Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  But this was not to be Jack’s year, or the film’s, although it started out well when Anjelica won her Oscar over an especially weak crowd of nominees, Margaret Avery in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, Oprah Winfrey in the same film, Meg Tilly in Norman Jewison’s Agnes of God, and Amy Madigan in Bud Yorkin’s Twice in a Lifetime. When Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss announced Anjelica’s win, the TV cameras caught Jack’s and John Huston’s reactions.3 Both had tears streaming down their faces.

  Anjelica strode to the stage, tall and proud. This was her first nomination and her first win. As the applause curved down, she spoke into the microphone: “This means a lot to me, since it comes from a role in which I was directed by my father. And I know it means a lot to him.”

  It was intended as a public thank-you to her father, who was terminally ill. It was also intended as a different type of message to Jack, whom she never mentioned.

  Considered the favorite in his category, Jack was upset by an actor not particularly well liked in Hollywood, William Hurt, in a film that was even less well liked, Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Jack’s face was captured by TV cameras as Hurt’s name was announced. It remained frozen in a smile.

  Her winning and his losing were apparently fine with Jack. He was a big star; she’d always wanted to be one. Now their emotional playing field might be at least a bit more level.

  After the long show ended, they agreed to skip the formal festivities in favor of going back to his place to celebrate—with a bottle of wine and a bag of cheeseburgers and French fries from In-N-Out, Jack’s favorite non-Mexican L.A. fast food.

  And each other.

  * * *

  1 Their seemingly perfect marriage—two Jewish journalists enjoying fame during the day and pizza in bed at night watching old movies—ended when Ephron discovered that Bernstein was having an affair with Margaret Jay, wife of the British ambassador to Washington.

  2 Whatever friendship or relationship they might have had ended in September, when Streep reportedly threw him out of her hotel room and vowed never to make another movie with him. The story was widely reported in the British press, and Streep denied it happened, but sources said the reason was Jack’s relentless sexual overtures.

  3 This made her the third generation of Hustons to win Oscars. Both Walter and John won Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which Walter acted and John directed. John also won an Oscar for Treasure’s screenplay.

  CHAPTER

  “I hate being one of the older people in films. Fifty was the first time I paid any attention to age. God, fifty brought me crashing to my knees. I’m very conversant with the fear of death. I’ve only been aware of it for the last, oh, thirty years or so … interviewing the [actresses] on The Two Jakes I suddenly realized, I’m not going to fall for a nineteen-year-old. I’m too old for this girl … for all these girls …”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  JACK WAS FAST APPROACHING THE MIDCENTURY MARK, AND AS IT does for everybody, it felt like it came too fast. He knew that quality roles would become increasingly difficult to find, with most of the juiciest parts going to the new kids in town—Eddie Murphy, Michael J. Fox, Paul Hogan (from Australia, with his Crocodile Dundee and “Throw one more on the barbie” television commercials); Mel Gibson, and a host of others. Jack and his generation were slowly and irrevocably being consigned to geezer duty.

  To push that time back as long as possible, Jack the shining superstar had also become Jack the savvy survivor. He still had his long-term agent, Sandy Bresler, who took all the offers that came in, screened them, and passed them on to Jack, with advice on what to take and what to pass on; but it was Jack who always made the final decisions. He could still afford to accept or turn down any role. And he did.

  Paul Mazursky, the actor-turned-director—he was in Richard Brooks’s iconic 1955 juvenile delinquent drama Blackboard Jungle playing one of the rebellious teenagers in Glenn Ford’s classroom and hit the box office jackpot directing 1978’s An Unmarried Woman—wanted Jack to star opposite Bette Midler in an American remake of Jean Renoir’s 1932 French classic Boudu sauvé des eaux, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Mazursky personally made the pilgrimage to Jack’s house on Mulholland on New Year’s Day 1986 to sell him on the script and persuade him to star in it. According to Mazursky, he had trouble dealing with Jack during the visit because he was completely stoned on pot, immersed in the broadcast of the Rose Bowl, and couldn’t be bothered.

  The part went instead to Nick Nolte.

  Barry Levinson then offered Jack the brother in Rain Man, and again Jack said no, understanding that whoever played the mentally challenged brother would walk away with the picture. Jack’s role went to Tom Cruise, who did indeed play the foil to one of Dustin Hoffman’s bravura performances.

  Jack didn’t pass on an offer from Warner Bros. and Peter Guber to the tune of $6 million, plus back-end gross percentages, to play the horniest devil in the world (Daryl) in The Witches of Eastwick about ten times what he would have made up front had he gone with Mazursky. He considered Guber a friend but also someone who knew how to get big movies made, and for Jack, the friendship and the savvy were the deciding factors in taking the film. At the same time Jack also signed an agreement to star in Ironweed, based on the William Kennedy novel, something he wanted to do after Witches simply because he loved Kennedy’s book.

  According to Peter Guber, “We had bought the rights to Witches from John Updike, developed the screenplay with Michael Cristofer, signed the three female leads, and then were stuck for a long time. How do we get someone to play the devil, we wondered? And then I got it, three women trying to conjure Jack Nicholson for a relationship was the perfect fix! After all, at that time he definitely had part of the devil in him. He had done The Shining a few years earlier, a part that also had some of the devil in it. I knew he could be great in Witches because the character had to have that Machiavellian aspect to it, along with some intellectual gravitas, and I felt that Jack certainly had both and the special magic that a star of his magnitude brings to any picture. Finally, this film is really all about sexual politics, something Jack knew a little about.”

  The Witches of Eastwick, directed by Australian native George Miller, who had done the Mad Max trilogy that made Mel Gibson an international star, was adapted from the satirical pro-feminist novel by John Updike, and proved a hard film to define. Even Miller seemed at first not to get it; he had wanted Robert De Niro, who, unfortunately (or fortunately) for Miller, was busy with his own “devil” movie, Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, decidedly darker and much more suited for De Niro than Witches. Eventually, with Guber’s encouragement, Miller made the connection between Jack the actor and Jack the womanizer.

  In Witches, three horny women (Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer) make a deal with the devil to get impregnated and then banish him from their lives forever (a kind of inverse satire on Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby). For Jack, the role of the seducer wasn’t much of a stretch.

  Anjelica had auditioned to play one of the witches, but despite her recent Oscar triumph and Jack’s influence and power (or perhaps because of it), Miller turned her down. Miffed, she accepted instead a part in Francis Coppola’s Gardens of Stone and flew to D.C. for some location filming. To try to cool things out, Jack flew to Washington on Anjelica’s birthday to give her a bracelet. They spent the night together and then he flew back to continue working on Witches.

  The film, with a budget set at $20 million, was shot south of Boston and in Little Compton, Rhode Island, and from the beginning was fraught with problems, not the least of which was the collision of female star egos among Cher, Sarandon, and Pfeiffer, working together without much chemistry in a script that touched upon misogynistically driven revenge. They weren’t good sharers.

  Because Jack was playing a character who thrived on excess and gluttony, he was not at all embarrassed when called upon by Miller to do a seminude scene. Rather than complain and try to ha
ve it cut out, or demand the use of a double, he seemed to devilishly revel in his obesity.

  When the clash among the female stars grew worse and threatened to shut down the production, Miller’s lack of familiarity with how to handle Hollywood divas frustrated Jack, as did Guber’s holding Miller’s feet to the fire for expense overruns in a film that called for so many special effects. Guber considered releasing him, until Jack stepped in and threatened to walk if he did. Guber then prevailed upon Jack to assist his Aussie helmer to get the picture done without going over budget. And, if there were any problems, Jack should be the one to bring them to Guber, not Miller. “In fact,” according to Guber, “Jack was the glue that held the entire production together.”

  Fortunately, he had an idea how to stop all the problems. Recalls Miller: “Early on in our shoot, Jack had 4½ minutes of dialogue. It was the ironing board scene—a big key scene. We had a particularly noisy crew. Jack walked into the marble hall, took his screenplay and threw it down with a thundering whack on the marble table, and gave this ranting performance about how he hated getting up in the morning and learning lines and how he was a night person. He went on and on at the top of his voice. The whole place went silent. He gave me a wink. He was almost doing my job for me, working the crew for me. They were totally reverent after that and we got the concentration we needed.”

  If Jack wasn’t overly concerned with any of it—the kitten scratching, the crew, Anjelica’s absence, or the budget—it was because during production he had become preoccupied with actress Veronica Cartwright, who was in the film, resuming an affair with her that had begun during the filming of Goin’ South, and that, despite his relationship with Anjelica, had never really completely ended. It was likely the reason Jack didn’t fight harder to get Anjelica into the movie.

  JUST AS PRODUCTION was winding down on The Witches of Eastwick, Heartburn opened on July 25, 1986, pushed back to cinema Siberia, after the first rush of the big summer films had opened and before that fall’s scheduled favorites. It received mixed-to-poor reviews and did just all right at the box office, about $25 million in its initial domestic release, a few million short of break-even. Audiences couldn’t connect to the two leads, or them to each other. (The film did have a second life in video, where it found an audience and eventually turned a profit.)

  EARLY IN 1987, strictly for a lark, Jack, encouraged by U2’s Bono, decided to make a talking children’s album, with Bobby McFerrin supplying the musical background. They did their version of Kipling’s “Elephant’s Child,” his first professional job after Witches. By all accounts, Jack had a ball. The recording was part of Jack’s narration for a half-hour PBS special by the same name, produced by Mark Sottnick.

  Then, during several delays before the start of production on his next film, Ironweed, having to do with studio issues, as a favor for James L. Brooks, Jack agreed to do a noncredited cameo as a TV newscaster for Brooks’s satire on TV journalism, Broadcast News, as long as he wasn’t given any billing or mentioned in any prepublicity. He didn’t want to upset the balance of the ensemble cast or mislead the public into thinking this was a “Jack Nicholson” picture.

  In Ironweed, Héctor Babenco’s film adaption of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, Albany-based novel, Jack was cast as Francis Phelan, a washed-up baseball player looking to find atonement for accidentally killing his infant son after dropping him. The film was dark, humorless, and ponderous, the kind of thing Hollywood normally shuns, but Jack wanted to do it, so it got made. Why? “I would like playing an Irish bum.” He had plenty of role models from his early days to choose from, beginning with John Nicholson. Ironweed was made that fall on location in Albany over a seventeen-week period. And as soon as it began, rumors exploded like wild mushrooms that something was going on between Jack and his co-star, I’ll-never-work-with-him-again Meryl Streep. There had been talk that the two had grown unusually close, but both denied it. Jack was in a bit of a bind, as he was actively, if secretly, still seeing Cartwright.

  However, once filming began on Ironweed, everyone on the set, and those who heard about it, were talking not about the film’s script, or direction, or scenic design, but about Jack and Meryl. Often during shooting, his Winnebago seemed to be balanced on four overworked Slinkys. One unnamed source told Mitchell Fink, of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, that “whatever is going on inside that Winnebago it’s starting to get out of hand, to the point where it’s embarrassing a lot of people on the set.” The story appeared on April 22, 1987, Jack’s fiftieth birthday.

  AFTER PRODUCTION ENDED on Ironweed, Jack flew back to L.A., and a few days later he showed up backstage at the Los Angeles Coliseum to watch U2 perform a holiday set complete with a fireworks show after the concert. According to Bono, “I turned around and there was this really disheveled looking guy. All he said was ‘I liked the fireworks, guys,’ and then asked us if we wanted hot dogs.” Bono didn’t learn until later it was Jack, still in costume and character from Ironweed, seeing if anybody would recognize him. And still later, he learned that Jack was thinking of having U2 do the soundtrack of The Two Jakes, if it ever happened.1

  Comfortably back on the West Coast, Jack resumed his obsessive attachment to watching the Lakers from courtside and enjoying the box office bonanza that continued to roll in from the recently opened The Witches of Eastwick, on its way to a $64 million take in its initial domestic release, placing it in the top ten earners in Hollywood that year. Nothing could relieve heartburn like a hit.

  He was spotted at Morton’s restaurant in L.A., dining with Streep, which helped fuel the speculation that they were a couple; Morton’s was not exactly on Jack’s list of preferred food establishments. After dinner, to avoid the paparazzi, the two sneaked away together.

  In July 1987, word reached Jack that John Huston had collapsed on set while his son Danny, Anjelica’s brother, was directing him in a film for TV, Mister Corbett’s Ghost. Huston had recently completed what would be his last directorial effort, The Dead, an appropriately elegiac film based on a James Joyce short story about love and loss, written by his son Tony and starring Anjelica. It would be released posthumously.

  Jack immediately flew to the hospital in Middleton, Rhode Island, to be with Huston, staying by his side until, on August 28, 1987, at age eighty-one, the great director passed. It was reported that Jack had promised Huston on his deathbed that he would look after Anjelica, and he accompanied her to the funeral. “For a certain period of my life,” Jack said afterward, “I knew the greatest guy alive … certain guys like John, they’re father figures to me. I was mad for John Huston …”

  However, he didn’t spend that night with Anjelica, when she probably needed him more than most others, because he simply couldn’t fit her into his busy social calendar. As Jack moved into his fifties, it was as if he was becoming more desperate. The late bloomer had come into his own in Hollywood, and in his younger days women were everywhere, even before he became “Jack Nicholson.” Now, though, it seemed as if he had something to prove, that he could still get them, that he could still satisfy them sexually. Whether he did, or whether they satisfied him, may not have even mattered. Women were no longer purely objects of desire but a form of self-affirmation. After all these years, Anjelica, with her strong maternal streak and desires, didn’t exactly ring his bells, if in fact she ever had. What kept them together was an “I’ll be there when you need me” kind of attachment, something deeper and in the long run perhaps more meaningful than purely romantic.

  He had recently become involved with a nineteen-year-old British actress he had met in L.A. named Karen Mayo-Chandler and begun an intensely sexual affair, even while juggling Anjelica, Cartwright, the occasional Lakers cheerleader, and possibly Streep. He especially loved Mayo-Chandler’s wild sexual streak. Mayo-Chandler then accepted Playboy’s offer of $150,000 to pose naked and spill the beans about her recent affair with Jack. She smiled happily through it all. At one point in her interview, she referred to Ja
ck as “that horny little devil … he has this image of being like Bogart, a lovable rogue, a naughty little boy …” She intimated that he was into playful S&M—“A guaranteed non-stop sex machine into fun and games, like spankings, handcuffs, whips and Polaroid pictures …,” described her sex life with “Spanking Jack” as “mad, wild, and wonderful,” and pointed out almost matter-of-factly that Jack was about the same age as her mother. She also claimed that he had given her his blessing to do the layout and interview. He later denied knowing anything about it.2

  And then there was golden blond-haired actress Rebecca Broussard, who happened to be a dead ringer for Mimi Machu and the same age, twenty-four, as Jack’s daughter, Jennifer. Jack had no problem with the fact that Broussard was so much younger. Just the opposite. He claimed Broussard’s youth, like Mayo-Chandler’s, was a sexual elixir. He went after Broussard and got her. “She’s what I like. She’s wild. Everything. Just, she’s wild. Wild’s it.”

  Broussard, a Kentucky-bred blonde, left college to come to New York and become a model; she was married for almost two years to record producer Richard Perry. After they divorced, Broussard moved to Hollywood and got a job as a waitress in Helena Kallianiotes’s new hot-spot Hollywood night club, Helena’s, which was where she first met Jack. He had some medicine of his own she seemed to like. “The first time Jack Nicholson touched my hand, I almost blacked out. I saw flashes of light. The minute I was introduced to him [by Helena] I knew something was there.”