Identified in his addiction

In the end, Eric Douglas, who began life so auspiciously in 1958, never really had a chance to live it.

The youngest son of Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas, half-brother of mega-star Michael, apparently died alone at 46 in a small New York apartment.

He had battled drug and alcohol addiction for more than a decade. His heart was weakened, his health diminished, his behavior had become increasingly erratic. News reports of his multiple minor run-ins with the law in the late ‘90s were just one barometer of the increasing chaos that marked his existence.

In his last years, he was clearly not the Douglas he wanted to be. That was evident from the self-deprecating jokes he told whenever he could grab a few minutes onstage as a stand-up comic: “There’s Kirk, Michael and Me. Oscar winner, Oscar winner and Oscar Meyer wiener.”

He was certainly not the person his longtime friends had known and loved. Cecilia Peck Voll, daughter of the late Gregory Peck, told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail that she and Eric had been friends since childhood, and she felt “great affection” for him. “He was an original thinker, articulate, very funny, deeply talented. I saw him star in an off-Broadway drama called ‘The Man,’ and his performance was thrilling. He fought to overcome his troubles, and when he was healthy, he was a thoughtful and supportive friend.”

Even as he became less healthy, and addictions overtook him, friends say he still had flashes of the charm and brilliance that originally drew them to him. And he still yearned desperately for success, to fulfill his destiny as a Douglas. He tried to work right up until days before his death on July 6, seeking stage time in New York clubs.

“I’ve known Eric for almost 15 years,” said Al Mar-tin, who owns the New York Comedy Club and the New York Improv. “He actually called about a week before he died. Said he was back in town and wanted to perform at either of the clubs, but we had no room for him.”

Douglas didn’t take no for an answer. He called the Comedy Club on 24th Street and talked with Martin’s daughter, Samantha Howard, the club’s manager.

“He didn’t sound sober. He rambled about the many films his father and brother had made. I just wanted to get off the phone,” Howard recalled. Yet Douglas got what he wanted -- those few minutes on stage. The house was full that night, but his act was unmemorable. A waitress on duty said she recalls only that he stuck his microphone between a woman’s breasts.

Trained for showbiz

Acquaintances say Douglas started doing stand-up comedy about a decade ago, possibly because his growing addictions made it difficult for him to continue working as an actor, the career he had prepared for. Douglas, a graduate of one of the Claremont Colleges, trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and with some of Hollywood’s top drama coaches. Throughout the 1980s, he performed on the New York and London stage and in about 10 films as well as in TV sitcoms and miniseries. He was named “most exciting new face” of 1987 by Faces International magazine.

Los Angeles comedian Argus Hamilton said that in the early 1990s, Douglas showed up on the Comedy Store doorstep on Sunset Boulevard, determined to become a stand-up comic.

“He showed very quick aptitude. Mitzi Shore, the owner, saw a lot of promise in him. She made him a regular. He did well for somebody just starting out,” Hamilton said. “It was a place he could be himself and love and be loved in equal amounts. I would say he lasted about seven months before the demons sort of got hold of him and he drifted away.”

The last time the two met was at the L.A. airport. “While I was waiting for a cab, he talked his head off about an argument he’d just had with Delta airlines,” said Hamilton. “He was funnier at that moment than I’d ever seen him onstage. So the art was in him.”

But the demons were in him too. And Douglas, who split his time between Los Angeles and New York, wasn’t fulfilling his comedic promise on either coast.

“I put him on because he was Kirk Douglas’ son, to be very honest,” said Improv founder Budd Friedman, one of the first to give Douglas a shot at comedy work. “But he was a troubled and sad young man. I simply assumed his problem was that he couldn’t cope with the family’s fame.”Friedman recalled that Kirk Douglas once came to see his son perform and apparently had no problem with his jokes, which were mainly about the Douglas family. “They hugged at the end of the show,” Friedman said.

Martin, the Comedy Club owner, said he too “sometimes put him on just because of who he was. Audiences were mesmerized by his physical resemblance to his dad. He loved his family, but he really wanted desperately to get out of their shadows,” Martin said. “He constantly tried to make his own way. Let’s face it. That’s a big hole to dig out of right there.”

Martin also recalled Kirk and Michael Douglas coming to watch Eric perform. “They seemed interested in his progress.”

But the progress was soon stalled as his comedy faltered.

Distinguished by his flaws

Douglas tried to win laughs mostly from his status as the self-destructive loser in one of Hollywood’s most celebrated families: “I know what you guys are thinking, right?” he’d say. “I look like somebody. I sound like somebody. OK, it’s true what the tabloids are saying. I am Elvis’ love child.”

He joked about having Spartacus as a dad, complete with “toga and sandals,” and how he could tell when his folks were “doing it in the bedroom, because I’d hear my father yell, ‘Action!’ ”

In one recording of his act, the biggest applause came from his confession: “By the way, I’m proud to tell you I’ve had to go into rehab myself.”

That was an understatement. Acquaintances said Douglas dipped into 12-step programs, rehab institutes and psychotherapy on both coasts, trying to find solutions.

“Just as he switched coasts, he switched personalities. He could be lucid and drinking orange juice during one encounter and appear totally zonked-out at the next,” said Michael Sands, a Los Angeles media consultant who met Douglas about 15 years ago and saw him occasionally at 12-step meetings.

The last time was in August, at a meeting in St. Paul’s church in West L.A. “He was drinking coffee, he was clean and sober, nice and polite as anyone. He said, ‘I’m in town because I want to be here for my dad; he’s getting on in years.’ ”

Baird Jones met Douglas in the 1970s, when Jones was a doorman at Studio 54. He said he and Douglas were close friends in 2001, when Douglas was “on his last legs as a comic” and often hard to deal with but still a “very charismatic guy.”

They met for the last time when Douglas “just called out of the blue” about two weeks before his death. Jones said he went to his friend’s apartment on East 29th Street to take him to an art gallery and a party, and he wound up waiting two hours for Douglas to come down.

“He looked fatter than I’d ever seen him, maybe close to 300 pounds -- and his speech was so slurred I could hardly understand one word he said.” Douglas “exploded” when their cab was stuck in traffic, becoming outraged when the driver misunderstood his order to turn right. Such mood swings were typical, Jones said, remembering that Douglas once showed up weeping at his door at 4:30 in the morning, convinced he’d left his expensive cellphone there, a gift from his brother. But when they dialed the number, “it rang in his pocket.”

Court and medical board records indicate that Douglas’ final, fatal descent may have stemmed from treatment by a psychiatrist who has since had his license revoked by the Medical Board of California.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court civil lawsuit filed in 2001 on behalf of Douglas against psychiatrist William O. Leader and the Leader Psychiatric Medical Group, stated that Leader treated Douglas for 2 1/2 years, from about 1997 to 1999. The suit claimed Douglas had suffered intermittently from cocaine and alcohol addiction for about 10 years before that, but had always been able to maintain himself and look for work.

The lawsuit alleged that under Leader’s care Douglas developed such a severe combination of medical problems that he was unable to care for himself. He nearly died at least twice from taking medications Leader prescribed, the suit charged, and was saved only by emergency room personnel. It alleged that because of Leader’s care, Douglas suffered “severe permanent disabilities” that included “irreversible cardiac damage and ... dementia.”

Leader prescribed huge amounts of drugs and in nearly lethal combinations, according to the court documents, and he often did so by phone without seeing his patient’s physical condition. Leader’s license was revoked in 2001 after a lengthy investigation. Attempts by The Times to reach Leader were unsuccessful.

Medical board records also show that Douglas made monumental efforts to straighten himself out -- citing hospitalizations at top-flight clinics in Connecticut, Arizona, New York, Kansas (twice at the Menninger clinic) and various places in Los Angeles. And they paint a chilling picture of a doctor who phoned pharmacies and obtained prescriptions for Douglas even during his hospitalizations, when he was under the care of other doctors.

The lawsuit was settled out of court in May 2004.

Attorney Neil Papiano, who represented Douglas, says his client had just “received news of a handsome payment” before his death, which would have been enough to care for him even “if he had lived for a long time.” Papiano would not state the amount but said it was “put in a trust to be used for his basic needs. What happened is a great tragedy,” Papiano said, adding that Douglas’ mother, Anne, “was a saint through it all.

“She did everything she could. Everything. Love, compassion, help, companionship, people with him, people watching him. She provided all of that.”

Born into a shadow

From Day One of Eric Douglas’ life, he was, in a sense, the son of Spartacus. It was the role his father created to worldwide acclaim at about the time Eric was born. The elder Douglas already had three children: Michael and Joel with his first wife, Diana Dill. And then Peter, by his 1954 marriage to publicist Anne Buydens, with whom he recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary. (The couple has declined to comment on Eric’s death.)

All four sons went into show business, despite their father’s cautions that it was the most difficult, uncertain profession.

The elder Douglas went on to make at least 20 films in the 10 years after Eric was born. There was little time for the mega-star father to be at home with his children. They visited with him on school vacations either at home or wherever he was on location. Eric complained to psychiatrists in later years that he never spent enough time with the father to whom he bore such a strong resemblance.

His problems with his father’s fame were not entirely figments of his imagination. In an interview Michael Douglas once gave to Playboy, he too said he used to wonder, ‘How can I possibly be a man? How can I be the man that this man was?”

In Kirk Douglas’ 1988 autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son,” he recalls asking Michael, “How was I as a father?”

“Gee, Dad, you were loony, jumping from one picture to another. You were so uptight.”

The book is lavished with tender references to his sons, acknowledgments of his inadequacies as a preoccupied father and the pride he felt and the love he hoped he was able to show them.

In a chapter recalling his 70th birthday, in London with his wife, Kirk Douglas remembers he made no plans, wanting to “quietly wait for the day to end.”

Eric showed up unexpectedly with caviar and vodka, then took his parents to an elegant restaurant and later a surprise party at the club Tramps, where Michael and Shakira Caine and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were among the guests. A cake and candles were accompanied by Tom Jones singing “Happy Birthday.”

Eric had outdone himself. And he made his father happy.