Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
2004: “Don’t Gaslight Me”
Ever since Mom and Dad’s divorce, they’ve shared custody of S’Estaca, their cliffside property in Spain, on the northwest coast of the island of Mallorca. Mom has it July 15 to New Year’s Day. Dad gets it the other half of the year.
On a breezy July day when I’m twenty-five, Dad, my friend Erin, and I are eating lunch on the veranda, which is shaded with a vine-covered trellis and overlooks the sea. The woman serving lunch comes over and tells Dad he has a phone call. He leaves to take it in the bar, a good twenty-five yards away. A minute later I hear a high-pitched sound, a keening moan that is human, but I can’t tell who it is. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” I stand up and run toward the person, realizing finally that it is Dad. My heart drops into my stomach. I’ve never heard him make that sound. Something devastating must have happened. He puts down the phone and turns toward me. He’s crying. “We’ve lost Eric,” he says.
Eric is Uncle Eric, Dad’s half brother. The call was from the New York City Police Department. Someone flagged down a cruiser after finding Eric in his apartment this morning. He had overdosed on a mix of alcohol, tranquilizers, and painkillers and, at the age of forty-six, is dead.
As long as I can remember, Eric was battling some pretty serious demons. He was always having conflict with Pappy, my grandfather, who’s been amazing to me but is a tough guy and, as I understand it, could be hard on his children. Pappy is known to the world as Kirk Douglas, the international box-office star of the 1950s and ’60s, a Hollywood legend nearly as famous for his conquests (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth) as for his illustrious career acting in movies like Champion, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Spartacus. He scored three Best Actor Academy Award nominations in the process, rebelled against the studio system by starting his own independent production company, and also broke the Hollywood blacklist, hiring Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus under his own name. In the summer of 2004, Pappy is still vital at eighty-seven, and despite experiencing a stroke eight years ago, he has now outlived one of his sons.
We all knew that Eric was gay, but he wasn’t out. It’s something he clearly wrestled with, and I believe was tormented by. Although I think the family would have accepted his sexuality unreservedly, he may have feared otherwise, given that Douglas men tend toward a square-jawed breed of masculinity.
Eric tried on many hats, professionally. Beyond a handful of roles (like a made-for-TV movie in which he played the younger, flashback version of Pappy’s character, and an episode of Tales from the Crypt, in which he played the son of Pappy’s character), he got little traction as an actor.
In recent years, he’d been trying to make it as a comedian. He wasn’t great at it. He was angry, and most of his jokes made fun of Pappy and Dad, known to other people as Michael Douglas. From Eric’s point of view, Dad, given the success he’d found, should have looked out for his brothers more. Dad had tried to be supportive, going to several of Eric’s comedy shows, but then he had to sit there and listen to a series of flat jokes ridiculing him and Pappy and, most painfully, Eric himself: “There’s Kirk, Michael, and me. Oscar winner, Oscar winner, and Oscar Mayer wiener.”
Eric and I had a warm relationship, but he had a hair-trigger temper that could be frightening. I remember once, when I was a toddler, being with him at a convenience store, where he got into a fight and was beaten up in front of me. Eventually, his drug and alcohol problems became so severe that brain damage slurred his speech and left him with a limp. Dad and Mom would often say things to me like “You don’t want to turn out like Eric.” This disturbed me on several levels. Beyond sharing a famous last name and a drug dependency, a combination that made both of us newsworthy to tabloids, I didn’t think I was anything like Eric. It bothered me that they thought I might be like him. Deep down, I suppose I was most upset by the fear that in some essential way I was like him.
I feel enormous pride in our family. It’s with a mix of reverence and awe that I look at the careers of both Pappy and Dad. Eric’s life, ruined by impossible expectations both real and imagined, was the more typical one for a star’s son. Dad’s success, equal to if not greater than his father’s, is something that almost never happens in the second generation of Hollywood families. He has won Oscars as both a producer (Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and an actor (Best Actor for playing Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko in Wall Street), and has made enormous amounts of money in a career that has also included iconic films like Romancing the Stone, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct. Fifty-nine and silver-haired when Eric dies, Dad remains a force in the industry.
I’m sure Eric felt that pride too, but I can also relate to the pressure he felt and his struggle being a Douglas. It’s strange growing up seeing your father and grandfather as giants projected on screens and billboards. It’s unnerving to walk into rooms full of people who know all kinds of things about you, or think they do, while you know nothing about them. It’s diminishing to be perceived mainly as someone else’s son or brother, and it’s hard to develop a sense of yourself as a person intrinsically worthy of others’ respect. How do you compete with Kirk Douglas? How do you live in Michael Douglas’s shadow?
The NYPD called Dad first, and now it’s his responsibility to tell Pappy and Anne, Pappy’s wife of fifty years, that their son is dead. After he makes the call, I have never seen such utter panic and raw sadness in Dad. He arranges to fly to L.A., and I follow close behind. In the limousine that brings us all to the cemetery, everyone’s quiet. Throughout the funeral service and burial at the cemetery in Westwood where Marilyn Monroe was buried, I feel physically queasy, with an anxiety I don’t allow myself to pinpoint.
I cry only once, when Oma, as Anne likes her grandchildren to call her, almost passes out while she stands over Eric’s grave throwing dirt onto the coffin. I don’t feel the depth of emotion that I know I should, and it’s not a huge mystery why. I’m a bona-fide liquid-cocaine addict. Drugs are my number one priority, and my most reliable friend. They’re always there for me, in bad times and worse.
Afterward, there’s a reception at Pappy’s house in Beverly Hills. Pappy speaks. Oma tries to but is overcome by grief. They’d gone through so many struggles with Eric, and I believe they were recently in a tough-love phase, so on top of everything else they feel guilt. I feel guilty too, because toward the end of his life Eric reached out several times to get together, but I heeded Dad’s advice to stay away from him. We spoke on the phone, and I told Eric I loved him, but I wish now that I had been there for him more. His life was so tortured. There was a tempest inside him that created a tempest around him.
For Dad, Eric’s death hits even closer to home. Dad was in rehab for drinking and drugging in the early ’90s. His brother Joel, my uncle Jojo, has struggled with both alcohol and drug abuse. And then there’s me. I’ve been using and abusing drugs since I was thirteen. I’ve been in and out of trouble, and in and out of treatment. My current addiction is particularly nasty: I inject coke as often as three times an hour when I’m on a run. My once-promising career as a DJ has been destroyed by my irresponsibility. I’ve had opportunities to make a life in acting and squandered them. I’ve hardly been giving my family, or myself, reasons to feel proud. When Dad looks at me, recently, I don’t see love; I see concern and sadness and frustration. When we talk, it’s usually a tense interaction about money or the latest way I’ve disappointed him. Maybe I really am like Eric. But I don’t want to die the way he did. And in the grip of a young man’s sense of immortality, I’m not afraid that I will.
As soon as I can, I slip away. I tell myself that there’s nothing for me to do here, no way to help, nothing for anyone to do now. The worst-case scenario has already happened.
Within days of the funeral, Erin and I return to Spain, which we’re using as our base while I do some lingering DJ gigs around Europe.
When I met Erin, I had just broken up with Amanda, my girlfriend of five years. Our relationship had been tumultuous and off-key and had gone on way too long—to the point where, when it ended, I resolved not to get into another serious relationship.
Erin was a sub-promoter at Go, where I spun a midnight set on Thursdays, and my biggest fan. She had been premed at Villanova, then worked in the IVF clinic at New York-Cornell Hospital. After two of her roommates and best friends died on 9/11, and her longtime boyfriend had a psychological crisis and broke up with her, Erin turned away from her old life, deciding to live in the moment.
She was attractive and warm, and we started hanging out. Then she started working for me; with Amanda gone, I needed someone to keep me organized and on track with my commitments, and Erin traveled with me wherever I went for DJ gigs. We’d also sleep together. I told her, as I told any woman I became involved with after Amanda: Buyer beware. I wouldn’t be her boyfriend, and she should know that up-front. So my relationship with Erin is more than just friendly, but she isn’t my girlfriend. She accepts this arrangement, and our emotional connection is real: I have a lot of love to give, and when I am focused on her, I offer genuine affection. I consider her family. Like me, she is a drug addict.
Dad isn’t here, and Mom isn’t here, so we stay in the compound’s main house, in the master bedroom. Erin, who speaks Spanish, goes to a pharmacy to get us needles, claiming she has diabetes. I drive forty-five minutes to score coke at a strip club in Palma. Eric’s fate is already out of my head. My urge to get high is stronger than any fear his death should sensibly inspire. I take Old Bessie, an ancient Range Rover that belonged to my grandmother Pat, Mom’s mother, who I called Nana. It’s a big car, with a huge, metal ram bar in front, and on the way back, taking a narrow turn, I sideswipe a line of parked cars. I leave my phone number on one of the windshields but never hear from anyone about it.
Then Mom hears from her best friend, Luisa, who’s known me since I was a kid, and who is also staying at S’Estaca. Luisa has observed that I stay inside all day and come out only at night. One morning, I pass her and notice her looking at my arms. They are ravaged, scabbed over with track marks. Usually I tie bandannas around them, but I wasn’t expecting to run into her. Luisa immediately calls Mom, who tells Dad, who calls me and says they don’t want us staying in the main house anymore. We can stay in a guest cottage. I feel like I have a contagious disease. Maybe I do.
In early September, back in New York, I run into Amanda at the 60 Thompson hotel in Soho. I met Amanda when I was nineteen and she was twenty-three. She had nightclub contacts in Manhattan, and got me hired as a DJ. We became fast friends, and within a couple of months boyfriend and girlfriend. She was a balancing influence who gave me structure and stability, and she was instrumental in building my DJ career. I loved her, but she was a surrogate mother more than anything, which made it both hard to break up with her and hard for me to remain faithful to her. Nothing takes the romance out of a relationship like feeling that you’re dating your mom. Instead of finding the courage to end things, I stayed in the relationship much longer than I should have, cheating on her, hating myself for it, and hating her, irrationally, for “making” me do something that made me hate myself. It was a volatile, tortured relationship.
Since finally breaking up, three years ago, we’ve remained dramatically entangled; Amanda is an unstable figure lurking on the fringes of my life, part angel of mercy, part agent of chaos. I genuinely love and respect her, and, when we’re getting along, I enjoy being with her. But she is still in love with me. We want different things from the relationship, but neither of us has the wisdom or strength to accept that; so we never fully go our separate ways.
When I told her we should take a break, her response was to form an alliance with Mom, who took her on as her assistant and invited her to live with her, first in New York and now in Santa Barbara, where Amanda is living in my childhood bedroom. Their real bond is a shared preoccupation with my destructive choices, degenerate behavior, and relationship with Erin, who they blame for my downward spiral.
Before Amanda left New York, she had basically become a spy for Mom and Dad, and she’d sometimes show up at the apartment where I live with Erin and a few friends and cause a scene. It’s a fifth-floor two-bedroom in Greenwich Village that I’m paying for, and which is dominated by a Balinese opium bed in the living room. We’re a makeshift little family of addicts.
At the Thompson, Amanda’s eyes flick to the sweatband covering my elbow.
“You have track marks.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Amanda?”
“Don’t gaslight me. I can see the track marks on your elbow.”
“You’re a fucking lying psycho bitch. I’m not doing anything. Stop telling my parents I’m doing this stuff. ’Cause I’m not.”
I’m not trying to scare her—she’s tough, and not really scareable—but I’m tired of her meddling and need to make her understand that she needs to stop talking about me. This is wishful thinking, but it feels good to vent. I know she’s going to call Dad, so I beat her to it. He seems to believe my story that I’m being harassed by my crazy ex-girlfriend. I have become a fluent liar.
