Days after Douglas wrote in his memoir that the two lied for four decades about their Romancing the Stone romance, Turner has responded with a shrug and a laugh.
Forty years is a long time to keep a secret, and Michael Douglas just let this one out in print.
In his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, the 82-year-old actor writes that he and Kathleen Turner were lovers during the making of 1984's Romancing the Stone, shot on location in Mexico, and that the two of them spent four decades publicly denying it. Douglas was separated from his then-wife Diandra Douglas at the time, though still legally married. He and Turner told the world, repeatedly and for years, that nothing had happened between them.
It had.
"It was a lie meant to protect my wife and son, a lie we told the world for 40 years," Douglas writes. He goes further, recalling how he'd slip into Turner's hotel room after the rest of the cast and crew had gone to sleep, a routine he says neither director Robert Zemeckis nor co-star Danny DeVito ever caught on to.
Turner's side of the official story, as Douglas tells it, held up even in interviews given "only a few years ago." He quotes her telling PEOPLE at the time: "Oh I was yearning, babe, but he was still married... It was that wonderful sexual tension, you know?" Flirtation, in other words. Nothing more. That was the line.
Now that Douglas has broken it himself, Turner isn't fighting him on the facts. Asked by PEOPLE to respond, she kept it light. "Good heavens, what a fuss about something 40 years ago! I love Michael, and I look forward to enjoying the book," she said. No denial, no pushback, just the sound of someone who clearly isn't losing sleep over a decades-old romance getting its moment in print.
The backstory, per Douglas's account, is messier than a simple on-set fling. His marriage to Diandra was already strained, with both having affairs of their own, including his, with the film's screenwriter Diane Thomas. What he had with Turner, he insists, wasn't casual. "It wasn't a fly-by-night affair," he writes, pointing instead to the pressure of the shoot and the closeness it forced on them. The relationship ended only when Diandra brought their young son Cameron to the Mexico set, and Turner, by Douglas's telling, chose to step back rather than get in the way of a marriage, even a rocky one.
Douglas went home. The marriage didn't really recover, not in the long run, but the two actors kept working together through Jewel of the Nile, War of the Roses and The Kominsky Method, chemistry intact, secret intact too.
Turner, for her part, moved on fast. By the time Romancing the Stone wrapped, she'd met property developer Jay Weiss, who helped her find an apartment in New York. They married that August, in 1984, and had a daughter, Rachel, three years later. The marriage lasted roughly two decades before ending in divorce in 2007.
What happens next is simple enough: the book is out, the quotes are already circulating, and Douglas and Turner, by all accounts, are still friends. Whether either of them says anything more on a press tour is the only thing left hanging.
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