Kirk Douglas’ Autobiography Introduces the ‘Ragman’s Son’

It is an almost unimaginably long reach from being Issur Danielovitch and living in abject poverty in Amsterdam, N.Y., to being Kirk Douglas.

After 80 movies and at the age of 71, Douglas has written about his frequently painful transformation in an autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son,” which in its blunt honesty and the revelations from its self-inquiries is in a class by itself among star voyages into their own pasts.

Douglas went back to Amsterdam again a few years ago with his wife, Anne, and his four sons, he said one recent morning in his Beverly Hills office. A bronze plaque identifying Kirk Douglas Park was being unveiled in the presence of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

But he returned reluctantly and with mixed feelings. “Anne wanted to go back; I didn’t,” he said. “Once I left for college (at St. Lawrence University), I never went back for more than a day. I would find summer jobs as a bellhop or wrestling with a carnival. There was so much unhappiness at home, I was trying to escape it. I saw myself with my mother, my six sisters . . . my father was never there.”

His father was indeed a ragman, a hard-working, hard-drinking, illiterate and uncommunicative Russian immigrant from whom Douglas wanted some sign of affection and, later, admiration, but which he never received, at least in sufficient quantity to quiet a life’s worth of anger.

Douglas understands--it is the linking theme of the book--that the father and the Amsterdam past explain much about the son--the unrelenting competitiveness, the unceasing ambition that does not appear to have eased much, even now.

“My first wife, Diana, once told me, ‘You keep working like you’re trying to be a star, but you are a star.’ ” Burt Lancaster, with whom Douglas has made several films and with whom he enjoys a gingery and gingerly friendship, was hosting a film tribute to Douglas in Manhattan not long ago. As Douglas remembers it, “Burt said, ‘Kirk would be the first person to tell you he’s not an easy man to get along with . . . and I’d be the second.’ ”

There have been seven or more cut-and-paste biographies written about him, Douglas says--the view from outside, looking in. “I wanted to know who I think I am, and the book was a process of finding out--in a profession where it’s especially hard to find out.”

He made some preliminary notes as long ago as 1959, beginning to describe and understand the view from within, and he made further notes in 1972 and 1979. He didn’t want to commit to a book until he had a few hundred pages of notes in hand.

“So much of my life has been make-believe that the characters looked more real than the people around me. For years I’d do three, sometimes four pictures a year. It’s an extraordinary amount of work. Michael and I talk about it; it’s different now. But you’re an actor, you act. And what you’re acting can be realer than things in your own life.”

Writing the book was painful, Douglas says. “You’re digging up things you’ve stored away. Some of the memories aren’t pleasant. Some of the things you see about yourself and remember about yourself aren’t pleasant.”

“Outwardly I’ve changed into Kirk Douglas. But the more I looked at him, the more I felt the need to get back to Issur to see the boy I’d evolved from. He was the quintessence of me.” In the book, Douglas invents a series of imaginary conversations with the young Issur, who comments on the adult Kirk Douglas.

The actor, Douglas says, “is always drawing bits of himself,” to help define a character or create an emotion for a scene. “I didn’t realize how much I was drawing on my father. Whenever I had to be a tough guy in a saloon--amazing how often that was--I realized I’d be thinking of my father.”

Douglas had no trouble figuring out where the competitiveness came from, going back to the Amsterdam days. “I was fighting for my life and my identity. I realized why I went out for wrestling and was undefeated. I was wrestling for my identity and my life.” The enemies included poverty itself and the implicit and explicit anti-Semitism he ran into in the city, the university, the summer jobs.

When what Douglas calls “the catastrophe of success” hits, you have a different but not unrelated set of problems. “You’re lonely; you don’t know who to count on. You become a target for betrayal. (Years ago, a business manager got away with a good deal of Douglas’ money.)

“Most people don’t have the preparation or the training for success. You have to adjust to the money and the adulation and it’s not easy.”

He advised all four of his sons not to go into the business, Douglas says, but he adds with wry pleasure that despite his advice all four did and all four are doing well, Michael most conspicuously. “Michael handles it well,” his father says. “I sent him a note saying I was even prouder of the way he handles his success than I am of his five blockbusters in a row.”

Youngest son Eric, an actor, has just finished a film in France in both French and English. Son Joel is producing films at Victorine Studios in Nice (where Truffaut shot “Day for Night”). Peter is producing a new “Fletch” movie.

Douglas’ candor about his love life will lift an eyebrow or two, but Douglas says, “I finished the rough draft and showed it to Anne. If she had objected to it I’d have changed it, but she didn’t. I didn’t tell all, and people tell me I’ve dealt with it delicately enough. It’s possibly blunt, here and there, but this late in life I can’t change my makeup.”