Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Interestingly, Kubrick treated Nicole differently than he treated Tom or any of the other actors. He allowed her more creative freedom and he encouraged her to ad lib. When she was clever or insightful, he invariably excused himself to go to his office so that he could write her ad lib’s into the script. If he was not smitten in the romantic sense (what are the odds there?), he certainly was smitten by her creative energy.

  Even so, he cut her no slack when it came to retakes. Sometimes they nailed a scene in one take, but it was not unusual for him to ask Nicole to repeat a scene dozens of times, until she was exhausted by the sheer physical effort needed to read lines over and over again. Sometimes she surprised Kubrick. Just when he thought she was out for the count, when her head seemed to be drooping, she would roll her icy-blue eyes in his direction and say, “Let’s do it one more time!”

  It was the same thing for Tom, who was not used to re-doing scenes over and over again at that point in his career. Incredibly, he kept his ego in check and never faulted Kubrick for his relentless perfectionism.

  Not everyone felt that way. Veteran actor Harvey Keitel was replaced with Sydney Pollack, allegedly after he came into conflict with Kubrick, and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh was replaced when she apparently balked at returning for additional filming.

  For less experienced actresses like Vinessa Shaw, who played a hooker, the hard work seemed like a reasonable price to pay to be in the movie. “I remember one time, around three in the morning, I did my 69th take of a scene,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I heard somebody say, ‘Wow! That must be a record.’ And then I ended up doing twenty more takes.” It gave her a sense of freedom, she said, because it gave her an opportunity to explore her character.

  In the film, Tom and Nicole play Bill and Alice Harford, a New York couple whose lives appear fairly ordinary in the beginning. In an early scene, they go to a party given by Tom’s friend Victor Ziegler (played first by Harvey Keitel, then subsequently by noted director Sydney Pollack). Bill, a physician, is called upstairs to a bathroom by Ziegler, who has a problem. A hooker that he invited to the party, ostensibly to service him in the bathroom, took a drug overdose and appeared to be near death. Bill examines her and tells Ziegler that he has dodged a bullet—the girl will recover.

  Later, at the party, Bill meets a former medical-school classmate, Nick Nightingale (played by Todd Field), who dropped out of school to become a jazz musician. On that night, he is playing with the dance band, not exactly the type of music that he had in mind when he left medical school. He gives Bill the name of an after-hours club where he performs real jazz and encourages him to drop by.

  When Bill and Alice return home after the party, they do the well-publicized nude scene with “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” playing in the background. Although the script did not call for them to kiss like strangers, that is the way the scene is played. There is a sense of awkwardness in which there is no visible chemistry between the two actors. Bill caresses her breast as she glances disinterestedly into the mirror. As the passion increases, Bill squeezes her on the neck, a little too hard it seems. She seems bored and he seems, at the very least, angry.

  Later, as they lie in bed smoking pot, she confesses that she once had a desire to sleep with a naval officer she met in the lobby of a hotel. She tells him that she was so attracted that she was prepared to give up everything—their marriage, their daughter, everything—to spend a single night with him.

  Bill is stunned by her disclosure, but before the conflict can be resolved, he is called out of the house to administer to the family of one of his elderly patients, who has just passed away. On the way over to their house, he fantasizes about Alice and the naval officer making love.

  After leaving the dead patient’s home, he decides to drop by and see his musician friend. While they are chatting, the musician receives a telephone call instructing him on where to go for a super-secret private party. He confides that he has done parties for these people before. They blindfold him when he arrives and he is asked to play the piano.

  Bill is intrigued and asks for directions. The musician is reluctant at first, but soon caves in to his friend’s request. He tells him he must go in costume and he must give a certain password when he arrives at the house.

  On the way to the party, Bill experiences another fantasy about Alice and the naval officer. It is clear that he is becoming obsessed with her disclosure. She was not actually unfaithful to him, but the admission that she thought about it was just as damaging in his eyes. She was the mother of his child. He had trusted her.

  The party turns out to be a massive orgy, during which everyone wears masks to conceal their identities. Not long after he arrives, Bill’s deception is exposed. He is brought before the entire group and ordered to remove his mask. Clearly, he is in serious trouble, but before the group can issue a punishment, a girl cries out from an overhead passageway that she is willing to take responsibility for his actions.

  Satisfied that someone will be punished, the group allows Bill to leave the house, but not before threatening him with dire consequences if he ever tells a soul anything he has seen at the house. The remainder of the movie deals with the consequences of that night (the woman who helps him eventually ends up in the morgue) and with the effect of Alice’s fantasy disclosure on their marriage.

  Throughout the film, Bill’s continuing fantasizes about Alice and the naval officer, all filmed in black and white, provide the story’s most erotic moments—and the film’s most visible chemistry.

  ~ ~ ~

  During the summer of 1997, Gary Goba was living in London, England, where he worked as a model. Tall and handsome, with Robert Redford-like features, his agency liked to pitch him to potential clients as a stereotypical all-American type (presentation photos sometimes showed him dressed as a cowboy).

  But Goba did not get his rugged good looks from growing up in the American West. Born in Montreal, Canada, he spent his childhood in Ottawa, Ontario, and attended the University of Toronto, where he majored in psychology and French. Part-time modeling assignments led to a full-time career after he realized it offered greater financial opportunities than a degree in psychology.

  So it was in London, where he had been working for the past several years, that the twenty-nine-year-old model received a telephone call from his agent, who excitedly told him he was booked for an audition with Warner Bros. for a movie that starred Nicole Kidman. He was told nothing else about the project—neither the title of the movie nor the director’s name. That type of audition was unusual for him because he had never appeared in a movie. All of his modeling work had been for print and television.

  When he arrived at the audition, he found a line of men already there, all of them models. “I waited my turn and walked through the door into a small conference room that would have seated maybe thirty people, but there was no table or chair, just an empty room,” he says. “I didn’t see anybody, but I spotted a small piece of tape on the floor and I knew to walk to the tape and stop. As I did that, I noticed a guy in the corner coming out from behind a camera and walking toward me.”

  The man was Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s special assistant. He introduced himself to Goba, but he did not tell him his employer’s name. He shook Goba’s hand and asked him what he was doing in London. When Goba told him that he was living with his girlfriend while working as a model, Vitali observed that he didn’t sound British. That’s when Goba explained that he had grown up in Canada. As they talked, Vitali asked him to please remove his shirt, which he did without thinking anything about it because he was always asked to take off his shirt whenever he auditioned for modeling jobs.

  “We chatted about ten minutes and he slowly, slowly backed up to the camera,” Goba says. “I thought that after that little chat he was going to turn that thing on and we’d do the formal audition, whatever that was going to be. Instead, he turned the camera off and said, ‘That’s it.’ So that’s when I realized that the audition was
just more getting a feeling for the guy, rather than finding out his talents as an actor.”

  During the audition, he asked about the part for which he was auditioning and he was told it was as a United States naval officer. Goba figured he would be an extra on a ship and would probably salute or something as Nicole Kidman walked past. His expectations were not high because he had never been in a movie. Why would Warner Bros. want him to be anything other than an extra?

  Vitali told him that shooting for the part would begin in a couple of weeks and he would get back in touch with him soon to let him know if he had the job. After the audition, Goba waited around London for several weeks. Finally, with no word from Vitali, he figured that the part probably had gone to someone else, so he moved to Switzerland, where his mother and her family lived (Goba says with pride that he is half Swiss). It was then that the telephone calls began. Every week, he says, Vitali, or someone from his office, called him and told him that he would hear from them soon.

  That went on for several months. Finally, in December 1997, Vitali called and told Goba that they were ready, at last, to shoot his scenes. He told Goba they had already made arrangements for his flight back to London and his driver (yes, he was elevated to limo status) would be waiting for him when he arrived.

  As he was hanging up the phone, Goga thought he heard Vitali say something. He yanked the telephone back to his ear and said, “Yeah, did you want me?”

  “Yes,” answered Vitali. “I wanted to run this by you and ask you if you would be okay doing a sex scene with Nicole Kidman.”

  Goba laughed and said, “Right! Would you have a problem with it?”

  “No,” answered Vitali.

  “Neither would I—not a problem.”

  “Well, it’s not going to happen, so don’t worry about it,” Vitali continued. “I just wanted to run it past you in case we did decide it would look great—and if you didn’t want to be in it, that would be a problem.”

  “No, no, no,” Goba said, stunned that they were even having that conversation. “That will be fine.”

  The next day, Goba flew back to London, where he made arrangements to stay with his ex-girlfriend and her new finance. The first thing Goba did upon his arrival was report to wardrobe, where he spent about four hours being fitted for a United States naval officer’s uniform. The following day, the limo picked him up and drove him twenty miles west of London to Pinewood Studios, one of the most respected film-making facilities in the world. It features state-of-the art sound stages, viewing theaters, cutting rooms and sophisticated lighting systems.

  Still in the dark about the title of the film, the director, or his role, Goba arrived earlier than anyone else. “All of a sudden, a car pulled up and Nicole and Tom came out,” he says. “Tom was the first one out and he just kinda’ ran in and they introduced him to me and he quickly said ‘hello’ and ran right by me into the make-up room and I never saw him again after that.”

  Then Nicole made her entrance. “She was more sociable and chatted with people as she came in. She was introduced to me and I guess she knew she was going to be meeting me. She stood there and chatted with me there on the stairs, heading up to make-up, for maybe two minutes or so. She was super sweet, really, really nice and relaxed and said, ‘Hi, pleasure to meet you and I’m looking forward to working with you.’

  “Then she went up to do make-up. I think she and Tom had a scene together that morning—and then we started in the afternoon. I pretty much sat around all morning until they were done and I didn’t see Tom again. He disappeared and went off to negotiate Mission Impossible II or something.”

  Goba waited in his dressing room for someone to call him. By then, he knew that Stanley Kubrick was the film’s director and he figured that he and his assistants were busy setting up the scene, whatever it was going to be. He was never given a script and still had no idea what he was going to be doing in the movie, except that it involved Nicole and may or may not involve a sex scene.

  Goba was not always alone in the dressing room.Assistants came in and out on a regular basis, mostly to check on the status of his uniform, which had not yet arrived. It was three hours late and the assistants were in a tizzy. When it finally arrived, it hung on his dressing room door only a few minutes before he got the call to report to the set.

  “Okay, I’ll just jump into this suit,” he replied.

  “Oh, no, just throw on the bathrobe,” the assistant said.

  “I was like, well I guess I’m just going to meet [Kubrick]—right?” he recalls. “So I walked out of my room and Nicole walked out of her room and the assistant director was there to take us down the stairs into the big studio.”

  Goba and Nicole walked down the stairs and into a drab hallway, then into a gigantic room that housed what they called the Cape Cod suite. It was a beautifully furnished hotel room and the way the lights shined on it made it look even more lavish.

  “I saw Stanley [Kubrick] there and chatted with him—super nice guy, completely normal. It was like meeting someone’s parents or something—then he said, ‘Let’s get right to it!’ I noticed it was just a bedroom and I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ Then he mentioned what we would be doing and that’s when I realized we were going to have a bloody sex scene.”

  Kubrick seemed almost clinical as he explained to Goba what he wanted from him. “He’s like, okay, what we’re going to do here is Nicole will be lying on the bed on her back and you’re going to be coming in on top of her and, you know, you’re going to be caressing her arms and her dress and maybe give her a kiss and let’s get right to it.”

  Goba was in shock, but he tried not to show it. He kept thinking, I don’t believe this, I don’t believe this! When they entered the room, it was filled with eight or ten people, all working on the lighting or making last minute changes to the set, but then Nicole asked for a closed set and everyone was asked to leave.

  Then it was just the three of them—Goba, Nicole and Kubrick, who sat in a chair that had been rigged up to a trolley. He planned to operate the camera himself, not a difficult task since he only needed three levers—one to move the chair up and down the trolley, another to pan the camera from side to side, and the third to zoom the lens in and out so that he would get what he needed, anything from tight shots of their faces and hands, to medium distance shots of their entire bodies.

  Once everyone but Kubrick was out of the room, Goba and Nicole faced each other and removed their robes, so that within seconds both of them were totally naked. Goba was amazed at how beautiful she was and how easily she showed him her body. But he still couldn’t believe it. What strange twist of fate was responsible for him standing before Nicole Kidman buck naked?

  Kubrick set the pace with the words, “Just go at it!”

  Suddenly, it was like they were two prized animals at a gladiatorial event, standing at face-off, ready to engage one another in something akin to sexual combat, as Kubrick egged them on from the shadows beyond the lights symbolically waving a red cape. She was the very image of physical perfection, with flawless skin so white it appeared blue tinged, and breasts that were small but firm, and a patch of reddish pubic hair that was well-groomed but not shaved—and he, sturdily built, but not muscled-out by steroids, all six-foot-one of him ready to do his best, his smiling face exuding an innocent schoolboy charm that immediately put Nicole at ease.

  For six days, Goba and Nicole engaged in sexual activity, everything short of actual penetration, with Kubrick shouting instructions and encouragement from his trolley, capturing on film every moment they were on film. Goba estimates that they probably acted out fifty different sexual positions.

  “The three of us got together and tried to come up with different interesting positions,” he says. “They were really trying to do things that had never been done in movies before. They were going to do the going-down-on-me thing, but that wasn’t even an option. We didn’t even film a blow job scenario because it had been done and done well. We
did a bathtub scene, where I’m sitting on the side of the tub with my feet in it (there was no water) and she was straddling around me, kind of facing me. We just tried to do stuff that we had never ever seen before in movies. Sometimes she would come up with an idea or I would or Stanley would.”

  The most intimate scene never made it into the film. In that one, Kubrick had Nicole stand nude against a wall, one foot propped up onto a table top and her leg flared open so that her pubic area was exposed. Then, he instructed Goba to go down on her.

  “They wig-glued on this patch over her private parts and I had to actually put my face right on it and, Stanley, I think he was having fun with it in a joking way because he really wanted me to go for it,” Goba says. “I did—and he was like, ‘You’ve got to really push in there and really move your head around,’ and I’d see him laughing and she would be like, ‘Oh, God, Stanley!’ So I was really grinding away in there, with my mouth on her patch—and there was hair in my mouth, too, and I’d be pulling one out.”

  The second most intimate scene actually made it into the movie, but viewers were treated to a sleight-of-hand that suggested much less on screen than was actually being delivered during filming. Goba remembers it this way: ”She’s lying on the bed on her back in a summer dress, with her legs up in the air a little bit, and he’s shooting the profile from the side—and I’m coming from the other side, leaning over her.

  “The way he directed it was to tell me to obviously kiss her, run [my] hands down her body, like down the dress, and grab the bottom of the dress and pull it up all the way over her breasts—and he’s like, ‘leave it up there and have those hands continue on down and, like, grab her tits, kiss them if you want, hands all the way down her body and end up between her legs.”