Hollywood’s Darkest Star

It only takes one look at Kirk Douglas’s chiseled face to realize he was no ordinary Hollywood heartthrob. Whether playing Vincent van Gogh or Spartacus, Douglas brought an intensity to the screen that no one else could match. But the real drama started when the cameras stopped rolling. A grim shadow was cast over Kirk Douglas’s film “Young Man with a Horn” when actress Jean Spangler mysteriously disappeared before filming had wrapped. All anyone ever saw of her again was her purse and a note inside, which contained a shocking revelation about Douglas. The whole story is coming up. From his countless affairs to some chilling accusations, it’s hard to say whether Kirk Douglas was a hero or a villain.

Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Amsterdam, New York. His family and friends called him Izzy. He was the only boy in the house alongside his six sisters. His parents journeyed to America in search of a better life, but their American dreams soon proved to be a nightmare. Izzy’s father had been a horse trader in Russia, but finding work in America was challenging, to say the least. Douglas’s father drank heavily, squandering his meager profits on the bottle every night. That meant back home, Izzy, his mother, and his sisters often went hungry. Worse still, when their father did come home, he often grew violent. While his life at home was miserable, Douglas excelled at school. He began appearing in plays and soon realized that he wanted to become an actor, but Douglas discovered much more than a future career at his high school.

Kirk Douglas’s high school flame wasn’t a cheerleader or the girl next door. No, his first love was Mrs. Louise Livingston, his English teacher. She took notice of him in class when he was just fourteen years old, and soon he was staying after class with her to read poetry. Mrs. Livingston read poetry to her teenage pupil, and eventually, she clasped his hand under the table, holding it firmly to her thigh. In his memoir, Douglas recalls feeling nervous and excited at the feeling of his hand in hers, but that couldn’t compare to what happened next. Soon, Douglas and his teacher took their poetry sessions from the classroom to Livingston’s home. The first time she propositioned young Izzy, he panicked and fled, overwhelmed by the taboo of it all. If he felt that was a missed opportunity, however, he didn’t have to worry. Mrs. Livingston was persistent, and soon they were sleeping together. Though they stopped sleeping together once Douglas graduated, the twisted power dynamics of that first relationship would shape Kirk Douglas’s messy love life forever. The two stayed in touch for the rest of her life; Douglas even helped support her, sending money when she needed it.

After university, Douglas earned a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. By now, he was much older than his fellow classmates. Soon, he became friends with another aspiring actor, a young woman named Betty Joan Perske, who would eventually change her first name to Lauren Bacall. Bacall dreamed about getting together with Douglas, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, the pair remained friends throughout school and beyond. Most of the students at the Academy came from fairly well-to-do backgrounds, Bacall included. Douglas, still going by Izzy Demsky at this point, was from an entirely different world, but Bacall came to this shocking realization when she discovered that her friend had spent a night behind bars. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he simply had no money to his name and needed a place to sleep. Bacall never forgot about that, and eventually, she helped Douglas get his foothold in show business. She also introduced him to his first wife.

Though Douglas wasn’t serious about having a relationship with Bacall, her friend Diana Dill was another matter entirely. Dill would eventually become Douglas’s first wife, giving him sons Michael and Joel Douglas. Dill married Douglas in 1943 while World War II was still raging. Their marriage fizzled out; maybe there was just no spark, or maybe Diana Dill realized that marriage to Kirk Douglas would not be easy.

After World War II ended, Douglas started working on the New York City stage. He soon got a call from his friend Betty Bacall, Lauren Bacall by this point. She had recommended him to Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis, who was looking for new male movie stars. This got Douglas his first film role, “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” Within a decade, he would be one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Kirk Douglas really arrived after his eighth movie, “Champion,” in 1949. For the first time, Douglas played a true hard-nosed tough guy, the role he was born to play. His alarmingly authentic acting style was a stark contrast to the classic male movie stars of the period, and it defined his performances for the rest of his career.

By the 1950s, Douglas was a bona fide movie star, and that’s when he really started to go wild. Though nearly everyone in America knew his face, Douglas still saw himself as someone who had to fight and scrap for everything he got. Fiercely competitive as an actor, Douglas wanted to dominate every picture and every scene he was in. He quickly gained a reputation as one of the most difficult men to work with in Hollywood, but few people could argue with the results.

The studio system still dominated Hollywood when Douglas began his career, and he played a large part in changing that. Before, studios would sign actors to extremely long, extremely rigid contracts. That didn’t exactly fly with Kirk Douglas. Douglas broke his studio contracts and started his own production company, Bryna Productions. With Bryna, Douglas gained almost complete control over his own career, something completely unheard of only a few years earlier. But while he had a handle on his career, his personal life was still as messy as it had ever been.

While Douglas and his ex, Diana, remained close friends, it wasn’t easy on everyone in the family. Douglas once recalled a heartbreaking moment when he spent the day with Diana and their two sons. At one point, little Michael took Douglas’s hand and put it in Diana’s. He looked up at his parents and said, “Now the family is together.” Sadly for Michael and Joel, that was only a fantasy. In fact, Douglas’s womanizing was getting worse than ever. Maybe it’s not surprising, seeing as his first relationship was with his much older English teacher, but Kirk Douglas had, let’s say, an unhealthy view of women.

Take Italian actress Pier Angeli. Angeli was many years younger than Douglas, who fell in love with her at first sight. However, it was all for the wrong reasons. Douglas discussed Angeli plainly in his memoir. He saw her as a young, perfect, virginal Madonna, a woman whom he could mold into whatever shape he wanted. His masculine charms evidently worked on her, and soon Douglas asked her to marry him. Had they actually gone through with it, who knows what shape Douglas would have molded Angeli into. Lucky for her, before they got the chance to tie the knot, Douglas’s eyes started to wander. Kirk started seeing his second wife while still engaged to Angeli.

Her name was Anne Buydens, and Douglas quickly realized she was not like the other women he’d been with. Douglas usually only had to give a chiseled grin and women became putty in his hands. He got a rude awakening with Anne Buydens. When Douglas asked out this enchanting European beauty, he didn’t expect her unimpressed response. She said, “No thank you, I think I’ll go home and make myself some scrambled eggs.” Kirk Douglas simply could not believe that this woman would turn him down. He was a gigantic movie star, after all. The scrambled eggs quip lit a fire under him, and he pursued Buydens until her no turned into a yes. But wait, wasn’t he engaged to Pier Angeli? Douglas rarely waited long when he knew what he wanted. He broke things off with Angeli, proposed to Buydens, and by 1954 they were married.

However, perhaps Buydens still had some doubts about her new movie star husband. When she said her vows, she called him her “awfully wedded husband.” Maybe she was just making a little joke, or maybe she had a feeling about the dark days ahead. Obviously, Kirk Douglas was a famous movie star, so his new wife assumed that she was marrying a rich man. However, when Buydens traveled to the US with her new hubby for the first time, she made a shocking discovery: Kirk Douglas was flat broke. After growing up in crippling poverty, he had hired a financial manager to oversee his wealth. Unfortunately, he had put his trust in the wrong man. Douglas was as surprised as Buydens to learn he’d blown through all of his money. However, his savior had arrived. Anne’s father had been a businessman, and he’d taught her a thing or two. Buydens immediately took control over her husband’s finances, and her smart investments quickly had him in the black. The couple soon had two more sons, and within just a few years of marrying, it appeared like they had achieved perfect marital bliss.

However, behind closed doors, no one would call this union perfect. Kirk had spent his entire life jumping from one woman to another, married or not. Hollywood in the 1950s was a debauched haven for free love, and Kirk Douglas was at the center of it all. One of his most famous conquests was legendary bombshell Rita Hayworth, though Douglas admitted he found her quite boring. It seems as though everyone slept with everyone in 1950s Hollywood. Kirk Douglas’s memoir contains detailed accounts of his dalliances, and he didn’t pull any punches when it came to Joan Crawford. The pair of them went out once and later retired to Joan’s house. Crawford’s dress hit the floor almost as soon as the front door closed, but Douglas had no clue what he was in for. From the way she creepily whispered to him about how clean he was, to her bizarre comments about his shaved armpits (he didn’t have shaved armpits), to her horrible breath, Douglas bared it all. Unsurprisingly, once he got out of there, he did not agree to a second date.

Douglas slept around while married to Diana Dill, and he continued doing so after he tied the knot with Anne Buydens. However, he and Buydens remained married for the rest of their lives. What gives? Well, this couple kept a shocking secret: Buydens knew about Douglas’s affairs. She once explained, “As a European, I understood it was unrealistic to expect total fidelity in a marriage.” It was unconventional, but hey, it worked.

Douglas wasn’t the only one who had suitors, though. Anne Buydens had been with plenty of men before she married Kirk Douglas, and one of them came back to haunt her. One day, she got together for what she thought was a friendly dinner with a former lover. She was in for a terrifying surprise. Her ex quickly grew hysterical and begged her to leave Douglas and return to him. When Buydens made it clear that wasn’t happening, the evening took a disturbing turn. Her ex flung himself on the windowsill and threatened to jump. Panicked, Buydens tried to talk him off the ledge, but that only made things worse. Her lover’s despair turned to rage, and he violently grabbed her and tried to disfigure her face with a lit cigarette. He planned to ruin her face so Douglas would no longer be attracted to her. Thankfully, Buydens escaped the room and fled, terrified, back to Douglas. That day, he promised he would protect her for the rest of his life, a promise he actually managed to keep.

However, it ended up being Buydens who saved Douglas’s life just a few years later. Kirk Douglas would have met a horrible end if not for his wife. In 1958, director Mike Todd invited Douglas with him on his private plane to New York City. Douglas ran the idea by Buydens, and she begged him not to go. She hated private planes to begin with and claimed she had a strange feeling about this particular trip. Douglas was determined to go, and the discussion turned into a fiery argument. Buydens won in the end, and Todd’s plane went down, leaving no survivors.

When he wasn’t busy sleeping with starlets, Kirk Douglas still managed to find time to change Hollywood forever. For over a decade, the Hollywood blacklist had cast a shadow over Tinseltown. The studios banded together to ban anyone with communist sympathies from working, and countless actors, directors, and writers lived in fear that they might end up on the blacklist as well. Then Kirk Douglas made a little movie called “Spartacus.” Kirk Douglas hired blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo to write “Spartacus”—in a bathtub, no less. This kind of thing had happened before, but here was the difference: Kirk Douglas was outside of the studio system, so he actually credited Trumbo with the screenplay. This was the first time anyone had broken the blacklist. The move scandalized studios, who prayed that Americans would avoid a film written by a communist sympathizer. But this was not what happened. A massive success, “Spartacus” became Universal Studios’ highest-grossing film ever, winning four Academy Awards in the process. The blacklist had already been hanging by a thread, and such an undeniable hit broke the dam. The blacklist was no more. “Spartacus” became the defining moment of Douglas’s legacy, and breaking the blacklist was undeniably a pivotal moment in Hollywood history. Though Douglas went on to appear in many more films, none could truly match “Spartacus”‘s impact.

Kirk Douglas remained a movie star well into his late life, but that changed forever in 1996 when he suffered a crippling stroke that left him unable to speak. Though he fought to regain his speech and valiantly returned to making movies, his days as a star were officially over. The effects of the stroke affected him for the rest of his life, but that was nothing compared to the pain he endured in 2004. In 2004, Kirk and Anne confronted their son Eric about his addiction and sent him to a rehab center. Though, according to Douglas, they had tried putting him in rehab more than twenty times already and nothing had worked, tragically, this time didn’t work either. Eric succumbed to an overdose some weeks later. The rest of Douglas’s sons outlived him, though he gave them all a run for their money. He lived to the ripe old age of 103. His wife Anne was there with him at the end, and she followed him just over a year later. Kirk Douglas had passed as true Hollywood royalty, but like all royalty, he kept secrets that couldn’t stay buried forever.

A shocking crime rocked the production of one of Kirk Douglas’s early movies. Jean Spangler, an aspiring actress and extra in Douglas’s 1950 film “Young Man with a Horn,” disappeared soon after shooting wrapped. Authorities began their search, but the only trace they could find of Spangler was her purse, found near the entrance to Griffith Park. Inside of the purse, doctors found a note that changed the entire case. There was initially no reason to assume foul play in Spangler’s disappearance until authorities found a note that said: “Kirk, can’t wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away.” It turned out Spangler was three months pregnant at the time of her disappearance, and hadn’t she just worked with a famous womanizer named Kirk? Though the authorities had not yet questioned Douglas, he actually called the station himself to state that he was not the Kirk mentioned in the note. Though investigators could find no one else named Kirk who had any connection to Spangler whatsoever, they believed his story and investigated no further. Eventually, they closed the case, and it remains unsolved to this day. Kirk Douglas went on to have a fabulous career, and Spangler’s disappearance ended up as little more than a minor bump in the road.

But that’s not the only young actress who may have ended up on Douglas’s dark side. In his memoir, Kirk Douglas briefly recalls meeting a pretty young girl in a suede jacket who asked him for an autograph. The young fan was none other than tragic actress Natalie Wood. She doesn’t appear again in the book, perhaps because Douglas was hiding his most disturbing secret from the world. In 1955, when she was sixteen years old, a man viciously assaulted Wood during an audition. Wood kept that night a secret for the rest of her life. It remained unknown until her 2001 biography hit the shelves, but the book didn’t reveal the identity of the assailant. Several years later, an anonymous blog post pointed the finger at Kirk Douglas, but it attracted little attention. However, in 2021, not long after Douglas’s passing, Natalie Wood’s younger sister publicly accused Douglas of the attack. The truth about what happened that night in 1955 will likely never come to light, but it is now an inextricable part of Douglas‘s incredibly complicated history.

Kirk Douglas ended the Hollywood blacklist and donated almost his entire fortune to charity. He played the legendary hero Spartacus, which cemented his place as a Hollywood legend. He was also one of show business’s most notorious lotharios and ended up wrapped up in some of Tinseltown’s darkest crimes. Thank you for watching this video. Please like and subscribe for more fascinating content.