Greed Is Good!

by Dennis Green

Oliver Stone is making a sequel to Wall Street, with Michael Douglas, and it promises to be as insightful as the original. But in the meantime, I have my own Michael Douglas stories.

He was a theater arts major at UCSB about the same time I was a student there, and I saw him in several campus productions, including a fine rendition of Waiting for Godot. His father was often in the audience, and we pretended to ignore him.

Michael kept a big house in Montecito after his burgeoning success in Hollywood, appearing in The Streets of San Francisco, and later a number of major movies made there. Montecito is just south of Santa Barbara and a little over an hour, by car, north of L.A. A big enclave of old mansions and estates, it’s also home to Westmont Baptist College, where I taught Shakespeare, Survey of American Lit and Creative Writing in 1972.

Visiting friends in Santa Barbara one year, long after I’d moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I went to a festival at the old Catholic Mission. Sidewalk artists were inscribing some wonderful chalk art paintings on the broad pavements in front of the Mission, and the public had been invited to view these works, some of them completed, some still in progress.

So I was there, with the Clouses and my wife Stefanie, lingering over one particularly fine work of art, when a woman bumped into me, and then began rubbing up against me in a quite familiar fashion. A svelte, trim blonde all in tight-fitting black leather, the pants, the boots, the jacket, the works. And I looked her in the eye and said, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

And suddenly, I realized that there was a man with her, also dressed in fashionable black leather, and it was Michael Douglas! I had, many years before, interviewed him when he was named “Alumnus of the Year” by the UCSB Alumni Association, where I had worked as editor of the newsmagazine mailed to some 68,000 alumni.

And he was pissed. He took the woman by the arm and pulled her away from the sidewalk art display. I saw them a few minutes later, standing in the parking area, Michael berating her with anger in his expression, shaking his fist at her. And I had another realization: she was his wife!

This was the same wife whom, I was told many years later, by old friend Alsie Ellington, trying to return to the States from Santiago, Chili, where he’d been living with his third wife, a dancer who had left him to live with her first boyfriend…(Boy, do these plots ever thicken as we age..!)…the same Mrs. Douglas who made Alsie feel unwelcome when he had visited Michael at his estate in Montecito, after Michael had invited him there for dinner shortly after making Wall Street.

Michael Douglas is married these days to Katherine Zeta-Jones, who is currently starring in a revival of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Angela Lansbury on Broadway, which Diane hopes to see in March. And I’m really looking forward to seeing the new sequel to Wall Street. It should be a humdinger, for now we all know just how good greed is.

©2010 Dennis Green