6 Degrees of Michael Douglas

a man among men in Hollywood

Michael Douglas has lead a very interesting life. In addition to his career as an A List movie star, writer, & director he’s had his personal misadventures with alcohol, drugs, sex, & marriage. Marriage is the regret he’s spoken of recently, in relation to ex wife Diandra. While he says he regards her warmly as a friend, he also says that the marriage counselors did him no good service by prolonging the agony.

picking the bones

Diandra has had a bone to pick with him too. For one thing she recently took him back to court to request more money. People figured that he must’ve let her well off cause he’s loaded. She could’ve reasonably expected half the Douglas fortune, or at least the $40 mill or so that Heather Mills picked up off of Sir Paul McCartney after their marriage went bust. Was Diandra coming off like a greedy Hollywood ex?

bringin’ home the bacon

Well Diandra has her expenses. For one thing she’s got a slew of kids. Their are a set of twins produced via surrogacy – Hudson & Hawke. She was with a hedge fund manager or something back then, named Zach Hampton Bacon III. It’s a shame that she wasn’t getting some advice from him cause she got burned in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme (as well as through her feeder fund the Fairfield Greenwich Group). Many wound up back at square one after that. Kevin Bacon, who may or may not be related to Zachery Bacon 3, lost most of his earnings after Madoff’s crash and had to do some commercials playing off of his 6 degrees notoriety to helps make ends meet.

“You probably can’t afford me” – reverse sales & too big to fail

As for Madoff no one is sure what the secret of his success was except that as his fund got bigger he became more reluctant to take on new clients. He was concerned about the scandal getting out of the fund got too big so he’d try and talk people out of signing on. He was trying to keep things under control by preventing them from getting to big to manage.

That seemed to work like a reverse sales pitch. The less he tried to talk on board new business, the more he got a rep as an investor with an exclusive clientele so the world beat a path to his door. Normally savvy people up to and including Hollywood celebrities clamored to be let on board based on the idea that if he doesn’t want your business then he must be good. By the time the gamey miscalculation was realized a ton of cash had disappeared like water under the bridge, leaving a horde of pissed off investors behind.

the Kazakhstan Connection

Ruslana Korshunova

Back to Diandra. She also has some other kids. She has an adopted daughter Imara, from Kazakhstan. That’s the home of fictitious world traveler and probing reporter, Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat. Also of tragic model Ruslana Korshunova. She’s the girl who jumped out her apartment window several years ago and just as she was about to break big as a fashion model. No one was quite sure what drove her to jump, except that she may have had some issues with a former boyfriend. There were also wild conspiracy theories about that. Russian message board forum claimed she was the victim of a Zionist organized ‘white slave trade’. Others claimed that she had been approached by the Russian Mafia to transport currency back behind the former Iron Curtain. Models are frequent flyers. According to some professional conspiracy theorists like Fritz Artz Springmeier that makes them natural choices as MK Ultra mind controlled spy couriers. In Ruslana’s case she made frequent trips back to Kazakhstan to help support her family.

Success is a dog’s dog’s life

As for Diandra, you can add a couple of dogs to her woes. There’s Blanca, and Blanca’s own ‘companion animal’ named Namaste. Now Namaste may be her dog’s dog, but Diandra is still financial responsible. Then there’s a boyfriend Paulo Oliveira who drops by frequently. That makes for a full house even without the presence of environmental activist Michael Klein. She married him and then quickly divorced him in 2005 – marriage, like Winston Churchill’s definition of success – and these days also like hedge fund management, is often lurching from one failure to the next with undiminished enthusiasm. As long as you’re too big to fail you’ve got nothing to worry about, & how will you know if you’re too big to fail unless you try? Klein knows a thing or two about success himself because according to his bio he’s also an entrepreneur – though I’m guessing that Diandra didn’t make anything on that divorce.

putting shit on ice cream don’t make it a hit fudge sunday

So put that all together and Diandra has a big household that takes money to run. There were other misfortunes. Her god daughter Casey Johnson died suddenly and unexpectedly. Casey was the woman who started seeing Tila Tequila shortly after Miss Tila disgraced herself by accusing Sean Merriman of assault after he tried to stop her from driving away form one of his parties drunk. He claimed to have placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her from going. She flipped the fuck out and said she’d been beaten down. For awhile people didn’t know who to believe. That’s based on the PC principle that when a woman says “shit”, everyone else has to call it “ice cream”.

love on the rocks

After a little while common sense started to click in and people wondered that if a 6’4″ 245 pound line backer viciously pounded a 5’1″ 100 pound girl then how come she didn’t have a mark on her. That would be like a Volkswagen Beetle hitting a bus and not getting a scratch! She showed up in public a week later with some dubious looking bruise that some said looked more like mascara and foundation. Her story also didn’t add up. She claimed that she never drinks because she’s Asian and has an alcohol allergy – but played a bar tender on her reality TV series Shot of Love. Yet neighbors of Merriman’s had seen her knocking back vodka only days before the alleged incident. So things weren’t adding up.

crossing the line with Miss Tila

So along about the time everyone thought it would be good for Miss Tila to go away for awhile, she hooked into Casey Johnson. They were gonna get married or something. Miss Tila was often photo’d with Johnson wearing a smug expression that seemed to say “now you’ll never get rid of me”. Then Johnson mysteriously died. Johnson had some health issues, so that prob caught up with her. Still people began thinking that Miss Tila would be a bad person to stand next to in an electrical storm. She had crossed the line from annoyingly entertaining to possibly dangerous, and hasn’t gotten back even in spite of her impressive work in the conspiracy theory field.

down & out in Beverly Hills

As for Diandra she also had a deal on her home fall through. She was trying to unload her Santa Barbara mansion Montecito for $29 mill. That might have been enough to scrape by on but the deal fell through. She has worked out an arrangement where she leases the use of the mansion for special events. Hilary Duff & Mike Comrie got married at Montecito. Now word on how much that cost them. Diandra does say, of her financial plight & her decision to sue her ex Michael Douglas for more financial support – “Because of the type of human being I aspire to be, if Starr & Company hadn’t happened and Madoff hadn’t happened, and if a lot of other things hadn’t happened, to tell you the honest truth, I really believe I would have walked away.” .

Happily Ever Wonder?

So if we’ve learned anything from this long and meandering tale of misfortune it’s that everyone has their problems – & no matter how successful they are, they might be lurching from one failure to the next like everyone else. If, as Sir Winston Churchill allegedly said, that the only difference is attitude, then there are no people like show people! The thing is that anyone can have a bad day, or even a long series of bad days, no matter how super they are.

Wonder Woman shows us that you can even have fun in a tight spot, if you’re into that sport of thing!

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