Remembrances

Remembrances

This week Kirk Douglas died at the very ripe age of 103 years. He was born in December, 1916 in upstate New York. My mother, who always liked Kirk, was born in September, 1916 also in upstate New York. They grew up about 150 miles apart. She lived 100 years and died three years ago last week. In the same way that Kirk Douglas, a.k.a. Issur Danielovitch, was the child of immigrants from Belarus, my mother, Ludmilla Uher (a.k.a. Uhrovcik), who went by Millie, was the daughter of her immigrant parents from Slovakia. Their heritage was Eastern European (600 miles apart) and their families immigrated during the post-potato-blight famines in Central Europe. They both came from families with seven children . In the case of Kirk, his siblings were all sisters, who “drove” him out of the house. Both went off to college, which was somewhat unexpected based on their family backgrounds. My mother entered Cornell in 1933 and Kirk found his way north to St, Lawrence University, a small but well-respected school for the prep school elite. Where she graduated in ‘37, he took until ‘39. From there their paths diverged as much as their lives more or less spanned the same century, though they may have crossed momentarily in 1958 in Pacific Palisades.

I remember Kirk in Spartacus but his other 94 entries to his filmography are a blur to me. I think it is fair to say that he was near his peak in 1958, which is probably when he was cast for the 1960 release of Spartacus. It was that time when my mother, having traded the ethnically-contracted name of Uher for the decidedly more ethnic Prosdocimi by virtue of her marriage to my Italian-born Venezuelan father. That story is chronicled in my biography of my mother, Mater Gladiatrix, available on Lulu and Amazon or in great volume in boxes in my garage. My family had moved to Santa Monica and my mother had taken her Rockefeller Foundation lump-sum retirement distribution and put it to work buying an art gallery in Pacific Palisades. It became a favorite hang out of some portion of the hoi polloi (ancient Greek for “the people”) of Hollywood and I recall my mother saying that Kirk Douglas once wandered in for a peek at all her avant-garde merchandise, some of which still lives in the homes of my sisters.

What are the odds that two first generation Americans from small towns in upstate New York would go on to be be leaders in their respective fields? One a cleft-chinned heartthrob of the silver screen and the other a UN diplomat breaking the glass ceiling of the international agency and impacting the physical lives of the women of the world. One played on the dreams of women and the other worked on improving the lives and prospects of women, both important and impactful in different ways. And then, to see that they both lived long and productive lives for a full century, makes me proud of my heritage and makes me feel closer yet to Kirk Douglas and feel his passing as a more meaningful blip in my consciousness.

I feel I have grown up with Kirk’s son Michael and enjoy Michael’s work even now with Alan Arkin in The Kaminski Method. The cleft chin carried through from father to son and has remained his most noticeable characteristic. Michael’s most famous on-screen female partner (other than his current lovely wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones) was Kathleen Turner, who co-starred with him in Romancing the Stone. I have never met Michael Douglas, but I did used to work with Kathleen Turner in my private banking days. Just to further play out the Six Degrees theme here, her famously gravelly and seductive voice was a product of her upbringing as a foreign service brat in Venezuela during the years when my family was there under the regime of the dictator Perez-Jimenez. She and I did compare growing-up notes with one another on one occasion and while I’m not sure that really links me to Michael Douglas or, for that matter, his father Kirk, it does make me scratch my chin about what a small world this can be.

As I have been cleaning out my garage this week, I have stumbled on two boxes that must have been sent to me by my sister after my mother’s death in 2017. One contained a memorial brick to her that we bought during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It now prominently sits on my doorstep. There are also a pile of my mother’s papers, which I will spend some time going through, but on top was her Laissez-Passer or UN passport, which chronicles many of her later-year travels. I’m thinking that I will need to somehow frame that particular document and hang it in my office. As anyone who has read my biography of her knows, my mother was my role model and life hero. She was all that and more, not just because she bootstrapped her life from rural New York State to the global scene, but because she had such an overwhelming thirst for the adventure of life. I’ll bet Michael Douglas and his siblings are doing something likewise with their remembrances of their father.

As much as I want to be reminded of my mother’s life as I work through my allotted days, I have no such feelings or mementos of my father. He was more focused on himself than me or anyone else in the world. However, I had the good fortune to have a surrogate father in my mother’s second husband, who she married when she was 76. Irving Aaron Jenkins was a classmate to hers in the Cornell Class of ‘37. He was from the lower east side of New York City, the son of a labor organizer. He was 6’4” tall and weighed 240 pounds for most of his 97 years. He captained the Cornell Crew Team that historically lost the 1936 race against the now-famous Boys in the Boat that went on to Olympic Gold in Berlin. He lived a “James Michener” life, running a pineapple plantation from horseback on the big island of Hawaii for forty years. He was an action figure worthy of a Kirk Douglas movie and equally worthy of being married to my adventurous Gladiatrix mother.

In another box in the garage, I found a few dozen hand-blown glass balls that were floats from Japanese fishing nets. These balls had a habit of washing up on the shores of Hawaii and were collected off the beach by Irving over the years. They now sit in the well of a lovely Moroccan tiled fountain that adorns our entrance and looks across at the brick of remembrance for my mother. That fountain is the result of a visit my family and I made to Fez several years ago. All of these remembrances are good reminders of the fleeting nature of life and the joys that come from sucking the marrow from life at every turn. These are the lessons we should all take from Millie and Kirk while they rest in their well-earned peace.