by Marc Eliot
It got better when Schneider gave Jack two impossible-to-get courtside season tickets to the Lakers, right next to the two that belonged to Dunhill Records owner Lou Adler.3 Adler was, like Jack, a basketball freak, and they immediately bonded, meeting each night before a game to grab a bite, or have a drink, before heading to Inglewood to enjoy the game. They also loved young and beautiful women almost as much as they loved Laker showtime. The Los Angeles Lakers, formerly the Minnesota Lakers (hence the team’s name), joined the NBL (National Basketball League) in 1947 and soon had their first superstar, the future legend George Mikan. In 1949 the NBL merged the BAA with the NBA. The Lakers moved to L.A. in 1960.
Jack was mesmerized, along with the rest of the country, by the memorable 1969–1970 finals that pitted Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West, the stars of the Lakers, against the Knicks’ indomitable Willis Reed. For Jack there was an extra kick; it was like watching his old hometown (on the East Coast) against his new adopted one, Los Angeles. The Knicks won in dramatic fashion in seven games, a series no one, especially Jack, would ever forget, and it cemented his love of the game.
And the season tickets, more even than the loan for the house, assured his loyalty to Schneider.
FIVE EASY PIECES was co-written (with Carol Eastman as Adrien Joyce based on an original story by Eastman and Bob Rafelson) and directed by Rafelson with a budget at just under $900,000. It is a film about the struggle of its protagonist, Bobby Dupea, who is part working class and part upper class, at home in both places but unable to relate to either. Dupea’s struggle to find his place and his identity, thanks to the script, Rafelson’s direction, and Jack’s performance, is at once powerful, provocative, emotional, dramatic, and very entertaining. Drawing a direct line between himself and Bobby Dupea, Jack told Newsweek, “I’ve taken all the drugs, balled everybody, gone everywhere … the search for me and for the character is compulsive … There’s never been a time in my life when that wasn’t going on. I suppose that’s partly the coincidence of when I was born and where, plus whatever fantasies I have as a person. So naturally, I feel the search is a way in itself. Looking for validity is not a big detective story but a continuing thing …”
Among the film’s many memorable scenes, the most unforgettable was the one in the diner. It became a signature Jack Nicholson moment, the perfect bridge between actor and character connected by Jack’s needs and his innate rage. Bobby and his girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), pick up two lesbian hitchhikers, played by Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil—both now regulars in the BBS family of recurring players. A little farther on, they stop at a roadside diner to get a bite to eat. All four look at menus. Bobby knows what he wants: “An omelet, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, and wheat toast instead of rolls. Some toast.” The waitress stubbornly refuses to fill his order because it’s not on the menu. Bobby then orders a chicken salad sandwich and tells the waitress to hold all the extra ingredients, so he can get what he originally wanted. When she asks him where he wants her to hold it, he says between her legs. Furiously, she asks him if he sees the right-to-refuse-service sign. In response, an equally furious Bobby asks her if she sees this sign, and with his two hands he sweeps the table clean, sending everything flying. During a script meeting where Jack and Carole were trying to find a scene to express Bobby’s rage, Jack reminded her about something similar that had happened to him and Rafelson a couple of years earlier at Pupi’s, a coffee shop on the Sunset Strip, when Jack exploded at a waitress. Out of that came the diner scene.
Although it has an improvisational feel to it, according to Kallianiotes, Rafelson wanted the scene played exactly as he had blocked it out, but Jack told her to use her acting instincts. “Jack started the scene. Defending him to the waitress, I rose and delivered the line to the waitress, ‘Hey Mac.’ The director, Bob Rafelson, told me to say the line seated. Then I heard Jack’s voice call out, ‘That’s her instinct … Curly, maan, adjust your camera.’ ”
When Jack was later asked by Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune about Five Easy Pieces, he said, “My character was written by a woman who knows me very well. I related the character to that time in my life, which Carole [Eastman] knew about, well before Easy Rider when I was doing a lot of second-rate TV and movies … So in playing the character, I drew on all the impulses and thoughts I had during those years when I was having no real acceptance.”
Five Easy Pieces is more of an extended character study than a film with a detailed plot. It concerns a period of self-contemplation, difficult to capture on film, that leads to major change in the life of Bobby Dupea, a self-exiled classical piano player from a well-to-do talented musical family, whose self-esteem has fallen so low he works on oil rigs and has a gum-chewing, country-tune-humming bimbo of a girlfriend, Rayette, played superbly by Karen Black (Jack had insisted that Black play Rayette). Shortly after Bobby’s rigging pal Elton (Billy “Green” Bush) is arrested, Bobby learns from his sister that his father has suffered a stroke, and he decides to try one more time to reconnect to his family.
The title of the film is something of a double entendre, referring at once to the Chopin piece that Bobby plays superbly, if too easily, on the piano, his musical talent diminished in his own mind by the very ease at which it comes to him, and the five women he is involved with in one way or another during the course of the film.4 If Easy Rider is about the politics of the counterculture, Five Easy Pieces examines the politics of the crassly cultured. Bobby has always rejected his family’s hollow elitism, but the low-level desperation of Rayette’s clinging fills him with self-loathing.
When he tells Rayette he is going home and that she can’t go with him, she tells him she is pregnant. Bobby gets into his car and throws what will become an increasingly familiar sight in Jack’s movies, a cyclonic fit. Then, spent and defeated, and weak, he reluctantly goes back and gets Rayette out of bed and, against his better judgment, takes her with him. It is clear she loves him unconditionally, at whatever level she is capable of loving. Whether he can return any of that love, or whether he can love at all, is one of the essential questions of the film.
Five Easy Pieces, shot almost entirely in sequence, is, as historian Douglas Brinkley points out, “On the Road gone wrong.” It’s Kerouac’s wanderlust intermingled with a Bergmanesque rondo of adult sexual relationships topped with a dose of Chaplinesque expressionism—early on, when Bobby is stuck in traffic, he climbs on the back of a pickup truck and starts playing an upright piano like a happy madman.
Karen Black remembers working on the film as an experiment in “ecstasy,” especially in her scenes with Jack. “I was so happy making that movie. Of course, I fell in love with Jack again, but neither of us was available—he had a girlfriend, or he was married, I don’t remember, and I was still with Peter Kastner … all the way up the West Coast, while moving from one location to the other, we’d stop in hotels, and at night we’d dance. Jack was a great dancer—he’d stick his butt out and bend his legs and really get into it … nothing ever happened between Jack and me, because, as I say, we were both taken.
“Another time I remember, I had a line as Rayette in the car about how she would take better care of Bobby than anyone else, and feeling that she would never say that, that she would never make a comparison like that. Bob stopped the shoot and we discussed this one sentence for easily more than an hour. That was his and the BBS way.”
The most difficult scene for Jack to shoot was when Bobby finally meets with his father and tries to talk to him, even though the father cannot speak because of his stroke. Rafelson wanted Jack to cry. Jack refused, and it nearly turned into a brawl. Jack insisted that crying in the scene was phony acting-school stuff. Rafelson countered by insisting it would be Jack’s Oscar moment. Jack finally and reluctantly did it—his way. After many takes, pulling deeper into himself each time, he was able to arrive at a place where he could cover his face and appear to sob. Ultimately, whether he really did cry is less important than the fact that he could convi
ncingly act as if he did.5
Although he was still going with Mimi, during production Jack became secretly and heavily involved with Susan Anspach, who plays a young and beautiful pianist engaged to Bobby’s brother and has a brief but heated onscreen flirtation with Bobby. Two and a half weeks after the film premiered on September 11, 1970, Susan gave birth to a baby boy. Although she denied it for years, everyone in Hollywood seemed somehow to know that Jack was the father. He claimed not to be sure himself, even after Anspach told him herself at a party not long after the night of the 1971 Oscars. She named the baby Caleb, after James Dean’s character in East of Eden. In 1974, Anspach married another actor, who adopted the boy and gave him his last name, but Jack secretly continued to send child support payments to Anspach.6
THE OPENING OF Jack’s two films bracketed the summer. On a Clear Day opened on June 17, 1970, and grossed only $14 million, with all the available heat going to Streisand. Jack’s one song was mercifully cut from the film’s soundtrack, much to his relief and delight, and although the reviews were dismal, he was completely ignored by the critics and the film did nothing to damage the late-in-coming but post–Easy Rider lightning momentum of his career.
MADE ON A budget of $1.6 million, almost twice what the tax shelter had mandated, the balance made up by the principal of BBS, Five Easy Pieces opened on September 11, 1970, to mixed-to-good reviews and grossed $18 million in its initial domestic release, making it the second straight box office hit for Jack and BBS. In December, Newsweek did a promotional cover story on Jack, a milestone first for him. In the interview, he credited Eastman for the high quality of the screenplay, alluding only indirectly to Rafelson’s earlier, unthought-through version: “The original script, as written by Bob Rafelson, had Bobby and Rayette going off a cliff in their car, with only Rayette surviving … we didn’t continue with that ending because we weren’t happy killing people off. I don’t like killing off people in movies … in every movie I made [before Five Easy Pieces], practically everyone was killed off, but we didn’t want to rely on that …”
After Easy Rider, and before Five Easy Pieces, Jack had told Schneider that he wanted to try directing again, and he quickly found a property for him. It was called Drive, He Said, a 1964 novel about college basketball and campus protest politics by Jeremy Larner. Jack read it and liked it, and Schneider obligingly secured the film rights for him. Schneider was aware of a commitment Jack had already made to Mike Nichols (“Big Nick,” in Jackspeak) to be in his upcoming Carnal Knowledge. After Jack’s performance in Easy Rider, Nichols had publicly declared him “the most important actor since Brando” and wanted him for Carnal Knowledge badly enough that he agreed to wait until Jack was available.
FOR DRIVE, HE SAID, Bert moved Steve Blauner into the co-producer slot. Peter Guber, now vice president of Columbia, the film’s distributor, while not directly involved with the production, considered himself “a cheerleader and a supporter of Jack and the film.” Bert then handed the entire project over to his brother, Harold, to work with Blauner and executive-produce (he is uncredited in the film).
Rafelson was less willing than Schneider to give Jack everything he wanted. He was wary of those he considered Jack’s hangers-on, like Fred Roos, whom Jack had worked with during the Corman years, and who had since become a casting director, and his good friend Harry Gittes. Bob had no use for Roos or Gittes; the latter served as Jack’s unofficial agent, meaning Bob had to deal directly with him about the business of the film. This last development was too much for Rafelson, who went straight to Jack and Bert and gave them an ultimatum: either Jack must stop using Gittes as his agent or BBS would not continue with Drive, He Said. Jack pulled Gittes off the financial watch. To make it up to him, he found Gittes a small part in the movie.
Jack then insisted on rewriting Larner’s script himself. Rafelson agreed it wasn’t very good (he had already rewritten it once with the help of Robert Towne and Terrence Malick, both uncredited). Larner was furious, but contractually there was nothing he could do. (However, even with all the work that was done on it, the script still didn’t work.)
Schneider, as a further gesture of goodwill, then hired a bunch of Jack’s friends besides Gittes to fill out the cast, all of whom accepted scale just to be in a Nicholson project. Bob Towne, the writer, played the cuckolded husband married to Olive (Karen Black), and the part of Coach Bullion, at Jack’s insistence, went to Bruce Dern, for whom Jack arranged separately to receive a thousand dollars a week for the part. He wanted to do something to help kick-start Dernsie’s financial situation caused by his stalled career. Henry Jaglom played Conrad, one of the hard-ass professors, and newcomer William Tepper, a recent UCLA film school grad who had played a little high school basketball, was cast as Hector, the film’s star athlete.
Set at the height of the Vietnam War, the film centers on two friends and fellow students, the apolitical, good-looking Hector and his not-so-good-looking pal Gabriel (Michael Margotta), who is extremely political and being hotly pursued by his local draft board (and offscreen by Mimi, who carried on hot and heavy with him behind Jack’s back for almost the entire production).
Between shooting baskets, Hector has an affair with Olive, a gorgeous professor’s wife, and (not at the same time) watches his naked girlfriend roam around his dorm. Meanwhile, Gabriel, freaking out over his imminent induction into the military, tries to convince everyone he is a first-class moron, setting reptiles free from the school lab. When that doesn’t work, he takes it to another, dangerous, and quite moronic level as he tries to rape Olive. The end of the film sees him being taken away in cuffs. Prison, not Vietnam, is his fate, and the film’s timely message suggests that there is no real difference for America’s youth of the day between the two.
It quickly became apparent while filming that nothing was right about the script, and more rewrites were needed. This delayed the shoot for more than a month. Labor problems also plagued the production.
During the downtime, Jack returned to Hollywood. While the rest of the production remained on location at the University of Oregon, where the film was being shot, Jack decided to operate his own personal casting couch to find the perfect girl for the brief nonsexual nudity that takes place in the film. High on dope, grinning from ear to ear, Jack had the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood come to his office at BBS as he sat between his poster of Bob Dylan on one side of his sofa and a large photo of a nude woman on the other and made each disrobe for him. Some were more eager than others, but all disrobed and endured Jack’s near-medical examination. He saw more than a hundred girls before he chose June Fairchild, an actress who had been in Head, likely someone he had in mind for the part all along.
Back in production, Jack shot the sex scene in a car, where one of the participants has a vocal orgasm; another scene showed male frontal genitalia that violated a “no nudity” clause he had agreed to in return for the right to shoot directly on the university’s campus. That produced a brouhaha that threatened to again shut down the film.7 Jack later explained, somewhat ambiguously and not altogether accurately, what had happened this way: “I want to make only X-rated films …[seriously,] I knew we weren’t supposed to do it, but one very early Sunday morning I went out with the cameraman, a friend, the actor, did the bit and then split. Someone ratted, but we had already gotten the film out of the state across the border …” To Playboy, he later said this about nudity in American films: “If you suck a tit, you’re an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you’re a PG … I don’t think there’s anything dirty about sex … I didn’t want to do a ‘Romper Room’ movie … we got in trouble because you weren’t supposed to hear the sound of an orgasm. In England they wanted me to cut one line from the movie: ‘I’m comin’.’ I refused and the movie was never shown there. No one cared that a character in the picture was nude all the time.… [She was] nude for no purpose. I was sick of convention. I just put a nude woman in for no reason. For that movie I also wanted to do a symphony of dick
s … I thought it might have been a good title sequence but the cameramen wouldn’t shoot it.”
There may have been another reason Jack wanted the film to hover near the notorious X. He never wanted a movie of his to be shown on television, a medium he hated. In the days before cable, videocassettes, DVD, and streaming, movies that came to broadcast TV too soon were considered box office failures (most of them were). He wanted to make movies that could be shown only in the theaters. Peter Guber took a supportive stand, backing Jack’s sexual ideas, but with one eye on protecting the studio: “We were enthusiastic about the film and stood totally behind it, with a safety wall. I was not really creatively involved with any elements of the production at all.”
To Jack, Drive, He Said had all the same rebellious elements of his best Corman films, but when it opened, after Five Easy Pieces, audiences didn’t buy it. Instead of antisocial or politically radical, it came off as dated, hollow, pretentious, and ineffective. As a (re)writer, Jack failed to provide his story with sufficient dramatic buildup or any kind of logical progression of the plot. As a director, he failed at illuminating the story’s subtext, and his frame lacked cinematic tension. Because of it, all the characters came off two-dimensional and vapid, and Gabriel’s final rape freak-out lacked any sense of moral outrage or ironic desperation, little more than a pornographic adolescent wet dream.
With all the delays, and the death of Ethel May, the production, originally scheduled for thirty days, stretched past two months. During the time Jack was away from the set, he kept hearing rumors that Mimi, whom he had given a small role, was having an affair with Margotta. When Jack got back, he tried to get her to stop; she ignored him, until one day she showed up on set with a black eye. The next day she left, telling Jack they were through, and once again he went crazy over losing her, performing his own tragic opera for anyone who could bear to listen to it again. Harry Dean remembers how Jack was “almost incoherent. I’ve never seen such despair.”