Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  SCRIPTS CONTINUED TO come Jack’s way. He was sought after to play Ernest Hemingway in a biopic, the thinking in Hollywood being, as it usually is, logically loose-limbed—if Jack could play Eugene O’Neill in Reds, why not that other great Lost Generation writer? He said he wasn’t interested (the part went instead to Clive Owen and eventually wound up as a TV movie co-starring Nicole Kidman). He was also offered the role of Eliot Ness by Brian De Palma for his big-screen version of the TV series The Untouchables, with a script by Postman’s David Mamet; he said no (he didn’t want to make another movie with Mamet). The part went instead to Kevin Costner. Jack’s instinct to pass was the right one. The film would belong to Robert De Niro as Al Capone, and the only thing anybody remembers from it is Capone bashing in the skull of another gangster with a baseball bat.

  He had recently read Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, which he bought the film rights to, with the intention of adapting it for himself and possibly directing it as well, but the project went nowhere. Even though he was sure it could be huge, he couldn’t get anyone interested, either the studios or an independent producer who could make it and bring it to them for distribution. Bellow, he was told by everyone, was unfilmable.

  There had also been talk of a sequel to Terms of Endearment, but Jack had made it clear he had no intention of going there again. Besides, there was talk that the long-overdue sequel to Chinatown, already postponed numerous times because of the continuing unavailability of Roman Polanski, was back in development. If he was going to do a sequel to any film, it would be this one. And if they wanted him, it would have to be with Polanski directing, which was always the holdup. Jack didn’t want anybody else to direct the film and hoped that Polanski’s situation had progressed to the point where the sequel was active again with him involved.

  Not that he was all that eager to get back to work. He was seen frequently around New York with Debra Winger, before jetting off to San Francisco to buy six more paintings by Russell Chatham, after attending the artist’s one-man show at the Maxwell Galleries. Jack gave Rolling Stone an interview in which he discussed his negative thoughts about monogamy and the inherent problems of being in a long-term relationship with Anjelica, specifically her desire to someday have children and his desire not to have any more. To Jack it was been there, done that. To Anjelica it was need to do it, with or without Jack.

  The day after his newest art purchases, he flew to London with Anjelica, having managed to look the other way to avoid her cold stares. He spent his free time playing tennis, a game he’d enjoyed intermittently through the years, less so when he was heavy like he was now and playing made his ankles hurt. They then flew to New York so that Jack could pursue his ongoing hunt for the work of new artists, then to Phoenix for a Lakers game, and when they got home, Anjelica, as usual, went her own way and he dove into the always-high pile of scripts waiting for him to read that had been passed on to him by Bresler.

  It was from this pile, unexpectedly, that he found a script he totally fell in love with. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to turn it down, even though he had no idea what it was supposed to be about. He just loved the writing so much. “In the beginning,” he recalled later, “I didn’t even realize the movie was a comedy … an action-comedy like Beverly Hills Cop and Henry V. It’s got girls, adventure, interesting talk, very black humor … I’d never done anything like it.” Here was a tectonic career shift, away from the sitcom-jokiness-meets-Camille that was Terms of Endearment to something darker and more complex. The character’s name was Charley Partanna. The movie, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was Prizzi’s Honor.

  “Mob” movies, which were popular in the thirties—when Warner Bros. had a lock on them—were back in style after Francis Ford Coppola’s 1973 The Godfather, at Parramount, made them relevant again, using the Corleones to explicate the story of American capitalism. Mobs were merely corporations involved in the big and dirty business of making money. It’s not personal, Sonny! It’s strictly business!” Dozens of films followed, all trying to imitate the look and message of The Godfather, but none came close to duplicating Coppola’s expansive vision, or his dream cast of Brando, Caan, Keaton, Pacino, Duvall, Cazale, and in the first sequel, De Niro. Many initially thought Prizzi’s Honor was, in some ways, a satire on The Godfather, minus the cannolis.

  What cinched making it for Jack was that John Huston had signed on to direct, someone he had always thought of as his adult father figure. “He’s been my idol since childhood and we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well over the last 15 years. I’m kind of a Johnny-come-lately in Johnny’s life … like—this guy was a legend when I was in grammar school. The way he relates to actors and the way he watches a scene.”

  The timing was a bit awkward as the long-awaited Chinatown sequel, now called The Two Jakes, had indeed moved back into active preproduction, the snail-paced Towne having at long last finished an acceptable script; Bob Evans was in place to produce, and with Polanski not coming back anytime soon, Evans offered Towne the chance to direct, which he grabbed. Like all good screenwriters, many of whom are frustrated directors, Towne, who had never directed before, believed he could do a better job helming his own scripts than anybody else. Evans assured Jack that Towne could do it, and Jack reluctantly gave the project his personal green light. They already had a start date that couldn’t be postponed. That left relatively little time for him to do Prizzi’s Honor, but Jack promised Huston he would get the film made, on time and within the bounds of its relatively modest budget. Huston was a one-take, two-take director, something Jack appreciated. As far as Huston was concerned, they were a perfect match. “Jack’s a virtuoso. He can do the acting scales on one hand.”

  And then came the real-life twist, as good as, if not better than, anything in the film. Huston cast Anjelica to play Maerose Prizzi, Charley Partanna’s (Jack’s) forsaken girlfriend. Huston decided to give her the key female role in what would be the biggest break of her career to date and a chance to kill Jack off, at least on screen.

  Partanna is the Prizzi family’s official hit man (one of the jokes of the film is that nobody in the family has any honor) and romantically involved with Maerose. In the film’s opening sequence, a mob wedding (a satirical reference to The Godfather), Charley sees and immediately falls for the gorgeous Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner), who, as it turns out, is also a hit “man.” They meet, fall in lust, and then, in short order, decide to get married. The senior Prizzi, superbly played by William Hickey, the head of the mob side of the family and the father of Maerose, orders a hit on Charley for “ruining” his daughter’s honor when Maerose lies to him about how Charley had “forced himself” on her, after he’s left her for Walker. And Prizzi also wants Walker killed for taking part in a Las Vegas money scam without the family’s permission. He orders Charley to carry out the hit.

  In the film, the spidery Anjelica is determined to either win Charley back from Irene Walker or have him killed for jilting her in favor of the ravishing blonde. How it must have tickled the seventy-eight-year-old Huston to have his daughter act out a fantasy revenge on her real-life boyfriend for all the misery he had heaped upon her during their more than decade-long relationship. Huston, like Jack, had done his share of womanizing, with five marriages and numerous affairs under his belt, and he had a fair measure of directorial wisdom when it came to getting personally involved while directing other high-wire couples such as Bogie and Bacall (Key Largo, 1948).

  The results showed up in the film’s splendid mirror-perfect image of the ins and outs of the couple’s real-life relationship. Offscreen Jack could laugh about their misadventures. Onscreen the audience would do the laughing for him. Jack explained the duality of their movie chemistry in Prizzi’s Honor with an ironic Shakespearean reference. “Mainly [Anjelica and I] just ran down what the motivations were of the people in different scenes. We arrived at the answer that she’s like Lady Macbeth. She’s going to be the queen of this realm, and I’m g
oing to be the king of it …”

  Jack especially loved the “doubling” aspect of the film’s plot, while not letting the darker aspects of it get too close to him emotionally. Throughout production he kept busy continuing to satisfy an apparently insatiable desire to chase and bed gorgeous and willing young starlets. He was now into the newest “hip” thing in Hollywood, dating porn stars. He called it research.

  Which was why, during the filming of Prizzi’s Honor, Jack and Anjelica stayed in separate suites at the Carlyle Hotel. Most evenings Anjelica stayed in, by herself, while Jack went out and partied it up in his favorite night-side town.

  TO GET A handle on how best to play Partanna, during production Jack slipped into several of Brooklyn’s most infamous outer-borough bars and beaneries. In one of these dingy, beer-soaked hangs, where stale cigarette smoke weaved through the air in layers of visible blue, fog to the eyes and a killer to the lungs, and where ordering a martini or a margarita instead of a shot of Irish whiskey and a brew could get one heaved out the door, Jack made pals with a couple of local wannabe Corleones, mostly tribute collectors who controlled their fiefdom’s local trash pickup, or ran numbers, or loan-sharked to those who couldn’t otherwise make the rent. It was at these neighborhood drowneries that Jack also learned the two-bit hoodlum walk of the small-timer who prances elbows-first to make him feel like a big man. But it was the lip thing that most fascinated Jack and provided a pathway to the character of Charley Partanna. All the local boys never moved their upper lip. By stuffing a wad of Kleenex under his own he was able to freeze it, which turned out to be key to his character’s kingdom. He added a choked Brooklyn accent that made every sentence sound as if the last word pounded its fist on the table. Dialect specialist and actress Julie Bovasso, best remembered for her role as John Travolta’s mother in Saturday Night Fever, helped him put the final touches on his Brooklyn accent—“Ey, Charley”—so different from his natural Jersey Shore intonation. “Let’s face it,” he told one writer, “certain parts of the character needed un–Jack Nicholsoning.”

  The rest was easy. Rheumy eyes (helped along by a little squirt of glycerin), Vaseline slicked-back hair, broken nose via actor’s putty, and thirty extra pounds of heft, put on by downing bowls of garlic-drenched tomato-paste pasta personally prepared for him by one of his advisors on the film, Tommy Baratta. (After production ended, Jack kept him on as his part-time cook for every movie he made.) The icing for Jack was the wardrobe, yellow jackets and dark turtlenecks, and it was a done deal.

  JUST AS THE final prints of Prizzi’s Honor were being shipped to theaters for a June 13, 1985, opening, The Two Jakes was ready to go into production. Bob Evans had made a negative pickup deal with Paramount, which meant the studio would finance the film and then make its money as its distributor.

  Jack was ready to bring J. J. Gittes back to life. To slim down for the role, after packing on the weight for Prizzi, Jack went on one of his “crash” health-food-and-exercise diets. He wanted to resemble the earlier Gittes as much as possible.

  Kelly McGillis, an up-and-coming actress who would play opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott’s 1985 Top Gun, and Cathy Moriarty, of Raging Bull fame, De Niro’s and Scorsese’s tour-de-force 1980 film bio of Jake LaMotta, were cast for the film’s two female leads. Also plugged in were Dennis Hopper, whose career had fallen into decline but to whom Jack felt loyal and gave him a part in the film; Joe Pesci, like Moriarty, from Raging Bull; Perry Lopez; and Scott Wilson. Robert Towne also wanted Bob Evans to return to acting in The Two Jakes, something he had never been very good at, to play the other Jake, real-estate developer and overall rat Jake Berman. Evans hadn’t been in front of a camera since 1959 but agreed, and for the occasion treated himself to an extensive facelift and a visit to a Tahitian weight-loss spa.

  And then just four days before production was scheduled to begin, Towne, the director, fired Evans the actor. His screen tests demonstrated what everyone else in the business already knew, that the best that could be said of him as an actor was that he was a great producer. Jack was visibly angered by Towne’s move and let him know it. Evans was a good friend and Jack believed he should be treated with more respect than that. Paramount then stepped in, demanding that Evans remain in the film. Shooting was delayed while what seemed like endless meetings took place, with neither side willing to budge. Finally, Towne, feeling that the studio had challenged and compromised his authority, quit the film. Paramount, believing the production was now in free-fall even before a foot of film had been shot, pulled out of its commitment. Jack then frantically tried to save the production by asking Warren Beatty to step in and replace Towne. Beatty said no. Jack then went to Huston to try to persuade him to take over directing Two Jakes. Huston, who was already having health problems during Prizzi’s Honor, regretfully declined the offer.

  And just like that The Two Jakes turned into no Jakes; the picture was dead in the water, to the tune of a $3 million preproduction cost that Paramount had to pay. The aborted picture also cost Towne Jack’s friendship.

  THE SAME WEEK The Two Jakes shut down, Jack’s beloved Lakers won the NBA championship, four games to two, against the hated Boston Celtics, the first time L.A. had ever beaten Boston in the finals. Despite all that was going on, Jack managed to be at every home game.

  Prizzi’s Honor opened and received mixed reviews from the critics—Pauline Kael in the New Yorker said of Jack’s performance, “It is a virtuoso set of variations on your basic double take and traditional slow burns … Nicholson doesn’t overdo his blurred expressions or his uncomprehending stare; he’s a witty actor who keeps you eager for what he’ll do next.” Richard Schickel, writing in Time, called it “one of [Jack’s] boldest performances.” David Ansen, in Newsweek, was less impressed: “Nicholson takes wild chances: assuming a deceptively dumb Brooklyn accent, he plays this hilarious anti-hero as if he were a schizo who couldn’t decide if his role in life was Bogart’s or Elisha Cook’s [in John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon].”

  Audiences were less ambivalent. From a $16 million budget, Prizzi’s Honor grossed $26 million in its initial domestic release (more than $4 million on opening weekend), and nearly twice that overseas. And almost from the beginning, there was Oscar buzz for Jack, Anjelica, Kathleen Turner, and John Huston.

  Just as Jack was basking in the glow of Charley Partanna and bemoaning the fate of J. J. Gittes, he was asked by Mike Nichols to step in to replace Mandy Patinkin, playing Mark Forman, in the film adaptation of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, her thinly disguised evisceration of Carl Bernstein, to whom she had been briefly married before Bernstein’s womanizing ended their union.1 On paper, Patinkin had seemed the perfect actor to play Forman, but it quickly became evident to Nichols on the first day of shooting that paper and film were not the same, and Patinkin was utterly wrong for the part. Patinkin couldn’t wait to leave.

  To replace him, Nichols wanted Jack, not that he looked especially Jewish (or Jewish at all), but he could act. Because it was so important to Nichols, one of his closest friends, Jack took over the role. (The $4 million up-front paycheck may have had something to do with it as well.)

  When Jack came aboard, Bernstein met with him at the Russian Tea Room—they were casual, not close, friends, and Jack still considered Woodward, Bernstein’s onetime reporting partner, a lowlife. Over lunch, Bernstein tried to persuade Jack not to do the film. Jack managed to ease Bernstein’s fears by telling him it was better to have a friend play him than a stranger. Jack assured him he would do right by both the part and Bernstein.

  When it came to shooting, Jack came off so affable that audiences wondered why Rachel (Streep/Ephron) would ever leave such a great guy. Later on, Jack told Rolling Stone, “I was specifically hired not to play [Bernstein]. Mike and Nora and Meryl were very anxious to move the film into fiction. And since I had no desire on a couple of days’ notice to do a biographical portrait, that suited me just fine.”

  Jack and Meryl Streep began filming in
Manhattan in August. Jack first met Streep the first day he was on set. Nichols had wanted to keep some tension between them before the cameras rolled. According to Streep, “It was like meeting Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan. He was a big deal …” To break that tension, just before their first scene together, Nicholson knocked on Streep’s trailer door and asked if he could use her toilet. She said sure. End of tension.2

  According to an appreciative Nichols, “Jack is the guy who takes parts others have turned down … and explodes them into something nobody could have conceived of … all his brilliance at character and gesture is consumed and made invisible by the expanse of his nature … you can’t see any technique. It just appears to be life.”

  Jack’s late arrival gave him little time to prepare for a role that he somehow managed to pull off. Filming was completed that October, and Jack immediately headed to Aspen for some R and R. For the rest of the year he took it easy in the mountains, without Anjelica, until early in 1986, while skiing, Jack took a bad turn on a slope, fell, broke his elbow, and hurt several ligaments in his thumb. The injuries were serious enough to require surgery. When Anjelica heard about it, she flew immediately to his side to take care of him. They were never closer than when he was injured and immobile and she could be in control.

  They showed up together at the Oscar ceremonies, held on March 24, 1986, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, hosted by the unlikely triumvirate of Jane Fonda, Alan Alda, and Robin Williams.

  Anjelica looked resplendent in a green gown designed by Tzetzi Ganev, while a still banged-up Jack walked tenderly along beside her. He had been nominated for Best Performance by an Actor for his role as Charley Partanna, and Anjelica for Best Performance in a Supporting Role by an Actress for Maerose, and the film received six more nominations—Best Supporting Actor, William Hickey; Best Costume Design, Donfeld; Best Director, John Huston; Best Film Editing, Rudi Fehr and Kaja Fehr; Best Picture, John Foreman, producer; and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Richard Condon and Janet Roach.