by Marc Eliot
14 “I’m not a superstar …” The anecdote is repeated in several places, including “Sunday Woman,” December 2, 1979.
CHAPTER 12
1 “I’m not much for birthdays …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in “The Outlook,” 1, 39.9B
2 “I hadn’t done a lot …” Jack Nicholson, quoted by Gregg Kilday, “Jack Nicholson’s Face Odysseys,” GQ, March 1981.
3 Henry Jaglom’s remembering Rafelson’s on-set fight … Henry Jaglom, interview by author.
4 “the most erotic movie …” Bob Rafelson, Variety, June 8, 1979.
5 “terrific farm girl …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in “Calendar,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1981.
6 “I did Postman…” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Rolling Stone, March 29, 1984.
7 “I’ve always viewed …” Ibid.
8 “I certainly would say …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in People, July 28, 1980.
9 “He can go only so many days without enchiladas …” Judy Mazel, quoted in W, August 14, 1981.
10 Jack’s stock answer to why he wasn’t making movies … Reported in Variety, December 16, 1981.
CHAPTER 13
1 “After Cuckoo’s Nest…” Jack Nicholson, to Martin Torgoff, Interview, August 1984.
2 “I can think of only a couple of other pictures …” Ibid.
3 “My whole career strategy …” Jack Nicholson, to Roger Ebert, “Jack’s Back,” Marquee, February 1984.
4 “You mean, we’re in danger …” James L. Brooks, quoted by Stephen Farber, “Jack Nicholson Comes to Terms with Middle Age,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (syndicated by the New York Times), November 27, 1983.
5 “you needed a male star …” James L. Brooks, quoted by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar, p. 631.
6 “Jack was always too much …” James L. Brooks, to Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter, January 19, 1999.
7 “He lived in that robe …” James L. Brooks, to Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, June 12, 1994.
8 “I’m in my forties …” Jack Nicholson, quoted by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar, p. 631..
9 “Look at what he did …” Mike Nichols, to Ron Rosenbaum, New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1986.
10 “One of the things …” Jack Nicholson, ibid.
CHAPTER 14
1 “I’ve been overweight …” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Rolling Stone, March 29, 1984.
2 “ghoul and an exploiter of emotionally disturbed widows …” Jack Nicholson, to Martin Torgoff, Interview, August 1984.
3 “In the beginning …” Jack Nicholson, to Diana Maychick, New York Post, June 13, 1985.
4 “He’s been my idol …” Jack Nicholson, to Deborah Caulfield, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1985.
5 “Jack’s a virtuoso. He can do the acting scales on one hand …” John Huston, ibid.
6 “Mainly [Anjelica and I] just ran down …” Jack Nicholson, to Richard Stayton, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, June 7, 1985.
7 “Let’s face it, certain parts … need un–Jack Nicholsoning …” Jack Nicholson, to Deborah Caulfield, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1985.
8 “I was specifically …” Jack Nicholson, to Fred Schreurs, Rolling Stone, August 14, 1986.
9 “It was like meeting …” Meryl Streep, to Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, June 12, 1994.
10 “Jack is the guy …” Mike Nichols, ibid.
CHAPTER 15
1 “I hate being one of the older people in films …” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Vanity Fair, April 1992.
2 “We had bought …” Peter Guber, interview by author.
3 “In fact …” Ibid.
4 “Early on in our shoot …” George Miller, quoted in Time Out (London), May 25, 1988.
5 “I would like playing an Irish bum …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Variety, December 5, 1985.
6 “I turned around …” Bono, quoted in People, January 18, 1988.
7 “For a certain period …” Jack Nicholson, to Peter Bogdanovich, Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, 2006.
8 All quotes from Karen Mayo-Chandler are from Playboy, December 1989.
9 “She’s what I like …” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Vanity Fair, April 1992.
10 “The first time …” Rebecca Broussard, ibid.
11 “It was always …” Peter Guber, interview by author.
12 “Crazy, nasty …” Kim Basinger, to Richard Brooks, The Observer, March 1993.
13 “I considered it …” Jack Nicholson, to Peter Bogdanovich, Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, 2006.
CHAPTER 16
1 “The actor is Camus’s ideal existential hero …” Jack Nicholson, to Ron Rosenbaum, New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1986.
2 “We had everybody helping us …” and “She’s rich, too …” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Vanity Fair, April 1992.
3 “I’m very moody …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Elle (British edition), September 1992.
4 “Jack’s sex pen …” The source of the quote wishes to remain anonymous.
5 “You got any idea …” Jack Nicholson, to Brad Darrach, Life, September 1990.
6 “Filming Jack wasn’t easy …” Vilmos Zsigmond, ibid.
7 “It never feels good …” Anjelica Huston, Vanity Fair, 1990.
8 “Do you know …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Long Beach Press-Telegram, August 9, 1990.
9 “[His sexual] relationships …” Don Devlin, quoted by Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades, p. 50.
CHAPTER 17
1 “I’ve only borrowed money …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in “Calendar,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1992.
2 “sky high” and “the baby looks …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Variety, February 24, 1992. Variety did not publish the phrase “big dick,” using two dashes instead. An anonymous source filled in the blanks.
3 “Rebecca’s number one …” An unnamed source, to Brad Darrach, Life, September 1990.
4 “It’s an unusual arrangement …” Jack Nicholson, to Nancy Collins, Vanity Fair, April 1992.
5 “I’d really rather not …” Rebecca Broussard, to Brad Darrach, Life, September 1990.
6 “I’m still wild at heart …” and “I’ve been in love …” Jack Nicholson, to Louise Gannon, Mail Online, January 31, 2011.
CHAPTER 18
1 “I’m one of the very few actors …” Jack Nicholson, to Hilary de Vries, “Calendar,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1992.
2 [Nichols] took my wolf …” Jim Harrison, quoted by Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades, p. 333.
3 “I wanted to get involved …” Jack Nicholson, to Brian Case, Time Out (London), August 17, 1994.
CHAPTER 19
1 “I’d like to take …” Jack Nicholson, to Hilary de Vries, “Calendar,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1992.
2 “Since the day he arrived …” The Observer (unsigned column), July 10, 1994.
3 “The thing I like best …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Hollywood Reporter, September 6, 1994.
4 “It was kind of like working …” Jack Nicholson, to Lucy Kaylin, GQ, January 1996.
5 “I told Ms. Anspach …” Jack Nicholson, to Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, June 1994.
6 “Unfortunately for Anspach …” Ibid.
7 “I can’t help but notice that women …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Rolling Stone, October 5, 2006.
CHAPTER 20
1 “We wanted to create …” Jack Nicholson, to Peter Bogdanovich, Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, 2006.
2 “a range of incensed …” Molly Haskell, “Where the Old Boy Always Gets the Girl,” New York Times, August 8, 1998.
3 “Well, Molly could answer …” Jack Nicholson, to Fred Scheurs, Rolling Stone, March 19, 1998.
4 “They’re the closest …” An unnamed source, to People, February 23, 1998.
5 “I’m on a constant …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Us, May 1998.
6 “I dropped about three q
uarts …” Jack Nicholson, quoted by Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza, The Academy Awards, p. 295.
7 “I have a career …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Variety, March 24, 1998.
8 “Castro is a genius …” Jack Nicholson, quoted by Army Archerd, Variety, July 16, 1998.
9 “liked to crack the sexual whip …” An unnamed source, Liz Smith’s syndicated column, December 12, 1999.
10 “I couldn’t look at myself …” Jack Nicholson, to Dalya Alberge, The Times (London), May 23, 2002.
11 “I looked at him …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in People, December 16, 2002.
12 “There are a lot …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in Newsweek, December 9, 2002.
13 “A younger woman …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in People, December 22, 2003.
14 “Jack’s character …” Nancy Meyers, quoted in Variety, January 7, 2004.
15 “We built this character …” Jack Nicholson, to Steven Kotler, Variety, December 11, 2006.
16 “The first thing Jack did …” Martin Scorsese, quoted in Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese.
17 “I was going to set …” Jack Nicholson, to Logan Hill, New York, October 9, 2006.
18 “One of the toughest parts …” Jack Nicholson, to Louise Gannon, Mail Online, January 31, 2011.
19 “It was a very singular …” Jack Nicholson, quoted in People, June 21, 2010.
20 “Keith would stay up …” Jack Nicholson, to Peter Biskind, Vanity Fair, December 16, 2011.
21 “The reality was …” Ibid.
22 “Jack is someone …” Anjelica Huston, Huffington Post, February 6, 2013.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I FIRST SAW EASY RIDER DURING ITS INITIAL RUN AT THE TRANS-LUX East in Manhattan with my then-girlfriend, a transplanted beauty from Ohio hippified via San Francisco. I remember her being upset when we left the theater because of the “injustice,” as she put it, of the two senseless murders at the end of the movie. To me, though, the greater injustice was the equally senseless murder of Hanson, a character superbly played by an actor I wasn’t as yet aware of, but whose relatively brief appearance moved me far more than the endless paranoid blather that poured out of two-dimensional Captain America and Billy for two hours. Their murder was as convenient as it was cliché. Hanson’s midfilm slaying was a genuine shock. It was my first exposure to Jack magic.
I was never a real hippie, I just played one on TV (true story, another time), but I did (and still do) love 1960s longhair rock. The first time I heard the songs from the soundtrack of the movie was on New York’s late, lamented WNEW-FM one night, a cream-of-the-crop collection including songs and performances, sometimes both, by Roger McGuinn, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Robbie Robertson, the Electric Prunes (yes), Bob Dylan, and the explosive track that drove the film, Steppenwolf’s anthemic “Born to Be Wild.” I had no idea as yet what the film was about, who was in it, or anything else. I went to see it because I wanted to hear how the music was used in the movie.
My next cinematic encounter with Jack Nicholson was Five Easy Pieces. I saw it by myself in a half-filled theater during the day in the middle of the week, as I had no steady job at the time. Not only did I now know who Jack was, he was the reason I went to see the film. I sat through it three times. I was held in my seat by its emotional power, and I wanted to see it the second and third times to somehow figure out how Jack had transformed himself out of Hanson and into Bobby Dupea, a character as far removed from Hanson as was imaginable. I couldn’t do it. Jack’s magic was too good.
THIS BOOK IS about the extraordinary power of that magic and the man who made it. Writing it I discovered many fascinating things; the most compelling, I think, was that when Jack was at his best, when the magic fairly shimmered on the silver screen, he was a cinematic spiritualist, able to somehow use the pieces of his difficult, deceptive, angry, at times ruinous life of endless charm, physical excess, emotional emptiness, and familial deception to conjure up characters of cinematic grace and beauty. Writing about him was a pleasure and a privilege and an experience of enlightenment; I think I finally did figure out how at least some of the tricks were done.
That is not to say that everything I found out about him was enjoyable or that I wrote on my knees in hagiographic worship. It just confirmed to me all over again how much I love watching great films and writing about the complex lives of those who help turn them into works of art.
We learn about the power of film through repetition; that doesn’t necessarily mean seeing the same film over and over again (although that too can be a surprisingly effective method) but watching a collective, hopefully chronological body of one actor’s (or director’s, or screenwriter’s or in some cases even producer’s) work, which for this biography I was fortunately able to do with Jack’s movies. I managed to see every Jack Nicholson film in existence in one form or another first to last—I caution you, not an easy task, but an imensely rewarding one. Even those I thought were unwatchable, and there were more than a few, held some value in the context of the body of his work. Today we have advantages that allow us to do what earlier generations could not. Because of it, we can more easily see how movies of a chosen subject are connected, that there are threads that run through them. We don’t have to wait years between each release to try to understand what they are and why they are important in the context of an entire career. Viewing films this way, semioticians might suggest, tells us that in terms of a filmmaker’s work, a single film is not the whole sentence (phrase) but a word in it (mot); to understand the language, then, of Jack Nicholson’s art requires an immersion into all of it. Seeing one Jack Nicholson film is a pleasure. Seeing fifty Jack Nicholson films is a revelation.
Finally, film has always been mislabeled as a great form of escape. It isn’t. Film brings us closer to ourselves. We learn more about who we are, not less, by watching characters up on the screen. In that sense, film is both a window and a mirror. Its emotional power and strength reassures all of us, in the temple of the theater, that we are not alone. The films of Jack Nicholson tell us more about who we are by showing us more about who he is.
Or maybe not. When I asked Henry Jaglom one time who Jack really was, he said, “I’m not sure that anybody knows Jack.”
“Not even Jack?” I asked. Henry only smiled.
Many thanks to all those who helped with this book, especially Toni Basil, Peter Biskind, Karen Black, Roger Corman, Peter Davis, Mickey Dolenz, Peter Guber, Monte Hellman, Henry Jaglom, Helena Kallianiotes, Mike Medavoy, and a host of others who in one way or another helped connect me to people and organizations that could help, with interviews and off-the-record information, or made it clear they didn’t want to participate on or off the record. There are only a few of them, and they are identified as such. They include Mick Sullivan, Alan Somers, Bryan Lourd, Ashton Fontana, Leslie Dart, Jay Sikura, Jolene Wolff, Alec Cast, Lauren Gibson, Quaid Films, Rand Holston, Jeff Berg, Dennis Aspland, Chris Donnelly, Julie McDonald, Charlie Nadler, Mandalay Entertainment, Julia Buchwald, Ari Emanuel, and David Salidor. And there were several people who, because of their personal proximity or professional positions, did not wish to be named. I am grateful for all of their gracious cooperation in granting original person-to-person interviews for this book. Many have never been interviewed before for any biography of Jack Nicholson.
I wish to thank the Los Angeles Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, the London Film Institute, and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris for their help and the availability of their resources.
I wish to thank my dear friend Henry Diltz for his great help. Henry, you are a prince.
I also wish to thank my fact checker and chief researcher, Jesse Herwitz (Blame him!); my editor, Suzanne O’Neill, at Crown Archetype; and the rest of the team, including Anna Thompson; and my agent, Alan Nevins of Renaissance Literary and Talent. To my loyal readers. I assure you we will meet again in the not-too-distant future, a little farther up the road.
&
nbsp; About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Marc Eliot has had his books translated into more than a dozen languages in countries all over the world. They include biographies of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Phil Ochs, and Steve McQueen.
Born and raised in New York City, he graduated from New York’s High School of Performing Arts—the “Fame” School—received his BA from the City University of New York, and his MFA in writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He did his postgraduate film work at Columbia, studying under Andrew Sarris. He frequently lectures to classes, at film events, and at conventions, speaking about his writing and his auteurist views of film. His work has appeared in several magazines, both in the United States and abroad. He is a favorite guest on several radio and television shows. He is also a member of the legendary Friars Club.
Nicholson is his twenty-fifth book.