Kirk Douglas was not at all amused.

For the second time, the 91-year-old screen legend had told me he was planning to return to the stage in a one-man show, and for the second time, I told him he should revisit his role as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which he had played on Broadway back in 1964) -- this time with an all over-80 cast.

It was the fall of 2008, and I had come to Douglas' Beverly Hills home to interview him for an article I was writing for The Hollywood Reporter about the beginnings of runaway production in the 1950s. I had been there a half hour. I had the quotes I needed. Yet there I sat, repeating the same joke.

I could see it in his eyes. Douglas must be thinking, "Who the hell does he think he is?! This punk, this pisher, wasting my time! " It was as if he was hissing the words through clenched teeth, as over the top as Frank Gorshin's famous impression of the actor. He was Spartacus, dammit! He'd dined with presidents and banged Joan Crawford!

The way I remembered it, anyway. But listening to the recording of my visit more than two years later, I discover that my Cuckoo's Nest crack got laughs from the two relatively young female publicists in the room and, regardless of what Douglas might've thought of the joke, he played along like the old pro he was.

"That would be a good show to do, because it's one set," said Douglas of my proposed revival. "I'm going to do it. You gave me a good idea."

If my memories of the day are darker than they deserve to be, it's due to the lingering feeling that, transfixed by the allure of fame, I had overstayed my welcome.

I had a similar feeling about Douglas as I watched him present the Best Supporting Actress Oscar on “The 83rd Academy Awards” telecast last month.  The next morning, publications from around the globe declared that the 94-year-old actor had stolen the show when he went wildly off-script, flirting with actresses a third his age, teasing Hugh Jackman and performing a will-he-or-won’t he routine with the envelope. I too was charmed by Douglas, but after the third unsuccessful attempt to ease him off the stage, I was half-expecting him to break out into "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls.

On one level, it was inspiring that a hunched and wrinkled nonagenarian not only had the wherewithal to walk across the expansive stage of the Kodak Theater and perform under blinding lights, but the cojones and the charisma to command the rapt attention of tens of millions of viewers worldwide armed with nothing but a cane and a handful of seemingly-improvised wisecracks. But if a celebrity between the ages of 8 and 80 had been similarly hogging the spotlight during someone else’s big awards moment, pundits would be making unflattering comparisons to Kanye West stealing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009. Of course, Douglas' manner was relaxed and engaging, not aggressive and confrontational like West’s, and, besides, it’s a universal truth that otherwise inappropriate actions are somehow charming if performed by infants or the aged ("Did you see him try to pinch the waitress' butt? How cute is that?").

What was most unsettling to me was the idea that after all the years of fame and acclaim, Douglas still needs it -- and us -- so badly. He still has something to prove, whether the audience is millions of TV viewers or a single reporter, as I found out when I rang the doorbell of the actor's home just south of Sunset Blvd. two and a half years earlier.

Check back for My Pal Kirk Douglas, Pt. 2.

When I heard of Elizabeth Taylor's passing this morning, my first thoughts were not of the striking violet-eyed beauty she possessed in her youth, her movies (let's face it, she didn't make too many exceptional ones) or even her stormy marriages to Richard Burton and six other men that made her a tabloid icon. No, it was the memory of holding an almost-empty bottle of Demerol, the kind you stick a syringe into. The patient's name on the label was "Mrs. Sen. John Warner." It was dated circa 1979. Taylor was married to Senator John Warner of Virginia from 1976 to 1982. That's right, I was holding Elizabeth Taylor's Demerol: a macabre piece of celebrity memorabilia representative of the pain that came with her glamor and her fame.

The bottle belonged to a man named B.J., who had appropriated it during his stint as one of Taylor's assistants in New York City in late '70s, a time when she was so heavy she was portrayed by John Belushi in drag on "SNL," munching on a chicken leg. 

B.J. showed it to me in 1989, when we were working together at the Sunset Blvd. offices of Celebrity Service, which provided clients not with high-end escorts or limos, as some confused callers assumed, but contact information (agent, publicist, etc.) for film and TV stars and other notable public figures.

The information was stored on tens of thousands of White Out-caked 3"x5" cards (already an embarrassingly outdated information storage system at the time), dating back to the 1940s. If you got bored, you could look on the back of a file and see what  hotel Cary Grant stayed in when he was filming To Catch a Thief on the French Riviera in the summer of 1954 or call Joey Bishop's home phone number and see if it was still good.

As we rifled through the files, B.J. would regale with stories of his days in New York, including tidbits about people like Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as well as tales of weekends spent at gay sex clubs in the Meat Packing District, like the one about the time he stepped into a cab after long "shift" at the Mine Shaft and the driver looked in the rearview mirror and said, "Hey, buddy, what's that stuff on your cap?"

I was fresh out of UCLA Film School at the time, but I'd seen and heard enough not to be shocked by mere bathhouse debauchery. If anything robbed me of my innocence, it's what I came to call Celebrity Festivals of Death.

Whenever news organizations caught wind that a celebrity might be dead or at least packing their bags for The Hereafter, our phones would light up with calls for their rep, as well of those of others who had worked with them, loved them or, it seemed, once breathed the same air.

Eager to protect their "scoop," the intrepid journalists from Entertainment Tonight, Variety, National Enquirer, Reuters, et al, wouldn't actually tell us the star in question had passed, but after the fifteenth call in a row for Frank Sinatra or Richard Pryor, we'd catch on and ask, "So . . .  did he die?" to which they'd typically reply, "We're not sure." Thus the responsibility of confirming the death often fell in our laps.

My first Festival of Death did not involve someone who was a true celebrity -- not in life, anyway. It was Rebecca Schaeffer, a 22-year-old actress who was shot and killed by a mentally ill fan in July 1989. Suddenly, the quiet of the afternoon was broken with a mad flood of calls for this girl who had done little more than co-star opposite Pam Dawber in the short-lived series "My Sister Sam" (1986-88). What's up with that? The first thing we had to do was confirm that her contact information was current, so we called up her agent's office and asked, "Do you still handle her?" We had no idea she'd been murdered. I can't recall for sure, but there's a chance her agent didn't know either. As information about what happened slowly emerged over the next few hours, a pall settled over the office. It was heartbreaking.

Oftentimes, the agent, manager or publicist in question knew very well that their client was dead, yet they denied it anyway. I remember calling up John Candy's agents at CAA on the March morning in 1994 when word of his death began to filter back from Durango, Mexico, where the 43-year-old actor had been shooting the movie Wagons East. As gently as possible, I asked if Candy had passed. "Um... he's not feeling well," replied the agent's young female assistant. It's possible that they were trying to make sure Candy's family and associates heard the news from them or another friendly source first, instead of a journalist calling for a reaction. ("I'm sorry. You didn't know? He's dead.") But agents' assistants know that the truth won't set them free, it will only get them in trouble, so they lie as a matter of course.

Usually, the is-he-or-isn't-he-dead drama unfolds behind the scenes and, more often than not, the rumor turns out to be false. But occasionally the public is invited to view the festivities. In 1998, the Associated Press inadvertently posted its pre-prepared obit for Bob Hope on the internet, and the "news" quickly found its way to congressman Bob Stump, who announced Hope's death on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Back in Los Angeles, the offices of Celebrity Service were getting slammed with calls from frantic journalists, convinced that the 95-year-old comic legend was already reading his wisecracks off of cue cards in the Great Beyond. I called Hope Enterprises and Linda Hope came on the line and told me her father was alive and had "just finished eating breakfast in his Toluca Lake (Calif.) home." Translation: Not only is Old Ski Nose still breathing, he's not in the hospital being fed through a tube.

With the TMZ-ing of celebrity reporting in recent years, this might all seem a little quaint now, but it affected me enough that I was moved to write an article about it, titled Celebrity Death Feeding Frenzy. If it had been written within the last ten years, it definitely would've mentioned Taylor, who's probably been the subject of several false death rumors during the last two months alone, as she lingered in the hospital. And as sad as her predicament was, you can bet the journalists chasing the story were buzzing on adrenalin, just as they would be covering a plane crash, a war or a similar large-scale tragedy.

Taylor had come back from the brink of death so many times -- starting with a bout with pneumonia in 1960 that left her with a tracheotomy scar -- it almost seemed like she could go on forever. But her work lives on, right? And as her friends, family and true blue fans mourn her loss, I'm the jerk writing about her Demerol. I'm sorry. I guess I've just seen too much of the celebrity meat grinder.

As for B.J., he died of AIDS in December of 1989. Given his raucous bathhouse tales and his occasional observation that he was in "the waiting to die period of [his] life," we should've suspected something was up. But he never looked or acted sick until that November, when he went to the hospital with a bad cough and never emerged alive. I inherited his job as the editor of the company's daily newsletter, the Celebrity Bulletin, along with a note from Jackie O that he'd gotten from friend who worked with her at Doubleday Publishing ("Lewis ... I took the Russia book. I'll be careful. Thanks, Jackie.") I scoured his desk for the bottle of Demerol, but it was nowhere to be found.