Tough Guy

If there is some way to mitigate a tragedy, maybe we could consider that Kirk Douglas and Kobe Bryant died at a median age of seventy-two.
Which is to say that Kirk Douglas, father of Michael, has passed away at the age of one hundred three years old. I first became acquainted with Kirk Douglas via Frank Gorshin. Frank passed away fifteen years ago at the ripe old age of, you guessed it, seventy-two. If  you're not familiar with Mister Gorshin, you may be familiar with his incarnation as The Riddler on the Batman TV show. That laugh. But before we go too far afield, it was Gorshin's impression of Kirk Douglas that brought me into his sphere of influence. He suggested that you began by pointing a finger into your chin in order to generate the pronounced dimple in the jaw of Mister Douglas. This would in turn cause a mild aggravation which would cause one to growl with exasperation, leading to a facsimile of Kirk Douglas' voice.
It was somewhere around this time that I first saw The Vikings. It starred Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis. Mister Curtis passed away at eighty-five. Ernie beat that by ten years, but Kirk, who played Einar outlasted them all. Douglas and Curtis were reunited in Spartacus, which might have been a career peak for anyone, if they could ever figure out exactly who Spartacus really was. It was also Kirk Douglas who worked to get blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo credit for writing the script for that epic of sandals and chains. The only thing missing was Burt Lancaster, who starred alongside his buddy Kirk in seven movies.
Burt Lancaster lived to be eighty-one, and it was Frank Gorshin who taught me how to laugh like Burt Lancaster.
Kirk Douglas made almost a hundred movies. Some of them were Spartacus. Some of them were Saturn 3. And he helped end the Hollywood Blacklist. And along with his wife of seventy-six years he started the Douglas Foundation, "committed to helping those who might not otherwise be able to help themselves." For more than a century, Kirk Douglas stomped on the Terra and made some great films. And lived to be a legend. He was Spartacus. And he will be missed. Aloha, Kirk (with a finger in my chin).