What’s on my mind? I’m about to use too many exclamation marks and italics. Hey! I’m an excitable woman! Besides, when you write about acting legend Kirk Douglas, the exclamations and italics tend to overflow.
Kirk Douglas celebrated his 102nd
Kirk Douglas celebrated his 102nd
birthday last December.
Anne Buydens, his wife of 64 years, is 100 years old, today. The couple’s 65th wedding anniversary is just five weeks away. And yes, that is a lot of numbers!
I met Kirk and Anne in 2001, in a retro Palm Springs piano bar called Melvyn’s. That sounds chi-chi, as though we were old pals. We weren’t even new pals. Kirk Douglas had never clapped eyes on me before.
At the time, I had no idea of Melvyn’s history as a Hollywood hangout for the likes of Liz Taylor, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, and numerous other celebs.
Together with my former husband, He Who Shall Not Be Named, I dropped by Melvyn’s because I liked the look of the place, lit as it was by thousands of tiny white lights on its roof-line and in the surrounding palms. I’m a sucker for tiny white lights and palms. Name one woman who isn’t and I’ll show you a liar.
(Women go nuts when we see white lights. We assume we’ve died and gone to heaven, all those years of self-sacrificing having finally paid off.)
Melvyn’s is a long, narrow room resembling an opulent train. The engine at the top of the room is the piano; anyone who wants to see and hear the lounge singer sits there looking cool ... an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned, Old Hollywood, place.
“One drink,” HWSNBN said. We took a seat near the pianist, who seamlessly segued from one equally old show tune to the next. Suddenly HWSNBN leaned into me, whispering: “There’s Kirk Douglas …”
HWSNBN had been spotting celebrities left and right for the two or three days we’d been in Palm Springs. His so-called “celebrity sightings” were hilariously incorrect.
Because of that, I sloughed him off with a disbelieving “Yeah, yeah …” and continued to focus on the pianist. Sipping my drink, I raised my eyes to the couple sitting opposite us. Clutching HWSNBN’s arm in a vice-grip, I hissed: “That’s! Kirk! Douglas!”
“I’ve already told you that,” he said.
“It! Really! Is!” I rasped. “Do! Not! Make! Eye! Contact! Do! Not! Look! At! Him!”
“I’m not looking,” he said, downing his drink. “Time to go!”
When HWSNBN said “one drink,” he meant “one drink” - for him. I’d barely begun sipping mine.
As HWSNBN sauntered down Melvyn’s long, thin train of Hollywood history, he made the ridiculous assumption that I was following.
From the top of the room, I saw a doorman in gold epaulettes bow to show him out. (GOLD EPAULETTES! Only doormen at Melvyn’s and parade drum bangers wear GOLD EPAULETTES!) HWSNBN reciprocated in kind, gesturing for me to exit first. His gesture met empty air.
What HWSNBN saw down the long hallway that is Melvyn’s was his star-struck wife, kneeling before Kirk Douglas like a novitiate, clutching his hand.
I, on the other hand, saw HWSNBN’s retreating backside as an opportunity to meet Kirk Douglas. Bounding to the spot Kirk and Anne occupied, I ignored my fast-growing suspicion that - other than the 1950’s Photoplay magazines my mother used to read - the sum total of my Kirk Douglas Information Directory was zip ’n’ zero.
Nor did it matter that I’d seen only one of Kirk’s more than 80 films. In the one I saw, he rode a horse and wore chainmail and a breast plate. Good enough.
I had no idea Kirk Douglas ranked 17th on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest American male screen legends of all time. All I knew was that I was in the presence of an actor famous enough to have been in Photoplay, and that he’d been sitting directly opposite us. This, I reasoned, was an open invitation to tell him how much I loved and admired him and had seen every single movie he’d ever made. Sorta.
By this time, HWSNBN was rapidly advancing with lips like a wire and a face that suggested he wasn’t pleased to find me kneeling at Kirk Douglas’ lap. It could have been worse. I could have been sitting on his lap. It could have been much, much worse, but his wife was there and Kirk is old and honey, let’s not go there.
I lisp when I get nervous, so at the very moment HWSNBN tried to extract me, I was stroking Kirk Douglas’s soft, marshmallow hand, fawning: “Ohhh, Mither Douglath, I loved you in Ben Hur!” Kirk looked chagrined. I’d forgotten Charlton Heston starred in Ben Hur. Seen one breast plate, seen ’em all.
It was obvious even to me that Kirk Douglas had had enough.
Although he was still recovering from the effects of the stroke that had impaired his speech, he managed to choke out the words: “Where ya from, dear?”
“Vang-coo-ver,” I said, continuing to kneel in adoration.
Extricating himself from my iron grip, he patted my hand dismissively, saying: “Well, you just have a re-e-al nice time.”
© Nicole Parton, 2019
