Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  “Despite his patience and reasoning, we never got in, but I remember thinking to myself that this was a side of Jack I hadn’t seen before, that nobody had seen before. We knew him as a bit of a wild guy, who loved to have fun and had no respect for bullies or any kind of hollow authority figures. Reasonable Jack, that was a new one on me.”

  Head premiered in New York on November 6, 1968, and nationwide November 20. Rafelson and Schneider came up with a campaign to promote the film built around a poster of a head with the word head on it. They plastered them on every lamppost in Manhattan up until an hour before the film’s premiere, when the two were arrested for damaging public property. To their dismay, the film did poorly and quickly disappeared from theaters. It took years to make back its $750,000 cost and could not be described as anything other than a disaster for Raybert’s initial foray into feature filmmaking. Even Jack didn’t like the final result and summed up his feelings after the opening this way: “I hope nobody ever likes it. I’m going to remake it with the Beatles …”

  IN JANUARY 1968, Hopper and Fonda joined forces and chose a new screenwriter for Fonda’s biker movie they were now calling The Loners. Terry Southern was a successful satirist as both a novelist and a screenwriter; his previous screen work included Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and (with Ring Lardner Jr.) Norman Jewison’s star vehicle for Steve McQueen, The Cincinnati Kid (1965). His 1958 satirical novel, Candy (written with Mason Hoffenberg), was a huge success in print and later, in 1968, onscreen.

  Fonda then approached Roger Corman and asked him to be the film’s executive producer. Corman loved it—The Wild Angels meets The Trip—and told Fonda and Hopper he thought they were sitting on a gold mine. While Head was still filming, as soon as Southern had a finished script, Corman took it to AIP for funding. According to Corman, “I was sure I could get all the funding we’d need from AIP. We all attended a meeting, and sure enough AIP loved the idea but wanted a rewrite from Southern with less emphasis on drugs. And one more thing, one of the executives warned us, in front of Hopper, whose reputation in the industry was not good, if the film fell even one day behind schedule because of him, the funding would be immediately canceled. I saw the looks on Dennis and Peter’s faces and knew that the executive had made a major mistake. After the meeting, the two made their displeasure quite clear to me.” Corman soothed their anger and assured them he could fix everything.

  Corman had left the meeting confident he would get a green light upon the presentation of an acceptable budget and shooting schedule and a commitment to come in at or under that budget. A day later, Corman called AIP to reassure them that Hopper would not be a problem. AIP said that was fine and then asked to see the revised first draft before making their final commitment.

  WHEN HOPPER BEGAN complaining about the stalling and the run-around he believed The Loners was getting from AIP, Jack suggested they come see him at Raybert and maybe Schneider, Rafelson, and Blauner might be interested in their project.

  A meeting was set up, but not for The Loners. Fonda didn’t want to jeopardize the pending deal at AIP and convinced Hopper they should pitch Raybert a different movie. Hopper suggested a film version of Michael McClure’s political satire, The Queen. When they showed up for the meeting, Jack invited them to come into his office to smoke a joint while they waited for Schneider, who had not yet arrived. He had recently injured himself in a skiing accident and was walking on crutches, which slowed his getting around. When he did get there, Jack, Schneider, Rafelson, Blauner, and Jaglom all went into Schneider’s office to listen to what Hopper and Fonda had to say. After making their pitch, Hopper asked for $60,000 in development money for The Queen.

  After a heavy pause, Schneider asked what else they had, which meant he was passing on that one. Jack then told them about The Loners, which he thought was the reason for the meeting. Schneider already knew about the deal at AIP from the trades and also that Hopper wasn’t happy there. “How’s your bike movie coming?” he asked. When Hopper angrily declared they were being dicked around by AIP, Schneider, Rafelson, and Blauner all looked up. After a few seconds of silence, Bert asked Hopper to tell them about it.

  Five minutes later Fonda and Hopper had a deal with Raybert.

  Schneider agreed to give them the $360,000 seed money they wanted to make The Loners: eleven profit points each for Hopper and Schneider (Southern was not in attendance and his points were not set), and $40,000 immediately for Hopper and Fonda to make a test reel. Depending upon how that reel came out, Schneider would give them the remaining $320,000.

  Schneider knew he was taking a big chance—Hopper had the worst reputation in Hollywood, and Fonda was untested as a producer—but Bert was willing to put his money where his mouth was. Raybert was in and Corman and AIP were out. Jack felt bad for Corman, but he understood better than anyone how the movie business operated. It could be cutthroat when it came to stealing projects and luring talent. Besides, this wasn’t his deal; he had only brought the project to AIP, which had not put up any front money, and money was what made a deal real.

  Schneider popped open a bottle of expensive champagne to celebrate.

  Hopper and Fonda left the next day for New Orleans, with Toni Basil (Mary) and Karen Black (Karen) and to fill out the female parts of the test reel. Hopper would be Billy (Billy the Kid), and Fonda would be Wyatt (Wyatt Earp, aka Captain America). The plan was to film an extended acid trip during Mardi Gras for as long and as far as the $40,000 would take them. Jack would go along as the watchful eyes of Raybert.

  Trouble began the first day in New Orleans. Everyone was up at six A.M. to try to blend in with the Mardi Gras festivities and shoot some wild footage, and then film a scene at the cemetery, but no sooner did everyone assemble when Hopper, already flying without a plane, declared himself to the crew as the greatest director who ever lived, and worse, said that they were nothing more than flunkies on his film. Several crew members quit the project right then and there. When shooting finally resumed at a local cemetery, so did the chaos. “We were all in our Winnebago,” recalls Karen Black, “and we were all looking for where all the people were marching down the streets for Mardi Gras and we could never find it. If you look at the film now you’ll see that Toni, Dennis, and I are never actually in the parade. I’m in there once.

  “It was a confused mess. Toni and I are sitting in the Winnebago while everyone else was doing, I think it was coke at this point. And there was a lot of wine. And they were blasting rock-and-roll music constantly. It was crazy. Dennis kept on looking out the window making funny remarks to passersby. That’s when I began to think this film was going nowhere.”

  According to Basil, “In the first scene in the cemetery I was on the ground and I saw Karen Black and Dennis coming toward me and I said, ‘Oh shit!’ I was ready for anything. But as the scene came together, it occurred to me that there was something very familiar about it. And then I realized that Dennis, who was heavily into experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner, was modeling the scene after a similar, experimental one that Conner had done. The cemetery scene wasn’t as haphazard, or spontaneous, or out of control as everyone always thinks.”

  The next day in New Orleans, a stoned-out Hopper tried to get Fonda to be further in touch with the essence of his character by reliving his mother’s suicide on camera. He thought it would provide great footage for the test reel. Fonda didn’t want to do it, thinking Hopper was going way too far. The two had a blistering fight, until Fonda gave in, climbed up on a statue of the Madonna, and mumbled a line or two to his “mother,” asking her why she’d done it. Hopper screamed. He loved it. From then on Fonda no longer was talking to Hopper.

  By the time they all returned to L.A., Fonda wanted to quit the project, but Rafelson persuaded him to stay with it by telling him that in their absence, Schneider had persuaded Columbia to distribute The Loners, in return for which they would advance the entire $360,000 budget. There was no
way out now, Rafelson told Fonda; he couldn’t pull out without creating major legal problems for everyone and hurt some of his friends, since Raybert had already deposited Columbia’s check in the bank and paid itself back the $40,000 it had given to Hopper to finance the test reel.

  A reluctant Fonda flew to New York City, where he kept a town house on the East Side, to do some work on the script with Terry Southern. When a paranoid Hopper heard about it he angrily flew to New York as well, not wanting to be left out of anything that had to do with “his” film.

  He arrived at Fonda’s place, where he was told by the housekeeper that Peter, Terry, and actor Elmore Rual “Rip” Torn Jr. had all gone to Serendipity 3, a nearby restaurant on East 60th Street that was a favorite among the New York hip/cool crowd. Torn was a young, good-looking Broadway actor who had signed on to play George Hanson, the football-helmeted, alcoholic ACLU lawyer that Billy and Wyatt meet on the road. He had come along to help out with his scenes.

  Hopper burst through Serendipity’s front door like it was a saloon and went directly to the table where Fonda, Southern, and Torn were eating and drinking. At the top of his lungs and oblivious to the rest of the patrons, he demanded to know why he hadn’t been invited to the meeting and, for that matter, why they weren’t all back at the house writing instead of goofing off, eating ice cream sundaes, and wasting production money. Hopper then made a derogatory comment aimed directly at Torn about Texans, knowing that Torn was from Temple, Texas. He said he couldn’t even take a stopover in Dallas because they cut long hair off hippies with a razor down there. Torn smiled and tried to cool Hopper out, saying all Texans weren’t assholes, and stuck his hand out to shake. Hopper then called him a motherfucker, grabbed a steak knife off the table, made a half lunge for Torn, and missed. Torn then told Hopper: “I’ll wait for you in the street. Bring your guns. Bring your knives. Bring your pals, and we’ll find out in about three seconds who the punk is.”

  Hopper never came out. The next day Torn quit the picture.2

  Hopper next tried to get rid of Southern, saying the new script wasn’t as good as it should have been. When Hopper called Schneider in L.A. to get Southern fired, he refused, claiming Southern was the biggest name attached to the project. Hopper’s attempt proved unnecessary. After giving Fonda a new and better title for the picture, Easy Rider, Southern, too, had had enough and quit.3

  Fonda and Hopper had yet another falling-out about how to divide the newly available profit points that Southern’s departure had created. Unable to reach an agreement, each later claimed the other had threatened his life.

  Back in Los Angeles, when Schneider heard that Torn had quit, without consulting Fonda, Hopper, or Bob, he approached Jack about taking over the role of Hanson. He offered him $392 a week ($508 less than Torn was getting). It was a small role but a gem, and Jack grabbed at it. He later claimed that despite the film’s thus-far chaotic production, he was eager to be in Easy Rider for two reasons. The first was: “Almost everyone wanted me out of acting. Not because they thought I wasn’t good. To do the kind of acting I was doing was a waste of energy. People thought I could be putting that energy into directing, writing, and producing …” This was his chance to prove them wrong. The second was: “There hasn’t been a motorcycle picture yet that hasn’t made [a lot of] money. It had [what was left of] Terry Southern’s writing, it had motorcycles, the open road, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as a pair of drifters. What more could you ask?”

  The character of Hanson was Southern’s creation. From the beginning he had felt there needed to be a third, sympathetic character in the film, one that balanced out the other two, who would be able to articulate a lot of what Wyatt and Billy felt but weren’t capable of putting into words. Southern later claimed he had based Hanson on a small-town lawyer who was a recurring character in several of Faulkner’s novels.

  Schneider had another reason for wanting Jack to be in the film. He knew that although Fonda and Hopper were at each other’s throats, they both liked Jack a lot, and Schneider was counting on Jack to make sure one didn’t kill the other before the picture was done.

  Not everyone was as certain as Jack was that he could pull it off. Hopper had strong reservations, believing Jack was too East Coast to be able to play a Texan, and in a paranoid rant, accused Schneider of purposely sabotaging his movie. Despite Hopper’s objections, Jack’s training and experience gave him both the discipline and the desire to play Hanson. He was stoned during the entire key “campfire” scene (Playboy reported that he smoked 155 joints during the time it took to film it) and for most of the making of the picture. To capture the Texas speech pattern, he listened over and over again to a recording of Lyndon Johnson. Jack: “That long scene by the campfire, about the UFOs and so on, I did with a script. It’s hidden under that coat you see there. It looks improvised but most of it was written in advance …” The famous Three Stooges, flapping-his-arms-like-a-chicken-and-going-“nik-nik-nik” bit, which Jack did whenever Hanson drank, he picked up from one of the crew, who occasionally did it during breaks. It is one of the more memorable moments of the beautifully acted monologue.

  JUST AS PRODUCTION was wrapping, late in 1968, Jack learned that his divorce from Sandra had at long last become final. The lawyers divided up everything as equally as they could. Sandra took her Mercedes that she had bought before they were married; Jack kept the yellow Volkswagen he had bought for himself after the Studebaker was stolen. They had a total of $8,000 in savings, which was split in half. Jack agreed to pay whatever alimony and child support he could, and Sandra agreed to weekly visitations in the settlement. But as soon as the divorce was finalized she moved to Hawaii, making it all but impossible for Jack to see his daughter. Because of the alimony and child support, Jack could no longer afford his share of the rent on the apartment he was sharing with Harry Dean and had to move out. He slept mostly on friends’ sofas, when he couldn’t find a girl to keep him warm in her bed.

  And Mud now wanted to buy a trailer. She asked Jack for the money and even though he didn’t have two nickels to rub together, he promised her he’d get it for her.

  IT TOOK SEVEN weeks to shoot Easy Rider and seven months to edit all the footage into something resembling a final cut. With Easy Rider nowhere near being released, and desperately needing money, Jack took a job acting in a studio film he was previously offered that he had absolutely no interest in.

  Vincente Minnelli was directing a movie version of a 1965 Broadway musical dud called On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, loosely based on a 1956 best-seller sensation called The Search for Bridey Murphy by amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein, about a patient he claimed he was able to put under and send back to an earlier incarnation of herself. Because they couldn’t get the rights to Bridey Murphy, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, the team that had adapted Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, based their musical instead on an obscure 1929 play by John L. Balderston called Berkeley Square.

  On a Clear Day You Can See Forever opened on Broadway in June and stayed on the boards for eight months. Even before it opened, Paramount paid Lerner $750,000 for the film rights, and the fast-rising producer Bob Evans signed red-hot Barbra Streisand to play the role of Daisy Gamble, the girl who “goes under.”

  Evans had decided the show needed to be updated, made more contemporary, with some mention of student protests that were happening all over the country at the time, to try to bring in a younger audience. He came up with a new character for the film: Tad Pringle, Daisy’s stepbrother, an articulate, cynical hippie—or what passed for one in Hollywood. Evans knew he had found his Tad when he saw Jack in a screening of Psych-Out, the last film he appeared in before Hanson in Easy Rider.

  Jack reluctantly took the part, but not before some hard negotiating with Evans. “I set up a meeting with the [then unknown] Jack Nicholson … He starts talking to me, and I don’t understand a word he’s talking about. But every time he smiles, I can’t take my eyes off his smile. So I say, ‘Liste
n, kid, how would you like to play opposite Barbra Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever? I’ll pay you $10,000 for four weeks’ work.’ He had never earned more than $600 [sic] on a picture his whole life. He looks at me and says, ‘I just got a divorce, and I’ve got to pay alimony. I have a kid. I have to pay child support. Can you make it $15,000?’ So I say, ‘How about $12,500?’ He throws his arms around me and says, ‘I love you.’ ” Jack was so grateful he kissed Bob Evans on the lips. (The film’s male lead, Italian-born French star Yves Montand, who could barely speak English, was paid $400,000.)

  Even though the film was something of a financial godsend for Jack, he hated everything about it—the script, the square (to him) score, and most of all his manufactured “hip and cool” character, who even sings a song with a sitar. Because he wasn’t a trained singer and couldn’t play the instrument, Jack talked the song through and faked playing the sitar, an instrument popularized in the West by Ravi Shankar and the Beatles. “I don’t know a movie that needs to cost $12 million,” Jack said before Clear Day opened. “I’ve only done that one big-budget ‘A’ film because I was desperate for money, and I wouldn’t be in the movies if that’s what making movies is like. I’ve got twelve years’ experience in all phases of filmmaking. I did please Vincente Minnelli because in my own theory of acting, I must please the director, and I think Minnelli is good, but each night [of shooting] I was unhappy.” It was an experience Jack wanted to forget, and he wished it would just go away. He used his salary to send money to Sandra and Jennifer and to buy Mud a pink-and-white trailer, even though he still didn’t have a place of his own.