Douglas Beats the Count

The Champion enters the room, a warm smile breaking above his trademark dimpled chin, and delivers a firm handshake before inviting a guest to take a seat in his comfortable, art-filled Beverly Hills home.

His hair may be white, his hands may be wrinkled with age, and he may struggle with words, but there is a sparkle in Kirk Douglas’ eyes, his mind is still as sharp as a tack, and he weaves abundant self-deprecating humor throughout his conversation.

“I think the most important thing is humor,” says the 82-year-old actor, who suffered a life-threatening stroke in January 1996. “You have to laugh at yourself.”

In fact, he notes wryly, there are certain advantages to his speech impairment. “You don’t insult people because it takes too much energy.” And, he adds, “you can remain strong and silent and make people think you are thinking deep thoughts.”

Douglas concedes that sometimes, when he’s tired or when he’s upset, his speech “isn’t so good.”

“So, don’t upset me!” he cracks with a smile.

Illness or not, Douglas has not lost his ability to deliver a comic line. Just like he did at a recent convention of speech therapists in San Francisco, where he told the gathering, “I’ve discovered that when I talk slowly, people listen! They think I’m going to say something important.”

Or, when he tells his son, actor Michael Douglas, that they really should hurry up and make a picture together. “I say, ‘Mikey, if you keep waiting, I am going to become too expensive for you.’ ”

As one of Hollywood’s living screen legends, Douglas’ story is well known and often told.

He received Oscar nominations for his roles in “Champion,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Lust for Life,” and formed one of Hollywood’s first independent film companies, the Bryna Co. (named after his mother), which produced such films as “Paths of Glory,” “The Vikings,” “Spartacus,” “Lonely Are the Brave” and “Seven Days in May.” He is also credited with breaking the infamous Hollywood blacklist, when in 1958, he gave screen credit to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for “Spartacus.”

In some ways, life has come full circle for Douglas, for just as he once starred as a prizefighter in “Champion,” he now plays a feisty onetime welterweight champion in his newest film, “Diamonds.” Miramax will release the movie Friday for a special engagement in Los Angeles and also for one week in New York for Academy Award consideration, before it’s scheduled to go wide in January.

It is Douglas’ first movie since the stroke and serves as an affirmation to Hollywood and his fans that the man is back, that despite the stroke and a horrible 1991 helicopter crash that left Douglas injured and two other men dead, life hasn’t beaten him down.

“Working again agrees with me,” he says, still cutting a handsome figure in his aqua-blue turtleneck. “I was surprised to see how much energy I had because my agent says, ‘You can’t work more than six hours a day.’ Listen, I worked sometimes 14 hours.”

It may be the autumn of his life, but to Douglas it is spring again.

On Thursday, his 83rd birthday, this son of illiterate Jewish Russian immigrants who was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, N.Y., will gather at Sinai Temple in Westwood with Anne, his wife of 43 years, and his four sons by two marriages--Michael, Joel, Peter and Eric--and, in a Jewish tradition that says life begins at 70, he will have a second bar mitzvah, having previously celebrated this important rite of manhood at age 13.

In recent days, he has been crisscrossing the country, hitting the TV talk-show circuit to promote the film while also attending book signings of his eighth book, a children’s book titled “Young Heroes of the Bible.” On Sunday he’ll receive a life achievement award given by the Hollywood Women’s Press Club.

Patricia T. Green, who produced “Diamonds” for Total Film Group, can only marvel at Douglas’ energy, but also noted there is much more to admire about the man.

“I have to say that the thing that I appreciated the most from him was his generosity and his knowledge,” she says. “And, he admits to having not always been this way. He told me, ‘I wasn’t always like this--as generous and open to people. But now, because of the stroke and the crash, I know that I’m here for a reason.’ ”

The stroke had hit him while he was having a manicure in his room. “Suddenly, I felt a slight tingling line go across my right cheek,” he told the speech therapists’ convention. “It wasn’t painful, but when I tried to speak, I just babbled.”

At first, Douglas experienced deep depression.

“I would pull down the blinds, crawl into bed and cry,” he said.

But what helped turn things around, he notes in an interview, was when his family persuaded him to accept an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the March 1996 Academy Awards ceremony.

“I just wanted to say, ‘Thank you,’ but when I went there, I saw 3,000 people standing up giving me an ovation,” he recalls, “so I said more than ‘Thank you.’ ”

Looking out on the crowd that night, Douglas motioned toward his sons who sat with tears in their eyes, and said, “They’re proud of the old man. And, I’m proud, too--proud to be part of Hollywood for 50 years.”

That might have been the last public performance for Kirk Douglas, for even he quips, “I thought, ‘That’s the end for me as an actor unless silent pictures come back.’ ”

But the curtain didn’t fall. He received a script titled “Sundowning” that featured a man with Alzheimer’s disease. Douglas told producer Green and director John Asher that he would love to make the movie but suggested that the central character might work just as well as a stroke victim. “Diamonds” was born.

Douglas poured himself into the role of Harry Agensky, a onetime welterweight champion who is suddenly left defenseless by the loss of his wife and the aftereffects of a stroke. Hoping to avoid the old folks’ home, he enlists his son (Dan Aykroyd) and teenage grandson (Corbin Allred) to accompany him to Reno, Nev., to hunt down the so-called “magic diamonds” that a mobster once promised him for throwing a fight.

Although initially nervous over whether he could even talk, Douglas got himself in shape for the part by keeping up with a daily regimen of exercise and “oral aerobics,” which also became part of the movie. The producers even had a perfect prop for the film--boxing footage of Douglas in his prime in “Champion.”

The movie also reunited Douglas with Lauren Bacall, with whom he co-starred in the 1950 film “Young Man With a Horn.”

“When I called her, I said, ‘Betty, I’m doing a movie. I think there is a great part for you.’ She said, ‘Well, what’s the part?’ I said, ‘The madam of a whorehouse.’ She said, ‘You sonofabitch!’ ”

Douglas was stunned when he learned that the Motion Picture Assn. of America initially gave the film an R rating. Although the film depicts some scenes in a Nevada whorehouse, Douglas felt it didn’t warrant the restricted rating, so he appealed in person to an MPAA panel to give the movie a less-restrictive PG-13 rating. To win an appeal requires a two-third vote, Douglas says, and 11 of the 15 members finally sided with him.

“I said, ‘I would take my grandchildren to see this picture,’ ” he says.

Filming got underway in November 1998 and ended the second week in January.

“Kirk is in every scene,” Green says. “He never had a day off.”

In one scene where Douglas, Aykroyd and Allred are driving in a car, she recalls, Douglas surprised everyone by suggesting that he be allowed to take the wheel of the car and drive off without Aykroyd.

“The first [assistant director] had a fit,” Green recalls, “because he thought we were crazy to let him drive. But off he goes and he does it and everybody claps.”

Remembering Blacklist, His Friend Lancaster

During a wide-ranging interview, Douglas talked frankly about the Hollywood blacklist and about his late friend, actor Burt Lancaster.

“Yes, I broke the blacklist,” Douglas recalls. “You know, when I think of it, was I stupid? Was I too young? You see, when you get older, you get more cautious. You weigh too many things.”

Douglas said he was pondering what pseudonym to use for Dalton Trumbo on the screen credits of “Spartacus,” when director Stanley Kubrick remarked, “Use my name.”

“That flabbergasted me,” Douglas recalls. “I said, ‘Stanley, you came into the picture when we were already shooting. I have the cast and everything. By the way,” Douglas says as an aside, “Dalton Trumbo never liked Stanley. So, that night, I went home and said to myself, ‘What the hell. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to use Dalton Trumbo. What can they do to me?’ People said, ‘Kirk, they’ll kick you out of the business.’ I said, ‘To hell with it.’ ”

On Lancaster, Douglas still feels the emotional sting of not being permitted to see his longtime friend after Lancaster suffered a major stroke.

“Listen, he was a big part of my life and his new wife would never let me see him,” Douglas recalls. “Her reasoning was, if he saw me it would make him feel badly. But, he wasn’t recognizing too many people. I just felt deprived that I couldn’t see him before he died and he was in that state for about three years.”

Douglas gets up to show a guest around his house. Notice, he says, there is no movie memorabilia, although he still keeps his scripts on a shelf along with a fake Oscar that his wife and son Peter gave him many years ago when everyone was telling him he would win an Academy Award for “Lust for Life,” but then didn’t.

The Douglases have lived in the same house on the flats of Beverly Hills for 22 years and, before that, raised their family in a larger house three blocks away for 20 years.

The homes had once been filled with priceless artwork, but the Douglases decided to sell a number of their expensive paintings, including a Picasso, a Miro and a Chagall, to fund the Anne and Kirk Douglas Foundation. The foundation funds a variety of projects, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and an Alzheimer’s unit at the Motion Picture Country Home to restoring more than 80 neglected playgrounds at schools around Los Angeles and others in Israel.

Asked how he would like to be remembered, Douglas says his epitaph should read: “I tried.”

“If you try your best,” he says, “there’s nothing else you can do.”

He brushes his white hair back with both hands.

“For a guy who can’t talk,” he says, “I talk a lot.”