Actor Kirk Douglas Signs His Book of Biblical Deeds

There is a long line of people outside Pages, the children’s bookstore in Tarzana, on a Saturday afternoon.

Waiting patiently, they are here to have copies of “Young Heroes of the Bible” signed by its celebrated author, actor Kirk Douglas.

When he arrives, the silver-haired actor, still handsome at 83, poses for snapshots and jokes with the crowd.

Inside, as each person approaches Douglas, it becomes clear that many have come mainly to wish him well. In 1996, Douglas had a stroke that garbled his speech. Since then, he has gone through the grueling process of learning to speak again--well enough to star in the recent film ‘Diamonds.”

He has also received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, celebrated a second bar mitzvah, authored a second best-selling memoir, “Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning,” and busied himself with good works. Among them, repairing public-school playgrounds.

Grants from a foundation started by Douglas and his wife, Anne, have repaired and improved almost 100 area playgrounds, including 42 in the Valley. And West Granada High School, a continuation school in Northridge, has changed its name to Kirk Douglas High in recognition of his support of public schools.

“For the first time in history, Kirk Douglas and I have the same plans for 2 o’clock Saturday,” a woman jokes as Douglas signs her copy of his book, a lively retelling of David and Goliath, Joseph and his brothers and other Bible stories with youthful heroes and heroines.

As Douglas explains, his speech slow but clear, he didn’t much care for the Bible as it was taught at the synagogue Sunday school he was forced to attend as a child. The stories were boring. So he has retold them in ways designed to appeal to kids. David’s defeat of Goliath becomes “The True Origins of Rubber Bands and Spitballs.” And the story of Joseph and his jealous siblings has as its premise that young Joseph was a spoiled brat before he grew into heroism. As for Joseph’s famous ‘coat of many colors,” Douglas writes that “it was made out of the same kind of shiny material that Superman’s and Batman’s capes are made out of.”

A number of men in the line carry publicity stills showing a very young, very fit Douglas in his most famous role, that of the rebellious slave Spartacus. “I am Spartacus,” several of them say when it is their turn to approach the actor, echoing the scene in which, one after another, Spartacus’ men try to persuade the Romans to punish them instead of their leader.

The women have other things to say to Douglas.

“Mr. Douglas, I just wanted to tell you you were my first crush,” says Pat Prince Rose of Encino. “Guess which movie.”

She gives him a break and tells him instead. The movie was 1958’s “The Vikings.” They trade jokes about the role in which Douglas’ Viking leader loses an eye. Rose assures him he was very sexy despite his lack of binocular vision, then introduces her teenage daughter Lauren. “She’s very impressed that you’re Michael Douglas’ father,” Rose adds.

Another woman approaches with her husband, a Holocaust survivor. Douglas’ first children’s book, which he is also signing at Pages, is a novella about a German Jewish boy who survives the Holocaust, loses his faith and then comes back to it. Douglas, who began practicing his Judaism again only after a helicopter crash in 1991, donates the profits from the book to Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

As for herself, the woman says, “I played hooky from junior high in 1947 to see one of your movies. I was scared to death someone would see me.”

Time has obviously mellowed Douglas. A baby starts to fuss as his parents wait to have books signed. Douglas takes the little one in his arms and laughs when the baby grabs his nose.

Douglas has three grandchildren, and another on the way--that of son Michael and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

“I told Michael, ‘I hope Catherine has a girl, but I hope she doesn’t look like you,’ ” he recounts, with a laugh.

The people in line seem to be fans in the least crazy sense. One woman is from Swansea, Wales, where Zeta-Jones is from, and asks Douglas to invite her to services at their Welsh church in Los Angeles. Every third Sunday the hymns are sung in Welsh.

As Marshall Lapin waits his turn, he runs through a list of his favorite Kirk Douglas films, including “Lust for Life,” “The Juggler,” ’Champion,” “Paths of Glory” and “Lonely Are the Brave.” Asked what he does, Lapin says: “I’m the dentist upstairs.” As for the patients in his office above the bookstore, “They’re all waiting upstairs with gauze in their mouths.”

The crowd includes a number of actors less successful than Douglas.

“I should have you sign my SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card,” one quips, ‘but I don’t think it would help.”

Several book buyers say they are here because they admire Douglas’ courage in defying the blacklist by giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit for “Spartacus,” a move Douglas was told could end his career.

“They should have given him an Oscar for that, not that other guy,” says Mark Ragonese, alluding to Elia Kazan, the director who received a controversial lifetime achievement award from the Academy in 1999, despite having cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A photographer who lives in Burbank, Ragonese learned about the blacklist from a movie, “Guilt by Suspicion.”

“He’s definitely my hero because of that,” Ragonese says of Douglas’ public recognition of Trumbo. “It took a lot of guts. It took more than guts.”

Douglas won’t describe the act as heroic, but he acknowledges the importance of what he did. As he talks, unself-conscious despite lingering evidence of his stroke, I keep thinking not of Spartacus, but of another hero--the aged Ulysses of Tennyson’s poem, the one who believes that old age too has its honor and its toil and that “Some work of noble note, may yet be done.”

Douglas laughs when I ask about his plans for the future.

“My plans for the future are to keep on living,” he says. And, he adds, to work on his golf game “and make another movie and write another book.”

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Spotlight appears each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.