The tension continued the next morning as Kirk, Anne - still not speaking to each other - and their young son Peter, along with his nanny, piled into the family car to drive to Los Angeles. Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne, in 1967 Photo: Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images As Anne later recalled, he even 'stomped off to bed without kissing me goodnight.' You can fly commercial and meet him there.''Īn argument ensued between the husband and wife, and a 'furious' Douglas decided that if he couldn't fly with Todd, he'd pass on the trip altogether. As she wrote in their book, 'I don't know what came over me, but I had a strange feeling. Six months pregnant with their son Eric at the time, Anne knew, however, that Kirk would soon be on the road promoting his movie The Vikings and jetting off to England soon after to film The Devil's Disciple.

“Mike asked me to go on his private plane with him, and we were going to stop and see Harry Truman and then go on to New York,” the actor, who has called President Truman an idol, explained in an interview with People. The next morning, Douglas returned to Todd's home for their 'regular game' of tennis, where he says he 'joshed him' about the jewels and making him 'look bad with his wife.' It was then that Todd, whose film Around the World in 80 Days had just won the Best Picture Academy Award one year earlier, told him that Taylor was ill with a cold and invited Douglas to accompany him to New York City later that day. Mike didn't need a reason to indulge his passion for his young wife.' Douglas' wife has a 'strange feeling' and said he couldn't travel on Todd's private plane 'It wasn't their anniversary it wasn't a holiday. 'He led her out to it and said, 'Go ahead, Pick whatever you want,'' Douglas wrote in his wife's 2017 book, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood.

As a surprise for his then 26-year-old wife, Todd had arranged a display of Van Cleef & Arpels jewels in his yard. In the late morning of March 21, 1958, Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, award-winning film and theater producer Mike Todd, called his close friend and neighbor Douglas across the street to his Palm Spring, California, home. Hollywood history would have gotten a tragic rewrite, had it not been for Kirk Douglas' wife, Anne.

Mike todd on relationships