Kirk Douglas: Kids beat me they said I killed Jesus Christ
The star of ”Champion,” ”Lust for Life,” ”Spartacus,” ”Lonely Are the Brave,” ”Paths of Glory” and many other films. The actor the French nicknamed la Brute Cherie (the Darling Brute). The man who played a key role in breaking the Hollywood blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo’s name on the ”Spartacus” script. The father of four successful sons, all financially secure, one a two-time Oscar winner.
Now he is the author of a best-selling and critically praised autobiography, ”The Ragman’s Son,” recently published by Simon & Schuster. Surely the model of establishment success.
”In a sense, I’ve always felt on the outside, looking in,” Mr. Douglas says. ”It’s my background, damn it.My father was an illiterate Russian immigrant, a ragman, the lowest rung on the economic scale. There were six sisters and my mother; I was the only boy. To be a young Jewish boy in a town – Amsterdam, in upstate New York – that was quite anti-Semitic. Getting beaten up going to Hebrew school, after regular school, every day. Having to run the gantlet every block.
”One day I came home with a bloody nose. My mother said, ‘Oh, God, what happened?’ I said:
‘Kids beat me. They said I killed Jesus Christ. I don’t even know who he is.’ Possibly being Jewish makes you more lonely than other people. There’s something inherent in the quality of this minority group that I think adds to the loneliness.” Poverty, Religion and Anger
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His poverty-stricken childhood, his Jewishness and, above all, his anger: these are some of the themes that pervade the autobiography of a man whose original name was Issur Danielovitch, and who then became Izzy Demsky before he decided to become Kirk Douglas.
”I found that writing ‘The Ragman’s Son’ was for me a voyage of discovery,” Mr. Douglas says. ”I was amazed at how many memories that I had suppressed deep down started to bubble up. I was amazed that when they started to come up, I could remember them so perfectly. Things that I thought I had forgotten began to come into very sharp focus.”
One thing, he says, is his anger. ”I’m obviously a very angry person,” he says. ”The first reaction my wife had when she read the manuscript was, ‘I never realized how angry you are.’ I guess it’s because the real motivating feeling in my book is that I never got a pat on my back from my father. How important it was for me to get his approval, and he never, never gave it to me.
”My book deals with a lot of things, but possibly the most important is the relationship I had with my father versus the relationship I have with my four sons. I try to – whether I’ve done it successfully or not, I don’t know, you have to ask them – I tried to correct certain things which I never had with my father. First of these is contact. My father was rarely around. I love being with them; they’re all men now, so fascinating to be with. And I occasionally make sure I give them that thing that was important to me – that pat on the back.” Looking Back in Anger
In the book, Mr. Douglas is quite critical of a good number of people with whom he had dealings of one kind or another. Those of whom he has not-so-nice things to say include Joan Crawford, Stanley Kubrick, Barbara Stanwyck and the writer Howard Fast. He also uses a device in which his alter ego, Issur, speaks to him: ”Why are you so hard on people?” Issur asks. ”You say such awful things. Why?” In the book, Mr. Douglas replies: ”Why? Because they are true.”
”But they happened years ago,” Issur says. ”Why are you so angry now?”
Asked that question the other day, Mr. Douglas replies: ”I think I’ve changed slightly. I’ve tried. I know I’m not as angry a person now, but everything is relative. I still have anger in me. I think I’m loath to let it go because I think that anger was the fuel I used in accomplishing what I wanted to do; you see it in my films, you see it in imitations people do of me. It’s an angry imitation – bare teeth and all.” Writing Through the Years
He spent a long time writing the autobiography, he says. ”I concentrated on it more or less for the last three years, but in a way I’ve been writing this for many years,” Mr. Douglas says. ”I have several hundred pages that I wrote in 1959, 1972, 1978. But it never felt right. It was only in the last four, five years I felt the time was right. First of all, I wouldn’t have written this book if I had young kids. My kids are all men. They should be able to deal with what I say, what I think I am.”
Mr. Douglas says he is happy with the result. ”I feel I want to be accurate to the facts, but I feel the facts are the least important elements,” he says.
”What I tried to do was write my perceptions, my feelings, how I felt at different times in my life.”
But, he adds, there is something in the book he wishes he had done differently. ”I guess the one thing that I might change,” he says, ”would be to give more of an understanding of my father,” who died in 1954. Problems and Pressures
”Because of my anger, I was too harsh on him,” he says. ”In calm reflection, I know that he couldn’t help it. He did a terrific thing. He came all the way from Russia here. He was such a powerful man physically. He literally could bite off a piece of glass and chew it up. He was like a movie figure. He once had a fight with seven men and subdued them all. He was always bigger than life. He had a problem trying to support such a big family. The pressure on him must have been enormous. How do you get rid of that pressure? You go to a saloon. You have a drink. Life was tough for him. ”I should have been more sympathetic, being a father myself. In the book, I tell of how I asked my son Michael, ‘What kind of a father was I?’ And he said, ‘Dad, you were so loony, you know, you were always wrapped up doing so many things, all this tension.’ And as he’s saying this, I’m looking at him. And he was tense; he had so many things going. He surpassed me; he got Oscars for producing and for acting. And I said, ‘Sort of a little bit like you, right now?’ Because in a way, it’s like father, like son.”
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