On Friday night, Michael Douglas stopped by “Real Time with Bill Maher” to promote his mammoth memoir “One Helluva Ride,” chronicling the acclaimed actor and producer’s rise through the Hollywood ranks, from winning the Best Picture Oscar for producing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to winning the Best Actor Oscar for “Wall Street” to the present-day.
The book also covered “sex, drugs and rock and roll,” as he told Maher, including how Douglas helped pay for college by smuggling marijuana across the country in fancy suitcases gifted to him by his actor-father Kirk Douglas.
“You and I share something in common about getting through college together,” offered Douglas, to which Maher replied, “What it is we discovered is that when you buy pot in one place and sell it in a different place, the difference between those two amounts can be very good in living your life.”
“Especially between East Coast and West Coast,” Douglas added. “When I turned 21, Dad wrote me a check for $10,000 and said, ‘Great son, you’re on your own.’ I said, ‘Well, Dad, this is wonderful, but I’ve got a couple of years of tuition left in school…’”
So, Douglas took matters into his own hands. “One time I said, ‘Dad, you remember one Christmas you bought me two beautiful Italian soft leather suitcases? Well, I found out that each one of those suitcases could hold 22 kilos of marijuana.’ I would go back east to see my mom with the clothes on my back and two suitcases. This was called BD: Before Dogs.”
Later on in their talk, the HBO host gave Douglas props for working normal jobs to make money despite having a rich actor as a father, including his time working at a Mobil gas station in Connecticut at the age of 20 and earning the title of “Mobil Man of the Month.” The topic prompted Douglas to address the “nepo baby” discourse, where the children of Hollywood players have been criticized for getting a significant leg up in the industry.
“With this ‘nepo baby’ thing, doesn’t every single business, doesn’t a father or a mother want their son or daughter to go into the business?” he asked, defensively. “They have a sign that says ‘so and so and sons,’ so why pick on show business?”