Michael Douglas memoir: Yes I had affairs, but I wasn’t a sex addict

Liam KellyMon, October 5, 2026 at 11:01 PM UTC

0

Michael Douglas looks back on his colourful life and career in ‘One Helluva Ride’ (pictured in 1975) - ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

If name-dropping were an Olympic sport, Michael Douglas would, based on the strength of his new memoir, have a chance at the gold medal.

It’s perhaps inevitable for a Hollywood star whose father was Kirk Douglas, a prize-winning Spartacus himself. His parents were separated, and Douglas fils lived mostly with his mother, the actress Diana Dill. At his father’s house, however, he often mixed with the likes of Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Walt Disney and Burt Lancaster.

One Helluva Ride only gets starrier from there: Douglas’s lifelong best friend and former flatmate is Danny DeVito; Steve McQueen gave him a Porsche after casting him in a film; Diana, Princess of Wales, sat next to him at a gala screening of his 1987 film, Wall Street, and Kofi Annan, then the United Nations secretary general, attended his wedding to Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Unlike so many celebrity memoirs of its type, Douglas’s book – penned with the help of two ghostwriters – is candid and packed with gossip, which doesn’t always reflect well on the Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct star. Here’s what we learnt.

Douglas has an extreme ‘daddy complex’

Douglas has always struggled with living in his father’s shadow. He and his younger brother, Joel, were desperately afraid of him growing up: “If we screwed up, he’d hit us… Dad was from the hitting generation, and when he raged, I learned early on to stay away and be quiet,” he writes. “I worked hard to stay off Dad’s radar and not anger him further when he was in a mood.”

‘I worked hard to stay off Dad’s radar and not anger him further’: a young Michael Douglas with his father Kirk - Lisa Larsen//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Douglas was encouraged to become a lawyer because film-making, his father said, “is the saddest profession in the world”. But the law did not interest him, and he went to the University of California to study drama. Even when he became a successful actor and producer in his own right, and was finally cheered along the way by Kirk, the younger Douglas was besieged by an “ongoing internal conflict… I wanted to distinguish myself from my father; I wanted to be close to him. His existence hurt my confidence; his support made me feel closer to him”.

‘His existence hurt my confidence; his support made me feel closer to him’: Michael and Kirk Douglas in 1999 - Dave Allocca/DMI/Time Life Pictures/Getty ImagesHe was a drug-dealing hippy at university

Despite taking his drama studies at the University of California seriously, Douglas became something of a hippy in the 1960s, growing his hair and beard long while living on a free-love (and mostly nudist) commune and protesting against the Vietnam War.

He didn’t receive an endless stream of money from his father, and so Douglas also became a marijuana dealer. “When I went back east to visit Mom for Christmas, I would fill those suitcases with 44 kilos of grass, which I could buy for $75 dollars-a-kilo in California and sell for $500 in New York,” he admits. “It clearly would have been more responsible (and legal) to apply for a student loan, but that never occurred to me.”

He managed to avoid being drafted into the army on account of his spinal arthritis (spondylitis), the severity of which he overstated: “I’m not proud of this story. I am just being honest.”

His stage fright was so severe it made him ill

Though he would become one of the most successful and recognisable actors of his generation, Douglas endured terrible stage fright when he was starting out in small theatres. Again, the spectre of Spartacus loomed large. “Meeting me, you wouldn’t have suspected confidence was a problem. It wasn’t… until I stepped into the spotlight my father had dominated,” he writes. “Right before I went onstage, I still needed to vomit into a bucket.”

The fears continued even when filming Fatal Attraction later in his career. Though he and “bunny boiler” Glenn Close were relatively well-established performers by then, they both needed a stiff drink before filming their first intimate scenes together as Dan and Alex.

Douglas and Glenn Close needed a drink before filming their first intimate scenes together in Fatal Attraction - Paramount/Getty ImagesHe was responsible for reuniting Simon and Garfunkel – briefly

Shortly after Simon and Garfunkel split up in 1970, Douglas went out for drinks with the latter and a group of friends in San Francisco. Art Garfunkel mentioned that his old partner was playing in town that night, which so excited Douglas that he insisted they pile into his car and rush to the arena. His car was from the set of the TV police procedural he was shooting at the time, and he sped across the Bay Bridge with the blues-and-twos on, arriving backstage just before Simon had finished his set.

“Art, who knew everything there was to know about Paul, whispered, ‘He’s going to do The Sound of Silence.’ I looked at Art, the devilish glint in my eyes saying, ‘You know what you have to do…’, and I gave Art a nudge,” Douglas writes. “Art Garfunkel walked out! The audience went nuts. Just bananas. Simon and Garfunkel were back together!

“But no-one was more surprised than Paul Simon. The look he gave was not exactly welcoming. It was a look of horror. And, just offstage, I was dying laughing, absolutely losing my s---. Paul and Art were pros. They did a stunning rendition of The Sound of Silence together, just like the old days. The applause was thunderous.”

Garfunkel apparently beamed with joy at dinner afterwards and said he loved “those types of surprises”. Paul Simon was less impressed: “That’s why we broke up.”

Advertisement

He has had a very colourful sexual history

From picking up a “beautiful, olive-skinned” Israeli soldier “with a long rifle slung over her back” in the deserts of Tel Aviv to a “Mrs Robinson” character in his youth, Douglas’s sexual history has been colourful.

“Much of what you’re about to read, I’ve never told anyone in public before,” he writes in the introduction. “There will be some intimate relationships revealed here for the first time. I called each woman involved and received their permission to share our story.”

His “sexual awakening”, he writes, came while on a summer job in the editing room at Universal. He recalls taking his lunch to where Psycho was being put together: “That was my editing bay of choice because we got to watch the out-takes of Janet Leigh in the shower scene. She was topless in some of them. Now, Janet Leigh and her husband Tony Curtis were regular visitors to my dad’s house,” Douglas writes. “I wish I could say the fact that Janet Leigh was a family friend made it awkward to spend so many lunch hours scrupulously reviewing that footage, frame by frame.”

Janet Leigh starred alongside Kirk Douglas in The Vikings - Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Escapades continued in New York, where he lived with Danny DeVito in a one-bedroom flat. They had a code to let the other know that they had company inside: a sock on the doorknob. DeVito saw a lot of hosiery in the hallway: “There were some periods where Danny found himself living more outside the apartment than in it,” Douglas writes.

Douglas would meet his first wife, Diandra Luker, at Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration. She was more than a decade his junior and they married just eight weeks later, which they “probably should never” have done. The two would stay married, with several separations and much infidelity, until splitting for good in 1995.

Douglas finally confesses to those long-denied affairs

For more than 40 years, both Douglas and Kathleen Turner, his co-star in 1984’s Romancing the Stone (and, later, The War of the Roses) denied having an affair while working together. “That,” he tells us now, “was a lie… [It was] meant to protect my wife and son, a lie we told the world for 40 years. Kathleen and I fell hard for each other and began a relationship… She was an extraordinary combination of smart and sexy.” They broke things off after Luker became suspicious and visited the set, and Douglas decided to give his marriage another chance.

‘Kathleen and I fell hard for each other’: Douglas and Kathleen Turner had an affair while filming Romancing the Stone - Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images)

There have also been rumours for years that Douglas had a fling with his Basic Instinct co-star Sharon Stone, not least on account of their chemistry in many sex scenes. (Douglas says that while shooting a sequence in which his character had to perform oral sex on Stone, his stubble scratched her so much that her thighs were “completely red and chafed”. It left him feeling “horrible”.) He reveals here that he did have an affair while shooting the film, but it was with Jeanne Tripplehorn, who played his character’s on-off therapist and lover.

Douglas insists, however, that he was never in rehab for “sex addiction” in the 1990s, as many tabloids claimed at the time. In fact, he checked himself into a recovery facility on account of his abuse of drink and drugs. “A typical night was probably five drinks and a gram of coke,” he writes. “But if I was feeling particularly indulgent, it could be more. Much more.”

The sex story, though, was “utter bulls---. Look, I had made mistakes, had moments I wasn’t proud of, made choices I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t high, but I was never a f---ing sex addict. It damaged my reputation with the public, it’s come up in countless interviews and profiles ever since, and it will live forever on the internet.”

Catherine Zeta-Jones is the love of his life – despite that HPV story

After the demise of his unsuccessful first marriage, Douglas started dating many women – sometimes in tandem. But he says he “fell in love” with Catherine Zeta-Jones after seeing her in The Mask of Zorro (1998). “I didn’t have any intention of doing anything else – hell, I was 25 years older than she was. It might never have gone further than that, until I read an interview where Catherine said she liked older men,” he recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Hey, I’ve got a shot.’”

The pair eventually met at the Deauville film festival, in Normandy, in 1998. After dinner they parted, and he went back to the bar, where he “got smashed”. Zeta-Jones returned later that evening, however, and they “kept talking, long into the evening”. He walked her to the lift and prepared to say goodnight. It did not go to plan. “In a moment of temporary insanity, I blurted out: ‘I’m going to be the father of your children.’”

Michael Douglas with his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, in 2010 - Jim Spellman/WireImage

They spent nine months speaking to each other long-distance before finally getting together. Despite her youth, Zeta-Jones was no pushover and told Douglas that she did not want to go out with him if he was seeing other women. His reply? “Wait here, I have to make five quick calls.” They eventually married – at a lavish ceremony where Garfunkel, Gladys Knight and Bonnie Tyler sang – and have two children together.

The pair were thrown into turmoil in 2010, when Douglas was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue and claimed that it was caused by the HPV he’d contracted from oral sex. The claim made headlines around the world, though Douglas notably doesn’t repeat it here (he has previously apologised for the remarks and said he “regretted the embarrassment” they reportedly caused Zeta-Jones).

The two split for a year in 2013, after Douglas had recovered, but got back together and have remained married since. “From the second we separated, I never gave up hope that we would reconcile. I love Catherine in a way that I have never loved any other woman. She’s my wife, my best friend, and my life partner. I could never lose her.”

One Helluva Ride by Michael Douglas with Shane Salerno and Michael Fleming Jr (Headline, £25) is published on October 6

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”