COVER STORY : Who Said Romance Was Dead? : With ‘Disclosure,’ Michael Douglas completes a trilogy of modern male anxiety that includes ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Basic Instinct.’ How did he find himself on the movies’ sexual forefront?

The couple is fully clothed, the man hovering directly above the woman. They are smiling, but they are not touching--simultaneously attracted and eternally repelled, perfect polar opposites. “I love them because you don’t know whether they’re floating or falling,” Michael Douglas says. He smiles his predatory smile, and the couple in the painting smiles back. On another of the canvases by painter Robert Yarber that hang in Douglas’ office on the Paramount lot, a man and woman hold hands as they step off the edge of a cliff. Perhaps they are flying.

From where Douglas sits, up and down, in and out, even good and evil are all simply limits to be pushed. As Sharon Stone, his co-star in “Basic Instinct,” said at the time of Douglas’ ability to keep his tongue on the pulse of America, “I think we licked the outer edge of the envelope.”

With the release of “Disclosure” this Friday, Douglas firmly affixes his stamp to the U.S. male as he has been delivered up to movie audiences over the past decade, completing the rough-trade triptych he began in 1987 with “Fatal Attraction,” continued with “Basic Instinct” in 1992, and concludes--violently, but without taking his pants off for a change--with Demi Moore.

“I love being politically incorrect,” he says, “so I thought the reverse twist of changing the roles of sexual harassment would give people a way to look at the issue from a different point of view. Reversing the roles stops us from lining up simply on gender, and allows people to see the other side. I don’t mean we should start feeling sorry for guys, but I think it helps everybody to look at the other side.”

The film also goes so far over to the other side that only an actor of Douglas’ seductive power could redeem it, suggesting that given enough sex and power, a woman can ruin a man’s chance for career advancement. Douglas stars in the adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel as a mid-level computer-company executive whose ex-girlfriend Moore is brought in as his boss to help the company finesse a profitable merger; she also has plans for Douglas that have nothing to do with the furthering of his corporate career. As he did in “Fatal Attraction,” Douglas plays a character who deceives his wife and imperils his family, and still leaves you rooting for him at the end.

“His role is difficult because he’s carrying the movie on his back,” says “Disclosure’s” director, Barry Levinson, “but he has the ability to make it look effortless. Having some big bravura emotional scene is easy, but it’s very hard to take the audience through this movie, to tell this story, without the audience getting tired of looking at him. But Michael always seems to be saying, ‘Watch me, look at me.’ ”

It is a trick he learned from watching his father work, and then resisted using for nearly 20 years, from the time he became an actor in the late ‘60s until he made “Wall Street” in 1987, because he didn’t want Hollywood to think of him first as the son of Kirk Douglas, known for playing some of Hollywood’s most legendary heels and heavies.

“I think there was a very conscious effort on my part to play these sensitive-young-men roles,” Michael says of his early parts in features such as “Summertree,” “Hail, Hero!” and “Adam at 6 a.m.,” as well as his career-making sidekick role in ABC’s ‘70s police series “The Streets of San Francisco.” “I was trying very hard not to be what I most wanted to be, which is a pretty limiting way to live.”

His father had cast a giant shadow, but when Michael finally emerged from it, it was by finding his own dark side. In “Wall Street,” for which he won the best actor Oscar, he played greenmailer Gordon Gekko as a shark with all shiny surfaces, a brilliantine killer in a gray-green suit.

“It ain’t the devil if it doesn’t look good, because the devil’s seductive, it’s gorgeous,” Douglas says. “That’s what’s interesting about the devil--the evil. I’m fascinated by morality tales, that struggle. It’s a theme that keeps popping up in my movies.”

That’s not all that keeps popping up in Douglas’ films, of course; he has become the John Wayne of the gender war movies.

“There’s been a gender war going on for a long time, and a lot of my pictures have been about that,” he says. “Both sexes are having a tough time identifying their roles to themselves, much less to each other. I think a lot of guys are lost as to what their role is, and they’re confused in terms of the signals they’re getting from women. I also think they’re concerned about losing their role as provider.”

He is not speaking strictly about being the breadwinner here. “A woman can be artificially inseminated, she has milk and can feed, has cycles like the moon,” he says. “She’s much closer to the earth than men are. I do feel guys are lost because their role, in a lot of cases, is to be the worker bees, the drones.”

Whether sexual or violent, Douglas has been living out the fantasies of the white, urban worker bee far more convincingly--and therefore troublingly--than many of the action-adventure figures who pass for leading men. In “Falling Down” he tapped into the volatile mixture ofcivility and rage that inform much of the urban discourse, and now in “Disclosure”he has entered the modern corporate hive and attempted to slay the queen bee.

*

When “Basic Instinct” was released, there were rumors that the movie’s graphic sex scenes had so offended Diandra Douglas that it had created a rift in the couple’s then-15-year marriage.

“None of that was true at all,” Michael says. “I have a very understanding wife. Diandra may shake her head sometimes, but she’s been extraordinarily supportive. You never want to embarrass people who are close to you, but sure, they get affected by all the dialogue.”

Diandra Douglas had not wanted her husband to take the part in the first place, and was even less thrilled when she saw the finished film. “It wasn’t really my decision, if you know what I mean,” she says by telephone from the office of her New York-based Wild Wolf Productions, for which she is writing and producing a film on the history of country music for Ted Turner. “I’ve never told my husband what roles he should take. He has his agenda, I have mine, and he doesn’t often agree with my opinion. Certainly there’s the issue of nudity, the sexual scenes. But there were things about the script that I found offensive as a woman. Sex was presented as a form of manipulation, and violent sex was portrayed in an accepted way.”

When the couple, who have a 16-year-old son, Cameron, met in Washington the night before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration almost 18 years ago, he was wearing his hair long and had a beard. Diandra had grown up in Spain with her mother, Patricia de Morell, who sailed sloops around the world, and was unfamiliar with the handsome young sidekick on “The Streets of San Francisco.”

“I thought he was an artist, perhaps some kind of painter,” she says. “It wasn’t until the third day, when we got into this discussion about his work, that I found out he was an actor, which to me was not such a great thing, to tell you the truth. But I liked him by then, so it was too late.”

She resisted Hollywood from the very beginning, and grew to love it less and less with time.

“Eighteen years ago there was a group of wild and crazy guys, partying a lot, they had the world spread out before them,” she says. “There was Jack and Warren--the group, the boys--and he was part of that group. I should probably be telling you I love the Hollywood system, that I love the way they rank people, but I think there are certain stereotypes that aren’t conducive to having relationships or a family.”

One of those stereotypes is that the boys will be boys, only more so, and whenever possible. In September of 1992, less than six months after he appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly being shaved by a leggy blond model, Douglas checked himself into the Sierra Tucson Center in Arizona, where he was treated for what was described in several British newspapers and U.S. tabloids as an addiction to sex. Douglas reportedly agreed to seek therapy after his wife caught him in bed with a woman he had picked up in a bar at a Beverly Hills hotel. He checked in the next day under the name Mike Morell, which is his mother-in-law’s last name.

“The tabloids tied in a lot of innuendo,” Douglas says. “It made for a cute story after ‘Basic Instinct,’ but none of that was true. I entered Sierra Tucson to treat the cumulative effects of 20 years of overwork and alcohol abuse. Until then, I had never had any counseling or therapy in my life. The program covers a wide range of issues, which is all I have to say about it.

“There’s supposed to be some confidentiality and privacy that goes along with these programs, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to apply in my case.”

Despite Douglas’ denial, his wife spoke openly of the effects of the rumors to the contrary on their marriage.

“It’s very difficult,” she says. “If I said I enjoyed it, they should send me to the Sierra Tucson Center right away. If you have a marriage to a movie star, you have to accept that your life is under the microscope. I don’t have the power to change it. I’m sure I could dwell on certain things that have been painful and humiliating, but I try not to do that.”

Among the exotica of the film community’s colorful addictions, sexual compulsiveness is just the sort of thing that often is allowed to go untreated. It didn’t really begin to seem, well, a little odd and very brave until he took the lead in “Disclosure,” a role that required him to simulate submission to a sex act over which he had no control. It seemed a little like checking out of the Betty Ford Clinic to play the lead in a remake of “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

Douglas says: “After ‘Falling Down’ I had taken a sabbatical and had not worked in two years. When I came back and looked at what was there, this was it. Quite honestly, I remember telling my agent, ‘I think I’ve been down this road before, in one form or another.’ But I have to remember that ‘Fatal Attraction’ was almost 10 years ago. In the ads they’re calling ‘Disclosure’ the ‘Fatal Attraction’ of the ‘90s. That movie was like a signature of the whole decade, right? So it’s not like I’ve been walking around with a raincoat on for the last 20 years, it’s simply that a couple of pictures I did during that time were effectively done and left an impression.”

What they left was more like a fault line running squarely down the center of the battlefield in the war between the sexes. But his films have frequently crossed borders into the heart of darkness, beginning with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the first of seven features he has produced.

His father had optioned the book years earlier, and turned it over to Michael, who spent four years nurturing the project while he appeared on “The Streets of San Francisco.” When “Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Academy Award for best picture in 1975, Douglas suddenly found himself an Oscar-winning producer at 31.

Douglas appeared in a number of forgettable films like “Coma,” “The Star Chamber,” “A Chorus Line,” and “It’s My Turn” after that, but was more successful as the producer of “The China Syndrome” and “Romancing the Stone,” both of which he also appeared in. He hit his stride as a performer in 1987, when “Fatal Attraction” and “Wall Street” came out within three months of each other.

“Michael dares to play what could be considered non-user-friendly roles,” says Joel Schumacher, who directed Douglas as a mentally unbalanced protagonist in “Falling Down” last year. “At no point did he come to me and ask if the character could be made more sympathetic.

“A lot of actors can do rage, but they telegraph it so it’s no surprise to the audience when they step out of a car and start destroying L.A. I think a lot of the controversy surrounding ‘Falling Down’ was caused by people’s confusion about whether Michael was playing the good guy or the bad guy.”

Even his trio of baddest guys--in “Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct” and now “Disclosure”--usually have audiences rooting for them in the final reel, just as those closest to Douglas quietly pull for him as he works through his own moral ambiguities, often in front of millions of people.

“I often ask myself why he’s picked those roles,” says Diandra Douglas. “And I still don’t know the answer. I think they’ve made it more difficult for me to live my life. I would be lying to you if I said this is every woman’s dream.”

As an actor, Douglas is every woman’s dream because he isn’t afraid to share the screen with them as equals. “He’s one of the few actors that works very well with women,” says Levinson. “A lot of actors don’t.”

Asked if it would be fair to say he has enhanced the careers of many of his leading ladies, Douglas quickly replies, “I think you can. With all the complaints women have about roles in films, please don’t talk to me about that, not with my record. I love, and have always felt very comfortable, working with ladies. And not a lot of guys do.”

He does not have his own shelf at video stores like many of the other leading men, and his recent withdrawal from the pirate movie “Cutthroat Island” in favor of “The American President” will further narrow the niche he occupies. “He’s not so exotic that, as a hero, you can’t accept him at face value,” Levinson says. “He has a certain degree of vulnerability, not just a macho sensibility.”

Douglas speaks slowly in a whiskey voice, as if someone had told him once that rushing betrayed a lack of confidence. He cannot seem to help squirming in his chair, however, and his fingers are constantly running through that improbable upsweep of caramel-colored hair. Occasionally, he has to get up and walk around the office, saying the coffee he’s been sipping is too strong.

“I have anger in me, definitely,” he says. “I try to channel it in productive ways. It’s a stimulant, it’s a way that you keep going longer and harder and further than you normally would. But time will show it can be exhausting, and take its toll. Sometimes there are easier ways to do it.”

*

He was 5 when Kirk and Diana Douglas divorced. “I think the divorce caused a lot of anger with him,” says his mother, now Diana Darrid. “He had been a very tractable child before that, but he began to have some problems. I finally took him to a child psychologist, who told me he wasn’t seriously disturbed but that I needed to ease back on the discipline. He still has some residual anger. It’s not completely resolved.”

Douglas spent most of his childhood in Connecticut with his mother and stepfather, visiting his father on holidays from school. “I think he made every effort he could to be responsible, and given that he was an absentee father, to be there,” Michael says. “But my father’s up to 78 pictures now, and I don’t think I have 25, so the workload was intense. It was show-biz, you know?”

As a prince of Hollywood, there was also a certain amount of show-biz at home. Hayley Mills was Douglas’ 16th-birthday date, and Candice Bergen lived across the street in Beverly Hills. “They were used to a much more luxurious life in California,” says Douglas’ mother. “One time Michael came home from a stay in Beverly Hills and left his dirty clothes lying around on the floor. I told him to pick them up, and he said, ‘Gee, Dad has a butler to pick up his socks.’ ”

He spent a long time loudly proclaiming his independence from what he now refers to as “the biz” with the practiced ease of the insider. “When he was in prep school, he didn’t join the drama club,” his mother says. “He would always say, ‘I’m going to be something sensible, like a lawyer.’ ”

It was that sensibility that illuminated his performance in “Fatal Attraction” years later. “That was a picture that’s close to who you are, as opposed to some picture where you’re a jet fighter pilot or a homicide detective,” he says. “I was just a schmucky lawyer in New York. For me, it was like, ‘Oh, I know that.’ ”

He came to acting reluctantly when the dean of UC Santa Barbara called him in during “the third year of my junior year” and suggested it would be a good time for him to declare a major. He selected theater because it sounded easy. “I don’t know whether I was lying to myself for all the years I totally denied ever having any interest in it,” Douglas says, “but I began working at it, painfully at first.

“I used to do plays and keep a wastebasket offstage, so I could puke and then go out and do it,” he says. “Once I jumped aboard it was not a lot of laughs. The risk element takes away a lot of the fun. When you’re flying without a net you can’t be laughing the whole time.”

At 50, he has begun to allow himself the occasional reflective smile.

“I feel pretty good, looking around,” he says. “Who else is still standing at 50? I look at the opportunities in acting, I see how far you can go, and I feel excited, like I’m just getting my second wind.”

Douglas and his producing partner, Steve Reuther, started their own production company six months ago, and have signed a deal with Paramount to deliver 12 to 14 pictures over the next four years. It is, according to one source, “the best actor deal in town,” because Douglas can make any movie he wants without getting a studio green light, and can choose to star in them or not, while retaining the right to continue working at other studios.

“I think I’ve found a way to marry my two careers,” Douglas says, “which have always been on separate tracks to a certain degree. When I had my success as a producer, people always wanted to know why I wanted to be an actor. And when I got some success as an actor, people asked me why I still wanted to produce. It’s always made some people uncomfortable that I won’t just be one thing or the other.”

He is also finally developing a picture that he and his father will star in together, perhaps as soon as next year, although he doesn’t have a script yet. “It’s something we both wanted to do, we just never found anything,” he says. “We’ve been looking for a long time.”

It may have taken until Kirk Douglas was 77 for Michael to feel comfortable standing shoulder to shoulder with his father under the bright lights. “My father had a very strong, dynamic persona. I’ve done some therapy now, and I’m sure that part of one’s ambition when one has a father as successful as mine is to achieve one’s own sense of identity. But I’ve never felt competition from him, only support and love.”

His office is almost completely dark now, but Douglas does not turn on the light. With “Disclosure,” he has finished what he calls “my long, dark run,” but he is never far from the shadow in which he has lived his entire life.

“I’ve always led with my instincts,” he says, “and they haven’t let me down. On some of these pictures, I felt like, ‘Is the audience really going to buy this?’ But there’s an edge there that is stimulating and exciting--you feel alive. Sometimes I feel like it’s not worth making unless it’s dangerous. But I mean it’s not like you’re a thrill-seeker.”

He brings both his hands up and slowly pushes his fingers through his hair, creating a small nimbus of light. “Or maybe you are.”