The star of ”Champion,” ”Lust for Life,” ”Spartacus,” ”Lonely Are the Brave,” ”Paths of Glory” and many other films. The actor the French nicknamed la Brute Cherie (the Darling Brute). The man who played a key role in breaking the Hollywood blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo’s name on the ”Spartacus” script. The father of four successful sons, all financially secure, one a two-time Oscar winner.
Now he is the author of a best-selling and critically praised autobiography, ”The Ragman’s Son,” recently published by Simon & Schuster. Surely the model of establishment success.
”In a sense, I’ve always felt on the outside, looking in,” Mr. Douglas says. ”It’s my background, damn it.My father was an illiterate Russian immigrant, a ragman, the lowest rung on the economic scale. There were six sisters and my mother; I was the only boy. To be a young Jewish boy in a town – Amsterdam, in upstate New York – that was quite anti-Semitic. Getting beaten up going to Hebrew school, after regular school, every day. Having to run the gantlet every block.