by Marc Eliot
He started May 5, 1955; his salary was thirty dollars a week, his job to do things like sorting the fan mail for Tom and Jerry, MGM’s cartoon cat-and-mouse answer to Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. He soon realized that the work (and the money) wasn’t much different than at the toy store. There he worked with stuffed animals, here animated ones, but at least now he could legitimately say he was in show business. He quickly got used to seeing all the real-life MGM stars roaming about the storied Culver City studios, where there were, supposedly, more than in heaven.
“I saw everybody. I was on those sound stages a lot … Monroe, Bogie, Hepburn, Brando, Spencer Tracy, everybody worked there in the time I was there. It was hog heaven for me. I laid out on the lawn one day to try and get a look at Lana Turner’s underpants …” Jack made it a point to address everyone by his or her first name, from the lowliest sweepers (even lower than him) to the top executives, his words always accompanied by a smile.
He was now able to afford a better place to live, a small above-a-garage apartment in Culver City he shared with another wannabe actor by the name of Roger “Storeroom” Anderson, who also worked at MGM, as a gofer. Like Jack, Anderson was yet another wannabe Brando from back east who after finishing high school decided to move to L.A. to strike it rich in Hollywood. The place was awful; the sound of the garage doors opening and closing at all hours nearly drove the two of them crazy, and the smell of gasoline seeping up through the floor made them sick to their stomachs, forcing them to keep the windows open during the often chilly L.A. nights.
Because he was earning a regular salary, Jack felt comfortable enough to ask Mud for a loan, which he promised he would pay back, so he could buy a car. Public transportation in Southern California then (as now) was woeful, and when Mud realized he wasn’t coming home, she sent him $400. As soon as he got the money he went out and bought a used Studebaker.
Jack loved his car and drove it everywhere, even to the track, where, one day, after playing his hunches, he came back to the parking lot to find that it was gone. It was a bitter reminder that Hollywood wasn’t only the land of dreams; it also had its fair share of reality.
AT MGM, JACK fit in easily with the other workers, but he wanted to get himself out of the cartoon division as soon as possible and into the acting one.
One of the more apocryphal-sounding stories Jack himself promulgated for years was how he got his first break. He claimed he was riding in an elevator at MGM and the veteran producer Joe Pasternak (Destry Rides Again, Summer Stock, The Great Caruso, and others) happened to be on it, began staring at Jack’s pleasant face, asked him point-blank if he wanted to be an actor, and Jack said no.1 Later on he would explain that he had been so flustered that he meant to say yes, but before he could correct himself Pasternak got off the elevator. Later on, Bill Hanna, one of the important animators in the cartoon department, who had taken a liking to Jack, listened to his relating of the incident and laughed when Jack said he’d said no. Hanna then told him about the one essential fact of Hollywood life: that you never say no to anyone, no matter what the proposition. Fortunately, Pasternak had ignored his response (or hadn’t heard it) and in May 1956 he arranged for Jack to take a screen test at MGM.
Which he failed miserably.
The report that came back on him was strong; it acknowledged his good looks, the terrific smile, his slight, athletic build, and his beautiful, magnetic hazel eyes. But the negatives were stronger: a notable lack of experience—MGM did not consider high school plays legitimate credentials, unless they were talking about a beautiful young blonde who wanted to be an actress—and a flat-toned voice driven by a pronounced New Jersey accent. He was instructed to take speech and acting lessons and told they would reconsider him in six months.
It was a setback, and Jack was depressed about it. Hanna felt sorry for him and hooked Jack up with a friend, Joe Flynn, another then-struggling character actor who had opened up a little acting school to support himself and that competed with the dozens of other workshop storefronts on Hollywood Boulevard. During this time Hollywood had almost as many acting schools as coffee shops. Most were attended by actors on the G.I. Bill, which paid for the classes. Flynn, whose portly physique and sharp tongue would eventually land him jobs as a regular and familiar face-without-a-name in dozens of TV sitcoms until he hit it big with 1962’s TV goofball sitcom McHale’s Navy, had developed a strong student following. Hanna arranged an audition for Jack.
The first thing Flynn told him was not to do anything about his accent, that it was what made him stand out from all the other perfect-diction hopefuls. Each sentence Jack spoke faded at the end, as if his vocal engine had run out of gas, but that was okay. And there was something else Flynn noticed about Jack. His eyes seemed to match his words. As he spoke, his eyebrows arched up and down. Flynn did not often see a face as uniquely expressive as Jack’s. It had a charismatic attraction, something that can’t be taught in acting classes. “I think I knew the power of my smile by the time I was five or six,” Jack remembered. “Once I started looking at myself, though, I thought, ‘I’ve got to keep my lips closed. Otherwise I look like an inebriated chipmunk.’ ”
Flynn suggested that Jack skip the lessons and instead find a place he could do some real acting and get some solid experience under his belt. At the time MGM underwrote a place called the Players’ Ring, a small, 150-seat repertory company on Santa Monica Boulevard, as a way to discover and develop new talent. With a good word put in from Flynn, Jack was hired for their production of Tea and Sympathy, a play that had had a successful run on Broadway in 1953 and would be made into a movie in 1956. To get the two-line part they wanted him for, Jack had to agree to also sweep the floors of the tiny stage every night after the show and perform other menial tasks, all for the royal sum of fourteen dollars a week.
The rest of the cast was made up of young, good-looking hopefuls, all unknowns on the brink: Michael Landon, who would go on to play Little Joe in the long-running Bonanza and two other long-running series for NBC; Robert Vaughn, who would go on to be TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Robert Fuller, who would land several series roles playing cowboys (Laramie, Wagon Train); and Edd Byrnes, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes when he landed a regular role on 77 Sunset Strip and became a fifteen-minute teen sensation because of the way he was always combing his hair on the show.
A fifth player, a real actor, dropped out early in the production. He had already appeared in George Stevens’s Giant, co-starring the very hot and very dead James Dean, Jack’s newest favorite actor after seeing him in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause. The fifth player had also appeared in Rebel, landing the part on Dean’s recommendation. His name was Dennis Hopper.
EVEN JACK, BY far the least experienced of all the company’s players, managed to get work off his brief appearance in Tea and Sympathy. He was called in again by MGM’s casting department; after seeing him in it, they gave him a small part in Matinee Theatre, an afternoon live sixty-minute drama the studio produced out of L.A. It wasn’t that Jack had been so great in Tea and Sympathy. TV ate actors, and every young out-of-work wannabe in Hollywood sooner or later landed on Matinee Theatre. Jack’s episode was broadcast September 3, 1956. He was ecstatic.
Two weeks later Jack was fired by MGM, along with everyone else on his floor, when the studio decided to shut down its animation division.
Once again Jack was on his own, broke and alone, just another out-of-work Hollywood actor scrounging for parts. His appearance on Matinee Theatre earned him membership in AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and because of it his name was listed in the Academy Players Directory, a kind of Sears catalog of actors and actresses. Out of that he scored a few more live local TV spots and shows like Divorce Court, sometimes playing the defendant, sometimes the claimant. It didn’t really matter; everyone on these shows was utterly faceless, forgotten the minute their “case” was resolved.
Barely scratching out a living, Jack continued to han
g at all the regular actor haunts. He had breakfast every morning sharing a booth at Schwab’s Pharmacy, the legendary drugstore/soda fountain, with whatever actor or musician happened to be there. He spent afternoons at Romero’s, and most evenings hustling pool. One day he happened to run into fellow MGM-exer Luanda Andrews and another friend, Jud Taylor, and they told him a spot was opening up in Jeff Corey’s acting class. Corey had been a fairly successful New York method-trained Shakespearean stage actor in the 1930s, came to L.A. and had a solid film career until 1951, when he was brought up before the House Un-American Activities Committee, after which he found himself on the dreaded blacklist and did not appear in another movie for twelve years. To support himself during that time he taught acting out of his garage. His list of students included Robert Blake; Carole Eastman, a young, good-looking woman interested in learning about acting to better write for the screen; Robert Towne, who had ambitions to both write and direct; Sally Kellerman; James Dean (whose mere attendance before his untimely death instantly elevated Corey’s reputation to near-mythic proportion after it); and a host of other actors and writers who would go on to successful careers. Many of them later attributed their success to having studied with Corey.
Jack wanted in, but soon enough was hearing the same old thing from Corey that he had everywhere else, except from Flynn—about his funny voice and accent. Corey insisted he had to get rid of it, that it made him sound callow. He practiced day and night until Corey was satisfied enough to admit him to the one available seat left in the current enrollment.
Jack always considered Corey one of the best teachers he’d ever had, acting or otherwise. He remembered Corey saying, “When an actor takes on a part, he or she should feel free to assume they have 85% in common with them … if you can’t drop the character within 10 minutes after the performance, then you’re in trouble, you’ve invested psychically in it in a way that’s not good for you as a person.” Jack could dig it. This was acting talk he understood. Especially the 85 percent. Only what do you use, he wondered; how do you measure that?
What became immediately apparent to Jack was how the other actors seemed to all want to emulate James Dean, who himself had seemed, before his death, to be emulating the Great God Brando. They all dressed in jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, and zippered or leather jackets, and spoke with their heads down while their eyes stared straight ahead. During breaks or after classes, having coffee somewhere, the boys in the class chatted about their other cultural touchstones, the 1950s beat writers and poets: Kerouac, Kesey, Ginsberg. Jack immediately made it his business to read their work, to find out what it was that these boys liked so much about them.
The girls in Corey’s class were another story: soft and creamy and career-minded, hoping to break into the movies. And they were not the least bit interested in getting laid, at least not by any of these horny wannabes.
Except for one, Georgianna Carter, a blond southern girl with a great smile. The first time Jack laid eyes on her, he decided she was for him, and he pursued her like crazy. She knew it and didn’t mind at all. “I liked him a lot,” she later remembered, “and pretty soon I couldn’t do without him. He was a year younger than I. He was very boyish and had a very soft look about him.” Georgianna happily took Jack’s virginity.
They quickly became a couple, always arriving at and leaving Corey’s class holding hands, and when Corey moved his classroom to a storefront in Hollywood at Western and Fernwood, Jack and Georgianna and some of the others volunteered to help move furniture, paint walls, do whatever was necessary to help, having fun doing it.
Then one day a new member joined the class. His presence would prove auspicious; it would change both his and Jack’s lives forever, in ways neither one could ever have foreseen.
* * *
1 Stories like this abound in Hollywood. The most famous is that Lana Turner was sitting at the soda counter of the legendary Schwab’s drugstore and was discovered by the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, impressed by her “abilities,” meaning the tight sweater she was wearing at the time. Jack has always insisted his elevator story actually happened.
CHAPTER
“Early on, I would say that Brando was a big hero of mine. Castro was a hero. I like Galbraith. Dylan. Joe DiMaggio was one when I was a kid.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
BY THE MIDFIFTIES, THE STUDIO SYSTEM WAS SLOWLY DYING BUT not yet dead. As original-looking, different-feeling, and popular as the new postwar films were, they still conformed to traditional studio standards to maintain their box office appeal to mainstream audiences. Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon resolves all its complex and psychological issues by that most fundamental of old-school methods, the classic cowboy movie shoot-out. On the Waterfront, too, is, above and beyond all its other socially relevant issues, a conventionally redemptive love story.
In the 1950s, coinciding with Jack’s arrival in Hollywood, a handful of film producers were looking to break studio precedent. With the help of a Supreme Court–ordered weakening of the lock the studios had on production, distribution, and exhibition and an influx of young people willing to work for little money and take the big risks the majors wouldn’t, or couldn’t, this new generation of filmmakers became the pioneers of the burgeoning independent movement in film. They were the real rebels of Hollywood.
One of these was a young, good-looking fellow by the name of Roger Corman. Like so many of his generation, he was film-literate, having grown up on the movies before the onset of television, and a total cinematic nonconformist. His importance to the independent film movement in the 1950s cannot be overemphasized. “Corman was one of those guys in the early years of the New Hollywood who grew up loving the John Fords, the Howard Hawkses, the Alfred Hitchcocks, and, later, the French New Wave, the Swedes, all the film avant-garde who had something new to say and a different way of saying it,” recalled Michael Medavoy, a major Hollywood player who has worked within the studio and also as an independent.
According to film critic and historian David Thomson, “One of the things that had been happening in the fifties was that Roger Corman had been doing a lot of exploitation films, biker films, drug films, and he had a coterie around him. Those films were extraordinarily cheap because Corman was cheap, but they made a lot of money. Say what you want, Corman proved one thing, that there was a teenage audience out there and they were ready to deal with films that had sex, rock and roll and drugs, that were becoming increasingly common in ordinary American experience.”
And from film historian and biographer Peter Biskind: “Corman provided everyone of that generation their first opportunities to write, act, and direct. Roger Corman was the closest thing to an institution. There were no film schools in those days. He just threw you into the deepest end of the pool. He pushed you out there and you had to perform.”
One thing everyone agrees on, no matter what they may think of his films, is that Corman was a young visionary in an industry run by old and ossifying functionaries. Here is Roger Corman in his own words: “It was difficult being an independent producer/director during my early days, which were at the height of the studio system’s last years of dominating American film. It was very difficult at first for me to get financing and second to get any sort of decent distribution, but I managed.”
Roger Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1926, and by his account was interested in movies as far back as he could remember. His parents moved to L.A., and he and his younger brother attended Beverly Hills High School. Roger then went on to Stanford, intending to major in industrial engineering, with time out for a stint in the Navy. After the war, he completed his degree and landed a job at U.S. Electrical Motors in Los Angeles, but lasted there only four days, realizing this was not the direction in which he wanted his life to go. “I began work on Monday and quit on Thursday, telling my boss ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ ”
Corman had studied engineering to learn about the mechanics of filmmaking, not engines. After quitting his
job, he tried to break into producing, but the opportunities were few and far between. “The only job I could get after that in films was at Twentieth Century-Fox as a messenger. I worked my way up to story analyst. I read scripts and commented on them … as the youngest reader I was given the most hopeless scripts to cover.”
A frustrated Corman quit Fox; scraped together enough money from friends, family, and anywhere else he could; and in May 1954 produced his first solo independent film, Monster from the Ocean Floor, for a pittance, directed by an unknown, Wyatt Ordung.1
Roger listed himself as the producer, but in fact he was much more than that; he was the hands-on one-man crew, arriving before every day’s shoot to help set up, staying behind after to help break down. He was willing to get on his knees and scrub the floor, if that was what it took to get his film made. Medavoy recalls, “The idea was to save money, and Roger figured the more he did himself, the less he would have to pay someone else.”
Monster didn’t break any box office records, but made enough money to allow Roger to produce another film. He then tried the sports car racing genre with 1955’s The Fast and the Furious co-directed with Eduard Sampson and starring John Ireland, a fairly well-known journeyman actor.