Is it now time to reassess Kirk Douglas's legacy?
The leader of a slave revolt, a pugnacious prizefighter, a western gunslinger, a teenage girl’s rapist. Kirk Douglas, a legend of Golden Age Hollywood, was all of these things during his lifetime – but only one for real.
This is what we must accept if we are to believe the word of Lana Wood, the younger sibling of the actress Natalie Wood, who this week named Douglas as the man who sexually assaulted her sister when Natalie was in her mid-teens.
Lana’s account of the attack finally puts on the record a story that has swirled around the industry for decades, but has until now never been openly discussed.
When a detailed account of the incident was posted anonymously on a popular industry gossip blog in 2012, the rumour gained in prominence.
And on a podcast in 2018, Lana described a childhood memory of accompanying Natalie to a private meeting with a “big star” at the Chateau Marmont hotel during which Natalie was raped, as Lana and her mother waited in the family car outside.
At the time of recording, Douglas was still alive, and Lana declined to name the star in question. But when Douglas died in February last year at the age of 103, the story had circulated widely enough that Natalie’s name began trending on social media alongside his own.
And in Lana’s memoir Little Sister, which will be published next week, she identifies Douglas as her sister’s assailant. She writes that it was her mother, Maria, who had arranged the meeting when Natalie was either 16 or 17 years old, in the hope that “many doors might be thrown open for [Natalie], with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf.”
The long wait outside the hotel in the car is described, as is Natalie’s visible distress and dishevelment on her return. Lana, eight at the time, was not privy to the muttered exchange between Natalie and their mother in the car that night. But years later, she says, Natalie told her what had happened, describing the attack as “an out-of-body experience” which had left her terrified and confused. The family’s decision not to speak out, then or later, came down to a fear that to do so would end Natalie’s career. Her mother’s advice, Lana recalls, was as follows: “Suck it up.”
The story is as sickening as it is horribly familiar: Hollywood cover-up culture in action, and running as smoothly as its inventors could have dreamed. A powerful man behaves monstrously, safe in the knowledge that the system his power sustains will stub out his young female victim before allowing him to be compromised.
That the people close to her will urge her to stay quiet, since they know that to speak out is not only to invite scandal and disgrace, but to dispel the very dream her industry exists to perpetuate. Natalie’s mother’s advice to her daughter that night was morally unconscionable, but also it must have seemed prudent.
Maria had been determined to make her pretty, middle daughter a movie star, and in 1955, the plan was firmly on track. Natalie had just appeared in Rebel Without a Cause opposite James Dean, and had been cast alongside Lana in The Searchers, the great John Ford western, in which the sisters would play the older and younger versions of a girl abducted by marauding Comanches.
The transition from cute child parts into more substantial, grown-up roles is a precarious moment: the worst possible point at which to rock the boat. Meanwhile, the then-38-year-old Douglas – a steely-eyed, dimple-chinned leading man of the old school – was one of the industry’s most influential and beloved figures.
He was a US Navy veteran; a two-time Oscar nominee; the founder of a thriving independent production company named after his beloved mother; a newly remarried father of two; a celebrated battler of McCarthyism during the years of the Hollywood blacklist. His career-defining role in Spartacus may have still been five years away, but the aura was already in place.
Perhaps Natalie felt that in the fullness of time, she would reach a point at which this dreadful secret could finally be publicly disclosed. But after her death by drowning in mysterious circumstances at the age of 43, the fullness of time was not a privilege she was ever to be afforded. As for Douglas, he earned a third Oscar nomination two years after the assault, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter in 1981, and shortly before his 80th birthday presented with an honorary Academy Award.
He worked steadily into his 70s, and remained married to his second wife, Anne, who died in April this year, for the rest of his very long life. On Douglas’s own death in February 2020, his son Michael Douglas, the actor, described him as “a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to”, and an actor who left behind “a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come”. His response to the claim in Lana’s memoir was more brief. “May they both rest in peace,” a statement issued through his publicist said.
The awful events of that night, more than 60 years before #MeToo, are a part of Natalie Wood’s legacy. They must also be a part of Douglas’s own. For decades he traded on his reputation as the embodiment of Hollywood’s progressive credentials: he was famously the actor who “broke the blacklist” by making sure Spartacus’s persona non grata screenwriter, the hard-left firebrand Dalton Trumbo, received public credit for his work. (Though the centrality of Douglas’s role in this has been contested by others.)
He is also the man who used his influence and status and the admiration of millions of cinema-goers to launder a sexual attack on a teenage girl who was less than half his age, and at least a year below the Californian age of consent.
It was Natalie who had to live under the cloud of it; Natalie who asked her sister never to divulge what had happened that night. Lana writes in her book that circumstances now allow her to break that promise in good faith, which seems reasonable. No rule of etiquette prevents us from sincerely reckoning with a dead celebrity’s faults, and the case against Douglas – which stemmed for so long from unverifiable whispers – is now vouched for by his victim’s sibling and confidante.
We all know it, but it bears repeating: real life isn’t like the movies, and tends to be short on neatly scripted conclusions. Douglas remains the monumental figure in Hollywood history he has been since Spartacus became the most successful film Universal Studios had ever made. Perhaps even more so than Harvey Weinstein, he is now also the embodiment of the industry at its most predatory and debased.
The Douglas Clan
Kirk
The patriarch of the family admitted to various affairs during his second marriage to Anne Buydens. In his autobiography, he wrote about having flings with actresses from cinema’s Golden Age, including Evelyn Keyes, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth, among others. Kirk has now been accused of assaulting actress Natalie Wood by her sister Lana.
Michael
The eldest son of Kirk and first wife, Diana Dill, went to rehab for alcohol and drug addiction in 1992. In 2018, a woman accused Michael of masturbating during a script meeting and making degrading comments about her when she was in his employment. Michael denied the allegations, admitted only to using coarse language within her earshot.
Eric
The youngest son of Kirk and second wife, Anne, was arrested several times for possessing drugs and drink driving. He died from an accidental overdose of alcohol, tranquilisers and painkillers in 2004.
Cameron
The grandson of Kirk, and son of Michael and his first wife, Diandra Luker, has been arrested for drug offences on several occasions, including dealing cocaine and methamphetamine. He spent seven years in prison, with two of those years spent in solitary confinement. In his memoir, he claimed that Michael asked him to hand out cannabis at parties when he was a child.
