Michael Douglas says Cameron Douglas has nothing to do with the moment that sent him scrambling for the phone in the late 1990s. Catherine Zeta-Jones told him she would not date him unless they were monogamous. He wrote back, “Wait here, I have to make five quick calls.”
That exchange sits inside One Helluva Ride, the memoir where Douglas, 82, lays out how he was juggling multiple relationships while serious about Zeta-Jones. He described that dating setup as “which felt like a respectful way to be nonmonogamous,” a line that sharpens the story: he is presenting a private arrangement as orderly even as the relationship he wanted required the opposite.
Catherine Zeta-Jones and five calls
“Five? You have to make five calls?!” was Zeta-Jones’s response, as Douglas recounts it. The scene gives the memoir its sharpest current-life detail, because it turns a celebrity courtship into a quick negotiation over terms, not a vague romance anecdote.
Douglas also wrote that he made sure the women he was involved with at the time lived in different cities. That detail is not just color. It shows how the relationship system depended on distance, which made Zeta-Jones’s monogamy demand a direct operational problem rather than a philosophical one.
Upper West Side and Danny DeVito
Years earlier, Douglas says he and Danny DeVito shared an Upper West Side apartment and used a sock on the doorknob as a warning when one of them was entertaining someone. He wrote that DeVito found himself living more outside the apartment than in during those periods. The memoir uses that setup to sketch a long pattern, not a single lapse.
Douglas extends the same frankness to an affair when he was about 18, describing the woman as “She was my Mrs. Robinson — she taught me a lot about women and what women liked, and it was very helpful information for a young man.” He also writes about family discipline, saying, “Dad was from the hitting generation, and when he raged, I learned early on to stay away and be quiet. I became shy and cautious. I rarely smiled or laughed.”
University of California at Santa Barbara
Douglas says that while he was at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he lived on a commune and took LSD more than a hundred times over a three-year period. He also wrote that he could buy marijuana for seventy-five dollars a kilo in California and sell it for five hundred in New York, using two leather Italian suitcases that each held twenty-two kilos. Those numbers make the memoir feel less like recollection than accounting.
His father’s response was no softer. Kirk Douglas gave him a $10,000 trust fund and told him, “From here on in, you’re on your own.” Douglas later wrote that his father “was transformed in the last third of his life. He became my dad in every way, and I became his son…We became stronger than I ever could have dreamed.”
The memoir’s value is in the collision between the polished public image and the arithmetic of the private one: five calls, two cities, twenty-two kilos, more than a hundred LSD uses, a $10,000 trust fund. For readers, the immediate question is simple and unresolved in the text available here: how much more of that private record Michael Douglas is willing to put in print after One Helluva Ride.
