Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  Michelle had been a few days late in arriving, and when she found the entire cast was holed up at a nearby Howard Johnson’s, she insisted she and Jack find a place of their own, somewhere on the beach. Jack didn’t want to look like he was on a star trip to the rest of the cast and crew, but to keep Michelle happy he agreed. The next day he took her to a football game at Manasquan High, to show her where he grew up as a child, and afterward for a walk in the sand, but Michelle wasn’t into nostalgia. Instead she kept pressing him to find them a place until he finally said he decided he didn’t want to leave the hotel after all, that it would make him look like too much of an elitist. Michelle threw up her arms, exploded, called him a “stupid Irish Mick,” and turned and left him standing there in the sand while she went back to the Howard Johnson’s, packed her bags, hopped into a taxi, and caught the next flight from Newark Airport back to L.A.

  What Jack didn’t know at the time, and what may have been part of the reason her temper was so mercurial, was that her hormones were out of whack. She was pregnant with his baby. A month later she miscarried.

  WITH MICHELLE GONE, even in Atlantic City, the constant flow of locals and groupies (“chippies” in Jackspeak) helped fill Jack’s sexual void, and there were plenty, as he was a big star, but he was still upset about Michelle and it showed. For Jack, it was a tired replay of his female abandonment-induced pain. According to his friend Harry Gittes, “Jack always has the same dynamic with women, tremendous push-pull. He was pulling away for the first three fourths of the time. Then eventually the girlfriends pull away—who can have a relationship with an actor who goes on location with beautiful women, wanna fuck ’em, and, start chasing them. The key word is control.”

  To one unnamed friend, Jack summed up his loss this way: “[Michelle]’s the only one who makes my wee-wee hard.”1

  AUDIENCES DIDN’T GO for Marvin Gardens. Despite Rafelson’s unbridled enthusiasm for it, and the film’s being chosen to open the 1972 New York Film Festival on the strength of Jack’s name, it was eventually pulled, and bombed at the box office.2 Critics were divided but mostly negative, unable to put their finger on what was wrong or right about the film. Andrew Sarris wrote a review in the Village Voice on November 9, 1972, that was more entertaining and clarifying than the film itself. It said, in part, that “the big problem with The King of Marvin Gardens is not that Rafelson saw too many Fellini movies, but that in casting Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern as the two fraternal leads he provided more angst than any movie could digest. And since The King of Marvin Gardens oscillates hopelessly between catatonia (Nicholson) and megalomania (Dern), the audience is left stranded on a lonely sandbar of alienation. There seems to be a gap in the movie between what its makers feel and what they choose to communicate to the audience. I say seems to be because the two mystifying female onlookers (Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson) at the spectacle of brotherly bathos seem to switch their moods as often and as capriciously as their underwear …”

  The King of Marvin Gardens followed a distinct BBS theme that had begun with Easy Rider, the independent “buddy” film. The theme continued in Five Easy Pieces, at least for the first half hour, before Dupea’s friend is arrested, setting off Bobby’s decision to try to return once again to his upscale roots. Drive, He Said centers on the relationship between the two male roommates, and Marvin Gardens is about the tenuous bond between two brothers. Even Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show has two buddies at its core, who eventually do battle over the same girl. In some ways, this structure also reflected the successful, if complex relationship between Bert and Bob: Bert was always more business-oriented than Bob, Bob more the self-styled creative artist. And yet, by the time of Marvin Gardens, Schneider was no longer interested in Bob, at least not as a filmmaker, and no longer cared about producing films when, as he saw it, America was on the eve of destruction. The film marked the start of the final descent of BBS, which had only one more major movie left in it.

  Jack was infuriated by the film’s critical and commercial failure. “I usually don’t think critics can hurt a movie, but that one they hurt …” The King of Marvin Gardens proved a creative and commercial failure for Jack.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1972, Jack had agreed to star in a Hal Ashby remake of Tay Garnett’s 1946 version of James M. Cain’s classic noir novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, to be called Three-Cornered Circle, playing the leading role of Frank Chambers, made famous by John Garfield in Garnett’s version. Garfield’s co-star had been the smoldering Lana Turner, unforgettable in her incandescent turban and tantalizing white shorts. She drove Garfield and every male who saw it crazy with her come-hither performance as Cora, the sexually frustrated wife of an older man who owns a dingy roadside diner.

  To play Cora in his version, Jack insisted on Michelle Phillips. Knowing how sexual her ambition was, and how ambitious her sexuality was, he thought that offering her the role and working together might rekindle their romance. Ashby said yes, knowing that if he wanted Jack, he would have to take Michelle. However, Jim Aubrey, the head of MGM at the time, which was financing the film in return for distribution rights, rejected Phillips out of hand. Jack, in a fit of anger, abruptly left the project and Ashby dutifully followed him out the door. Jack then tried to move the project to Peter Guber at Columbia, who passed on Postman but signed Jack to agree to star in and Ashby to direct another project the studio already had, a military police drama titled The Last Detail, with a screenplay by Jack’s good friend Robert Towne, adapted from the novel by Darryl Ponicsan. Both Jack and Ashby said yes, which put an end to Three-Cornered Circle.

  Producer Gerald Ayres had paid Ponicsan $100,000 for the rights to his novel and hired Towne to write the screenplay. Although Columbia and Guber, then head of American production, was enthusiastic about the project from the get-go, he could only give it a yellow light, halfway between a dead-stop red and a go-ahead green, mainly because of the script’s heavy use of the F-bomb, necessary, according to Towne, because the film was about a bunch of rough Navy guys and that was the way they talked. Jack refused to sign his contract until the film was an official go, although he maintained he would definitely sign on when it was.

  According to Peter Guber, “I was totally involved with this film but in the first seven minutes, there were 342 ‘fucks.’ ” The original novel had used the F-bomb innumerable times, and with countless variations, giving it a military authenticity that Guber thought read better than it would play onscreen. These were the Nixon years, and everybody in Hollywood was aware of Nixon’s disdain for the film industry, his “enemies lists,” and his history of involvement with the blacklist, and Guber was hesitant about pushing the government too far. A film that portrayed MPs as foul-mouthed louts might not be the best way for Columbia to go. “The project broke down several times,” Guber recalled. “Jack was the only one who could save it.”

  Guber believed a big star might make the production work, and if Jack was not going to sign on, Guber wanted Burt Reynolds, huge at the time, who could bring some authentic “good old boy” to the role of Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky, along with Jim Brown, a former football great, as “Mule” Mulhall and David Cassidy as Larry Medows, the prisoner they have to deliver to military prison. Guber also flirted with the idea of firing Towne and bringing in a new writer who would not resist toning down the language of the script as well as simplifying the plot to make it more accessible to a broader audience not familiar with the ways of the military.

  It didn’t help anything that while the studio was trying to reduce the number of fucks in the film, hoping to put a ceiling on them at twenty, Ashby was busted in Canada trying to cross the border back into America holding a considerable amount of pot. He had traveled there to scout inexpensive locations and picked up some “supplies” along the way. According to Guber, “I had fly to Canada and get him out of the hoosegow. It was a total nightmare.”

  After Ashby’s bust, the project was on life support, until Ayres, with the film at
a very pale yellow, managed to get Jack to sign his contract, after which Columbia gave it a $2 million green light, a modest amount but enough to get the film into production while the rest of the deal, including the language issue, was resolved, and dialogue such as “I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker!” was reluctantly approved by the studio.

  In the film, a teenage kleptomaniac sailor convicted of petty theft, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid), is being taken from his base in Norfolk, Virginia, to the prison compound in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by two career sailors, “lifers,” shore patrolmen Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky (Jack) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young).3 They quickly learn that the boy had the bad luck to be caught stealing from the favorite charity of the commanding officer’s wife and was convicted and sentenced to eight years in the brig. On the way, Billy and Mule decide to send Meadows off with one last healthy dose of freedom during the five-day journey that included a beer blast, a brawl in Penn Station with a couple of Marines, and, when they discover that Meadows is still a virgin, getting him laid at one of the sleaziest (and therefore, to Billy, the best) brothels in Boston.

  Then the unexpected happens. Having had a taste of real life, Meadows decides he won’t be able to stand eight years of confinement, and, despite the fact that Billy and Mule have relaxed their custody of him and treated him as a friend rather than a prisoner, he decides to flee. Billy and Mule quickly recapture him, are sympathetic, and consider letting him go, but they know that if they do, they will wind up in the brig, in effect doing Meadows’s time for him.

  Towne’s script is brilliantly realized by Ashby, whose edgy, nervous direction illustrates the tension between authority and rebelliousness, obligation to duty and love of fellow man. And as far as Guber is concerned, “Jack was a force of nature in this film.”

  Because of the film’s salty language, and the behavior of all three sailors, the film received no cooperation from the military. Most Hollywood films about the armed forces enjoy at least some measure of cooperation, including being allowed to film on bases and using soldiers or sailors as extras, backgrounds of real equipment and ships, and military assistance to make the script more accurate. The Last Detail was shot in Toronto from November 1972 to March 1973, in the dead of the Canadian winter, where the weather was so cold it nearly froze everyone’s coffee during breaks.

  To keep warm and stay high, which he was most of the time, Jack stayed close to Ashby. The two chain-smoked joints during the entire shoot as if they were Marlboros. Perhaps because he was so stoned, Jack bragged offscreen to the few women in the film that his Navy uniform costume was custom-fit to emphasize his dick. He liked it that way, he said, it helped his character.

  His co-stars Quaid and Young physically towered over Jack, which emphasized his 5′9½″ height, but in every other way Jack soared above them. His charisma was the glue that held this unlikely trio together.4 Here was Jack, charming, smirky, and at his best, showing off his singular ability to carry a nongenre film to mainstream audiences and, despite the language and some of its depressing situations, making it not only palatable but actually fun.

  At the first screening, the executives at Columbia, including Guber, hated everything about Detail, from its language to Ashby’s nervous jump-cutting that to them seemed an odd mix of Godard stylistics and a kid with his first movie camera. They threatened not to release it at all, which Ayres countered by wrangling an invitation to exhibit it at the San Francisco Film Festival, where Jack’s performance was so well received that Columbia had no choice but to commercially release the film. Later that year, after the Oscars, the film also played at the Cannes Film Festival, and Jack’s performance was once again what everybody talked about.

  Returning from Cannes, Jack stopped off in London, where director Ken Russell asked him to do a brief cameo in the film version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. Jack, eager to be reunited with Ann-Margret, agreed to play the doctor who examines the deaf, dumb, and blind boy. The $75,000 check for one day’s work didn’t hurt. Russell had originally wanted Christopher Lee for the part, but he was in Bangkok filming the James Bond flick Man with the Golden Gun and couldn’t get away. Next on Russell’s wish list was Peter Sellers, but when he turned him down, Jack stepped up, took the money, and ran, later claiming he did his own singing (demonstrating why the producers of Clear Day cut Jack’s song).

  TO CELEBRATE JACK’S return to Los Angeles, Lou Adler took him to the Playboy mansion, where Jack got all the female comfort he could handle. He preferred Playmates dressed as nurses.

  Adler then flew with Jack back east to do the New York scene—with all its beautiful and available, in Jackspeak, “moe-dells”—to Warhol’s The Factory, Studio 54, and Regine’s.

  There he noticed a tall, dark-haired fashion model with a strong face and high-beam green eyes at a party thrown by Andy Warhol. She was Anjelica Huston, the younger child of legendary film director John Huston and Balanchine ballerina Enrica “Ricki” Soma, his fourth wife, and the granddaughter of actor Walter Huston.5 Born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, she spent an idyllic childhood living in a Georgian mansion in Galway, where horses roamed and sweet rhododendron bloomed everywhere. She attended school in Ireland and marveled at her father’s charismatic presence whenever he was home, which was not all that often, as he was always off on one film project or another (or heavily involved with this woman or that).

  She returned to Los Angeles in 1969, when she was eighteen years old, following the tragic death of her mother. She had blossomed into an imposingly tall, striking beauty, and her father cast his then shy and reluctant daughter as the lead in A Walk with Love and Death. The film was a disaster and Anjelica turned away from acting to what was, for her, an easier profession. Her good looks, lithe figure, and 5′10″ height quickly made her a sought-after fashion model. She became a favorite of such top photographers as Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Bob Richardson, twenty-three years Angelica’s senior when they started a blazing affair, during which time Vogue devoted thirty pages of a single issue to his photos of her.

  But all the attention did nothing for her ego. “I loved the clothes, the champagne, the attention,” she later recalled. “Everything but my own looks. Day after day I shared a mirror with the world’s most beautiful women and stared at eyes that were bigger than mine, noses that were smaller. I cried and cried because I thought I was ugly …”

  The camera, a lot of men, and some women disagreed. Still, she could not shake the feeling that she would need a strong man to rule her life. A man like her father.

  Anjelica was a spike heel taller than Jack and, at twenty-two years old, fourteen years his junior; from the first moment she laid eyes on him at Warhol’s, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She finally met him at a party at his house in Los Angeles. “I was invited by my then stepmother, Cici [Celeste Shane, her father’s fifth wife]. The door opened and Jack’s grinning face presented itself to me and I thought, ‘Ah, I like you.’… I was always attracted to bad boys, cool boys. Actors, musicians, those kind of guys.”

  She recognized in Jack a younger version of her wonderfully crazy, creative, live-life-to-the-fullest father. Jack had that same Irish stallion in him, and she knew right then and there they were going to be together: “When I was working in New York, it was very difficult to meet real men. It’s so easy to become a fag hag if you’re a successful model. Jack is very definitely a real man, one who gets your blood going.”

  She and Jack spent the night alone in his bedroom while the party took place throughout the rest of the house. The next day she returned to New York only long enough to pack whatever things she needed from the apartment she kept there, flew back to L.A., and moved into a small house near Jack’s on Mulholland Drive.

  For the next seventeen tumultuous years, strewn with affairs on both sides, they managed to stay involved, if not always together. She fell in love with him early on; he was handsome, he was manly, he was funny, he was cool. Perhaps most of all he
gave her “a feeling that has something to do with fun and with family, a feeling like when you had a good time with your dad. It’s a secure feeling, something like, ‘Now we can relax: we’re with Jack.’ ”

  As for Jack, he loved the fun angle of their relationship, but the more she devoted herself to him, the more he felt smothered by her blanket of paternal need that reinforced his need for an escape clause, to feel free to be with any of those young, gorgeous, and willing moe-dells who were out there and just as sexually willing and adventurous as he was. Just as in his marriage, no matter how great the love, monogamy was just too monotonous.

  * * *

  1 It was a fascinating rondo. Michelle, who had been married to Hopper, then lived with Jack, next appeared on an episode of the TV game show The Dating Game and won a trip to Asia with some guy she barely knew, either before or after the trip. She then dated French actor, director, and screenwriter Christian Marquand, who directed the film version of Terry Southern’s novel Candy, which starred Marlon Brando. She next began a relationship with Lou Adler, one of Jack’s best friends, who had been previously dating Britt Eckland, with whom he had a child. After leaving Adler, Michelle lived for a while with Warren Beatty.

  2 Jack fought hard to keep the film out of the early fall festival, because it meant delaying its opening for six weeks, and it would then be surrounded by other big fall commercial films, denying it the kid-glove platform-release treatment that it needed to find an audience. Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon opened the festival after Gardens was pulled.

  3 When Jack agreed to be in The Last Detail, he wanted either John Denver, the singing star who had a great quality of innocence about him that Jack thought was perfect for the role of Larry Meadows, or John Travolta, another young TV actor who could also project innocence well. Neither had made a feature film at the time. In the end, Jack reluctantly agreed to Quaid, although he was concerned if Quaid had enough experience or “innocence” to pull off the role.