According to E! News, Michael Douglas has confirmed in an excerpt of his upcoming memoir "One Helluva Ride" that he and Kathleen Turner were having an affair during the making of "Romancing the Stone" in 1984, days before the book hits shelves.
A forty-year-old secret doesn't leak. It gets excerpted. The confession lands days before the book date, which is not a scandal, it is a trailer. The memoir does the heavy lifting: the thing "grew naturally" on the 1984 set in Mexico, and it ended when Douglas's wife visited the set with their son and "made it clear that we were still married." Even the breakup gets a plot point.
Turner's response is one sentence of joint marketing: "Good heavens what a fuss about something 40 years ago! I love Michael and I look forward to enjoying the book," per Page Six. Note the "look forward to enjoying." She is not responding. She is pre-ordering. The co-star of a forty-year-old plot twist is selling the sequel before the premiere.
And the sequel exists. The two of them, the book says, "repaired things between us" while rewriting the script of "The Jewel of the Nile," the 1985 movie that put the affair on screen. 1984 fling, 1985 sequel, 1995 divorce, 2026 book. The story needed four decades to become a memoir, and the memoir needed the story to become an excerpt. The machine has been running since 1984 and has never once checked a box office.
YOUR TURN: Is "I look forward to enjoying the book" a response, or a co-signed press release?
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