The Actor and the ACLU

Burt Lancaster

When George H.W. Bush, in a craven bid to put himself into the White House, began to call the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American,” the ACLU needed someone substantial to defend it.

In a showdown, who better to back you than an actor who’s played Wyatt Earp? Without hesitation, the star signed on, and soon national ads were airing that began, “I’m Burt Lancaster and I have a confession to make: I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

In fact, Lancaster was an ACLU board member, and had expressed his concerns about civil liberties and democratic ideals through his involvement in film projects such as Seven Days in May and Executive Action.

“His political ideas had now distilled down to what he called a central ‘simple’ belief: the Bill of Rights was what ‘made this country unique’ by empowering the individual while setting limits on government. The balance between them was fragile and too easily lost without the vigilance of a group like the ACLU,” wrote Kate Buford in her biography Burt Lancaster.

“In the feel-good ambiance of the Reagan/Bush era, he saw a nostalgic kind of conformity that had, in his opinion, nothing to do with the hard work of tolerating unpopular opinions if a free society. Censorship, discrimination, abortion rights — for him they were issues of personal freedom. ’He was a very common-sense kind of guy,’ said (ACLU communications director Linda) Burstyn, ‘very aware of his own strength, which made him protective of others who were not so strong — the people other people pushed around.’”

Although he could be cruel and controlling at times, Lancaster was also brave and generous, a self-made liberal intellectual who always pushed the limits of his art and regularly stood up for the underdog.

Director Sydney Pollack recalled, “You couldn’t scare him. He knew who he was, what he was worth — knew himself better than anyone I’ve ever met. He was, in a curious sense, fearless: he had no fear. I was always curious: Where’d this guy come from, to be like this? It was because there was nothing at stake for him in terms of his own self-worth.”

“Burt would come out in the morning to get the newspaper in a nightshirt and Rayfiel said that looking at him was like going to the zoo and there’s one animal that just stands out, that’s built different and better than anyone else. That’s what Burt was like — he was like a better animal. He had a stronger and more integrated character than most people have. He was in one piece.”

And director John Frankenheimer said Lancaster was “a very dedicated honest man who wanted to do good work in a society where it’s very difficult to do good work.”

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