by Marc Eliot
4 Rupert Crosse, originally cast as Mule, had something of a nervous breakdown before the film began shooting and was replaced by Otis Young.
5 John Huston was married five times. Enrica was killed in a car crash while still married to Huston. His other four marriages all ended in divorce. His other child with Enrica was Walter Anthony “Tony” Huston, who is today a lawyer and the father of actor Jack Huston.
CHAPTER
“Cocaine is in now because chicks dig it sexually … I guess it could be considered a sexual aid.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
WITH HAL ASHBY AS HIS SUPPLIER AND ENTHUSIASTIC FELLOW user, Jack had gotten more heavily into cocaine during the making of The Last Detail. While psychedelics and pot were still his drugs of choice, coke was something he’d discovered sometimes helped delay the premature ejaculations that plagued him. By following what he’d heard about Errol Flynn, he learned that by putting a dab on the tip of his manhood, he could last longer, and, because of the way women reacted to that, he also believed it intensified the sensations for them.
Jack was by no means the only one in Hollywood to have come upon the so-called joys of the white Bolivian Marching Powder. When recreational drugs hit the film studios, it galloped through them like a white plague. Films ran wildly over budget, salaries skyrocketed, and contracts were torn up and rewritten, while nobody seemed to notice that fewer and fewer people were going to the movies they were making.
Columbia, on its last legs as a major studio, nearly shut down when its stock fell from a high of $30 a share in 1971 to a low of $2 a share in 1973. The culprit, or the scapegoat if you will, it was decided, was the rising cost of independent film studio pre-release guarantees. One of its biggest abusers, the board concluded, was BBS, which, under Bert Schneider, despite the success of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show, had helped the studio rack up an after-tax loss of $50 million. Too many other BBS films, such as Drive, He Said, A Safe Place, and The King of Marvin Gardens, did not make any money.
Soon enough, heads rolled at Columbia. One of the first was Abe Schneider, Bert’s father, eased out of the company after a few rounds of corporate musical chairs, leaving BBS and Bert Schneider in a precarious situation regarding his final film for BBS, the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds.
JACK AND ANJELICA were one of those couples that had never dated, just went from zero to sixty in no seconds. Jack gave Anjelica a welcome to L.A. gift, a Mercedes. After all, he told her, a girl needs a car to get around. Translation in Jackspeak: Welcome to my world. He began to call her “Toots” or “Tootsie” or “Tootman” or “Big,” in Jackspeak. She in turn rather unsubtly nicknamed him “the hot pole.”
In June 1973, Jack got word that Antonioni was at last ready to begin The Passenger, aka Fatal Exit, and that he should fly to Spain immediately to start filming. However, as he was preparing to leave, a bizarre series of circumstances began that would have a profound effect on Jack’s life as they churned up the past and reached all the way back to make him question his parentage and therefore his actual identity. It all started innocently enough in 1973 when two enterprising students from a University of Southern California film class, Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer, decided to write their graduate thesis together on Jack Nicholson. Their goal was to interview him and everybody associated with him. They sent out letters, assuring one and all this was not a personal investigation but one that would look at the films, with Jack’s added commentary wherever possible.
It took them a year, during which time Jack made The Passenger. He asked Anjelica to accompany him to Europe for it, which made her extremely happy. To keep busy while Jack was filming, Anjelica was able to book a series of overseas modeling jobs. They were met at the airport by the paparazzi, where Jack teased both Anjelica and the press about being with Anjelica: “Since we’ve been together,” he grinned, “she hasn’t done a day’s work. She hasn’t given up her career completely. But she’s not exactly what you would call ambitious … she gets perky around seven in the evening … we both love dressing up and going out at night. I love her in black! She could wear black both day and night as far as I’m concerned. But she is always beautiful.” It was a riff she didn’t especially appreciate, especially the part about her not working, followed by how beautiful she was. It hit a nerve, making her sound like she was one of his starlet hangers-on. As she said later, “Can you imagine what it was like living with Jack when the phones were always ringing and scripts were always coming in for him and there were deals to be made constantly and I couldn’t even get a job.”
The bad taste in her mouth stayed with her, and sooner rather than later, she returned to Los Angeles without him.
Jack was too busy to notice that they were having their first fight, preoccupied as he was with the long-awaited chance to work with Antonioni, although as filming went on he kept trying to figure out exactly what the film’s isolated, quasi-existential story line was, what his character was all about, and what Antonioni was trying to say. Like Sergio Leone, another European director who aimed for an international audience, Antonioni understood that the less dialogue used the better, and that plot was less important than mood.
His co-star, Maria Schneider, of butter-up-the-butt fame after co-starring with Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 Last Tango in Paris, seemed as disinterested in the film as she was in Jack. To one member of the press during production, Jack said, “Maria has a fantastic screen personality—the other personality I’m not nuts about.”1 To another, he was a little more forthright, confessing that theirs was more than just a friendship, although the details were left out. “Maria and I were old friends,” Jack semiwhispered. “I’d been out with her [Jackspeak for slept with her]. I always think of her as a female James Dean—she’s a great natural …”
The Passenger was shot mostly in Spain—Barcelona, Madrid, the Ramblas, Málaga, and Seville—and two weeks in Algeria at Fort Polignanc, which stood in for the African state of Chad. Everyone, including Jack, lived in tents in Algeria and suffered from the blistering heat. Then, after a brief stopover in Germany, it was off to England for five welcome weeks of postproduction in the luxury studios at Bloomsbury.
Even if he never entirely figured out what the film was about, Jack loved working with Antonioni. The plot, such as it was, had something to do with switched identities and a long train ride, leading some critics to compare it to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest for its landscape screenplay and the idea of a character becoming an identity he assumes (as, in Hitchcock, Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill “becomes” George Kaplan).
Jack appreciated the film’s air of mystery and ambiguity: “There are movies that you do where they don’t look, on the face of them, certainly, mainline commercial. But you see and hope there’s something in [The Passenger] that gives you a shot at that—an off-the-wall shot.”
Years later, reflecting on the experience of making the film, Jack said, tellingly, “[Antonioni was] like a father figure to me. I worked with him because I wanted to be a film director and I thought I could learn from a master. He’s one of the few people I know that I ever really listened to.”
The Passenger was completed in September 1973, and the next day Jack boarded a nonstop flight from London to Los Angeles and reported to Paramount’s wardrobe department at eight that morning to begin costume fittings for his next film, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
Jack was eager to get home for two reasons: he wanted to begin preparations for Chinatown, and he wanted to be with Anjelica, who had gotten over her annoyance and was eagerly waiting to give him the most royal of welcomes.
The two students finally got to Jack in late 1974.2 According to Crane and Fryer, “Having heard of the upcoming publication [of our interviews] a woman in New Jersey sent us a letter. She claimed to be married to Jack Nicholson’s biological father … the letter described how Jack’s mother was, in fact, the woman Jack thought was his much older
sister, June. His ‘Mom,’ Ethel May, was really his grandmother and his older sister Lorraine was really his aunt. The woman writing the letter said that her husband, Jack’s biological father [not John], was a wonderful man, not the hard-drinking deadbeat who had abandoned his wife and son [Ethel May and Jack]. The letter implored us not to repeat these false characterizations.” In their pre-interview research the two had apparently uncovered some material that suggested, accurately, that John was thrown out of the house by Ethel May for drinking too much, and that he was, in fact, not her husband; they had never married. The letter writer did not identify herself or indicate who she believed Jack’s real father was.
Crane and Fryer later claimed they brought the letter to Jack, who was shaken by it. He decided to call Lorraine. Now that all the senior players were gone, she decided to tell Jack the truth about who he really was, and who he wasn’t.
These are the facts: His sister June was born in 1919, at home. By the time she was a teenager, she was dancing professionally with the bandleader Eddie King, whom she had first met when he was playing on the Jersey Shore. He briefly had a radio program, “Eddie King and His Radio Kiddies,” and June appeared on it regularly as one of the “kiddies.” In 1934, at the age of fifteen June dropped out of high school in search of a career on her own as a model, a singer, and a chorus girl.
For the next two years, until 1936, June was able to find work up and down the East Coast, from Florida all the way to New York City. During a brief stay back at the family house, she met Don Rose, who was also a performer and ten years her senior. The two began dating, and soon June fell in love with Rose, or Furcillo-Rose, as everybody who knew him away from the dance halls called him. On October 16, 1936, they married. The ceremony took place in Delaware, far enough away from Neptune so that no one would know. To further keep their secret, she signed the marriage certificate June Nilson—her stage name, a contraction of Nicholson, and he signed it Donald Furcillo. What she didn’t know, but would soon find out, was that Furcillo-Rose was already married and had a child. When she found out, she abruptly dropped him and planned to get an annulment. But before she could, she became pregnant.
Early in 1937, June disappeared from Neptune. No one except Ethel May knew where or why. Ethel May had insisted that the baby not be born at home, or anywhere in New Jersey. Instead, she chose St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic hospital in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, run at the time by the Sisters of Mercy, with June registered as “June Wilson,” likely a misspelling of “Nilson.” This was the reason Jack could never find his original birth certificate.
June gave birth April 22, 1937. Because Ethel May did not want Furcillo-Rose’s name on the birth certificate, she listed the baby’s name as John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson Jr., and her companion, John Nicholson, as the father. Ethel May, who was forty-four at the time, decided that she would act as the boy’s mother, and John his father.
Two months after they all returned to Neptune, June took off once again, still determined to have a career in show business. This time she headed west but got only as far as Ohio, where, broke and hungry, she took a job at a Cleveland airfield. There, her good looks attracted a lot of men, and despite the fact she was technically still married to Furcillo-Rose, she wed one of them, a wealthy divorced test pilot by the name of Murray “Bob” Hawley. Not long after, Hawley relocated them to Southampton, New York. They had two children, and everything seemed to have settled in June’s life—she even planned to reclaim Jack and make him part of her new family—until, one day in 1941 or 1942, Hawley abandoned June and the children for another woman. June, only twenty-three years old, then took the children with her to Los Angeles, hoping to make it big in the movies, leaving Jack behind at the Neptune house to be raised by Ethel May and John Nicholson.
All during this time, the forlorn Furcillo-Rose kept coming around, hoping to find June there. Ethel May hated him, but she knew he was the real father of the child, and couldn’t just turn him away.
Who had really contacted the two students? Was it Furcillo-Rose himself, disguising his identity by claiming to be a woman, likely looking to cash in on Jack’s celebrity and bankbook? Another possibility was Furcillo-Rose’s mother, who always insisted her son was Jack’s real father, even though they had never met.
Either way, Jack was devastated. He didn’t want to believe it, especially the part about Fucillo-Rose being his real father, but the story had the ring of truth about it, as disturbing as it was.
Jack agreed to talk to the two boys for their thesis as long as they didn’t ask him any questions about the letter in their work. They agreed.
A shaken Jack kept the terrible secret mostly to himself, except for a few friends, who insist he was deeply affected by both it and the near exposure of it. One close associate claims Jack was “devastated and shocked by the information.” Peter Fonda said the possible publication caused “a deep hurt inside …” Michele Phillips, his ex-girlfriend who still kept in touch, said “The [possible publication of the news] was horrible for him. Over the weeks, the poor guy had a very very rough time adjusting to it. He’d been raised in this loving relationship … surrounded by women … now I think he felt all women were liars.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, while Jack was immersed in the making of Chinatown, on December 12, 1973, The Last Detail was released to qualify for that year’s Oscars, to mixed reviews but so-so box office. Newsweek loved Jack’s bravura performance—“Nicholson dominates!” wrote Paul D. Zimmerman. Stanley Kauffmann later wrote, “Here [Jack] has a part exactly right for him … aside from the faint air of virtuoso occasion, he and the role are perfect for each other, and together they galvanize the film.” Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, liked Jack better than he did the film: “The best thing about The Last Detail is the opportunity it provides Jack Nicholson to play the role of Signalman First Class Buddusky … his performance is big, intense, so full of gradations of mood that it becomes virtually a guide to a certain kind of muddled, well-meaning behavior.” Andrew Sarris praised Ashby’s auteuristic direction, while John Simon, the angriest uber-intellectual of his time, was not especially enamored of either the film or Jack’s performance: “Nicholson gives what many consider a superlative performance, and what strikes me as yet another example of his customary turn.”
Oscar talk began immediately. On a budget of $2.6 million, the film eventually grossed more than $10 million, a profitable ratio but in no way a blockbuster, and as expected went on to be nominated for a slew of awards for both Jack and the movie. The film was up for two Golden Globes—Jack for Best Motion Picture Actor in a Drama, and Randy Quaid for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture—but neither actor won. Jack did win a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for his role in the film and Best Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.3
After this run of accolades, the studio sent Jack to New York to do publicity and drum up interest in a possible Oscar nomination for him. He took Anjelica with him and the two lived it up. In between promotional duties, they saw the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden on January 28; two nights later it was Bob Dylan at the Garden. After the show, Jack and Anjelica stopped backstage to say hello. Bob was smiling and gracious when he met the couple. On February 5, they saw Joni Mitchell at Avery Fisher Hall. They capped off each night in New York at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side nightspot that had become a must-stop for the writer/actor/newspaper columnist/celebrity set.
WHEN THE NOMINATIONS for that year’s Oscars were announced, The Last Detail got three—Jack for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Randy Quaid for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and Robert Towne for Best Writing for an Adapted Screenplay.
The 46th Annual Academy Awards were held on April 2, 1974, once again at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this time hosted by David Niven, Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross, and Jack’s girlfriend’s father, John Huston.
Three years had passed since Jack had
been nominated for an Oscar. His last appearance at the awards ceremony was in 1972, as a presenter. Despite some stated resistance—“Who wants to sit under 67 floodlights for four hours without even being able to go out to take a leak?”—Jack showed up looking resplendent in a tuxedo with a gray shirt underneath, and Anjelica gorgeous in black on his arm.4
He knew he was up against some formidable competition—most pointedly, to Jack, from Brando’s second consecutive nomination (the year before he had been nominated and won for his role in The Godfather), for Last Tango in Paris, although after what Brando had pulled the previous year refusing to show up and sending Sacheen Littlefeather to pick up his award and make an acceptance speech that dealt with the rights of Native Americans, there was virtually no chance he would win. Al Pacino was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, and the betting money was on Pacino for the win. Also nominated were Robert Redford for George Roy Hill’s The Sting (but not Paul Newman for the same film, yet another role Jack had turned down) and Jack Lemmon’s frankly weirdly edgy performance in John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger.
The Oscar went, surprisingly, to Lemmon, even though Save the Tiger had been a box office disaster and the Academy usually doesn’t reward commercial failures. The Monday morning quarterbacks concluded that Lemmon had won by a process of elimination: Brando was a definite no-no, Redford without Newman was problematic, Pacino was still too young, and Lumet and his New York–based films were not well liked in L.A. (in those times, so-called New York pictures were rarely favored by the Academy), and The Last Detail had all those dirty words. Lemmon was an audience and Academy favorite but had last won an Oscar in 1955, for his supporting role in John Ford’s, Mervyn LeRoy’s, and Josh Logan’s (uncredited) Mister Roberts. According to the Academy, he was due.