Michael Douglas walks into a swanky New York bar - the basement of the Mercer Hotel - sits down, puts his phone on the table and orders two large glasses of Château Réal-Martin, Perle de Rose.
It's lunchtime but he doesn't order food. Having demolished a thick pastrami-on-rye about an hour earlier, he's done with eating. It's time to talk. Douglas is wearing a perfectly tailored black Canali two-button suit, no tie, with a crisp, box-fresh white shirt and black, nondescript rubber-soled shoes. Today the hair - a breaking wave of silver - is a little less voluminous, not as an indication of the man's mojo but simply because the film he's currently shooting - And So It Goes, co-starring Diane Keaton - requires a particular style of flatter, prissy preppiness. The actor's overall appearance is part David Lynch, part minimalist-Nineties-architect John Pawson - a businessman who works the numbers by day, but by night isn't scared of cutting loose.
Think of a much thinner, much better looking, less hands-on Charles Saatchi. With superhero hair.
For a man only a few months shy of his 69th birthday, Douglas looks physically robust. The skin on his face is supple, a little tanned and taut, the eyes are a backlit electric blue - the way your boss looks after his August vacation in Aix. His lips are thin - they always have been - but the smile is sharp and that disarming smirk still brilliantly gleeful. He looks plugged in. Rebooted.
Recharged. We discuss the sheer Gekko-ness of the dark Manhattan bar. He tells me he likes Soho House in London. Nick Jones' establishments always seem to let him in despite Douglas not being a member (funny that). George Clooney comes up briefly. As does Mikhail Gorbachev and nuclear disarmament.
Then, Douglas starts talking. And I mean really talking. For two hours. Openly. Candidly. Without pause. About playing a gay icon whose greatest fear was to be outed as a gay icon; about finding a walnut-sized tumour under his tongue (or
not finding it, as it turned out); about telling his New York physician in no uncertain terms to go f*** himself; about waging war against the American justice system for the continued incarceration of his son; about sex; about sex scenes; about
those sex scenes; about a youthful fondness for psychedelics; about wearing the right underpants when someone is going down on you in front of the camera; about a father who can't help but compete with everyone (even at 96); about being honoured as British GQ's Legend Of The Year 2013; and about a 44-year career in film that has brought us some of the most iconic, most memorable portrayals of contemporary modern men ever seen in cinema. Michael Douglas talks; I listen. Just as it should be.
"You know the biggest thing for me - by which I mean the thing that was the most challenging - wasn't kissing Matt [Damon], or the act of portraying sexual intercourse with a guy," Douglas insists. "It was trying to do all that, with the prosthetics on, the over-the-top costumes and the enormous wigs, without winking to the audience on the other side of the camera. I didn't want it to feel like a Saturday Night Live sketch. I didn't want to camp it up. No La Cage Aux Folles-type stuff, you know? I think we achieved that. The moment when I watched it and I forgot that I was watching a relationship between two men - that's when I knew we'd nailed it."
Douglas, if you didn't know already, is talking about his performance in Behind The Candelabra, the much-lauded biopic of Liberace based on the entertainer's six-year relationship with Scott Thorson, the bald impresario's aide and impressionable young lover. It's an astonishing film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, a man who directed Douglas once previously in
Traffic. "We shot Traffic in 2000 and we were about halfway through filming," he explains. "I don't know if you've met Soderbergh but he's kind of pensive, a man of few, carefully chosen words. Anyway we're filming one day - my character is this drugs tsar who works for the government - and mid-scene Stephen turns to me and goes, 'Michael have you ever considered playing Liberace?' I stop. Look at him. I laugh. I got to tell you I thought he was messing with me, one of those director mind tricks, so I turn to him and say, 'Why? Is this drug tsar a little too light on his feet for your liking, Stephen?' And that was that.
We continued filming. Maybe I did a couple of impressions, told Stephen that I'd met Lee [Liberace] with my father [Kirk Douglas] in Palm Springs... But, beyond that, I didn't think of it again."
Soderbergh's seemingly playful inquisition on set 13 years ago, however, couldn't have been more genuine. As the years ticked by the director couldn't shake off his hunch; all he needed was a way into Wladziu Valentino Liberace's eccentric tale. Then in 2007 Soderbergh came across the forgotten autobiography of Liberace's scorned ex-lover Scott Thorson. Originally published in 1988, the book is a tell-all account of their tumultuous time together.
Thorson met Liberace in 1976 when he was only 16, and within a year he had become his personal assistant, his driver, his stagehand, but mostly crucially, his lover. Remember, although Liberace's inner circle would have undoubtedly known of the star's sexuality, it certainly wasn't made public - in fact, quite the opposite. (In 1956 Liberace famously sued the *Daily Mirror * who dared insinuate that the star was a homosexual; Mirror columnist Cassandra Connor described Liberace at the time as "the summit of sex - the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Everything that he, she, and it can ever want... a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love". Liberace responded with a writ and a telegram that read, "What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.") The relationship between Thorson and Liberace, although blissful and heady at first, imploded, though not before Liberace insisted that his lover have plastic surgery in order that the younger man look more like his sugar daddy. It's a dynamite saga - Sex! Drugs! Showbiz! Palimony! Poodles! - so perfectly Hollywood that it's a wonder it hasn't been told more prolifically until now. "Stephen loved telling this story from Scott's point of view. So he got Jerry Weintraub, a producer, to buy the rights to the book and then hired Richard LaGravenese to pen the script. I was all in from the get-go. All he needed was the right man to play Liberace's bitter, blue-eyed lover Scott. I remember Stephen calling me one night. He said, 'Michael I have something for you. Matt Damon has signed on to play Scott.' What else could I reply other than,
'You're shitting me!'" So the sex scenes with Damon didn't worry Douglas at all? "I was excited and enthralled to explore the gay aspect of it. Listen, I played a gay guy once before, for TV, in
Will & Grace - it's character acting. I love it. I've been doing this for 40, 45 years; there comes a time when you know you want to switch it up a little. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I felt a certain sort of liberty this time around. I've always been a hard worker, but now it's a little different..." The actor's head sways from side to side, the words rolling around in his mouth like gobstoppers. "I feel open-minded. I'm not one to give this sort of thing too much thought but maybe I'm just a little freer."
Liberty? Freedom? Well, maybe that's what happens when you come within a silver hair's breath of the great black abyss.
Death, or rather near death, has undoubtedly changed Douglas.
He's not so much more cautious as a little less myopic. "I've always been a sports fan - forever. More so than being a fan of movies actually. Movies you can usually guess the endings, but with sports it's always a toss up - anything can happen. I always liked living my life like that; I never planned anything and I never knew what my next movie was going to be, even right at the height of my career. Now, I'm looking ahead a little more."
Cut back to 2010 and Douglas was in the process of planning the press campaign for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It was a big deal; the return of Gordon Gekko, plus the film was directed once again by Oliver Stone. Douglas had been complaining of a toothache for several months, nothing terribly painful, more like a bad cavity that needed seeing to. "They thought it was some sort of bad infection of the gum; they kept on feeding me antibiotics. If you go and see a doctor - supposedly a good one - and he tells you it's nothing, you tend to want to believe them, right?" Despite the drugs and the continual reassurances, however, the pain persisted. "So eventually, nine months later, I went to see these specialists in Canada. Some moments really stick in your mind and this is one of those moments. One of the specialists took a simple wooden spatula, he pushed my tongue down. I will never forget the look on his face. He looked up at me and said, 'OK, I think we need a biopsy.' Two days later he rang me up and said I had cancer. Now, at that moment, I didn't know how bad it was. Or how advanced. But back in New York I went to see this particular surgeon at Sloan-Kettering [Cancer Centre] and he told me I was stage four. I nearly fell off the chair. There ain't no stage five, man! It was about the size of a walnut."
Needless to say Douglas had a thing or two to say to his doctor: "He'd missed it for nine goddamn months! I fired him. And I didn't mince my words, shall we say." The -prescribed treatment was immediate and intense - the only option if he was going to beat the disease at such an advanced juncture. "I was pretty medicated during the whole radiation and chemo period; I actually have a high threshold for pain. The weight loss can become a problem. It's really painful to swallow but they encourage you to keep eating, rather than have a feeding tube put in, otherwise at the end of the cycle you basically have to learn how to swallow again. I lived off Frappuccinos. I wasn't scared of dying, probably because I was too pissed off at all the physicians!"
Two days before our interview, the actress Angelina Jolie writes an editorial that appears on the front page of the New York Times announcing that she's had a preventative double mastectomy. I tell Douglas the news shocked me. "Me too. Angelina is one of the greatest beauties in the world, so for her to come out publicly and expose it, in her profession, that takes real courage. She probably could have gotten away with doing it privately, but now she's got it out there, taken control of the situation and raised awareness. I applaud her." Did Douglas try and keep his diagnosis to himself? "It would have been impossible.
Firstly I had to cancel the press tour for Wall Street... and without a decent reason the studio would have gone ballistic.
Secondly, I lost 34lbs. It's not just your kids who tend to notice that sort of thing."
Michael Douglas never wanted to be an actor. I mean, if your father is Kirk Douglas - the man who was Spartacus, a towering, growling dynastic monument to cinematic machismo with a steel-capped chin - would you? Sitting with Douglas, reminiscing about his two Academy Awards - Best Actor for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and a lesser-known Best Picture gong for co-producing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - the actor wears his staggering career accomplishments so lightly you'd be forgiven for thinking the whole journey comes down to his notorious amiability and glimmering charm. But there's ambition and grit behind that matinee, glinting swagger. He's a Douglas after all. "If you're looking for someone to blame other than my father it would be my high-school counsellor," he laughs. "Aged 17 or so I was called into his office - I went to an all-boys prep school in Connecticut - and out on his desk were all these brochures for various universities across the States. It was like a travel agents. So this guy goes to me, 'Where do you want to study, Michael?' He started talking about courses and campuses and I said, 'Stop. Where's that?' I pointed at a little booklet that said, 'Campus By The Sea'. The photo showed no buildings, no students, nothing. All it had was a picture of a golden beach and a guy carrying a surfboard walking beside two beautiful girls, each in two-piece bathing suits. Remember, it was 1963 and a kid like me had never seen a two-piece bathing suit back east. Before that I was thinking about going to Yale..."
Enrolling at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Douglas did what every dashing young adult with a sniff of freedom did back in the early Sixties: he tuned out and dropped lysergics. "I was a hippie! I think my dad thought I'd moved west to be closer to him in LA - well, whatever makes you happy, dad! I wasn't studying anything. Nothing. I was introduced to psychedelics; we did a lot of drugs. It was a magical time. I lived in a sort of commune. We rented a little A-frame house, three of us. It had a little swimming pool although if I remember it was more like a moat; nobody knew about chlorine or anything. You went into this pool and you came out covered in slime. We all swam naked, smoked a lot of weed, got high, we had wine stops and festivals. It was a crazy, beautiful time."
Eventually, however, Douglas had to put his young mind to something other than partying. "By the third year of messing about I was told by the vice chancellor that I had to declare a major. So I chose theatre. Why not? But even then I had no burning desire to be an actor. I was a terrible actor! I used to get terrible stage fright. My father came to see me in my first ever appearance on stage - Much Ado About Nothing. Afterward he said, 'Son, you were terrible!' And in his heart, I knew, he was relieved because he didn't have to worry about me becoming an actor."
Rather than quit, however, Douglas did what his father no doubt expected him to do, what any son of Kirk Douglas would be
expected to do: he worked his line-fluffing ass off.
During the summers, between skinny-dipping with those golden-haired girls in bikinis, he went to work in construction back in Connecticut. "My stepfather was on the board of this place called the National Playwrights Conference; they helped build amphitheatres and they put on little plays. I got involved. It made me realise the importance of an acting company as a whole." After leaving university the first significant role that Douglas won was in 1972, on a TV Series called The Streets Of San Francisco. "It was a huge hit. I did 104 hours of filming a week; six days out of seven. Each episode had a new guest star and a new director. It was a level of excellence that rubbed off on me."
The TV show made Douglas a household name, a star; but while he was getting national recognition for his small-screen turn, it would be as a producer that Douglas would get his first real taste of international success. "I quit San Francisco going into the fifth year, which took everyone by surprise. My father played the lead role in a Broadway play called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he had the option on the novel by Ken Kesey for years. He took it to Hollywood but couldn't get it moving. So I said, 'Listen Dad, let me see what I can do with it.' He humoured me." Within a year the once-layabout son had got the financing in place, a screenplay written and the acting talent teed up. "The problem was," admits Douglas with a wry smile, "my dad really wanted that lead part. I mean, you could say he was born to play that part; he was ready to play that part. But the director thought he was too old. So it went to a young guy by the name of Jack Nicholson. We laugh about it now but I don't think my dad has ever really forgiven me." The film went on to win five Academy Awards at the Oscars in 1976; earning Douglas a golden statue for Best Picture as a co-producer. "Even after that I would tell people I wanted to act. They'd say, 'Aren't you a producer?' And I felt a little resentful at that, you know? I felt that I still had something to prove in front of the camera."
Throughout the Eighties and Nineties Douglas became Hollywood's tawny-haired himbo: either playing the risk-taking, lovable cad in a billowing linen suit Romancing The Stone, The Jewel Of The Nile or the white-collar everyman caught out by his own moral indiscretions, usually involving a deadly tryst with a lust-fuelled member of the opposite sex. "I like to call those films 'the sex trilogy'," laughs Douglas when I bring up Fatal Attraction (1987) with Glenn Close, *Basic Instinct * (1992) with Sharon Stone and
Disclosure (1994) with Demi Moore. "Listen, a great sex scene is really an issue of being comfortable with ladies in front of the camera. It's all about preparation and rehearsal. Those scenes with Sharon [Stone]? They became like a choreographed fight sequence. You practise, talk it through step by step: 'So, first I grab your hand, then it's kiss, kiss, hand here, then I'm going to touch your breasts - is that OK? Then I'm going to grab you by the ass...' That way the actress knows what to expect when the camera's on." Did every scene go as planned with Sharon, Demi and Glenn? "Mostly. Listen, everyone knew what they were doing. We'd all read the script, you know? Though I do remember one time on Basic Instinct, Jeanne Tripplehorn - the actress that played the psychiatrist - she looked down the call sheet and ran through the list of requirements for that day's shooting and it said, 'Eight pairs of rip-away panties.' That was something of a surprise."
So what was his big secret? As someone who, as a teenager, has had the indignity of watching Sharon Stone uncross her legs provocatively as his mother has waltzed into the living room unexpectedly, it's a true testament to Douglas' acting abilities if he was able to fully detach himself from the steaminess of some of those infamous sex scenes. "I used to sew my underwear up."
Excuse me? "You know the little gap at the front of your briefs?"
You mean the "Y" in Y-fronts? "Exactly. Just sew that up so nothing can pop out unexpectedly. That was one of the tricks; a sort of insurance policy. But listen, those sex scenes might look [like] impulse but I wasn't some sort of rampant exhibitionist. It's a very different thing when you've got 40 crew [members] all starring at you with cameras and mic booms." I bet the crew didn't complain, I tell him. "Well, yeah, I remember in
Fatal Attraction, the scene in the elevator when Glenn has to go down on me. The camera was positioned behind Glenn and usually the director in this case Adrian Lyne - should be next to the camera, right? I noticed, as we got ready to roll, Adrian was behind me, watching Glenn, watching what was happening. Bless his kinky little soul! Glenn is going to kill me for telling you that..."
Another glass of Perle de Rose is ordered and we talk about
Wall Street - "I'm still amazed when I meet traders and they tell me, 'Hey you're the guy that got me into business school.' At times I feel like I'm responsible for the crash; encouraging all those money sharks to behave like Gekko" - we talk about Douglas' next slated release, Last Vegas, out in November - "It's basically The Hangover with old dudes.
It's tested through the roof. All the actors had such a good time, which is usually the kiss of death" - and we talk about being honoured as a British GQ Man Of The Year. I ask the actor how it feels to be back on top. "I'll be honest with you, Jonathan," he flashes a smile, running a tanned hand through a shock of silver hair, seemingly genuinely surprised at his own good fortune these past couple of years, "if I'd known, I would have gone gay a lot earlier!"
Michael Douglas, a living legend. This year, every word of that sentence feels great to write.
Originally published in the October 2013 edition of British GQ.
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