by Marc Eliot
Jack wanted to break down any remaining emotional or physical barriers between him and Sandra. She had taken a new drug called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, that unleashed one’s inhibitions and Jack wanted to try it. With Sandra’s enthusiastic support, he went to see psychiatrists “Oz” Janiger, Mortimer Hartman, and Arthur Chandler, all of whom had begun using LSD in their practices.
Jack’s experiences with the drug were life-changing. He believed after taking it the first time that he had seen the face of God. He also had castration fantasies, homoerotic fear fantasies, and revelations about not being wanted as an infant. “All of your conceptual reality gets jerked away and there are things in your mind that have in no way been suggested to you,” Jack said later on. He also had vivid insights about his childhood, with visions of not being wanted by his mother. And while tripping, he could confront the persistent problem of premature ejaculation that had plagued him ever since he had begun sleeping with Georgianna (and would never fully overcome). All of these visions and revelations were connected, like the wire that links individual posts to a fence. Jack would continue to take LSD for years.
Three weeks after Jack’s first acid trip, Sandra proposed to him and he accepted. They tied the knot on June 17, 1962. Jack asked Harry Dean Stanton to be his best man. Sandra’s maid of honor was Millie Perkins, a slim, dark-haired beauty whose breakthrough came in 1959 when she was cast in the lead role in George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank.
As Jack later remembered, “While the ceremony was going on, that part of me that, at night, half believes in God, was looking upward and saying, ‘Now, remember, I’m very young, and this doesn’t mean I’m not ever going to touch another woman.’ It’s a humiliating thing and a horrible thing, allegedly, to admit to, but I remember this very clearly.”
They had no honeymoon. Instead, both went immediately back to work: she in a small role in Roger Corman’s lowbrow take on Shakespeare’s Richard III called Tower of London, he working on but not acting in Corman’s 1963 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, often incorrectly remembered as Jack’s debut in films.
As it happened, Corman had built expensive Gothic-style sets and had the studio space rented through the following Monday but temporarily ran out of money the Friday before and had to halt filming. Jack remembers, “I said, look, Roger, these [elaborate] sets are going to be up over the weekend, so can I use the same sets for free [to direct a few pages of script]? He went and got [Leo Gordon and Jack Hill] to write something.” Corman said yes.
Something, but no one was quite sure what. Unlike Richard Matheson’s comparatively well-written script for The Raven, the screenplay for what Jack named The Terror was an out-and-out disaster. It is the film that Jack always names without hesitation as the worst of his career. Boris Karloff, who was in The Raven and agreed to give Jack two days for his film, remembered that by late Sunday night, “As [the magnificent sets from The Raven were being pulled down around [us] Jack was [still] dashing around with a camera two steps ahead of the wreckers.” He was filming some additions to his script he had written himself at the last minute, a few pages of plot, in the hopes he could pull the film together. He couldn’t.
After that, everyone connected with The Raven had to cool their heels while Corman worked on the finances. It took him another nine months to come up with sufficient funds to complete the final outdoor scenes, on location up at Big Sur.
At least some of the first part of the film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, until he left for another job that paid more money. Monte Hellman also directed some scenes (a great deal of it, he claims) until he, too, left for a better-paying job. Corman directed the rest of the film himself. He brought the principals back for eleven days to complete the film. Jack and Sandra arrived together, but they had little to do except enjoy the scenery and observe the methodical madness of moviemaking, Corman-style, and each other.
Sometime during those eleven days, Sandra told Jack she was pregnant.
* * *
1 Five months prior to Monster from the Ocean Floor’s release, Corman co-produced Nathan Juran’s Highway Dragnet with Herb Meadow and Jerome Odlum for Allied International Pictures, an outgrowth of the ’40s Monogram Pictures.
2 The Cry Baby Killer, made in 1956, was released in August 1958. After its brief theatrical run, it was sold to television, where it eventually made back its investment.
3 The film is now in the public domain.
4 The studio complex was later turned into the A&M recording studios, and still later bought by Jim Henson Productions.
5 Although they were based on the original film, Corman had nothing directly to do with the later musical film and Broadway versions.
CHAPTER
“I never dug [being in Corman’s films]. I’m not a nostalgic person. They were just bad. The people who never saw my [early] movies are better off in life than I am, but like all other actors, I needed the work … they were the only jobs I could get. Nobody else wanted me.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
BY THE EARLY SIXTIES, THE MAJORS WERE BEGINNING TO CATCH on to and up with Corman. They were attracted to his ratio of low budgets to high profits. Twentieth Century-Fox created a small subdivision called Associated Producers to crank out movies that mostly fell between A-features, the studio’s standard fare, and B-movies like the ones Corman was making.
Jack, meanwhile, asked the debacle of The Terror Corman how he could get himself a real screenwriting job. Corman’s advice was simple: write something easy to film, with no fancy sets or special effects, and make it a thriller. Shortly thereafter, Robert Lippert asked Corman if he knew a good screenwriter and he suggested Jack, who in turn brought Don Devlin in with him as a partner. Devlin had actually written and sold a screenplay he also acted in, Anatomy of a Psycho, a cheapie independent released in 1961, directed by Boris Petroff. Jack felt more secure working with an experienced co-writer. It helped him to have another voice there to develop ideas and throw dialogue back and forth to test it out loud.
Lippert hired them for $1,250—for both—and turned them loose to write an easily shootable script. Jack came up with a plot and some dialogue for what became Thunder Island, while Devlin did most of the actual scripting. The film, about a political assassination plot set in the Caribbean, starred the voluptuous Fay Spain, and Gene Nelson in the part Jack had originally written for himself. The reason he didn’t get it, Lippert said, was that he liked Jack better as a writer than as an actor, and besides, he wasn’t a big enough name, which was why Nelson, who was a star at the time, got the part.
Shortly after completing Thunder Island, Jack received a call from Mud with the news that June had taken ill. He dropped everything and went to visit her at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The doctors told him June was dying of cervical cancer and an especially aggressive breast cancer and warned him not to be shocked when he saw her. He was. She weighed eighty pounds and was skeletal. He couldn’t bear it. The last time he’d seen her, when he’d introduced Georgianna to her, June had looked terrific. They talked for a few minutes, and then he kissed her on the forehead and left. He never went back to the hospital and never saw June alive again. The day-to-day job of seeing her through to her death fell to Mud. As she lay nearly unconscious, June suddenly asked to see, of all people, Georgianna. She was the only girl Jack had ever introduced her to, and they had become close, with June perhaps still believing this was the woman Jack was going to marry. Mud told Jack, and he said he would call Georgianna and ask her to visit his sister in the hospital.
When Georgianna answered the phone, Jack quickly explained that this wasn’t a romantic call, that he was married now and about to become a father, that the reason for it was that June was dying and had asked to see her. Georgianna immediately went to the hospital, and, like Mud, visited June every day until she died on July 31, 1963, at age forty-four.
THUNDER ISLAND WAS released in October 1963, a little more than two months after June’s p
assing and a month before the killing of John F. Kennedy. After Dallas, no one wanted to see a film about an assassination, and it quickly disappeared from theaters. Jack and Devlin had proved a good creative match, but when the film failed to find an audience, it put an end to their writing partnership.
That August, Jack flew to Acapulco, Mexico, to start work in Josh Logan’s Ensign Pulver. He had managed to land a small role in the Warner Bros. production, and although the part was tiny, it was by far his biggest mainstream production so far. Ensign Pulver was based on the character played by Jack Lemmon in the 1955 screen version of Mister Roberts, directed by John Ford and Mervyn Leroy (and an uncredited Logan), originally produced on Broadway by Logan, from Thomas Heggen’s best-selling semiautobiographical 1946 novel.
The film was shot off the waters of Acapulco, in Puerto Marques, aboard a retired naval cargo ship. The crew was played by up-and-coming studio contract players. Jack was the least well known and his role in the film was the smallest, while its star, Robert Walker Jr., struggled in the lead. Jack remembered Walker from the old coffeehouse cliques. His father was a famous movie star who committed suicide in the early 1950s. Walker had waited a long time for his big break, and when it finally arrived, it became clear from the start that Logan had picked the wrong actor for the lead. Although he looked remarkably like his father, the difference between the two was that Junior had no talent.
Shooting progressed at a snail’s pace. With little to do, Jack passed the time getting stoned. Pot was easily available in Mexico, and soon all the ensemble players were smoking every day, part of the reason they come off a little goofy-looking in the film.
The film’s female lead still wasn’t cast. With Sandra pregnant, Jack suggested to Logan he consider her best friend, Millie Perkins. Logan tested her and gave her the part as the gorgeous young nurse who drives Pulver gaga.
Not surprisingly, without Fonda, Cagney, and Lemmon reprising their roles, and with the film resting solely on the shoulders of Walker, Jack, most of whose scenes didn’t make the final cut, didn’t have to wait for the film’s release to know that he had just finished participating in what the cast had called the Manhattan Project: the making of an atomic bomb.
THE SAME DAY Jack returned to Los Angeles Sandra gave birth to a daughter they named Jennifer. He immediately gave her a nickname, Ona, presumably after Ona Blake, daughter of Urizen in William Blake’s mythology. Ona was the only name Jack would ever call her as a child.
During the filming of Pulver, Jack had become friendly with one of the cast, Larry Hagman, and now Jack and Sandra began socializing with Hagman and his wife. The Nicholsons lived in a modest bungalow near Plummer Park on the outskirts of Hollywood, where they had moved to make room for baby Jennifer. Hagman’s situation was a little different. He came from acting royalty—his mother was the famed Broadway and movie star Mary Martin. He kept a beach house in the Malibu colony, where the Nicholsons loved visiting them on weekends, when it was always party time, the best champagne flowing plentifully. Sandra quickly found her own version of paradise in the Hagmans’ out-of-a-magazine kitchen. She enjoyed standing barefoot in it and concocting various exotic dishes, more often than not laced with a little pot.
But it was Jack to whom everyone gravitated. His charismatic presence was the best thing in these weekend get-togethers. Word quickly spread about the soirées, and soon everybody who was anybody in the business wanted an invitation. When the Hagmans moved, Jane Fonda and her then-lover, film director Roger Vadim, who had recently relocated to the beach, happily took over the hosting chores, throwing regular beach bashes for some of Hollywood’s biggest names. And when Fonda and Vadim had had enough, they passed the baton to John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who lived in Bel-Air, and threw even more extravagant parties than the Hagmans or the Vadims. Regardless of who was hosting, the Nicholsons were there every weekend.
Jack loved to party with Hollywood’s crème de la crème, but work was still the most important thing. In 1964 he co-wrote another screenplay, this time with Monte Hellman, called Epitaph (aka To Hold the Mirror), about a couple of unemployed actors, one of whom is searching desperately for someone willing to perform an illegal abortion. They took it to Robert Lippert at API. While Lippert hemmed and hawed (and eventually passed), Fred Roos, a former agent and now an up-and-coming independent producer associated with Medallion Pictures, yet another of the new independents, had commissioned a screenplay of his own, Back Door to Hell, and wanted Jack to star in it.
Set during World War II, by Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, Back Door to Hell focuses on three young soldiers scouting an island held by the Japanese before the main Allied forces will attempt to take it. Jack’s American character can, inexplicably, speak fluent Japanese. Jack read it and agreed to do it, but only if the film could be directed by Monte Hellman. Jack, always loyal, didn’t want to leave Hellman with nothing to show for all the work they had put into Epitaph, and he knew that Hellman still wanted to direct. Roos agreed and hired Hellman.
Back Door to Hell was shot on location in the Philippines, which, according to Hellman, “in those days was like the Wild West. You’d go into a gas station and the attendant would have a forty-five automatic in his belt. It was rough and tough and exciting. A terrific experience.” Roos wanted them to make two movies while they were there, one for theaters and one for TV, and was looking for a second script. Hellman said he had one all ready to go and Roos gave it the green light—the long-dormant Flight to Fury. With Jack’s help, they revised it to make it work in the Philippines. In it, Jack played another psychopath. In the end, after ample carnage, his character kills himself.
The pace was nonstop. “Three weeks for one, a short break, and three weeks for the other,” Hellman remembered. But despite some interesting touches of directorial stylistics on Hellman’s part and Jack’s intense performance, when they were released, both films faded quickly. Back Door to Hell played briefly on the bottom half of Robert Aldrich’s eerie 1964 Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which was itself a dressed-up B-movie. Flight played only a few times on TV before disappearing. Flight to Fury is notable as Jack’s favorite of the twelve pictures he made from 1958 through 1964, all the way back to The Cry Baby Killer. He loved playing psychopaths, and he thought this was his best one yet.
Despite the failure of these two films, work kept coming Jack’s way. His next film, The Shooting (not to be confused with Don Siegel’s 1976 John Wayne vehicle, The Shootist), was a western Jack described as a “McLuhan mystery,” the first of two cowboy films Jack and Hellman would produce for Corman under his new Proteus Film banner. Jack would produce and act in them, Hellman would direct, and they would each write the screenplay for one.
They brought Corman the idea at a meeting at the old hat-shaped Brown Derby on Vine Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. Corman was eager to get them back into the fold and offered them the same two-picture deal that Roos had given them, more than Corman usually paid. At the meeting, he asked only one question: What were the plots of the films? The first was The Shooting. The second Jack remembered was “the one I wrote. We called it Ride in the Whirlwind. We kind of sold it as an Attack of Apache Junction, or something, with a lot of stagecoaches and Indians. And The Shooting, we sold as African Queen in the desert.” Before dinner was over Corman had given them the green light, as long as there were “lots of tomahawks and ketchup,” which Jack assured them there would be.
Corman: “I agreed to let them make these two low-budget westerns with Monte directing and Jack co-writing them and also starring. It was a big assignment, and later on we all agreed to hire Carole Eastman, our classmate from Jeff Corey’s acting classes, to help write the script for one of the films.” It was a good thing. Hellman didn’t want to write any of The Shooting, so he could concentrate on directing it. Jack and Eastman (“Speed” in Jackspeak, for the slow pace of her writing) began working on it in a tiny office on the second floor of the Writers’ Bu
ilding, in Beverly Hills, Eastman under the name Adrien Joyce, after her literary hero, James Joyce. She wanted to reserve her real name for films she wrote by herself. The Shooting, to her way of thinking, was not a true Carole Eastman film.
She was an exceptionally good-looking woman, a former ballet dancer and fashion model with long, thick blond hair; she was preternaturally thin and most resembled a swan. She definitely had the face to become an actress but decided early on she really wanted to be a screenwriter. She had dozens of phobias, which may have limited her career opportunities. She wouldn’t fly in planes, she wouldn’t ride in cars unless she drove, she didn’t like her picture being taken, she chain-smoked, and, as Peter Biskind pointed out, despite being hit on by men and women constantly, no one ever knew her to have a lover of either sex. In a time when paisley headscarves, short skirts, high boots, and free love were overrunning Hollywood, she refrained from all that; she dismissed current fashion as culture communism. She always dressed down in jeans, shirts, and sneakers.
Jack gave her the concept for The Shooting, while he worked with Hellman on the plot points of Ride in the Whirlwind. The budget for the films was $75,000 each. Corman put the money up himself, and because of it, he warned Jack and Hellman that if they ran even one dollar over budget, they would have to make it up out of their own salaries.
The Shooting, filmed in Utah, looks like the first western film where nearly everybody involved in it, except Corman and one or two other of the straight, nondrug contingency, was taking psychedelics during the entire shoot. It is an incomprehensible fury of a film, with an indecipherable plot. There were lots cowboys on horses, lots of guns fired, and lots of people (maybe) dying. It is a fascinating attempt at bending a genre (and a couple of minds). Hellman cut out as much of Eastman’s dialogue as he could, including the entire first ten pages of her script, feeling that her plot interfered with the “pure” visual impact of his film.