Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  The rest of the evening was long and laborious for Jack, and by the end of the ceremony, his last Oscar win seemed a million years ago.

  * * *

  1 Besides Jack and Hackman, the other nominees for Best Performance by a Supporting Actor were Jaye Davidson in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game; Al Pacino, nominated for Best Actor in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman and Best Supporting Actor in James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross; and David Paymer in Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night.

  CHAPTER

  “I’m one of the very few actors who can do what he wants …”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  COMING OFF HIS OSCAR LOSS, THE FIFTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD JACK WAS fed up with making movies and told friends he wanted to quit the business once and for all, take it easy, go to Lakers games, and just veg out after quietly traveling to New York for another round of hair transplants. They never really took, but he kept coming back for more.

  The films he turned down during this period included Lee Tamahori’s Mulholland Falls, which Jack felt was a bit too similar to Chinatown. The role Tamahori wanted him for eventually went to Nick Nolte. Warner Bros. asked him to star opposite the then-hot Jodie Foster in Robert Zemeckis’s sci-fi film Contact. Jack turned it down, saying he didn’t do sci-fi, and the role went instead to Matthew McConaughey. He was also offered the starring role in the remake of Diabolique with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. He turned it down and his role went to Chazz Palminteri. He also turned down The Fan, and that role went instead to Robert De Niro.

  Soon enough, he grew bored with doing nothing and started looking around for something new to occupy his time. He tried getting into the nightclub business. Helena Kallianiotes had recently closed her Hollywood club, which was one of his favorite after-hours hangouts, and when Alan Finkelstein, one of Jack’s night-side friends from the Studio 54/Warhol days in New York, came to him with an offer to partner up and buy out a former gay club in West Hollywood and transform it into something called the Monkey Bar, Jack jumped at it. Opening night he was sure Helena’s “regulars,” including Bob Evans, Mick Jagger, Nick Nolte, and Don Henley, would all be there and sure enough they were. Jack was there every night, enjoying his own little private-room celebrity fiefdom, with no cameras allowed in to catch his alarming weight gain.

  However, his presence there lasted only a few weeks, before he got bored playing nightclub impresario. This time when a new film offer came in, he took it, and just like that his film retirement was over. This was a remake and reimagined version of the classic The Wolfman.

  “Wolfman” pictures were once one of Hollywood’s favorite genres, part of the horror cycle made famous by James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. In 1933 Whale made a film version of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, with a script partly doctored by the great Preston Sturges, that made its star Claude Rains, barely seen in the film as he played the gauze-wrapped title role, Hollywood newest sensation, and helped temporarily move horror from the basement of B-movies to the ballroom of the A’s. George Waggner’s 1941 The Wolf Man gave the title role to Lon Chaney Jr., and he repeated it in sequels for years.

  After another few years and dozens more films, the genre lost its audience and was for the most part relegated to the Hollywood junk bin until director John Landis reconfigured and updated the wolfman in his 1981 campy An American Werewolf in London. The film proved a hit ($61 million gross in its initial domestic release, off a $10 million budget), and Hollywood began looking for ways to revive the genre. A year after American Werewolf was released, paperback writer Jim Harrison claimed he had had a werewolf-like experience while he was alone in a Michigan cabin. Years later, he turned his “experience” into a screenplay.

  Harrison ran into Jack one day in Paris, where he’d gone to relax, and over drinks he vividly re-created the night of the occurrence and left his script of the experience. Jack read it and loved it and wanted to make it into a movie. He brought it to Columbia and they offered a finance/distribution deal worth $40 million, with Jack playing the werewolf. He said he would, for a $13 million fee up front, and only if one of five directors he chose would make it with him. His list included Peter Weir, who said no; Kubrick, who showed no interest in the project; Bertolucci, also a no; Polanski, still in exile, and Columbia wouldn’t make it overseas—too expensive; and Mike Nichols. It was Nichols who said yes to produce, Nichols wanted Douglas Wick, who had worked with Nichols on the successful 1988 comedy Working Girl. Jack approved Wick, and Nichols postponed what would have been his next project, The Remains of the Day, to start Wolf (he would never make Remains; it was eventually directed in 1993 by James Ivory).

  In the film, Jack’s character, Will Randall, works in publishing, and to prepare for the role Jack patterned his character on the well-known Random House editorial director Jason Epstein, whom he knew socially. He copied Epstein’s walk and his style of talking. Jack even began to use tar-reducing cigarette filters like Epstein did. And once again he yo-yo’d down his body weight—he felt he needed to lose fifty pounds to play Randall. To do so, he hired his old friend Tommy Baratta, now chef and owner of Marylou’s, a small seafood restaurant on West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, one of the places where Jack liked to eat and drink when he was in New York. At Jack’s request and his own expense, Baratta had a separate, private smoking room built, so Jack could puff on his cigars and cigarettes while eating without annoying any of the other diners.

  Baratta put Jack on a stringent diet and exercise program. Soon enough, he was, if not slim—that would never happen again—trim enough to play Randall; a little heft made sense for a man who also happens to be a wolf.

  Production began, and soon enough things started to go off track. In the beginning, it appeared to be a love affair between Harrison and Jack until they began to disagree about what the film was really all about. Jack believed the roots of the story were not in environmentalism, as Harrison had written it, but in Native American mysticism, which he somehow was convinced could be communicated by Randall’s transformation from man to wolf. And when he couldn’t pull it off as written, he complained to Nichols, who agreed that Jack’s character should be making a comment about the taming aspects of American civilization. They both went to Harrison to fix the script. Harrison not only hated these interpretations, he felt they seriously dumbed down the screenplay he had written. After five additional rewrites, Harrison declared that “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua.” He not only quit the picture, he left the industry, ending his twenty-year career as a writer in Hollywood.

  Wesley Strick, who had written Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took over and rewrote the screenplay, aided by Nichols’s onetime performing partner, Elaine May, uncredited for her work on the film (though by all inside accounts, much of her script was what ended up on the screen). Her version turned the wolf from some kind of Indian ghost to an out-of-control womanizer, a turn Jack liked). Here is how he told May he wanted to express the mystic in the wolfman: “I wanted to get involved in some kissing and then pull back in a very subtle silhouette from it with a hungry and longer tongue. I thought that would be a very interesting cinematic image, just have this great wolf tongue down her throat.”

  The film co-starred Michelle Pfeiffer (twenty-one years younger than Jack) as the victim/victimizer (with Jack more a seductive Dracula than a hairy werewolf) and also featured his daughter Jennifer in a small role. Shooting was finished by July 1993, and after an early screening proved disastrous, Columbia pulled it from its scheduled Christmas release. The film needed additional work, and the budget escalated to a whopping $70 million with no release date in sight.

  INTO THE NEW YEAR, Jack was without a steady girlfriend. He always operated better when he was with a young, beautiful woman who professed to love him. With Broussard gone, Anjelica gone, and no one there to make him feel right, his temper, which he managed to keep in check most of the time, may have escaped its safety valve after all the intensity making Wolf—or it may simp
ly have been Jack having a bad day. Jack had taken up golf during the making of The Two Jakes, because Gittes was a golfer. On February 8, 1994, on the way to play a round of golf in the Valley, he was driving along Moorpark leading up to the intersection of Riverside when he thought he’d been cut off by a big-ass Mercedes. The driver stopped at the next light, and Jack grabbed a graphite two-iron from his golf bag, which was in his trunk, and proceeded to smash the windshield and roof of the Mercedes.1 The owner of the car, thirty-eight-year-old Robert Scott Blank of Hollywood, claimed he never got out of his car, a sensible decision. When Jack was satisfied he had gotten justice, his road rage spent, he got back into his car and continued driving on.

  Blank recognized his attacker immediately and took down Jack’s license plate number during the assault. There were two eyewitnesses to the bizarre event, and one of them also wrote down Jack’s number. After Jack left, Blank called the police, who interviewed Blank and the two witnesses and showed up at Jack’s house to arrest him. He was taken to the police station in Van Nuys, charged with two misdemeanors, one count of assault against Blank, and one count of assault against his car. He was released on his own recognizance.

  A week later, Blank filed a civil suit, claiming that he had been hurt by some of the flying windshield glass and, during the attack, was in fear for his life.

  On March 3, three weeks before he was to be arraigned, on the advice of his lawyers, Jack settled with Blank by publicly apologizing and paying him an unknown sum to drop the charges.2 After the case was settled, Jack answered all questions but essentially gave the same answers to everyone. He told Us and others that he was upset because a friend of his had recently died, and that he was deeply embroiled with the making of a movie, immersed in his character.3

  While all of this was going on, Jack was named the recipient of 1994’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, in a ceremony held on March 3 at the famed Beverly Hilton Hotel ballroom. It was a bit of a hollow prize, one more self-serving industry ceremony, this one established in 1973 by the AFI board of directors to honor a single individual for his or her lifetime contribution to enriching American culture by advancing the art of film through motion pictures and television. John Ford was the first recipient, Jack the twenty-second. But to Jack, it meant more than even the Oscars. This night was all about him, his the only award handed out. Everybody who spoke talked about him. The audience was full of friends and co-workers. It was the kind of attention and recognition from the industry that Jack savored.

  On the night of the event, taped for later cable broadcast, he and Rebecca Broussard (they had agreed to remain public friends for the sake of the children) were brought to their table as the band played Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild, the unofficial theme song of Easy Rider and a tongue-in-cheek description of Jack’s life.

  Among the guests were a table filled with his co-stars, including Shelley Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Louise Fletcher, Ellen Barkin, Kathleen Turner, Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, Madeline Stowe, Cher, and Broussard. Among the female no-shows were Anjelica Huston, Susan Anspach, Mimi Machu, Carole Eastman, Michelle Phillips, and Sandra Knight. The more notable male attendees were Warren Beatty, Bob Rafelson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Bob Rafelson (but not Bert Schneider), and Bob Dylan, with whom Jack had become friendly while Dylan was hanging out with Jagger when Jack was in London making The Shining and remained so after filming ended.

  After a number of speakers, all telling stories about their experiences with Jack, it was, finally, his time to accept the award. Mike Nichols introduced him, at one point referring to him directly as Nick, and that no one deserved the award more. He also said that if you ask any kid, “He’ll tell you that Jack is the hippest place in the universe, coolest place in America, the Independent Republic of Jack. The hardest thing to do is wear a gift well, and Jack wears it with a killer smile and a pair of shades.” The audience applauded, Nichols stepped back, and Jack came to the podium. He walked from his table to a standing ovation.

  “I’m touched,” he said, adding, self-deprecatingly, “Unfortunately I’m not drunk and lucky to be at large.” His reference to the golf incident brought a healthy round of laughter and applause. He then acknowledged a rare public appearance by his sister Lorraine, who had come all the way from New Jersey, and his daughter Jennifer. He also singled out Broussard, the mother of his children: “She changed her mind a lot of times, she said let’s take the babies but I said they were too young to drink.” Broussard didn’t find it at all funny. He went on to acknowledge all his friends, especially the female ones. He then said the Buddhists had asked him if anybody had ever won it twice. Huge laugh. He then skipped over most of his speech: “Yeah yeah … I’m a late blooming success … all of that … just a hick actor …” And then he choked up. “You know I love you all … My work motto is ‘Everything counts’ … My life motto is ‘More good times.’ … I guess the only really danger here is after this I’ll fall in love with myself …” For the first time ever in public he mentioned his mother and his sister, not differentiating one from the other, and Shorty too, thanking them for all they had done for him: “So, Mud, June, Shorty, who had an enormous nose. I may be Godless, I may be faithless, I still pray that they can hear me. I started out to please them and had a ball.” He made no mention of Furcillo-Rose. He then smiled, and as if to respond to the many past-tense speeches that had been given earlier that night about his work, he said, “All these things about age and time. You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

  He received a standing ovation as he wiped away a tear and, holding the award, made his way back to his table, blowing air through his cheeks like he was glad he got through it, and took his seat between Broussard and Candice Bergen.

  JACK WANTED TO find a role that would somehow reinvigorate his relevance, the way Clint Eastwood had with Unforgiven. He needed fresh creative blood. A commercial producer offered him $10 million to do an unseen voice-over that would last all of ten seconds. He said no in a single breath’s time. That was not where he was going to wind up, hawking garbage on TV.

  He thought he found his future in actor/writer/director Sean Penn, who reminded Jack of himself twenty years prior: talented, young, intense, excessive, and consumed with the notion of being an artist. The difference between the two was star power: Jack had it, Penn didn’t, perhaps one of the reasons why Penn, too, had publicly stated that he was giving up acting in favor of directing his own scripts because acting was no longer pleasurable. Would Penn benefit commercially from Jack’s star power, or would Jack find creative reinvigoration working with Hollywood’s baddest boy?

  And would anybody care?

  * * *

  1 Golf Digest reported that it may have been a three- or five-iron.

  2 Sources claim the amount was $500,000.

  3 There is an interesting postscript to the incident. That November, several months after the incident, Blank sent a letter of apology for cutting Jack off but gave no explanation for it. Jack felt vindicated by this belated confession. Everyone in his circle agreed that Blank had made a purposeful killing off Jack’s temper tantrum, and that Jack was right that he had, indeed, been cut off.

  Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson walking on the beach in Nancy Meyers’s 2003 Something’s Got to Give. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives

  CHAPTER

  “I’d like to take the middle-aged actor into real steaming sensuality …”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  WOLF FINALLY OPENED IN JUNE 1994 TO A SERIES OF POOR REviews and was expected to quickly disappear. However, no one counted on Jack’s resilient star power and Nichols’s strong fan base, which, combined, drove the film to become a $131 million box office smash.

  He went out and promoted the film in the States and then in England and Europe, treating himself to a good time on the studio’s nickel. While Jack was hawking the film in London, a reporter for the Observer noted, “Since the day he arrived from New York by private plane two weeks ag
o, Nicholson has been partying with beautiful women … one looked young enough to be the 57-year-old actor’s daughter [she wasn’t]. Others appeared considerably younger … for the past fortnight he danced nightly in the pale moonlight, not returning to the Connaught Hotel until close to dawn.”

  At the Venice Film Festival, Jack was asked by a reporter why he wanted to play a wolf, and how he researched the role. Jack smiled and said, “The thing I like best about wolves is that one guy fucks all the women.” A roomful of reporters, mostly male, cheered.1

  Anthony Lane, the articulate new-blood film critic for the New Yorker, gave the best summation of all the critics who reviewed the film: “Will Randall is the part that Jack was born to play … He was a wolf man long before this picture was ever conceived. Wolf is like a one-movie retrospective of [his] schizoid career.”

  Stars like to work with stars. Most of the time, big ones are sought out by lesser ones, but occasionally big ones do seek out lesser ones. Sean Penn, whose heroes were Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Dennis Hopper, sought greater mainstream film validation by working with a hip powerhouse like Jack Nicholson, a mainstream actor with more than a little independent film cred. The opportunity to go out on those creative limbs lessens as stars like Jack get older, and the roles they are offered are, logically, meant for middle-aged actors. Middle age is not the time for rebellion. It’s the time to play jokers and werewolves.

  Penn approached Jack in the summer of 1994 about being in The Crossing Guard, a script Penn had written and intended to direct. Penn may have been discovered by audiences after his turn in Amy Heckerling’s 1982 Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then played the Hollywood game for a while, was not this Penn, the darker, self-styled rebel artist. His 1985 marriage to pop star Madonna (who had been a girl twirl for Jack reportedly both before and after her marriage to Sean) and his subsequent arrest and jail time in 1987 for punching a paparazzo were elements that helped change him, and in some ways take him, whether by choice or action, out of the mainstream.