Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/10/doug-f10.html
10 February 2020
By David Walsh
Kirk Douglas, a major performer in American films from the late 1940s until the early 1970s, died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on February 5 from natural causes at the age of 103. One of the leading film actors of the post-World War II era, he also played a role in helping to end the anti-communist blacklist by hiring and crediting blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for his efforts on Spartacus (1960).
Douglas brought his renowned dynamism to dozens of films, including many valuable ones, among them, Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Champion (Mark Robson, 1949), Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952), Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), Two Weeks in Another Town (Minnelli, 1962) and Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964).
The actor’s career expressed some of the continued strengths of American filmmaking as it suffered through and emerged from the anti-communist McCarthyite purges, as well as the limitations imposed on—and accepted by—Hollywood as a result of the virtual criminalization of left-wing ideas in the early 1950s.
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in December 1916—four months prior to US entry into World War I and 11 months before the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia—in Amsterdam, New York, a small manufacturing city in the Mohawk Valley known for its carpet-making.
In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son (1988), Douglas recounted his childhood on Amsterdam’s “East End, the opposite side of town from the rich people on Market Hill.” He, his parents and six sisters lived in a “run-down, gray clapboard house, the last house at the bottom of a sloping street, next to the factories, the railroad tracks, and the Mohawk River.”
In the same memoir, Douglas wrote that he had been “born in abject poverty. My parents came here from Russia, illiterate immigrants.” Douglas’s parents were Jews who emigrated, his father first, to the US in 1908–1910 to escape the oppression and misery of tsarist society.
Douglas described his father, Herschel, born around 1884, as one of the “ignorant peasants” who, when conscripted into the army, “had hay tied on one sleeve, and straw on the other, so that they could tell their right hand from their left.” His father was a rag picker and junkman in Amsterdam, working from a horse-cart.
His mother, born Byrna Sanglel, wrote Douglas, came “from a family of Ukrainian farmers… She wanted all her children to be born in this wonderful new land, where she thought the streets were paved with gold—literally.” In Russia, Douglas’s mother had seen a brother killed in the street by one of those Cossacks, “exhilarated by vodka,” who “considered it a sport to gallop through the ghetto and split open a few Jewish heads.”
Douglas worked at a variety of jobs from an early age, although he managed to go to college, St. Lawrence University, also in upstate New York.
He had first been encouraged by an Amsterdam high school teacher to pursue acting. After graduating from university, Douglas, like many others before and after him, moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. He entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which offered him a scholarship. One of his classmates, who later helped him launch his movie career, was actress Lauren Bacall. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Douglas returned to New York and started finding work in radio and the theater.
Douglas appeared in his first film in 1946, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (directed by Lewis Milestone, from a screenplay by left-winger Robert Rossen). He began a Hollywood career at an interesting time, at the height of the film noir era, when American filmmaking was at one of its most realistic and critical moments. Like others of his generation (including Burt Lancaster, William Holden and Robert Mitchum), Douglas—at 30 or so—already brought to his initial performances some knowledge of life and its difficulties.
After another valuable “dark” and troubling work, I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1948), the first of seven films in which he appeared with Lancaster, Douglas featured in the French-born Tourneur’s Out of the Past, based on a novel by left-wing American writer Daniel Mainwaring. Douglas plays a gangster, Whit Sterling, determined to track down his former lover (Jane Greer), who shot and wounded him, and stole $40,000 of his money. Unusually, while he is menacing throughout, Douglas’s character is suave and articulate, his homicidal tendencies hidden as much as possible.
The WSWS commented in 2015 that Out of the Past was a “morally and psychologically forceful” work. “Considering its subject matter, there is very little overt violence in the film… For his part, Whit smiles and jokes, and almost never raises his voice. He doesn’t have to, his money and power automatically demand respect.”
Robson’s Champion, in which Douglas played a leading role as a boxer ruthlessly battling his way to the top, brought the actor to prominence. Douglas’s Midge Kelly shamelessly betrays friends, associates and women in the course of this “story of a man who,” as the film’s opening proclaims, “starting from the most sordid poverty, has become World Champion.”
Ace in the Hole is one of Wilder’s bitterest films (and one of his few commercial failures), influenced, one would assume, by the media’s foul role in generating the McCarthyite hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, although it approaches the issue of deceitfully manipulating public opinion only by way of allegory.
Douglas, now a full-blown “movie star,” plays a cynical, down on his luck journalist, Chuck Tatum, who stumbles upon the case of a man trapped in a New Mexico cave collapse. Tatum (“I’m a pretty good liar. I’ve done a lot of lying in my time.”) does everything in his power to manipulate a gullible public, all too eager to be led by the nose. He conspires with a corrupt, ambitious local sheriff to see to it that the unfortunate victim is not rescued immediately (“If I just had one week of this…”), so that the story can remain on the front pages of newspapers across the country.
In The Bad and the Beautiful, one of several of Douglas’s films directed by Minnelli, the actor played, once again, a relatively ruthless character, a maverick Hollywood producer, Jonathan Shields, “cynical, cunning, and demonic,” in the words of one commentator, based on several famous Hollywood figures. The melodrama proceeds in flashbacks. Three figures, a director, a scriptwriter and an actress, gathered in a Hollywood office essentially explain why they refuse to have anything to do with Shields, based on bitter past experience.
A common theme clearly emerges in a number of these films, associated with general postwar criticism of “the American dream” and the pursuit of achievement “at any cost.” (Although, in the case of The Bad and the Beautiful, the Douglas character actually sacrifices others and himself in the effort, at least in part, to liberate “the creative potential of his director, scriptwriter, and leading lady,” as film critic and historian Thomas Elsaesser observes.)
It is worth noting that Douglas, whose Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story, in his own words, was so trite “as to be unbelievable,” was able to recognize the problematic nature of the framework in which his own life was often presented as proof of America’s unlimited opportunities.
Film historian and scholar Joseph McBride (see accompanying interview below), in his short 1976 biography of Douglas, argues eloquently that “the life vein running through virtually all of his films is a spirited, anguished critique of the American success ethic.”
Two processes seem to be work simultaneously, and sometimes at cross-purposes, in a number of Douglas’s films: the undeniable ability (and determination) of certain people in America, including from immigrant or impoverished backgrounds, to raise themselves, economically and culturally—rooted in the powerful position and resources of US capitalism—and, on the other hand, the questionable, unstable character of the success achieved, often leading to the anguish, guilt or intense self-doubt of the central character.
One recalls film director Rainer Fassbinder’s comment about the outlook of German novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–1898): “He lived in a society whose faults he recognized and could describe very precisely, but all the same a society he needed, to which he really wanted to belong. He rejected everybody and found everything alien and yet fought all his life for recognition within this society.”
In a 1960 interview, cited by McBride, Douglas commented, “All your life you’ve been dreaming of wanting to act, to portray roles. Then what happens is that if you’re successful at it, you become big business. A myriad of things that you never bargained for come into play. All of a sudden you are buffeted from every side and you’re fortunate if you’re a guy that has the right advice.”
Of course, it is easy enough to argue that all this took place within the general acceptance by the actor and Hollywood liberalism of “American democracy,” in whose political service Douglas often performed officially, including on State Department tours and other political operations. (Lancaster, who worked with European directors such as Luchino Visconti [The Leopard, Conversation Piece] and Bernardo Bertolucci [1900] in the 1960s and 1970s, and also appeared in actively oppositional works like David Miller-Dalton Trumbo’s Executive Action, Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming and Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans, adopted a somewhat more openly anti-establishment course.)
Here too, however, it is necessary to distinguish between the artist and the actor-public personality, with his career, financial success, endless sexual conquests and all the rest. Douglas was honest enough as an artist to paint and leave behind unflattering pictures of American society through his characterizations and the truth, in particular, of his emotions and “anguish,” whatever function he may have performed as one of its loyal spokesmen during the Cold War.
The objective contradictions involved with doing serious artistic work under conditions in which entire arenas of social life had been cordoned off by anti-communism and the film industry’s self-censorship perhaps find particular expression in the sometimes overwrought quality of Douglas’s performances (in Minnelli’s Lust for Life [1956] for example), as though too much had to be read into and squeezed out of too little. Critic Manny Farber, reviewing Detective Story, referred to the “gymnastic-minded” Douglas’s “mad-dog style of acting.”
McBride, in his 1976 book, noted that to segments of the film-going public, Douglas was “synonymous with the jut-jawed, strident-voiced, tirelessly pugnacious characters he usually plays on screen,” characters whose “gesticulating” and “ranting” (in Farber’s phrase) could be both irritating and distracting. At its best, however, his “phenomenal energy and intensity” (McBride) brought contradictory and disturbing conditions and dilemmas to life.
Douglas did have the good fortune to work with many of the most serious studio film directors in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, in addition to those already mentioned, including John M. Stahl (The Walls of Jericho, 1948), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives, 1949), Michael Curtiz (Young Man with a Horn, 1950), Raoul Walsh (Along the Great Divide, 1951), William Wyler (Detective Story, 1951), Howard Hawks (The Big Sky, 1952), Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954, and The Vikings, 1958), Henry Hathaway (The Racers, 1955), King Vidor (Man Without a Star, 1955), André de Toth (The Indian Fighter, 1955), Robert Aldrich (The Last Sunset, 1961), Otto Preminger (In Harm’s Way) and Anthony Mann (The Heroes of Telemark, 1965)
Douglas’s most prominent years extended from 1957 to 1963, when he was one of the top 25 most successful film stars each year.
Paths of Glory, set during the slaughter of World War I, is one of Douglas’s most important works. He plays a French officer, Colonel Dax, obliged to lead a suicide mission against German lines planned by the French general staff, who know that it cannot succeed. The military hierarchy is quite prepared to see the mass killing of its own men. After one unit refuses to advance into the path of the murderous German fire, General Mireau (George Macready), to deflect attention from his own role in the fiasco, decides to court-martial 100 men for cowardice, eventually reduced to three.
Dax, a lawyer in civilian life, defends the three soldiers in a proceeding that is a farce from a legal standpoint. Conviction is preordained. In his summary, Dax tells the tribunal, “The prosecution presented no witnesses. There has never been a written indictment of charges made against the defendants. And lastly, I protest against the fact that no stenographic records of this trial have been kept. The attack yesterday morning was no stain on the honor of France… and certainly no disgrace to the fighting men of this nation. But this court-martial is such a stain and such a disgrace. The case made against these men is a mockery of all human justice. Gentlemen of the court, to find these men guilty would be a crime, to haunt each of you till the day you die.” The court, however, does precisely that, and three men are executed.
In one of the final scenes, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), a member of the general staff, informs Mireau that he will be made a scapegoat for the whole affair and subsequently offers Mireau’s command to Dax. Dax-Douglas replies, “Sir, would you like me to suggest what you can do with that promotion?”
When Broulard demands an apology, Dax responds with fury, in one of Douglas’s finest moments: “I apologize for not being entirely honest with you. I apologize for not revealing my true feelings. I apologize for not telling you sooner that you’re a degenerate, sadistic old man. And you can go to hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!”
Stanley Kubrick (after the firing of Anthony Mann 10 days into the picture) directed Spartacus, the epic story of the slave revolt in ancient Rome, in the first century BCE. The film was made by Douglas’s company, Byrna Productions, named after his mother. The script, as noted, was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, adapted from the 1951 novel by left-wing author Howard Fast, begun in prison where Fast was serving a three-month sentence for refusing to provide names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
There are intriguing and powerful sequences in Spartacus. For the creators, the slave revolt in the ancient world clearly bore parallels to the revolt of the oppressed in modern times, including the ongoing Civil Rights movement. According to McBride, Douglas pointed out that his lead character “was a complex blend of the animal and the spiritual, beginning as a brutish and brutalized sub-human and eventually finding a conscience and becoming a figure of heroic legend.”
In a famous scene, after the defeat of the slave revolt, Roman officials try to locate the rebel leader by promising the survivors they will avoid “the terrible punishment of crucifixion on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus.” Famously, each of the survivors shouts, “I’m Spartacus!”
Two Weeks in Another Town, based on a novel by Irwin Shaw, is a further examination of the film industry directed by Vincente Minnelli. Douglas is a former star, Jack Andrus, afflicted with alcoholism, who travels to Rome to play a small part in a film to be directed by his onetime mentor, Kruger (Edward G. Robinson), featuring an up-and-coming film star (played by George Hamilton). In the end, after Kruger suffers a debilitating heart attack, Andrus takes over the direction of the film and completes it successfully. Instead of gratitude, he is met with jealousy and the charge that he has attempted to undermine Kruger. An atmosphere of bitterness and disillusionment pervades the lush, quasi-decadent goings-on.
In Seven Days in May, set in the future, in 1974, a rogue Air Force general determines to organize a coup d’état in opposition to the US president’s signing of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Lancaster plays the semi-fascist general, James Mattoon Scott, and Douglas a Marine Corps colonel, “Jiggs” Casey, while Fredric March performs as the somewhat ineffectual President Jordan Lyman.
The best-selling novel by Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel was inspired by the activities of Gen. Edwin Walker, a fascistic figure who resigned in 1961 after it come to light he was indoctrinating troops under his command with his ultra-right political views and had described former President Harry Truman, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as Communist sympathizers. Bailey and Knebel also interviewed another extreme reactionary in the US military high command, Gen. Curtis LeMay, one of the inspirations for characters in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).
In Frankenheimer’s film, Casey comes to learn that Scott and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to stage a military takeover of the US government, removing Lyman and his cabinet. Under the plan, a secret unit will seize control of the country’s radio, telephone and television networks. Lyman and Casey work to stymie Scott’s plans, without, however, disclosing their existence to the American public. The film has numerous chilling and prescient aspects, and points to the cancerous and sinister growth by the early 1960s of the “military-industrial complex” and the fragility of American democracy at the height of postwar prosperity. What is its hollowed-out condition six decades later?
The final confrontation between Lancaster-Scott and Douglas-Casey goes like this, with Scott leading off:
–You’re a night crawler, Colonel. A peddler. You sell information. Are you sufficiently up on your Bible to know who Judas was?… I asked you a question.
–Are you ordering me to answer, sir?
–I am.
–Yes, I know who Judas was. He was a man I worked for and admired… until he disgraced the four stars on his uniform.
A good number of Douglas’s films will endure. He had the energy and intelligence, and talent, to shed light on American life in a manner that encourages criticism and independent thought.
Interview with film historian Joseph McBride: For Kirk Douglas, life was “like a war—you have to fight all the time”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/10/inte-f10.html
10 February 2020
By David Walsh
I spoke last week to Joseph McBride, film historian and educator, and the author of more than 20 books, including a valuable biography of Kirk Douglas (1976). When McBride was writing his biography, his editor prevented him from speaking to Douglas, on the grounds that the latter might censor or restrict the work. Later, when McBride met the actor, who asked why he hadn’t called him while writing the book, Douglas informed him he firmly believed in freedom of speech and would have done no such thing.
David Walsh: Your introduction to the book on Kirk Douglas has an appropriate title, The Fighter, and it makes reference to Douglas’s family background, including the oppression of the Russian Jews and the family’s poverty in the US, in upstate New York. And you describe his phenomenal energy, intensity—as well as the desire to please his father, which he was never able to do.
Joseph McBride: Yes, there was immigration and poverty, having to fight his way through school. Life is like a war, you have to succeed and you have to fight all the time. Once he was successful, he got his way with many productions. I read a lot of the correspondence he had with Billy Wilder and other directors. They respected him because he was smart.
DW: I think the comments you cite seem not so much directed at bumping up his own roles, but at making them somewhat more rounded or contradictory. He was quite articulate about it.
JM: In one of the obituaries this week, he is quoted saying, “When you play a strong character, find his weakness. If you play a weak character, find his strength.” It’s a reasonable way of approaching a character. He played a lot of tough guys, but there is always a weakness, a significant flaw. I think Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is a great film. He played some weaklings, but they were always complex people. Seven Days in May [John Frankenheimer] is a terrific, political film, about an attempted military coup in the US.
DW: It stands up, I think.
JM: The day John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963, there was a full-page ad in the New York Times about the upcoming Seven Days in May. That film and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove were made in 1963, but their openings were both delayed until 1964 because of the assassination.
Kennedy wanted to see Seven Days in May made into a movie as a warning to the country because of people like former Gen. Edwin Walker, the extreme right-wing figure, John Bircher, who incited rioting against the integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith in 1962. Walker essentially tried to lead an insurrection. Seven Days in May is quite a prescient film about the military and the US government. Burt Lancaster’s character is based on a figure like that.
I found Kennedy’s tape-recorded conversation during the time Walker was leading the riot at the University of Mississippi. He was saying, “How could that son of a bitch have been in charge of an Army division in Germany?” and then Ted Sorensen [Kennedy’s close adviser] replied, “Have you read Seven Days in May [the novel, a political thriller, by Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel, published in 1962]?” Kennedy said he had, and that it had rather awful dialogue, that the general was the most interesting character and the president was not believable.
Then, of course, there is Douglas’s role in helping to end the Hollywood blacklist. There’s a dispute as to whether he ended it first, by having blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo credited on Spartacus, or whether Otto Preminger did it, also with Trumbo, on Exodus. Spartacus came out in October 1960 and Exodus in December 1960, but there are claims that Preminger acted first and then Douglas felt he had to respond to that. In any case, Kennedy actually made a point during the campaign that fall of going to see Spartacus as his way supporting the ending of the blacklist, which was a big deal.
Trumbo said somewhere that getting his name painted on a spot in the studio parking lot was a huge deal for him. He got his name restored. My research indicates that the blacklist began to crumble in 1957–58. I found some comments by Ward Bond, the actor and a leader of the blacklist, complaining that the studios were allowing too many communists writers.
In any event, it took several years before it really fell apart. The blacklist did not disappear overnight. Abe Polonsky did not officially get off the blacklist until 1968, when he got a co-writing credit for Madigan, with Richard Widmark and directed by Don Siegel. And then Polonsky made his own film, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here [1969], his first feature in more than 20 years.
DW: It’s interesting, Douglas’s feeling about Hollywood stardom and its contradictions. In your book, you quote from an unpublished 1960 interview: “All your life you’ve been dreaming of wanting to act, to portray roles. Then what happens is that if you’re successful at it, you become big business. A myriad of things that you never bargained for come into play. All of a sudden you are buffeted from every side and you’re fortunate if you’re a guy that has the right advice.”
JM: I think he was intelligent enough to realize there was a lot of hype involved with being a star. All the glamour, the kowtowing of others, the business end of it and all that. But I think he enjoyed it too, since he started out in obscurity and poverty. He was one of those immigrants for whom the fame and glory meant a great deal, as it did for Frank Capra.
Douglas was a tough producer. He had a battle with Kubrick on Spartacus. Supposedly, Kubrick wanted to put his name on the script if Dalton Trumbo’s name couldn’t be used. Douglas thought that was outrageous. He called him “Stanley the Prick.” Kubrick later said he didn’t like Spartacus, largely, I think, because it was a film where he did not have total control, because of Douglas.
This is a telling anecdote. In Spartacus, Douglas and Woody Strode, the black actor, have a scene in which they fight, as gladiators. The Strode character refuses to kill Spartacus-Douglas. Afterward, the Strode character tries to kill Laurence Olivier, a wealthy Roman senator, and gets killed himself. It’s a great scene, a deservedly famous one. Strode also featured in John Ford films, of course, and a lot of others.
After Woody Strode died, at the end of 1994, they held a memorial service in Hollywood at some crummy night club. I went to it, and it was a really rainy Sunday afternoon. Toward the middle of the event, Kirk Douglas slipped in. They asked, does anybody want to say anything? Douglas was the first person who put his hand up, and said, “I’d like to talk.” He had driven from Palm Desert, a two-hour drive in the rain to come to the memorial. He gave a wonderful talk about how he and Woody Strode had rehearsed very intensely for that scene for two weeks. They were both athletes. Strode and Kenny Washington were the first black players in the National Football League in the modern era. Strode was an Olympic athlete and a UCLA football player, along with Jackie Robinson. Douglas had been a wrestler.
They worked out the scene in Spartacus with tremendous effort and camaraderie. Finally, Douglas said, I’m sorry I have to leave, I have to drive back to Palm Desert. I have an engagement. It was touching that he came all that way to honor his friend. He was 78 at the time.
Late in life, he was bar mitzvahed, perhaps for the second time. He was 83. At a temple in Westwood. He got more religious as he got older after his 1991 brush with death in a helicopter crash. But Douglas tried, I think, to use his position for betterment. He had a strong belief in justice, a lot of his films convey that sentiment. He criticized police brutality, media corruption. I came across a letter in which he said he had a profound distrust of military people, and found them generally stupid. That influenced his producing Seven Days in May. He was an anti-authoritarian kind of guy.
DW: You have a good passage in your book suggesting that “the life vein running through virtually all of his films is a spirited, anguished critique of the American success ethic.”
JM: Yes, the “success ethic”—for example, in Champion, the boxing story, and Ace in the Hole, about ambition pursued at any cost. After Douglas became famous because of Champion, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper told him, “This Champion has really gone to your head, you know. You’re such an SOB [son of a bitch] now.” To which he replied, “You’re mistaken. I was an SOB before Champion, but you never noticed it.”
He was a well-liked figure, I think, but, as I said, he was a tough character. Domineering or challenging in a creative way. He had definite artistic opinions and he expressed them, to directors, to the studios. He wanted to exert his influence, and he produced a wide range of interesting films.
DW: The Bad and the Beautiful, about Hollywood, is a film I admire. Lana Turner gives one of her best performances. It’s a remarkable scene when she has that meltdown in the car.
JM: That’s a scathing look at the film industry. Douglas played a character somewhat modeled on two producers, David O. Selznick, for the megalomania, and also Val Lewton, for his unusual inventiveness.
Douglas liked to play outrageously tough, even neurotic, explosive guys. He was unafraid to be dislikeable on screen. A lot of stars today have this obsession about being likeable, which is terrible. The best tradition in Hollywood, represented by Humphrey Bogart, Douglas, Lancaster and others, was one of anti-heroes. Intriguing, flawed people. Today leading actors are afraid to do that, so the studios smooth away the edges. They make characters so bland. Douglas was the opposite of that.
DW: He made generally interesting choices, within the limits of his situation. Some of the films were mediocre, or worse, but one has the feeling he tried to do interesting things.
JM: He critiqued American values, but at the same time he was a very patriotic American, like a lot of successful immigrants in that era. He traveled the world for the State Department.
He and his second wife Anne endowed 400 playgrounds in Los Angeles, in poorer neighborhoods. They gave a lot of money to schools and other institutions.
DW: What do you think are some of his best performances?
JM: Paths of Glory, about the French military in World War I, is an extraordinary film, very timely, very anti-war. I was hoping 1917 would go in that direction and show that the British generals were rashly sacrificing their own men. But it didn’t. Kubrick went all the way with that. That was a film that was hard to get made. It was banned in France for a long time, to its credit.
Douglas is great in Spartacus. In Seven Days in May he’s superb. He plays a character battling with his conscience. Out of the Past is a tremendous film noir. Those stand out the most for me. Also, The Bad and the Beautiful.
He made a good number of routine films, to keep himself viable as a star, but that’s how it works. Douglas was always compelling and tried to make films that were substantial. I don’t think he was ever less than committed to what he was doing, even if the material was rather ordinary. He put everything into his performances. He never merely phoned it in, he wasn’t cynical about the business.
He also wrote books, novels, memoirs. The Ragman’s Son is a very gripping autobiography.
Douglas lived a very long time. It’s funny, about 15 years ago, the LA Times interviewed me for his advance obit. Yesterday I looked at the obit in the LA Times and my comments were not in there. Maybe the guy lost them, or forgot them, over the years. I was also interviewed by CNN about 15 years ago as well, and I have no idea whether they used the comments or not.
DW: He outlasted your quotes. The reports of his death were seriously premature.
JM: He lived such a long time that his advance obit was really out of date.
Emma Olive 