Michael Douglas grew up as the firstborn of Spartacus, and he says it was no easy job. His father, Kirk Douglas, wanted to be a good dad, he says. Career stress gave him a temper that hurt his marriage and his boys. Kirk's own father had ignored all seven of his children. So Kirk didn't have a model, his son says, and he says it with love.
The family moved from a one-bedroom in Greenwich Village to a Craftsman house in Los Angeles in 1945, after Kirk landed a film role, he tells the Journal's Marc Myers. Kirk was unfaithful. When Michael was 5, his mother, Diana, moved the boys back to New York, to Central Park West, and the parents divorced. He saw his father mostly on movie screens and holidays. At 8 he found out what fame could cost. Two kidnappers followed him, and he got away by ducking into an elevator. In 1956 his mother married the writer-producer Bill Darrid. They moved to a farmhouse in Westport, Conn. Darrid listened to him, he says, and no father had before.
Kirk called acting the saddest profession and steered him away. At UC Santa Barbara his freshman year went off the rails, and the school told him to sit out a year. Back in Westport, his stepfather found him work at a gas station. He won “Mobil Man of the Month.” Then Kirk asked whether he planned to pump gas his whole life. The disappointment sent him back to school. He came back and, as a junior, was majoring in drama. His father saw him in A Midsummer Night's Dream and called the performance “absolutely terrible.” Stage fright had him racing through his lines.
Out of the shadow
After graduating in 1968 he studied in New York with Wynn Handman, who gave him his first real encouragement. The Streets of San Francisco in 1972 made him a known name. In 1975 he produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The rights had belonged to Kirk, who handed them to his son. The 1987 double of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street got him out of his father's shadow. Kirk told him he was the better actor. Today he and his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, split time between New York and Mallorca. The Mallorca house was built in 1867, and 190 acres surround it above the Mediterranean. His favorite spot is a fuchsia armchair, where he reads with the window open to the sea.
Our read
This one lands in Estate planning, the work of deciding who gets what when you're gone, by way of Behavioral. Ask Michael Douglas what he treasures most of his father's and he doesn't name the money or the houses. He names the leather-bound scripts with Kirk's notes in the margins. Reading them is “like hearing him think.” The fights after a funeral are rarely about the brokerage account, which splits by percentage. They're about the watch, the recipe box, the scripts. The second lesson is the rights to Cuckoo's Nest. A father handed his son a piece of property that became a career. A business, a book, a song, a patent, all of it is an estate asset that needs a named heir.
Here's the connection to your plan. Your will probably says who gets the house and the accounts. It probably says nothing about the things with your handwriting on them. This week, find your will and check for a personal-property memorandum, the short list that names who gets the specific things. Many states honor one if the will points to it, so ask. If there isn't one, start the list with the three objects your kids would actually argue over. Then write one page in your own voice about why. That page is the thing they'll reread. You put the umbrella by the door before the forecast turns, and we're glad to sit with you while you make the list.