Michael Douglas shared a lot of secrets in his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, but there’s something his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, allegedly didn’t want him to include in his book.
According to Rob Shuter’s Naughty But Nice Substack, Zeta-Jones was against her husband talking about his infamous 2013 claim linking his throat cancer to oral sex.
“Michael was willing to go almost anywhere in this book, but Catherine drew a line around this,” a source told the outlet. “She hated the humiliation it caused the first time and made it clear: we are not doing this again.”
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In 2010, Douglas was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer, per Page Six. While speaking about his diagnosis to The Guardian in 2013, he said he believes his cancer was caused by HPV contracted through cunnilingus — instead of years of him smoking and drinking.
“I did worry if the stress caused by my son’s incarceration didn’t help trigger it. But yeah, it’s a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer,” he said. “And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it.”
Douglas’ comments went viral, causing his representative to clarify what the actor really meant in an statement. According to People, it said, “Douglas did not say cunnilingus was the cause of his cancer. It was discussed that oral sex is a suspected cause of certain oral cancers as doctors in the article point out, but he did not say it was the specific cause of his personal cancer.”
Now that everything has died down, Zeta-Jones allegedly didn’t want to revisit this topic in Douglas’ new memoir. “That’s what makes the omission so noticeable,” the insider told Naughty But Nice. “Michael discusses incredibly personal things. This wasn’t about him being afraid to tell the story. Catherine wanted it buried, and Michael respected that.”
Though he doesn’t talk about this salacious moment in his memoir, Douglas does reveal a few secrets. He wrote that he had multiple affairs when he was married to film producer Diandra Luker from 1977 to 1995. Some of the famous women he was intimate with include his Romancing the Stone co-star Kathleen Turner and his Basic Instinct co-star Jeanne Tripplehorn, who is nearly 20 years his junior..
Not only that, Douglas said that he broke up with five women to be monogamous with Zeta-Jones.
However, all of that may remain a mystery to Zeta-Jones who admitted on the Today show that she’s not in any rush to finish reading the book. “It’s true,” she confessed. “As much as I love my husband, when I’m tired at night, I have no intention of reading about him. At all.”