A Lust for Life : AFI Will Honor Kirk Douglas, the Risk Taker

Kirk Douglas paused by the front door of his home in the Beverly Hills flats--which, by local standards, is probably a little less than opulent--and pointed out one of its more expensive ornaments: A Picasso vase, its curved fullness embellished with a female backside, in a swivel case.

Though he’s a collector, it’s one of the few pieces of art Douglas still owns that dates back more than a few years. Most of the older works have been sold, replaced with representations of lesser-known modern art.

“My wife bought this little Picasso vase just about the time we got married,” he explained. “Look at it, it’s so sensual. That one I didn’t want to sell. But we did get rid of a lot of so-called masterpieces last year, and I said to my wife, ‘Let’s buy modern art. Let’s get some crazy things from guys who are doing paintings now who are alive , so they know.’ ”

Douglas’ attitude stems back to the movie role that, of all his 69 theatrical features to date, most obsessed him: Vincent van Gogh, as essayed unto madness in the 1956 biopic “Lust for Life.”

“It affected my collection of art,” he said. “Van Gogh was never a success in his lifetime. When he died--too late. So we meet the artists. This kooky one on the wall, we got from Paris. We bought several from a new group of young, different artists there. You meet ‘em, you know ‘em, and they’re flattered when you say ‘We like your painting, we’re going to buy it and hang it in our house.’ Masterpieces I go look at in museums.”

With his Hollywood star having shone bright for more than four decades, the 74-year-old Douglas is in no danger of being the Van Gogh of his own lifetime, or even a museum piece just yet.

Still, oversights do occur. Despite three Academy Award nominations for best actor, Douglas has never won an Oscar. This puts him in the august company of such Oscar-less film greats as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Barbara Stanwyck, all of whom preceded him in receiving the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award.

The AFI dinner honoring Douglas takes place tonight at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, to be taped for telecast on CBS in May.

Resting at home earlier this week, Douglas expressed thankfulness for the honor, but didn’t mince words about which award he would most like to have been granted.

“Oh sure, I would’ve loved to have gotten an Oscar,” he said. “There were a lot of good movies I made that I thought might win an Oscar that weren’t even nominated, like ‘Detective Story’ and ‘Ace in the Hole.’ Yeah, an Oscar would have meant a lot because it’s given by your peers. I’ve won film critics’ awards, awards for acting all over the world, but (the Oscar comes from) your peers . That means something.

“But Jesus, I’ve been lucky, and the older I get, the more grateful I am. . . . I made a bunch of movies. And a few of them were successful. And I’m still working.”

Douglas said he was reminded how lucky he’s been when a helicopter he was riding in collided with a light plane near Santa Paula last month. The two men in the plane died and Noel Blanc, who was piloting the helicopter, had some serious injuries. But Douglas survived the crash with stitches, soreness and a black eye.

The black eye, which he says looks like a “a bad makeup job,” persuaded him not to be photographed for this story.

That Douglas could recover as quickly as he has is indication of his good physical condition--no surprise, given his deservedly rugged screen image as a “tough guy.”

But Douglas rarely channeled that marketable ruggedness into stock parts, either heroic or villainous.

“It’s hard to get a focus on him,” says cinema historian Ron Haver, curator of the film department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “He’s done so damn many different things, and he’s been very good at all of them.

“But his performances really are unique. If Gable was a romantic anti-hero, Douglas was, I think, following in his footsteps as being a very aggressive, almost obnoxious anti-hero. I would say that he was . . . as fine an actor of his time as Marlon Brando was, without the idiosyncrasies, without the mannerisms, just Kirk Douglas.”

Trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, his skills honed on Broadway, Douglas was far from being a Method actor, but the explosive intensity of his performances--be it expressed in surface rage or a quality more quiet and brooding--stood out from the beginning. Even in heroicness or weakness, Douglas’ very on-screen presence seemed to signal some sort of latent danger.

“He’s the same and yet he’s different in all his performances,” says Haver. The common thread is “that clenched-jaw kind of wound-wire intensity, very aggressive and suspicious and cynical, even when it’s not an overt cynicism.”

Haver cites Burt Lancaster and, to a lesser extent, Richard Widmark and Robert Ryan among fellow tough guys as Douglas’ contemporaries. “But there was always something larger than life and volatile and grabbing about Douglas. Lancaster had intensity, but he didn’t reach out of the screen and grab you, whereas Douglas always did. Go see a Kirk Douglas movie of the ‘50s in a theater, and you can feel it coming right out at you, the intensity. He’s the kind of an actor who picks you up by the shoulders and shakes you.”

Yet the man described by Haver as “everybody’s favorite heel” in classics like “Champion,” “Ace in the Hole,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and even lesser later efforts like “Scalawag” and “The Fury” was counterbalanced by an eclectic parade of unlikely heroes, often gentle, often doomed: “The Big Sky,” “Paths of Glory,” “Spartacus,” “Lonely Are the Brave.” Distinctive yet versatile, he was never afraid to find the pitiable qualities in his complex characters.

In one famous exchange at a party, a fellow tough guy took issue with his choice of roles, as Douglas recalled:

“When I did ‘Lust for Life,’ John Wayne was so mad at me. ‘How can you play that sniveling, weak character?’ he said.”

Norman Corwin, the screenwriter of “Lust for Life,” was delighted with Douglas’s characterization, not to mention his perseverance in getting the studio to greenlight the project against considerable odds.

“I cannot see his performance without being moved by it,” says Corwin, who based his script on Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. “It was no easy job to play a guy on the border of madness all his life, but he played it with extraordinary sensitivity. He portrayed Vincent in a way I think is very close to being definitive, as an artist of enormous stature who had a burning talent and exercised that even through a madness ending in suicide. That’s no easy assignment.

“He was a gutsy man, had a lot of courage and undertook difficult roles very often. He has a terribly good batting average.”

Remarked Douglas of his choice in roles, “A character like the boxer in ‘Champion’ was probably one of the first anti-heroes. He was the so-called protagonist of the film, and yet he was a bastard. But when I play a strong man in a movie, I always try to find out, where is he weak, and if he’s a weak character, what are his strengths? Because nobody’s John Wayne.

“Even so, I think that audiences still tend to see you a certain way. I think in spite of my trying to play a variety of roles, audiences tend to think of me as a tough guy. . . . Maybe a certain vitality or something comes out. That’s all right.”

Richard Fleischer, who directed Douglas memorably in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Vikings” in the ‘50s, well remembers that vigor: “He had supreme confidence in himself, and he had a strong physique, of course. The kind of energy he got from being in such good shape went into his acting as well. He relished his work and devoured his work. He was very much alive on the set all the time. Even when required to sit and listen, he had this energy you could feel across the set, and it energized the other actors.

“He’s not the easiest person to work with. He’s very demanding of himself and others, very quick to assert his feelings and what he thinks should be done. None of it is said to be argumentative, but it’s a struggle getting through a day’s work with him.

“He gets you riled up, but he gets riled up too, and it gets the juices flowing. He works to his utmost and expects you to do the same, and he’s right, you should. At the end of the day, nobody got hurt. He has a lot of heart, and it was never out of spitefulness or meanness on his part. And he will take direction and will do whatever is required of him to do.”

John Frankenheimer (“Seven Days in May”), one of several directors who comes under fire in Douglas’ autobiography for alleged adherence to the auteur theory of filmmaking, said he regrets the things Douglas said about him in the book, but quickly adds, “Making that film was a great experience. Kirk was my partner on that picture, and we came out of it good friends. . . . He’s certainly among the giants of American movies.”

Now, Douglas is being recognized as a giant twice in one month--by AFI tonight, and by the Writers Guild of America on March 20 for his part in breaking the blacklist, via the epic “Spartacus” (which is due for re-release in a restored version this spring).

That, as a producer and star, he was willing to hire the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write “Spartacus” was not unusual, but his decision to use Trumbo’s name in the credits sent a shock through Hollywood.

“Suddenly, I get suspicious,” said Douglas. “I’m getting a lot of awards. When I thought about that, more than breaking the blacklist when I decided to use Dalton Trumbo’s name on ‘Spartacus,’ I just left a pass for him with my production to come on the set. He came and said, ‘Kirk, this is the first time I’ve been on the set in 10 years. Thanks for giving me my name back.’ That was reward enough.

“But what I was fighting against was the hypocrisy in Hollywood, where the heads of these studios were using these blacklisted writers and just looking the other way, not paying them their full salary, making them use different names. That was more what I was fighting against; breaking the blacklist was secondary.”

Douglas regards himself as a lifelong maverick, and that he balked at the blacklist because he saw it as one more form of studio hypocrisy.

“A lot of the things I have done, good or bad, have been impulsive--my gut reaction, this is how I feel, and I followed it,” he said. “Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. It doesn’t necessarily make you very popular. I think that very often I was misunderstood. But that’s all right. There’s a few people that you like that kind of understand you. I was always saying what I think, shooting my mouth off. That’s dangerous.”

Among the riskiest moves Douglas made was to form his own production house, Bryna, not to develop the safe star vehicles that come out of such companies today but to raise financing for unusual projects. It was Bryna that was able to make Stanley Kubrick’s breakthrough film, “Paths of Glory,” which would have been all but impossible at a major studio, as well as such risky bets as “Spartacus,” “Seven Days in May” and “Lonely Are the Brave.”

“I had no desire to be a movie mogul,” Douglas said of his decision to start up Bryna. “I don’t want to produce. I want to help produce, I want to help the writer, I want to play a part in it. I have always tried to participate--perhaps too much, some people would think--in the making of a film. But in moviemaking, that’s the excitement to me, it’s a democratic process, a collaborative effort.”

Though Douglas has wrapped up work on two films due for release this year--”Oscar,” with Sylvester Stallone, and “Veraz,” an environment-themed story shot in both French and English versions--he’s been more consumed with writing, borne out in the success of his autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son,” and first novel, “Dance With the Devil.” He’s nearly finished with a second novel and prepared to launch into a third.

“But I’m always an actor,” he emphasized. “When I write a novel I’m an actor; I just play all the parts. Which is fun--no director to criticize you, no co-stars to argue with.”

“A lot of the things I have done, good or bad,have been impulsive--my gut reaction, this is how I feel, and I followed it.”