Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  After his arrest, Penn was no long considered as bankable by the studios, and he reached out to Jack first in 1992 and again early in 1994, to get him to agree to appear in The Crossing Guard. This was the second film written, produced, and directed by Penn; 1991’s The Indian Runner was the first. The Crossing Guard was also going to co-star, of all people, a now happily married Anjelica Huston. Jack waived his normal fee to be in the film. When Anjelica found out Jack was going to be her co-star, she agreed to stay with it as long as Jack remained strictly professional throughout the shoot. If Jack had other ideas, consciously or otherwise, he didn’t give any indication of it. One unnamed member of the crew who worked on the film said he saw nothing but politeness and courtesy between them. They stayed in opposite corners for most of the shoot. If he had any ulterior motives, she did not. She was happily married. She still loved Jack, she would always love him, but she had put their romantic relationship behind her.

  To make things even more interesting, the other female lead was Penn’s second wife-to-be, Robin Wright. (Penn and Madonna were divorced in 1989, and he then had two children with Wright—a girl named Dylan and a boy they named Hopper Jack Penn, after Dennis Hopper and Jack.)

  The film, shot mostly at night to give it a noir feeling, is about two men linked by the accidental murder of the daughter of one and the revenge sought by the other. Freddy Gale (Jack) is obsessed with revenge; he wants to kill the tellingly named John Booth (David Morse, whose off-beat performance in The Indian Runner Penn especially liked so much he used the actor again). While drunk, Booth accidentally runs over Gale’s four-year-old daughter and spends four years in prison for it. Upon his release, Gale intends to kill Booth to exact his full revenge.

  The premise is good, the execution less so, with a climax that is at once hokey and unbelievable. Somewhere beneath the film’s mountain of self-loathing and Method posturing was an allegory for the meaninglessness of war and the necessity of peace, a favorite subject of Penn’s (who not only went to jail for punching a photographer, but allegedly hung another one out a window by his ankles, and allegedly was said to have hit Madonna with a baseball bat).

  However, despite its hollow foundation, Jack loved the character Gale’s mixture of rage, sadness, and obsessive desire for redemption. “It was kind of like working without a net,” Jack later recalled. “First-person acting—because there’s not a lot of character to hide behind, so to speak. No makeup, no wardrobe, no haircut, no limp, no accent, no voice, no nothing. Just emotion …”

  The Crossing Guard was released on November 16, 1995, and received mostly good reviews but had a limited distribution and did not draw a significant audience. The Crossing Guard had been financed by the up-and-coming Weinstein brothers’ production company Miramax, in exchange for international distribution rights. It was made on a budget of $9 million but grossed only $869,000 in its initial domestic release. Ironically, the film, and Penn’s writing and directing career, might have been better off without the distraction of Jack’s fame and charisma in a project that required a character that had absolutely no redemptive qualities and therefore generated no sympathy from the other characters in the film or from the audience.

  Several months after the film’s brief run, fifty-seven-year-old Jack decided to settle (or heal) a lot of old scores. First, he made good on his long-standing threat to foreclose on the house he had bought for Susan Anspach. He didn’t need the money; it was something he felt he had to do after Anspach sent a chiding letter to Vanity Fair about that April 1994 interview with Jack, in which he had raved about fatherhood but failed to mention or acknowledge his son Caleb. Anspach’s letter appeared in the June issue, noting that Caleb was Jack’s child, too.

  Jack exploded when he saw it. “I told Ms. Anspach that this is a catastrophic approach to life, making protestations and all that. I don’t think it accomplishes anything.” What especially got Jack so angry was that he had continued to help Anspach financially, even after her second marriage had ended and she had difficulty getting work in an increasingly youth-obsessed Hollywood, right up until the publication of her letter, which he took as an act of disrespect, after which he stopped all assistance and foreclosed.

  Anspach then showed up at his front door with Caleb, to let Jack see his son for only the second time. He had never publicly admitted he was the boy’s father. After an awkward moment between them, Jack embraced the now twenty-five-year-old CNN employee. He and Caleb became friends, if not exactly bosom buddies. Caleb wanted to get to know his real father better, and Jack had no problem with that.

  But Jack’s relationship with Anspach remained hostile and the foreclosure stood, on top of which he added a lawsuit for unpaid loans he had made to her through the years, totaling $600,000. In response, the fifty-three-year-old Anspach filed a countersuit against Jack, claiming through her lawyers that Jack had fraudulently led her to believe that she would not have to repay the loans, including the money for the house. Anspach also claimed to have kept seeing Jack secretly into the 1980s, all during her marriage and his involvement with Huston and Broussard.

  As she bitterly told the Los Angeles Times, following the filing of her countersuit: “I could have sold the house in 1989, paid off Jack in full and walked away with a million-dollar profit” if she’d known he was one day going to foreclose. Jack’s response, through his lawyers, was, “Unfortunately for Anspach, the law is straightforward. When you borrow money, eventually you have to pay it back.” But it wasn’t the money that had gotten him so angry, it was the public humiliation, the embarrassment, especially the letter Anspach wrote to Vanity Fair. There were some things that didn’t belong to the public, he believed, and he wanted to teach her a lesson not to try to push him around. Depositions for Jack’s lawsuit went ahead that August. Shortly afterward, a Superior Court judge ordered a trial to begin the following March. While all this was going on, he had quietly donated sixty acres of deer-inhabited land in the hills above Santa Monica to a California conservancy dedicated to preventing overdevelopment of that part of Los Angeles, as if to underscore that none of this was about the money; at least not for him.

  JACK WANTED TO work again, and sooner rather than later. His next film would see him try to move forward by retreating, by returning to the directorial realm of none other than Bob Rafelson, whose own career was on the brink of extinction. Rafelson hadn’t made a feature film since the disastrous Man Trouble, and after extensive trips to Tibet and the Amazon he wanted to make one more film and rightly believed he could get Jack to be in it.

  Rafelson’s new picture was Blood and Wine, which Rafelson described as an erotic Oedipal film noir (it was neither Oedipal nor noir), scripted by Nick Villiers and Alison Cross. It was financed by Majestic Films, a London-based company Rafelson found that was willing to put up $15 million for the foreign rights. Majestic was Rafelson’s miracle; no U.S. studio or independent group would go near him. The film was necessarily shot fast and cheap, with little money left after Jack’s $10 million up-front fee. He also got a piece of the back end. Rafelson agreed. His co-star in the film was Jennifer Lopez (thirty-two years younger than Jack).

  Rafelson played the completed film in noncompetition at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September 1996. Fox Searchlight Pictures then picked it up for American theatrical distribution. The film also starred Judy Davis, Michael Caine, and Stephen Dorff.

  Jack also agreed to do a cameo in Robert Harling’s The Evening Star, co-written by Harling and Larry McMurtry, the sequel to Terms of Endearment that James Brooks was not involved with. Jack did the four-day part as a favor to his friend Shirley MacLaine, who reprised her Academy Award–winning role of Aurora Greenway, after which he received a script by Mark Andrus and James Brooks that Brooks would direct called Old Friends, at once hilarious and heartbreaking, and far superior to anything Jack had read or done in recent years. It was about a character named Melvin Udall, a middle-aged misanthropic, homophobic, obsessive-compulsive writer who works
at home and slowly gets drawn into the lives of his gay next-door neighbor and a waitress at the breakfast shop where he eats the same meal every day, and manages to alienate everyone he interacts with. He counts the edges of sidewalk cement blocks to make sure he doesn’t, God forbid, step on any cracks.2

  Various names had declined the chance to play Udall in the movie, including Kevin Kline, before Jack took it on. In September 1996, Old Friends, retitled As Good as It Gets, finally went before the cameras. Getting the casting just right had caused part of the delay; everybody was working somewhere else at the time. Brooks desperately wanted but couldn’t get Holly Hunter to play the female lead as waitress Carol Connelly. The role went instead to Helen Hunt (twenty-six years younger than Jack). He got Greg Kinnear for Jack’s gay neighbor after Ralph Fiennes turned down the role, and Cuba Gooding Jr. to play Kinnear’s rough-and-tough agent.

  The challenge for Jack was how to turn Udall from a cartoon character into a three-dimensional human being, capable of caring and being cared about. It wasn’t easy, and more than once Jack thought about giving up the part entirely. He struggled to find a way into the character without hating who he was. In the beginning, Udall comes off as a complete jerk, but gradually, as the film progresses, he turns into a decent, if not exactly likable human being. Jack the actor may have known what was going to happen to him later on, but Jack the character couldn’t. He had to play what he knew in the present tense, and that pulled him through without letting his performance either go overboard or turn into a parody of someone suffering from OCD. What made the connection for him was the realization that in real life he was claustrophobic in restaurants and always sought the seat closest to the exit. It wasn’t a terminal disease, but it was a bit quirky, and it got his foot in the door of Udall’s psyche. What came out of it was a walk on a performance tightrope, and Jack pulled it off flawlessly, easily his best performance since Prizzi’s Honor.

  Sometime just after production ended, Jack had sufficiently cooled off and, perhaps because he liked Caleb so much, decided to settle things with Anspach. He deeded the property to Caleb and stipulated that Anspach could continue to live in the house, and all the land would eventually go to their son. Caleb sold it a few years later, with Anspach’s permission, in a deal that benefited both of them.

  JACK ALSO AGREED to make an appearance in his friend Tim Burton’s goofball comedy based on a series of trading cards, Mars Attacks!, in multiple roles reminiscent of what Peter Sellers did in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, including one as the president of the United States and one as a Vegas hustler. The film co-starred Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan, and Lukas Haas.

  Production ended on November 11, a relatively brief shoot, after which Jack was sued for $10 million by Catherine Sheehan, a self-admitted prostitute who claimed that on October 12, he had hired her and another unnamed woman to show up at his L.A. home wearing little black dresses. According to them, he proceeded to rough them up and then, apparently dissatisfied, refused to pay their agreed-upon $1,000. In her lawsuit, she claimed that her injuries prevented her from working, that Jack had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her several feet before slamming her head on the floor, and when she and her friend tried to leave he threatened to kill her if she called the police. She did anyway, they investigated, and she filed a criminal complaint that went nowhere. She settled for $32,000. Then she sued again, for an additional $60,000 for doctor bills, claiming one of her breast implants had been ruptured that night. Jack settled that as well. No one believed he had done any of the things he was accused of. Celebrities run the risk of being sued by opportunists, and in the end the episode seemed a combination of Jack indulging himself for fun and a hooker indulging herself for money.

  ON DECEMBER 12, 1996, Mars Attacks! opened to dismal reviews and proved a box office loser, earning $37 million (domestic) off a $101 million budget, despite an expensive promotional campaign and a red carpet opening at Hollywood’s Chinese Theater. It broke even with the foreign box office but did not go into significant profit. A week before, as part of the promotional campaign for the film, Jack received his long-overdue star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, the 2,077th in the industry’s publicity ritual, in which the personality “buys” the space where the star is to be put. Jack had long rejected the idea, acting a little like Melvin Udall, not liking the idea of everyone walking all over him every day, people spitting on it, and dogs using it to relieve themselves, but this time he let his agent convince him it was a good thing to do. A reasonably sized crowd showed up that included Rebecca Broussard and their four-year-old son, Raymond.

  The Evening Star opened Christmas day and laid another bomb, grossing $12 million.

  In February 1997, Jennifer, who had given birth a year and a half earlier to Sean Knight Nicholson (named, in part, for Sean Penn), decided to marry the father, Mark Norfleet, whom she had first met while both attended Panahou School. The reception was held at the Bel-Air Hotel, where Jack’s “date” was friend and director James L. Brooks. Over drinks they discussed a project Jack had in mind, hinting that he was interested in directing one more picture, which Brooks would write and produce. Brooks said he would think about it, and nothing more was said for the time being.3

  A FEW DAYS after, fifty-nine-year-old Jack took a quick PR trip to London. While there he saw a West End sex revue that included such charming bits as sex toys being used woman-to-woman and a feigned gang rape of a virgin. It was called Voyeurz. Jack wound up taking one of its female stars, Christine Salata, back to his suite with him at the Connaught Hotel. Their affair lasted two days. Jack instructed the girls to call him by his first name. “I can’t help but notice that women, especially, when they’re in any sort of amorous mood, don’t say my name that much, so I like it when they do. I like being called ‘Jack.’ I like being identified by my name. At that moment.” When he left the morning of the third day, he left Salata a note saying he would try to keep in touch. He signed it “Jack.”

  * * *

  1 While doing promotion for the film, Jack was interviewed by a comely French journalist. Later, he told Spy that he told the woman after the interview, “I would have tried to have intimate knowledge of you.” The woman replied, “Twenty years ago you tried to fuck my mother.”

  2 Rumors abounded as to whom Udall was based on. The name heard most often by some was Hollywood writer/​director/​producer Dennis Klein, an acquaintance of Brooks.

  3 They divorced in 2003, as Jennifer insisted on pursuing an acting career.

  CHAPTER

  “We wanted to create a kind of really bad man, basically a villain who was pretty flamboyant and somebody who you wanted them to get pretty bad. I thought it would bring out the best in Marty …”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  BLOOD AND WINE OPENED ON FEBRUARY 21, 1997, TO OKAY REviews, and grossed just over $1 million in its initial release, but it made back most of its money overseas and eventually became a staple of international cable and DVD. It was especially popular in Hong Kong, where virtually every film Jack made that was released there was a huge hit. The Chinese loved Jack. He was comically candid about the film’s lack of immediate success in America, good-naturedly criticizing the director and the lack of distribution. He couldn’t be too critical. He knew the film wasn’t well done.

  ON JULY 27, 1997, Don Furcillo-Rose, still trying to sell his story that he was Jack’s real father, passed away. He was buried in New Jersey. Lorraine then called Jack to tell him the news. Jack sent no condolences, no flowers; he did not pay for the funeral and never mentioned Furcillo-Rose’s name in public again.

  BUT THEN AS GOOD AS IT GETS opened on Christmas Day, 1997, to solid reviews and tremendous box office and all was okay again, as Jack knew it would be. Sean Mitchell in the Los Angeles Times called it “As Funny as It Gets.” Jack was singled out by several other critics for his wonderful performance, especially how he was able to balance the humor and the pathos of his character. The film would go
on to gross $314 million internationally, making it the second-best-grossing film of his career, after Batman.

  Oscar buzz began for Jack immediately.

  He went along with it as much as he could take, keeping magazine interviews to a minimum—they had caused him enough trouble—and continued to refuse to appear on any television shows to promote the film. The studio pushed him, but there was nothing they could do. It was in his contract that he didn’t have to do promotion if he didn’t want to. And he didn’t want to.

  Despite the lack of Jack, there was also talk of a Golden Globe for his performance, and the New York Times used it to take a hard look at sexism and ageism in Hollywood, with Jack, unfortunately for him, sitting in the bull’s-eye. The article that caused all the water-cooler talk was by feminist-auterist critic and film historian Molly Haskell. It appeared that February under the heading “Where the Old Boy Always Gets the Girl.” In it, she pointed out that the sight of sixty-year-old Jack as a grouchily desirable mate in As Good as It Gets to Helen Hunt, thirty-four in real life, had elicited “a range of incensed women’s comments from ‘Repulsive’ to ‘Yuck’ to ‘Puhleeze!’ ” Haskell acknowledged that some things had improved, but throughout the history of Hollywood aging stars like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire consistently played opposite ever-younger girls.