a question or an issue of how can we ever be the man that our father is.

He was making five to six movies a year, was really overwhelmed with the pressure and with his guilt of having divorced my mother when I was five and my brother Joel was three.

And so when we saw him, because we were growing up on the East Coast with my mother, and when we come out to see my father, he was so guilt ridden about not being the father that he had hoped to be because his father had totally ignored him and given him no attention growing up. So there was a degree of pressure when we came together, that he meant well, but there was such an intensity about him that made it awkward. He was also of that generation that physically corrected behavior and so we...

Tonya Mosley (3:37)

He would hit you guys.

David Bianculli (3:38)

I mean, he would hit us, yeah.

Michael Douglas (3:39)

Corporal punishment. Corporal punishment. My mother had the hairbrush and that was a generation, you know, that that wasn't so unusual.

So the early years were tentative. We admired him, but were slightly afraid of him.

Tonya Mosley (4:00)

Your mother, Diana Dill, had her own acting career, and when you were about five, she and your father separated, and she married Bill Derrett, who was an actor, writer and producer. And there's a moment that you write about when one day you guys are talking and suddenly you realize he's actually listening to you and you become emotional.

Why did you become emotional?

Michael Douglas (4:20)

Well, what happened and I realized, and because of my early experiences with my father, I was used to people not listening to me. And I looked up at him in his eyes, and I saw a man who was listening, listening to what I had to say.

And Bill turned out to be a wonderful surrogate father, who my father greatly admired and called him that. He said, Bill was your surrogate father, and I'm eternally grateful for the responsibilities he took in raising you.

Tonya Mosley (5:01)

You tell some really great stories about your origin growing up. There's a particular story you tell when you're 21 years old, and you're finding yourself. You are out there in the world. You're actually in college. Your father gives you $10,000 and told you from then on that you were on your own. He also had given you two Italian leather suitcases.