Before the Oscars, before Wall Street and Taxi, two twenty-somethings paid $75 a month for an apartment in Manhattan.
Michael Douglas had just graduated and arrived in New York with a weighty surname: he was Kirk Douglas’s son. Danny DeVito was just another actor trying to make a living. According to Douglas, they met in 1967 on a beach facing Long Island Sound, when a long-haired man came up and asked him if he smoked marijuana. “We were two stoners in 1967, so we smoked a joint, and that was the beginning of a long, very long friendship”, he recalled in Cigar Aficionado.
It wasn’t long before they were sharing a roof. And living together produced some anecdotes: DeVito said Michael did the laundry, Douglas joked that his friend was the messy one, and a sock hanging on the door let them know when one of them needed privacy.
What Douglas values most is something else: DeVito “never treated me like the son of a movie star”. The trust they built during those years when they had nothing stayed with them through Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses, and even The Kominsky Method. Today, at 81 years old each, Douglas calls him “Danny D” and his “oldest friend in the business”.