Michael Douglas is spilling some serious tea in his new memoir“One Helluva Ride.”The 82-year-old actor reveals that when he first started pursuing Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998, he wasn’t the only famous face vying for her attention. Kobe Bryant, who lived nearby in Pacific Palisades, apparently kept finding excuses to stop by her house. Douglas wrote,“I’m not sure how many times he‘lost his dog’but it was a lot!”
The timeline is interesting: Douglas and Zeta-Jones met at the Deauville American Film Festival in France, but he was based in New York while she lived in California. They maintained a long-distance connection by phone, eventually getting engaged on New Year’s Eve 1999 and marrying in November 2000. Kobe hadn’t even met Vanessa Laine yet at that point, so this was less a love triangle and more a case of two ambitious young stars crossing paths.
What makes this story truly touching is how it came full circle. After Kobe’s tragic death in January 2020, Zeta-Jones paid tribute to him, remembering her former neighbor and how his dog would wander into her garden. Douglas says he has no regrets about being candid in the book. So, what do you think — should celebrities share these kinds of personal stories, or is some stuff better left private?
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