Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  The film was co-produced by Jack’s old friend Harry Gittes and Harold Schneider, and directed by John Herman Shaner, and it had a boatload of writers, including Shaner, Al Ramrus, Charles Shyer, and Alan Mandel. (That many writers usually means the script is not very strong.) Jack had wanted to do another western, a genre he was familiar with, and thought Goin’ South might be a good follow-up to Missouri Breaks. This time his co-stars would be John Belushi, a comic actor who had made it big on TV’s Saturday Night Live. He believed Belushi was perfect for the small role of a sleazy sheriff. A completely unknown, the plain-looking Mary Steenburgen, who had studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, was discovered by Jack in Paramount’s reception area. He had been looking for an actress who could play the dour but dominating frontierswoman Julie Tate, who saves the life of Henry Lloyd Moon (Jack), a doomed-to-die-by-hanging horse and cattle thief and bank robber. Just before the execution, Julie takes advantage of a little-known Civil War ordinance that allows a woman to save the life of a condemned man by marrying him and taking responsibility for his behavior. It amounts to a form of sexual slavery, without any of the balancing benefit of sexual favors. It was supposed to be funny.

  Goin’ South, with its tongue in cheek and other places (the title is a slang expression for oral sex), suggests a submissive role for Moon in what amounts to a soft-core S&M relationship, the real theme of the film. Steenburgen, who had previously been a waitress at the Magic Pan, was plucked out of obscurity by Jack for her “quiet, ingenuous aura.” Without being beautiful, he said, she was totally seductive.

  Before being tested for the film, she had never even been on a soundstage. As she remembered, “I did a screen test and when I hadn’t heard anything five days later, I was going to go back to New York. I went to Paramount to get the money they owed me for my hotel bill, and Jack was sitting there, smoking a big cigar and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re on the payroll.’ He stood up for me in so many ways because I was so naïve and so inexperienced about film. He tried to teach me things it had taken him years to learn. He’s very generous that way; he takes great delight in other actors doing well.”

  Whatever feelings of atonement Jack may have had for the way he had treated women in Hollywood in the past (and the way they had treated him), Goin’ South was equal parts self-victimization and self-atonement, as well as what he saw as the entrapment and ongoing victimization of Polanski. It was rich material, and right in Jack’s wheel-house. Because he had been compared to Bogart for so many years, here was his chance to emulate not just the great actor but the great actor’s role in Huston’s 1951 The African Queen, a film Goin’ South resembled in some ways. Along the way Julie reforms Henry by teaching him true Christian values. Jack filled out Goin’ South with a lot of his pals in cameo roles—many from the Cuckoo’s Nest ensemble, including Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd.

  Despite his training at the feet of Corman and the BBS boys, where brevity was king and a second take was thought of as extraneous, while directing this film Jack reshot almost every scene, and if an actor was not happy with a take, he would gladly shoot the whole thing again.

  Jack was energized by holding the director’s stick, the first time since 1971’s Drive, He Said. At two every morning, when the rest of the cast and crew were exhausted from the heat and bitten to distraction by bugs, Jack was rarin’ to go. He often stayed up all night marking out scenes, camera angles, lighting, and so forth. It was Gittes who finally tried to put the brakes on Jack, for the sake of the film’s budget and to get this thing done before Paramount, unhappy with the slow pace of progress, pulled the plug. Discussing the next day’s shoot, Gittes told him, “All we can hope for is that next year, this picture won’t just be another faded T-shirt.”

  If Jack was excited about the film, he was also nervous, and for good reason. On the other side of forty, he appears for the first time as a middle-aged character actor, without a trace of the lean and hungry good-looking rebel that defined so many of his earlier roles. He comes off in the film as quirky, goofy, and weirdly off-pace, which may be partly attributed to lingering injuries to his left hand and several ribs after being thrown from a horse and partly because of the excessive heat, the militant mosquitoes, and an extremely dry throat he kept trying to quench with tequila rather than water. Worse, John Belushi was in the throes of a drug addiction that kept him from showing up on time, and his erratic behavior started to get to Jack. One day when Belushi failed to show, Jack found him sleeping and threatened to fire him, or kill him, or both.

  Paramount, meanwhile, after seeing the first round of rushes, wanted Jack to hurry up and finish it. Nobody in the screening room liked his frankly weird performance, Steenburgen’s lack of sex appeal, and Belushi’s bizarre acting. In his own defense, Jack tried to explain, rather sheepishly, that “actually, I was trying to do a kind of Clark Gable spin on the character.”

  SHORTLY AFTER he finished Goin’ South, Jack received word from Kubrick that he was to arrive in London the last week in June 1978 to begin work on The Shining. After two years, Kubrick’s screen adaptation of the Stephen King novel was finally going into production with a scheduled twenty-five-week shoot.

  THE FILM WAS shot between May 1978 and February 1979 on the soundstages of London’s EMI-Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. When Jack first arrived, he was put up at the Dorchester but was moved at his request by the film’s distributor, Warner Bros., to a little house on the Thames, which Jack greatly preferred to a hotel swarming with paparazzi.

  No sooner did he arrive than a parade of friends stopped by to visit. Harry Dean Stanton was in town shooting Ridley Scott’s ten-little-Indians-in-outer-space sci-fi thriller Alien and became a frequent visitor, usually with a couple of girls. Bob Dylan always came alone. Mick Jagger, like Harry Dean, brought girls instead of flowers. George Harrison and John Lennon came by at various times to hang out, sing, eat, and joke around, turning Jack’s London dwelling into an informal, ongoing salon-on-the-Thames.

  Early on during his stay in London, Jack met Margaret Trudeau, the estranged wife of Canada’s prime minister, fresh from her dalliance with Mick Jagger (who made the introduction). They fell into a hot and heavy affair that ended when Jack took up with Christina Onassis, the wealthy, overweight daughter of the Greek shipping magnate. There were also affairs with Melanie Griffith and Jill St. John, all of which kept him going during the long production and contributed to his back problems exacerbated by an on-set accident that at times left him unable to get out of bed and caused him to miss a couple of days’ work on the film. Jack’s happyland carousel reconvened when Bianca Jagger eagerly took over nursing duties.

  The shoot proved long and difficult for everyone except Kubrick. The screenplay, co-written by Diane Johnson, took so long to film that they had to share studio space with two other films scheduled to be in that studio space after The Shining—Irvin Kersher’s The Empire Strikes Back and Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon.

  Kubrick, the perfectionist, wanted everything onscreen to look and sound perfect. That was why he often did forty or more takes of a single shot, sometimes one hundred, which Jack found tedious and unnecessary, despite the fact that he had done precisely the same thing on Goin’ South. As a director, Jack understood the quest for perfection, but as an actor he felt his best stuff came in the first few takes, after which he lost the intensity and the reality of the moment.

  Seen through Kubrick’s creative lens, The Shining looked like what it was, a weird horror story, cut with moments of high humor, like Jack’s memorable “Heerrrrre’s Johnny!” punch line, a 1970s reference to TV talk show host Johnny Carson (Jack later said it was his comment on television, which he still felt was a nightmare medium).

  AS SHOOTING WOUND down, Kubrick said he needed a few days off to figure out how to use the newly developed Steadicam—a camera that could be handheld without showing visible shaking on the screen—to frame some key tracking shots. Jack took the oppo
rtunity to fly to New York for the October 6, 1978, opening of Goin’ South. Seen from the distance of time, it was now clear to Jack that the film was a dud, a conclusion shared by all the critics after its official opening. Pauline Kael, sharpening her knives, was particularly outraged by Jack’s character’s “working his mouth with tongue darting out and dangling lewdly. He’s like an advertisement for a porno film.” The next part of her review eviscerated his directing: “Wasn’t there anybody on the set who’d tell Nicholson to give it a rest? An actor-director who prances about the screen maniacally can easily fool himself into thinking that his film is jumping. Nicholson jumps in Goin’ South, all right, but Goin’ South is inert.” The film opened and closed quickly. The only good reviews it received were for Steenburgen’s performance, but she did not have the kind of star power needed to save the film. Made for $6 million, it grossed less than $8 million in its initial domestic release.

  Jack was more upset about the film’s commercial failure as a director than he was as an actor. He had yet to direct a film that the public accepted. He was determined to keep trying until he got it right.

  He returned to London after Christmas, delaying his departure so he could celebrate the holidays in the States, which may have been at least partly an excuse not to have to go back to work on The Shining. He had, by now, lost all enthusiasm for the film and Kubrick’s wearying perfectionism. When he did finally return in January, he wasn’t there very long before a fire gutted one of The Shining’s major sets, further delaying the production. What had originally been a scheduled December 1979 opening was pushed back until Easter 1980, and then only if Kubrick could finish the film in time.

  Kubrick finally completed The Shining late in February, and Jack immediately returned to L.A., where he was met with a flood of new offers. Hal Ashby wanted him to co-star with Clint Eastwood in a filmed version of Richard Brautigan’s Gothic western novel The Hawkline Monster, but Jack turned Ashby down to work with Warren Beatty, who was producing, directing, and starring in an epic based on the life of John Reed called Reds, co-starring Beatty’s then real-life girlfriend, Diane Keaton (“Special K” in Jackspeak) as Reed’s real-life girlfriend, Louise Bryant. Beatty wanted Jack to play the small but important role of Eugene O’Neill but didn’t tell him so right away. They were great pals, but women, not filmmaking, was their most shared obsession, which sometimes got between them. Michelle Phillips, Jack’s former live-in, had taken up with Beatty after she left Jack. Warren didn’t want to lose him for the film over the Phillips affair, so he came up with a scheme straight out of Tom Sawyer; he wouldn’t ask Jack to play O’Neill, he would get Jack to ask him.

  He invited Jack to a casting session, ostensibly to find the right actor to play O’Neill. During it, Beatty told Jack, “I’ve got to get an actor to play Eugene O’Neill and it’s got to be somebody who leaves not a shadow of a doubt that he could take Diane away from me,” to which Jack replied, grinning, “Well, you have no choice. There’s only one person—me!”

  According to reports in the press, Playgirl, and other such bastions of journalism, Jack really believed he could take Keaton away from Beatty, payback for Beatty’s having gone with Phillips. The result was that Warren played opposite Keaton onscreen and in real life, with Jack trying to steal her onscreen and in real life.

  If Beatty knew what Jack was up to, it didn’t bother him. He was so deeply involved with the making of the film that if he did know, he likely thought it added to the level of dramatic tension and conflict between Reed and Bryant, Beatty and Keaton, O’Neill and Bryant, Jack and Keaton, Reed and O’Neill, and Jack and Warren. To complicate matters further, Jack developed a real-life crush on Keaton, although he always maintained that nothing ever happened between them, and that the attraction was a product of his Method-immersion style of creating a character.

  Jack tried to make light of all of it. “I get such a bang out of Warren, I mean he’s so funny I can’t sit still … I was meant to be in love with Miss Keaton, which isn’t hard. I had ‘The Pro’ there as my boss and I was playing a real fascinating character so I had a good time.”

  Jack returned to London to film his scenes for Reds during the summer of 1979; Beatty had sets built there to stand in for Provincetown. He threw himself into the part of O’Neill with a quiet intensity that he had not put on display since Five Easy Pieces. He was nearly a decade older now than he was when he played Bobby Dupea, which gave both his face and his body the gravitas that he hadn’t had before.

  To prepare for the role, he met with Oona O’Neill, the playwright’s daughter, who was married to Charlie Chaplin. To arrange it, Jack went to Bert Schneider, who made the connection. Schneider had been the one who’d heralded Chaplin’s triumphant return to America in 1972 to receive an honorary Oscar after being exiled during the blacklisting era. Oona was happy to do whatever Bert asked, including meeting with Jack. He later hinted that he also based at least part of his mustachioed character on his early memories of John Nicholson Sr.6

  DURING BREAKS IN filming, Jack made several visits to Paris to visit Polanski, now living there. Jack volunteered to escort the fugitive director back to the States, something Polanski had suggested he might agree to at the Cannes Film Festival in May that year if he got a guarantee of either probation or minimal jail time. Without it, Polanski said, he had to remain, at least for the time being, a fugitive.

  He didn’t get it and he didn’t go back.

  Also while in London, Jack visited Kubrick to discuss The Shining’s rescheduled May 1980 release. Despite their artistic differences, Jack and Kubrick remained good friends, so much so that afterward, Jack regularly sent tapes of Lakers games to the expat director, who, because of working with Jack, had become a basketball fanatic.

  As the seventies cross-faded into the eighties, Jack was now firmly a part of the Hollywood mainstream, a champion driver in its fabulous fast lane, reckless and daring and unafraid of anyone or anything. When Jack was asked by a fan at an airport what made him a superstar, without breaking stride, Jack smiled and said, “I’m not a superstar. I’m a Mega-star!”

  * * *

  1 These are the release dates: Chinatown (U.S. release dates), 1974; The Passenger (U.S.–Italy), Spain, England, Germany, Algeria, 1974; Tommy (England), 1975; The Fortune (U.S.), 1975; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (U.S.), 1975; The Missouri Breaks (U.S.), 1976; The Last Tycoon. All six films were made from 1974 to 1976.

  2 What complicated things further was that when Jack’s legal team contacted Furcillo-Rose and asked him to submit to a blood test that would clear up once and for all if he was Jack’s father, he refused.

  3 It remains unclear if Anjelica had agreed to testify against Polanski, as no trial ever took place. She has always vehemently denied that she struck any deal to get her charges dropped, but according to David Thomson, she “gave evidence when Roman Polanski’s trouble with the law occurred in Jack’s house.” Thomson gives no source for his information. The quote is from “Jack Nicholson, King of Mulholland: He Just Wants to Make Nice,” Playgirl, April 198l.

  4 In August, a still-free Polanski avoided standing trial by copping a plea and being admitted to California’s state prison at Chino for a forty-two-day psychiatric evaluation. After his release, the night before he was to be sentenced, he learned the judge was going to break the plea bargain and sentence him to up to twenty years behind bars. Polanski then fled the country and to date has not returned; he remains a criminal fugitive in the eyes of the law. Polanski has never directed another movie in Hollywood.

  5 In March 2013 it was announced that the Kubrick estate had made an agreement with Steven Spielberg to film Kubrick’s Napoleon script. Jack is not involved at this point and not likely to be.

  6 Oona loved Jack’s portrayal and wrote Jack a note to tell him so: “After a lifetime of acquired indifference the inevitable finally happened. Thanks to you, dear Jack, I fell in love with my father.” Jack called it “the greatest compliment I ever got.
”—Both the letter and Jack’s reply are from Chris Chase, “At the Movies,” New York Times, February 5, 1982.

  Publicity photo of June Nicholson, circa late 1930s to early 1940s. She performed as a dancer under the name June Nilson, an abbreviation of “Nicholson.”

  Early publicity photo of Don Furcillo, who performed under the name of Don Rose and was the primary love interest of the eighteen-year-old June Nilson.

  Ethel May Rhoades, the matriarch of the Nicholson household, and her boyfriend (they never married) and Jack’s namesake, John Joseph Nicholson Sr.

  The previously undiscovered marriage certificate of Don Furcillo and “Rose Nilson.” They married in Maryland, far away from Neptune, to keep the secret from the rest of the family.

  The delayed registration and completely false certificate of birth for Jack Nicholson.

  Jack Nicholson, age five.

  Jack Nicholson’s senior-year high school yearbook photo, Manasquan High School, 1954.

  Roger Corman, young and eager and searching for his future in film. Courtesy of Getty Images

  An early publicity photo of Sandra Knight, circa late ’50s, before she became Jack Nicholson’s first and only wife, in 1962.

  Promotional poster for Irving Lerner’s 1960 Studs Lonigan, one of Jack’s first leading roles. At twenty-three years old, he was a handsome, lean, self-styled Brando-to-be. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives

  Jack and the Monkees at the Valley Music Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah, May 17, 1968. The Monkees’s performance of “Circle Sky” was used in Bob Rafelson’s Head, released November that same year. Courtesy of Henry Diltz