Kirk Douglas, the ragman's son who became a star and helped end the fascist Hollywood blacklist

(Kirk Douglas in 1955)

I was preparing to write about the sordidness of the Iowa caucus and American politics in general as the Democratic National Party, aided and abetted by CNN and MSNBC, does everything it can to scuttle presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, but I’ll hold that for later as more pressing is to address the legacy of the great Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, who passed away this week at the age of 103. He was my favorite actor, a hero on the screen but also in real life, and he deserves an appreciation here in Labor South.

I never got to meet you, but I almost did. It was 1988 at a bookstore in Washington, D.C., and you were signing copies of your autobiography The Ragman’s Son. The line was long to get a signed copy, but I waited patiently. It was down to a mere handful of folks in front of me when they announced the signing was over. Still, they came to the first few of us, collected our books, and I got your “For Rachel and Michael, Kirk Douglas, ‘88” on the cover page of my copy. When my day comes, I’m not sure which of my children will inherit it. A quandary!

You wrote The Ragman’s Son yourself, no ghost writer, unusual for books by celebrities. It’s a good book, and it launched a second career for you as a writer. You were indeed the son of a ragman, Herschel Danielovich, a Russian Jewish peasant, and Bryna Sanglel, daughter of Ukrainian farmers, both illiterate immigrants escaping the Cossack swords and clubs of the pogroms sweeping across the villages of their homeland. Your father became a hard-drinking, brawling ragman in Amsterdam, New York, collecting and selling rags and junk from his horse-drawn wagon, “the lowest rung on the ladder” even “in the poorest section of town.”

You would later tell your children they didn’t have the advantage of growing up poor. Your mother warned you not to become your father, and you did escape his world, but you carried with you its memories and they helped give you the drive that made you one of Hollywood’s greatest actors.

My first encounter with you was a Sunday evening when my family sat down in front of the television to watch your 1960 film Spartacus, that epic tale of an historic slave uprising against the Roman Empire led by the slave Spartacus. He would go on to become the namesake of the radical Spartacus League in Berlin, Germany, that led major strikes again German munitions factories around 1917.

I had little political consciousness when I first watched Spartacus but something in its David-and-Goliath story appealed to me. I would much later learn that you, as its producer as well as its star, would insist that Dalton Trumbo write the screenplay and receive credit for it. Trumbo had been blacklisted by the Communist witch-hunting House for Un-American Activities Committee and essentially banned from Hollywood. Director Stanley Kubrick, brilliant but vain and egotistical, suggested he get credit for the screenplay to avoid the bad publicity Trumbo’s name would create. You said “No”.

“Stanley’s eagerness to use Dalton revolted us,” you wrote in The Ragman’s Son. “That night it all suddenly became very clear. I knew what name to put on the screen.”

That act helped bring an end to the Hollywood blacklist that destroyed so many careers and even lives. It’s a period of infamy in Hollywood and the nation’s history, a time when a peculiarly American brand of fascism was allowed to reign and wreak havoc in the name of democracy.

"Some of the people accused of being Communists were Communists, but that is not against the law in the United States," you wrote. "I think we spend too much time fighting communism instead of fighting to make democracy better." 

From Spartacus, I would go on to watch and love other films of yours, great film noirs like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Ace in the Hole (1951), Detective Story (1951), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which I watched again just the other night. So many others—Champion (1949), Lust for Life (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Lonely Are the Brave (1962), all those films with one of my other favorite actors, Burt Lancaster—rank right up there among the best ever, tales of backstabbing boxers, manipulating movie moguls, tortured artists, conflicted soldiers and cowboys out of sync with the times.

In your 2014 book of poetry and memories, Life Could Be Verse, which you dedicated to your wife of 60 years, Anne, you say, “Hard work can get you fame and fortune, maybe make you a star, but nothing will make you happy until you know who you are.”  Let me add a thank you for your hard work. It helped make a lot of people happy, including me.