If you live in L.A., sometimes it seems as though Kirk
Douglas is everywhere. I’ve heard him speak at a local synagogue, and I’ve attended
plays at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, a Culver City movie palace converted into a
playhouse specializing in intimate, unusual fare. He and wife Anne have made
sizable donations to Children’s Hospital L.A. and have helped revamp
playgrounds on schoolyards throughout the city. Today, when I went to do research
at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, I gained access to the collection
via the Kirk Douglas Grand Staircase. Gracing the Herrick lobby was a special
exhibit featuring the informal celebrity photos of Nat Dallinger. Prominently
featured was a charming Dallinger image from 1950. It shows Kirk Douglas
shaving his famous chin, while young son Michael (all of six) studiously tries out
his own electric shaver in imitation of Dad.
Douglas of course made the big bucks as an actor, famous for
leading-man roles in films like Champion,
The Bad and the Beautiful, 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea, Lust for Life, and
Lonely are the Brave. But in recent
years he’s become quite the writer too. There are several volumes of
well-received memoir, starting with The
Ragman’s Son in 1988. There’s fiction, and also books for young readers.
His late-in-life exploration of spirituality produced Climbing
the Mountain: My Search for Meaning, as well as several volumes about
growing old. (He’s now a still-vigorous 98). But I want to discuss the book he
published in 2012, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist.
The Screen Writers Guild honored Douglas in 1991 for
dramatically signalling that the era of the blacklist was over. In truth, he
wasn’t the first to give screen credit to a writer who’d been banished from
Hollywood in the HUAC era on trumped-up charges of being a Communist. Back in
1958, producer-director Stanley Kramer hired Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob
Smith to write The Defiant Ones. As
Stanley Kramer’s widow Karen has often reminded me, Kramer not only put their
names on the screen but also gave them roles in the film. Still, neither Young
nor Smith was one of the infamous Hollywood Ten. These were prominent Hollywood screenwriters (and one
director) who were sent to jail for contempt of Congress, with the approval of
many Hollywood power-figures. Douglas, producing Spartacus in 1960, first concealed his hiring of the prolific
Trumbo, but then had the guts to credit him for his work. He was emotionally
told by Trumbo, who had recently won two screenwriting Oscars officially
credited to others, “Thank you for giving me back my name.”
Douglas’s Spartacus book
isn’t only about the blacklist. He tells great yarns about the casting of Jean Simmons,
the hiring of a young Stanley Kubrick to replace a less accomplished director,
and the heroic dedication of Woody Strode. There’s also a disturbing glimpse of
Laurence Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh, deep in the throes of bipolar disorder.
As an aside, Douglas shares the story of his own son, Eric, who years later
struggled with the same cruel disease.
Part of what makes this book so fascinating is its sense of
an old man looking back. At one point Douglas notes, “Writing about myself
almost fifty-three years ago is a strange experience. I’m learning a lot about
the man I was back then; I’m not sure I like him very much.” Elsewhere he
admits, “I was a very different person fifty years ago . . . . I was surprised
by how headstrong I was back then, and yet that’s probably what helped me to
make Spartacus.”