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Authors: Michael Douglas, John Parker
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and the occasional screams from someone on an acid trip gone wrong. Most of us survived to return, at some point, to the harshness
of reality and earning a living. Or perhaps the truth was that we just got bored with lying around pickling our brains with
acid and scented smoke. But that was then. Now is now. It’s so different, no one who wasn’t part of it could possibly understand
it today.’
Kirk didn’t understand. He came looking for Michael one day and found him in his seedy, sparsely furnished shack with no plumbing.
He screamed blue murder, called Michael every kind of cunt and said that he had spent ‘half my fucking life trying to get
away from that kind of existence’ and now here was his idiot son taking it up for pleasure. Jesus!
As Garsite said, no one who wasn’t part of such an existence could appreciate it. Although the hippies of the San Francisco
area had already had a bad press, somehow Kirk Douglas’s son managed to stay out of the headlines.
Michael kept up his campus studies, while life in the colony was relaxed and carefree. He would say that he learned muchfrom the life there, particularly a sense of loyalty to friends and a communal trust, led by a spiritual searching and a sensitivity
about life that was so vastly different from the Mammon personified in Hollywood.
The activism of that era also engaged his interest and provided another platform of contemplation to which he returned virtually
as soon as he began his professional life. The counter-culture movement was born out of that hippie era and eventually provided
a decidedly more serious edge to the cult of just dropping out: politics, protest and peace marches, demos, campus sit-ins
and a general mistrust of authority became standard, and Michael Douglas was heavily involved in those too.
The draft and the shadow of Vietnam loomed large, as they did across the entire student population of America. Michael and
his friends would sit around for hours discussing how they could beat it. All kinds of schemes were devised, and Michael himself
decided that he had no intention of being drafted into that war; he would skip off to Canada if it became necessary. He told
Kirk, who said he understood. In the event, it didn’t happen. When Michael eventually went for a medical, he was disbarred
from military service because of a previously undiscovered floating vertebra. The scene at Banana Road provided everything
he wanted at the time – drugs, sex, a strong feeling of attachment … Above all, perhaps, the colony life surrounded him
with freedom and a surrogate family which, for the time being, were all he wanted.
CHAPTER FIVE
M Y F RIEND D ANNY
T he summer holidays of 1966 saw Michael Douglas back in Connecticut, where he was drawn to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
in Waterford. Even as a student majoring in drama and the son of an actor, he was offered no greater job than unpaid backstage
hand and general dogsbody, with the promise of a small part in one of the plays. It was there that he first met Danny DeVito,
a would-be young actor who was to become his lifelong friend and associate.
Michael and Danny were an unlikely pair. The diminutive but tough DeVito, five foot nothing in his stockinged feet, came from
a fairly typical sharp but comfortable New Jersey upbringing. His father ran a pool-hall and a variety of other businesses,
including a little bookmaking, and was sufficiently well off to send Danny to a prep school. Unlike Michael at that time,
Danny was very serious about acting. His father,noticing a theatrical streak, had encouraged him to study in New York.
Like Michael’s own father, Danny possessed sufficient determination and talent to win himself a place at the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts, where he became a grade-one student, a fact barely acknowledged in the early roles in which he was cast,
as in the television series
Taxi
. As he was constantly being
and the occasional screams from someone on an acid trip gone wrong. Most of us survived to return, at some point, to the harshness
of reality and earning a living. Or perhaps the truth was that we just got bored with lying around pickling our brains with
acid and scented smoke. But that was then. Now is now. It’s so different, no one who wasn’t part of it could possibly understand
it today.’
Kirk didn’t understand. He came looking for Michael one day and found him in his seedy, sparsely furnished shack with no plumbing.
He screamed blue murder, called Michael every kind of cunt and said that he had spent ‘half my fucking life trying to get
away from that kind of existence’ and now here was his idiot son taking it up for pleasure. Jesus!
As Garsite said, no one who wasn’t part of such an existence could appreciate it. Although the hippies of the San Francisco
area had already had a bad press, somehow Kirk Douglas’s son managed to stay out of the headlines.
Michael kept up his campus studies, while life in the colony was relaxed and carefree. He would say that he learned muchfrom the life there, particularly a sense of loyalty to friends and a communal trust, led by a spiritual searching and a sensitivity
about life that was so vastly different from the Mammon personified in Hollywood.
The activism of that era also engaged his interest and provided another platform of contemplation to which he returned virtually
as soon as he began his professional life. The counter-culture movement was born out of that hippie era and eventually provided
a decidedly more serious edge to the cult of just dropping out: politics, protest and peace marches, demos, campus sit-ins
and a general mistrust of authority became standard, and Michael Douglas was heavily involved in those too.
The draft and the shadow of Vietnam loomed large, as they did across the entire student population of America. Michael and
his friends would sit around for hours discussing how they could beat it. All kinds of schemes were devised, and Michael himself
decided that he had no intention of being drafted into that war; he would skip off to Canada if it became necessary. He told
Kirk, who said he understood. In the event, it didn’t happen. When Michael eventually went for a medical, he was disbarred
from military service because of a previously undiscovered floating vertebra. The scene at Banana Road provided everything
he wanted at the time – drugs, sex, a strong feeling of attachment … Above all, perhaps, the colony life surrounded him
with freedom and a surrogate family which, for the time being, were all he wanted.
CHAPTER FIVE
M Y F RIEND D ANNY
T he summer holidays of 1966 saw Michael Douglas back in Connecticut, where he was drawn to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
in Waterford. Even as a student majoring in drama and the son of an actor, he was offered no greater job than unpaid backstage
hand and general dogsbody, with the promise of a small part in one of the plays. It was there that he first met Danny DeVito,
a would-be young actor who was to become his lifelong friend and associate.
Michael and Danny were an unlikely pair. The diminutive but tough DeVito, five foot nothing in his stockinged feet, came from
a fairly typical sharp but comfortable New Jersey upbringing. His father ran a pool-hall and a variety of other businesses,
including a little bookmaking, and was sufficiently well off to send Danny to a prep school. Unlike Michael at that time,
Danny was very serious about acting. His father,noticing a theatrical streak, had encouraged him to study in New York.
Like Michael’s own father, Danny possessed sufficient determination and talent to win himself a place at the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts, where he became a grade-one student, a fact barely acknowledged in the early roles in which he was cast,
as in the television series
Taxi
. As he was constantly being
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