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continue for almost two years.
    For the time being, Kirk carried the Hollywood mantle of the village Lothario, more strident than anyone around but never
     lovable because he had acquired a reputation for being difficult to work with, hard to handle and easy to enrage. He could
     never understand it or explain it. ‘I don’t know why I got tagged with this reputation,’ he moaned. ‘True, I’d prepare myself
     beforehand, do my work as I felt fit, and of course I’d fight and argue if I didn’t like what they were doing to me or my
     part. But if you’d asked Wyler, Wilder, Minnelli or Hawks – you would not find them complaining.’
    His life had all the ingredients necessary for a tabloid saga that was set to run and run, and it did. His most recent screen
     success merely added to the maelstrom. As he began working on
The Story of Three Loves
, MGM rushed out
The Bad and the Beautiful
for release in early 1953; it was a major hit, positivelybristling with good performances, especially from Lana Turner in probably her career best.
    It was at this time that Michael found other confusions difficult to apprehend. He had come to terms with seeing his father
     on set, but he happened to visit him in Los Angeles at the time
The Bad and the Beautiful
was being filmed. Kirk had taken him to the set, and Michael walked in at a moment when his father was engaged in a heavy
     love scene with Lana. Kirk spotted him, and sent him away until they had finished the scene. Kirk then had to face the young
     boy’s questions: ‘Why were you kissing her, Daddy … ?’
    These echoes from the past came flooding back later when Michael experienced exactly the same situations with his own son,
     only worse because by then sexual explicitness allowed on screen had moved on apace, to the bare bottom stage.
    The Bad and the Beautiful
attracted six Oscar nominations. Ironically, the only one not to convert into an award was Kirk’s own for Best Actor (it
     went that year to Gary Cooper for
High Noon
).
    There was some discussion that the role he played in
The Bad and the Beautiful
, that of a detestable character who used anyone and everyone, was not far off Douglas’s real-life image – a trifle undeserved.
     The columnist Sheilah Graham, with whom Kirk had several run-ins, described him as a boastful man who was so egotistical that
     he resented any kind of criticism, ‘if anyone dare give it’.
    There was, as one of his supporters suggested, evidence of a conspiracy against Douglas at this time. Not least among his
     detractors was the foul-mouthed boss of Columbia, HarryCohn, who was heard distributing some colourful invective. If it was a conspiracy, perhaps it had some effect, for Kirk’s
     career hit a bad patch during the mid-1950s before he changed tack and recovered.
    Whatever he did, Kirk was at the eye of a hurricane. The media descended upon him as the focus for everything that was happening
     in Hollywood at the time. He was the heel, the adulterer, the son of a bitch who slugged his wheelchair-bound brother (in
Champion
) … He was the explosive personality, the rampant lover, the Hollywood stud with a cruel, sadistic edge. Fact and fiction,
     art and life became blurred.
    Who was the real Kirk Douglas? For three or four years no one really knew.
    The sons in New York, out of sight, were not oblivious to these developments. In summer Michael and Joel were put on planes
     to journey across America to their father’s house, arriving nervously and with wonderment, the elder boy holding his brother’s
     hand and dragging him along. Sometimes they would join Kirk on location in other parts of America or elsewhere in the world.
     They were never shielded from Kirk’s temperament or from his background, which they were told they should never forget.
    Whatever confusion rested in their minds over their parents’ relationship, it was merely expanded by watching Dad at work,
     or meeting his current girlfriend: would one of