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Long Way Home - Hardcover

Douglas, Cameron

 
9780525520832: Long Way Home
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 052552083X ISBN 13: 9780525520832
Verlag: Knopf, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

On the surface, Cameron Douglas had everything: descended from Hollywood royalty (son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas), he was born into a life of wealth, privilege, and comfort. But by the age of thirty, he had become a drug addict, a thief, and—after a DEA drug bust—a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added while he was incarcerated.

Through supreme willpower, a belief in himself, and a steely desire to alter his life’s path, Douglas began to reverse his trajectory, to understand and deal with the psychological turmoil that tormented him for years, and to prepare for what would be a profoundly challenging but successful reentry into society at large.

A brutally raw and honest memoir, Long Way Home is a powerful story of one man’s descent into the depths of addiction and self-destruction—and his successful renewal of family ties that had become almost irreparably frayed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cameron Douglas is an actor, writer, and filmmaker.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

2004: “Don’t Gaslight Me”

Ever since Mom and Dad’s divorce, they’ve shared custody of S’Estaca, their cliffside property in Spain, on the northwest coast of the island of Mallorca. Mom has it July 15 to New Year’s Day. Dad gets it the other half of the year.

On a breezy July day when I’m twenty-five, Dad, my friend Erin, and I are eating lunch on the veranda, which is shaded with a vine-covered trellis and overlooks the sea. The woman serving lunch comes over and tells Dad he has a phone call. He leaves to take it in the bar, a good twenty-five yards away. A minute later I hear a high-pitched sound, a keening moan that is human, but I can’t tell who it is. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” I stand up and run toward the person, realizing finally that it is Dad. My heart drops into my stomach. I’ve never heard him make that sound. Something devastating must have happened. He puts down the phone and turns toward me. He’s crying. “We’ve lost Eric,” he says.

Eric is Uncle Eric, Dad’s half brother. The call was from the New York City Police Department. Someone flagged down a cruiser after finding Eric in his apartment this morning. He had overdosed on a mix of alcohol, tranquilizers, and painkillers and, at the age of forty-six, is dead.

As long as I can remember, Eric was battling some pretty serious demons. He was always having conflict with Pappy, my grandfather, who’s been amazing to me but is a tough guy and, as I understand it, could be hard on his children. Pappy is known to the world as Kirk Douglas, the international box-office star of the 1950s and ’60s, a Hollywood legend nearly as famous for his conquests (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth) as for his illustrious career acting in movies like Champion, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Spartacus. He scored three Best Actor Academy Award nominations in the process, rebelled against the studio system by starting his own independent production company, and also broke the Hollywood blacklist, hiring Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus under his own name. In the summer of 2004, Pappy is still vital at eighty-seven, and despite experiencing a stroke eight years ago, he has now outlived one of his sons.

We all knew that Eric was gay, but he wasn’t out. It’s something he clearly wrestled with, and I believe was tormented by. Although I think the family would have accepted his sexuality unreservedly, he may have feared otherwise, given that Douglas men tend toward a square-jawed breed of masculinity.

Eric tried on many hats, professionally. Beyond a handful of roles (like a made-for-TV movie in which he played the younger, flashback version of Pappy’s character, and an episode of Tales from the Crypt, in which he played the son of Pappy’s character), he got little traction as an actor.

In recent years, he’d been trying to make it as a comedian. He wasn’t great at it. He was angry, and most of his jokes made fun of Pappy and Dad, known to other people as Michael Douglas. From Eric’s point of view, Dad, given the success he’d found, should have looked out for his brothers more. Dad had tried to be supportive, going to several of Eric’s comedy shows, but then he had to sit there and listen to a series of flat jokes ridiculing him and Pappy and, most painfully, Eric himself: “There’s Kirk, Michael, and me. Oscar winner, Oscar winner, and Oscar Mayer wiener.”

Eric and I had a warm relationship, but he had a hair-trigger temper that could be frightening. I remember once, when I was a toddler, being with him at a convenience store, where he got into a fight and was beaten up in front of me. Eventually, his drug and alcohol problems became so severe that brain damage slurred his speech and left him with a limp. Dad and Mom would often say things to me like “You don’t want to turn out like Eric.” This disturbed me on several levels. Beyond sharing a famous last name and a drug dependency, a combination that made both of us newsworthy to tabloids, I didn’t think I was anything like Eric. It bothered me that they thought I might be like him. Deep down, I suppose I was most upset by the fear that in some essential way I was like him.

I feel enormous pride in our family. It’s with a mix of reverence and awe that I look at the careers of both Pappy and Dad. Eric’s life, ruined by impossible expectations both real and imagined, was the more typical one for a star’s son. Dad’s success, equal to if not greater than his father’s, is something that almost never happens in the second generation of Hollywood families. He has won Oscars as both a producer (Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and an actor (Best Actor for playing Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko in Wall Street), and has made enormous amounts of money in a career that has also included iconic films like Romancing the Stone, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct. Fifty-nine and silver-haired when Eric dies, Dad remains a force in the industry.

I’m sure Eric felt that pride too, but I can also relate to the pressure he felt and his struggle being a Douglas. It’s strange growing up seeing your father and grandfather as giants projected on screens and billboards. It’s unnerving to walk into rooms full of people who know all kinds of things about you, or think they do, while you know nothing about them. It’s diminishing to be perceived mainly as someone else’s son or brother, and it’s hard to develop a sense of yourself as a person intrinsically worthy of others’ respect. How do you compete with Kirk Douglas? How do you live in Michael Douglas’s shadow?

The NYPD called Dad first, and now it’s his responsibility to tell Pappy and Anne, Pappy’s wife of fifty years, that their son is dead. After he makes the call, I have never seen such utter panic and raw sadness in Dad. He arranges to fly to L.A., and I follow close behind. In the limousine that brings us all to the cemetery, everyone’s quiet. Throughout the funeral service and burial at the cemetery in Westwood where Marilyn Monroe was buried, I feel physically queasy, with an anxiety I don’t allow myself to pinpoint.

I cry only once, when Oma, as Anne likes her grandchildren to call her, almost passes out while she stands over Eric’s grave throwing dirt onto the coffin. I don’t feel the depth of emotion that I know I should, and it’s not a huge mystery why. I’m a bona-fide liquid-cocaine addict. Drugs are my number one priority, and my most reliable friend. They’re always there for me, in bad times and worse.

Afterward, there’s a reception at Pappy’s house in Beverly Hills. Pappy speaks. Oma tries to but is overcome by grief. They’d gone through so many struggles with Eric, and I believe they were recently in a tough-love phase, so on top of everything else they feel guilt. I feel guilty too, because toward the end of his life Eric reached out several times to get together, but I heeded Dad’s advice to stay away from him. We spoke on the phone, and I told Eric I loved him, but I wish now that I had been there for him more. His life was so tortured. There was a tempest inside him that created a tempest around him.

For Dad, Eric’s death hits even closer to home. Dad was in rehab for drinking and drugging in the early ’90s. His brother Joel, my uncle Jojo, has struggled with both alcohol and drug abuse. And then there’s me. I’ve been using and abusing drugs since I was thirteen. I’ve been in and out of trouble, and in and out of treatment. My current addiction is...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
052552083X
ISBN 13 
9780525520832
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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