Cameron Douglas Claims Dad Michael Douglas Cheating On His Mom Caused His Drug Addiction
She stuck by her son when he went to prison on drug charges.
Instagram Cameron Douglas, son to Michael Douglas and grandson to Kirk Douglas, has a new memoir out. Long Way Home details his childhood as the son of a powerful Hollywood family, his fall into drug addiction and how a seven-year stretch in prison ultimately helped him get clean.
In the book, he talks about the years at the apex of his father's stardom when the Oscar-winner was partying with other Hollywood powerhouses like Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito. Cameron even remembers his dad handing him a joint and telling him to take it to a party guest at their house. His mom Diandra Luker disapproved of the drugs and disapproved even more of the way Michael cheated on her, something she told her son when he was only seven years old.
The stress and anxiety of his parents' lifestyle and their disintegrating marriage led Cameron down a path of self-destructive behaviors, including disordered eating and eventually drug use. When his parents cut him off financially, he turned to crime to feed his addiction. Eventually, he was arrested on drug charges and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.
Now, he's out and has repaired his relationships with his parents. He credits his mom and dad with sticking by him even in the worst times of his life.
Whi is Diandra Luker, Cameron Douglas's mother? Read on to learn more.
1. Child of the Foreign Service
Diandra Luker grew up on the island of Mallorca, where her father was in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. Her mother was an archeologist. In a New York Times profile from the 1980s, Luker described her childhood as fairy-tale-like, despite the loss of her father when she was very young. 'I grew up with writers and painters and archeologists,'' she said. She went on to study at boarding schools in the United States and eventually went to Georgetown University where she was studying to join the foreign service herself.
2. "Then I met Michael"
In college, she landed a job as a White House intern. She had planned to enter into the foreign service like her father but her experience working in Washington changed her perspective. "Little by little I started to change my ideas about going into the Foreign Service,'' she said. ''Then I met Michael.'' Michael was in town as part of the promotional tour for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and he and co-star jack Nicholson were attending a gala in the days before President Carter's inauguration. Diandra was also at the party and she and Michael struck up a conversation. She had no idea who he was. They spent the next two days together and it was only then that she learned that he was a Hollywood star. But she had already fallen for him. Nine days after they met, he proposed and they married six weeks later. She was 19 years old and he was 32.
3. The Hollywood lifestyle
The couple lived in L.A. because it was better for Michael's career but Diandra never felt like it was the perfect place to raise children. By the time Cameron was seven years old, Diandra knew that Michael was partying a lot and cheating on her. Cameron recalls his mother finding a bag of marijuana and showing it to him. "Do you know what this is Cameron?" she asked him. "Your father is using drugs." The Daily Mail reports that Luker also told him his father cheating on her. The anxiety of it made him cry himself to sleep and binge eat.
4. Passing out drugs for his dad
Despite Diandra's objections, Michael brought the drugs home and didn't even try to hide them from Cameron. He writes that he remembers handing joints to his father's friends at parties. "Even as a really young kid, I remember running joints back and forth," Cameron recalls. "Dad would say, 'Hey, bring this over to your uncle,' and I would, not realizing until years later what it had been. As I got older, I would 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." After the parties, he would rummage through guests' belongings to steal leftover drugs for himself.
Michael and Cameron Douglas.
5. Split at last
Cameron's state of mind was not improved by the constant tensions in his parents' marriage. Michael never stopped cheating on Diandra and even went to rehab for sex addiction when Cameron was ten years old. In 1995, Diandra hired a private investigator to tail Michael into a hotel where the P.I. caught him with another woman. The couple finally divorced in 2000, and Michael remarried that same year. Diandra later had a long term relationship with Zachary Hampton Bacon III. She had twin sons with him. She also adopted a daughter from Kazakhstan.
Luker walked away from her marriage with a lot of money and real estate but she ended up losing a chunk of it to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. She took her ex to court to try and get more money from him in 2011 — this time for a share of profits he made on the sequel to Wall Street. She says she only did it because of the Madoff issue and the connection Wall Street corruption had to the film. At the time, they both confirmed that typically they only ever spoke about Cameron and didn't have contact otherwise.
6. Descent into addiction
Cameron began using pot in boarding school and said that it felt like a "path out of loneliness." He escalated from pot to cocaine and heroin. He was eventually kicked out of school but that didn't stop him from doing drugs. He moved to New York to try and be a professional DJ but even that was derailed by his addiction. He writes that in 2004 he was powerfully hooked on cocaine and it was damaging his relationship with his family. “I’ve been using drugs since I was 13,” Cameron writes. “My current addiction is particularly nasty: I inject coke as often as three times an hour when I’m on the run. My once-promising career as a DJ has been destroyed by my irresponsibility. I’ve had opportunities to make a life in acting and squandered them. I’ve hardly given my family, or myself, reasons to feel proud. When Dad looks at me, recently, I don’t see love; I see concern and sadness and frustration. When we talk, it’s usually a tense interaction about money or the latest way I’ve disappointed him."
7. Cut off financially
Cameron's parents tried to get him clean — Michael even once hired men to kidnap Cameron and take him to rehab, according to Good Morning America — but when he continued to do drugs, they had to back away. The limited his finances and he turned to crime to fund his habit. By 2009, he was selling meth and committing theft to get money. He was eventually busted and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and conspiracy to distribute drugs. He spent seven years in federal prison, two of them in solitary confinement.
8. Standing by him
Cameron's parents were at his side when he was sentenced to prison and they stayed with him during his sentence. In prison, he got sober and really committed to recovering from addiction. He was released three years ago and he is now living with his girlfriend and their 22-month-old daughter.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. Her work has been seen at Ravishly, Babble, Scary Mommy, The Mid, Redbook online, and The Broad Side. She is the creator of the blog Stay at Home Pundit and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.