Take What's Dished and Push Your Principles

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the 1986 film "Tough Guys"

Joel Douglas, the overweight second son of Kirk Douglas, and Billy Lancaster, the polio-stricken second son of Burt Lancaster, bonded from third grade on because they were a lot alike.

Ordinary 1950s kids with movie-star dads, they felt that they were competing with the world for the attention of their fathers and yet found themselves a little intimidated by the spotlight-intensity of that attention when they finally got it.

The worst thing was that unthinking question from adults: “Are you really Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas’s son? You don’t look anything like him.”

Joel finally came to see that the lives of both fathers were “…organized around controlling and hiding their fear and surviving.”

“Burt was a good man, a strong man, not a killer,” Joel recalled. “Most killers are weak, they’re manipulative, figure out the situation and go for throat. The strong guy takes what’s dished and keeps pushing his principles and ideas forward. Bill and I used to fantasize that our fathers were carpenters or plumbers where they knew we loved them for them and not because they were superstars and they came home every night at five and the only problem was getting food on the table and it seemed so clear.”

Source: “Burt Lancaster: An American Life” by Kate Buford