Growing up in the shadow of one Hollywood icon can’t be easy, never mind trying to live up to two of them. Cameron Douglas, son of Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas and grandson of Spartacus star Kirk Douglas, was always going to have a tough time carving out his own identity. Sadly, instead of rising to the challenge he crumbled under the pressure, spurning countless golden opportunities.
To the dismay of his mother, Cameron’s life spiraled out of control. His relationship with his famous father also became strained to a breaking point, although for much of that tension, Cameron shoulders the blame. “A lot of the anger that I felt was really towards myself, because I was failing at making him proud of me,” Cameron recalled in his 2019 memoir, Long Way Home (via The New York Times).
The pair are on much better terms nowadays, though neither of them will ever forget the hell that Cameron put the family through. This is the tragic real life story of Cameron Douglas.
In his memoir, Cameron Douglas pinpointed the start of his struggles as a memorable incident from when he was just seven years old. His mother informed him that his father had been having an affair, and then outed the A-lister as a drug user to boot. “Do you know what this is Cameron?” his mom asked, holding up a bag of marijuana she’d found among her husband’s possessions (via the Daily Mail). “Your father is using drugs.” The sad thing is, this information probably didn’t come as a surprise to him. Douglas got used to being around wild Hollywood parties at a young age, hanging around the house while his father lived it up with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito.
“Even as a really young kid, I remember running joints back and forth,” Douglas recalled in Long Way Home. “Dad would say, ‘Hey, bring this over to your uncle,’ and I would, not realizing until years later what it had been.” Weed smoking wasn’t the only adult activity that Douglas witnessed on his father’s property, either. In his book, he admitted that he used to “creep from house to house on the compound, climbing balconies and seeing more than I was supposed to: beautiful grown-ups doing the things that beautiful grown-ups living lives of excess do.”
According to the National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse (via Columbus Parent), kids who see their parents smoking pot are three times more likely to pick up the habit themselves. In his tell-all book, Cameron Douglas revealed that he was barely a teenager when he first started dabbling with weed. “I’ve been using and abusing drugs since I was thirteen,” he confirmed in Long Way Home. For Douglas, marijuana was very much a gateway drug — he snorted cocaine at 15, took crystal meth at 17 and later moved on to liquid cocaine and heroin. When he sat down for his interview with Diane Sawyer in 2019, the ABC News vet asked the recovering addict if he ever came close to dying during the height of his problem. “Probably pretty close,” he answered.
In his book, Douglas wrote that he was “playing a game of chicken” with his life. By 2004, Douglas was injecting himself with liquid coke “as often as three times an hour,” he also revealed in his memoir. By this point, his relationship with his famous father had hit rock bottom. He could only see “concern and sadness and frustration” in his dad’s eyes whenever he looked at him, and their conversations were “usually a tense interaction about money or the latest way I’ve disappointed him.”
Cameron Douglas was sent off to boarding school in the sixth grade, a decision that he was very much against at the time. It was here that his addiction to marijuana developed — an addiction that eventually led to him being kicked out. When school officials discovered that the celebrity scion had been stashing drugs away in his dorm room, Douglas was expelled. “The impetus for a lot of my behavior as a youngster was trying to prove that I was worthy of that last name,” Douglas told Rolling Stone. “To me, that meant pushing everything just a little bit further than whoever was willing to push it furthest.” He pushed his school too far, however, and his parents decided they’d had enough, too.
At a loss over how to handle him, Douglas’ mom and dad sent him to a wilderness program for troubled, wayward teens. Participants were made to trek across the deserts of southern Idaho in the hope that they would come back feeling more appreciative. For Douglas, marching through the desert wasn’t the hardest part — he was more concerned with keeping his identity a secret. “I used to go into those places under my middle name [Morrell] because they felt like I’d be a target if they knew my last name,” he told the outlet. “Eventually everyone would find out, but I would have like two weeks of anonymity.”
After numerous failed stints in rehab and some futile family interventions, like the one which was staged by Cameron Douglas’ legendary grandfather Kirk Douglas, (per Inside Edition), Michael Douglas reached the end of his rope. The actor felt as though he had done everything he could at that stage, and he just he wasn’t able to “emotionally commit” to Cameron any longer. “You’re my son. I love you, but I think you’re going to die,” the desperate Wall Street star told him. Cameron had already turned to stealing by this point (he was involved in a few petty robberies after getting booted from boarding school, per Rolling Stone), so when his dad cut him off financially, he simply returned to crime.
By his own admission, Cameron took extreme measures to feed his lifestyle. According to the Daily Mail, it was then that he started sticking up local stores, using a Glock he’d managed to get his hands on to rob cashiers at gunpoint. In Long Way Home, the recovering addict revealed that he even robbed an elderly lady who was working the check-in counter at a little hotel, taking her last 20 bucks. He told Nightline’s Diane Sawyer that particular incident the “lowest point” in his life, and we’d have to agree — you can’t really get much lower than that.
Cameron Douglas discussed the painful moment his father stopped supporting him during his interview with Nightline’s Diane Sawyer. He recalled how his father’s words were “heartbreaking” to him at the time, and how he’d asked him if he even loved him anymore. “You were going to kill somebody, or you were going to get killed,” Michael said of his son while speaking to Sawyer. “We had reached a point where I thought I was gonna lose him, based on everything I’d seen.” That might sound a tad dramatic, but make no mistake, it was a dark and violent world in which Cameron was operating. At one stage he joined a gang called the Sewer Rats and would regularly carry a weapon. “I usually had a buck knife or a switchblade on me,” he revealed in his book (via Nightline).
Cameron was also involved in instances that Rolling Stone described as “nasty street brawls,” and Michael was well aware that his son had an aggressive streak when challenged. In his despair, the Romancing the Stone star hired two men to kidnap his son and deliver him to a rehab facility, but Cameron successfully fought the pair off. “I think everything made me angry ’cause I was so angry at myself,” Cameron told Sawyer (via Good Morning America). The failed abduction was another real low in his relationship with his dad. “I think we stopped talking for quite a while after that,” Cameron recalled.
In 2009, Cameron Douglas’ destructive behavior finally blew up in his face — he was arrested for selling drugs out of a trendy Manhattan hotel. According to the BBC, Douglas was allegedly procuring his product in California and transporting it to New York for distribution. Douglas had been using his room at the Gansevoort Hotel as a one stop shop for methamphetamine and cocaine. He had “large amounts” of both drugs, and was also in possession of heroin at the time, Reuters reported. In court, Douglas expressed remorse to his family, and admitted that he was a long-time heroin addict, describing his situation as “a nightmare of my own making.”
And now for some good news. Despite the tragic events that engulfed nearly his entire life, things seem to be looking up for Cameron Douglas.
He was first pictured with New York yoga instructor Viviane Thibes (above) in 2016, not long after being released from prison. He and Thibes (originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil) fell hard for each other and things started moving fast — they welcomed their first child in December 2017. “Since Viviane has given birth to a beautiful healthy girl on Monday afternoon, I’ve been at their side ever since,” Douglas told People. “I’m very happy.” They named their little girl Lua Izzy, a subtle nod to his grandfather, who was born Issur Danielovitch and later went by Izzy before adopting the name Kirk Douglas.
