When Catherine Zeta-Jones told Michael Douglas she wanted a monogamous relationship, he was dating five women in five different cities, according to Douglas’s own account in his memoir One Helluva Ride.
Douglas told her he needed to make five phone calls.
Zeta-Jones was 28 and still relatively new to Hollywood. Douglas was 53 and one of its biggest stars. Yet she was the one setting the conditions.
They married in 2000 and have been together since.
The Michael Douglas we knew
This was at odds with the image Douglas had cultivated by then. By the early 1990s, the line between Michael Douglas the actor and Michael Douglas the celebrity had blurred. Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Disclosure (1994), he kept playing successful men who got into trouble around sex. Off screen, there were rumours of his affairs with co-stars Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.
Movie star, sex symbol, women, excess. That was the Michael Douglas people knew.
His memoir, One Helluva Ride, published last Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing, does not try to sanitise that image. Much of the fun comes from Douglas spelling out which parts were true.
Kathleen Turner? Yes, they had an affair. Sharon Stone? No, he was seeing Jeanne Tripplehorn. The five girlfriends were real. So were the drugs, fights, and bad decisions. Douglas also writes about being hit by his father, his son Cameron’s addiction and years in prison, and his own cancer diagnosis.
This is exactly what I want from a celebrity memoir: the gossip, the grief, and everything in between.
If you lived that life, tell us about it
Famous people have lived lives most of us cannot imagine. They have had access to people, places, money, and experiences most of us will never have. And our love, attention, and adulation helped make them stars in the first place.
So when they finally write the book, give us that life.
Not just the career milestones and the stories that have aged well. Give us the affairs and stupid decisions. The things that went wrong. The things that were fun at the time and embarrassing later. The ridiculous stories that could only happen because you were Michael Douglas.
Douglas is not asking for absolution. He is simply refusing to rewrite his life into something neater than it was.
Celebrities have never been more visible — or more managed
A generation ago, stars could be mysterious. You saw them in films, read the interviews and picked up the gossip. You did not also see them at the airport on Monday, at the gym on Tuesday, or posting a birthday tribute to their spouse on Wednesday.
That has changed completely. Indian stars now put huge parts of their lives online themselves: weddings, holidays, homes, festivals and relationships. And there is money in that closeness. The more invested people are in you, the more valuable your Instagram account becomes.
And yet celebrities have never felt more managed.
Go back to the older seasons of Koffee with Karan. People were bitchy. They flirted. They took digs at each other. They said who they fancied and who they couldn’t stand. Sometimes they said something stupid and had to live with it.
That candour was what made it fun.
It is also what makes Douglas’s memoir enjoyable. He is not giving us a polished version of his life. He is giving us the affairs, the bad decisions, the family mess and the absurd stories. He lets the contradictions stay.
A marriage that can live with the past
Zeta-Jones seems unbothered by it, too. Asked whether she had read the memoir, she joked that after working all day, she had little interest in spending her evenings reading about her husband.
It sounds like a marriage in which the past is known, not hidden. What Douglas did 40 years ago does not need to disappear for the life he has now to be real.
The title says it best. Douglas takes us along for One Helluva Ride, speed bumps, accidents, and all.
And people seem to be enjoying the ride.
Edited by Maryam Hassan