Opinion | Studying the Bible With Kirk Douglas

He came from nothing. His father, Herschel, who emigrated from Moscow to Brooklyn in 1908, literally picked rags up on the street and resold them. His son, Issur, born in 1916, trained himself as a wrestler and managed to combine sports and academic prizes at his public school to go to St. Lawrence University where he became student body president. From there it was to the New York stage, the navy and then Hollywood, with the encouragement of his old friend Lauren Bacall.

Issur Danielovich became Kirk Douglas after college graduation. He sat around with friends trying on new names (Norman Dems was another consideration). He wanted a name that started with a “d,” and someone suggested Douglas. Another friend suggested Kirk and he liked the hard sound of it. He explained later that the gentile-sounding name exposed him to new levels of anti-Semitism because people did not know he was Jewish and would say vile things about Jews blithely to his face. “Issur” he wrote in his biography, “was with me all the time.”

He wildly outstripped his background, and yet always felt himself unappreciated by his father and seen with suspicion by a prejudiced world. He had six sisters and a mother who adored him (“When my son walks, the earth trembles” she said, and he loved to quote her. His production company, Bryna, was named for his mother.) But his father, abusive and irascible, never told his son he was proud — and it rankled him until the very end.

Kirk would speak to me wistfully at times about things he might have done better. He wished he had spent even more time with his beloved sons and told me that Anne was the best and kindest person he had ever known. He joked that he gave her all his money and the only thing he still owned was his wedding ring. Kirk had a deep well of self-confidence, and when he single-handedly broke the blacklist by naming Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus, he did it without a shadow of doubt. “I knew about exclusion,” he once told me. “After all, I was a Jew.” It was his proudest professional moment, and when the movie “Trumbo” came out he urged me to see it. (I did.)

The man who kissed Lana Turner in “The Bad and the Beautiful” on Yom Kippur (“Do you know how hard it is to kiss Lana Turner on an empty stomach?”) never quite lost his acute angle toward the world. He was always teasing and pushing and challenging himself and others. A few years ago, at 101, he gave me a stack of books to donate to the synagogue library. He could still walk but very slowly, with a walker and an aide on each side to make sure he did not fall. As I hoisted the books he looked over and said: “Like some help?”

He could be stubborn and prideful, but there was an element of self-aware mockery as well. As he and I once walked through a famous Hollywood restaurant, someone from a table called out “You were the greatest!” He turned and hit me on the shoulder and said: “Hear that? Now, a little respect.”

He got angry about anti-Semitism, about the government, about Israel and the Palestinians, about things in the Torah he did not like. Once, fed up with a certain passage when he believed God was being harsh, he slammed the book shut and said “Ach, get me a better story.” Yet he would also say over and over that the stories in the Bible were the wisest in the world, and if he were young, he would start making movies of them, beginning with King David.