I also think I was the only person on campus who wore a hat. And I know I was the only person who carried an umbrella every day. When I got to my next stop, Yale graduate school, I fell into great confusion, because the grad school was full of genuinely eccentric people, and to try to be eccentric in the midst of a zoo full of eccentrics was a lost cause. The currency was debased. At the same time, it was no use trying to dress very conventionally because there was a whole campus full of undergraduates who were dressed very conventionally.
Finally, when I got to Washington, I started having clothes made because I discovered a traveling British tailor. There were actually several who advertised in the back pages of the Manchester Guardian air-mail edition. They would set up shop in a hotel room. The samples used to always be on top of the bureau. You’d go look at all these samples books and pick some material. They’d make you whatever you wanted.
When I came to New York I decided I should start getting clothes made in this country so I could get fittings, because there were some rather bad mistakes, though not as bad as you would get with a Hong Kong tailor. So I went to a tailor here in New York and picked out a white material to have a suit made for the summertime. Silk tweed is actually a very warm material, so I starting wearing the thing in the wintertime. This was the winter of 1962 or 1963, and the reaction of people was just astonishing.
Long hair at that time outraged people. It was a real transgression. I did a story on Phil Spector in 1964, and he had hair about as long as the Beatles’. The things that were yelled to him on the street—I mean the hostility—were just amazing.
The hostility for minor changes in style was just marvelous. I had a great time. I was really getting into the swing of things. I remember my friend Bill Rollins, who was one of the great figures on the Herald Tribune at the time. Every time I came into Bleek’s or one of those places where newspaper people met, he’d say, “Here comes the man with the double-breasted underwear.” I rather liked that.
Which brings me to one final note on style. It’s still possible to have fun with clothes if you’re willing to be pretentious. That still annoys people: pretension in dress. In fact, this summer I was in East Hampton visiting some people who took me to a party. I was wearing a four-button seersucker jacket that buttons up really high—I think it is actually Edwardian—with a little tiny collar and a white tie with small, far-apart black stripes, and I had on a collar pin and cuff links, white serge pants and white cap-toed shoes, which are real English banker shoes, only I had them made in white doeskin. I had on some sheer white socks with black stripes to pick up the stripes in the necktie—I’m the only person who would confess all this to somebody. Pretty soon I noticed that I was the only man in the room—and this was a party of maybe sixty people—who had on both a jacket and a necktie. I think everyone had an income far in excess of mine. Finally this man came over to me; he was a little drunk, but he was also angry. He asked, “What’s the idea of the rig?” I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “The tie, the pin, all this stuff.” So I looked at him, and he had on a polo shirt and some kind of go-to-hell pants, and he had this big stain down the front of his polo shirt, right down the middle, right down to his belt line. I said, “Well, gee, I guess I can’t keep up with the styles in these parts. How do you do that bright stripe down your polo shirt?” He looked down sort of in surprise and said, “That’s sweat, goddamn it, that’s sweat!” He suddenly was very proud of it. I could see that I had landed in the midst of the era of funky chic.
You know when I write certain things and it turns out that I’m correct, it amazes me, I must confess. When I wrote that thing, funky chic, I never dreamed how correct that was.
On several occasions, most recently in the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, I’d just be standing around and people would come up and ask me if there’s a table available, because I’d have on a suit and necktie. Wear some trick outfits. If it’s worth it to you.
Does it ever get in the way of your role as the observer?
No, most often the opposite has gotten in the way. In the beginning of my magazine-writing career, I used to feel it was very important to try to fit in.
To be the chameleon?
Yes, and it almost always backfired, most notably when I went to do a story on Junior Johnson, the stock-car racer, one of the first stories I did for Esquire. I was quite aware that he was from the hills of North Carolina. A lot of moonshine and ex-moonshine runners were involved with stock-car racing at that time, Junior being one of them. I thought I’d better try to fit in, so I very carefully picked out the clothes I’d wear. I had a knit tie, some brown suede shoes and a brown Borsalino hat with a half inch of beaver fur on it. Somehow I thought this was very casual and suitable for the races; I guess I’d been reading too many P.G. Wodehouse novels. I really thought I’d fit in until about five days after I was down there. Junior Johnson came up to me and said, “I don’t like to say anything, but all these people in Ingle Hollow here are pestering me to death saying, ‘Junior, do you realize there’s some strange little green man following you around?’ ”
I realized that not only did I not fit in, but because I thought I was fitting in in some way, I was afraid to ask such very basic questions as, what’s the difference between an eight-gauge and seven-gauge tire, or, what’s a gum ball, because if you’re supposed to be hip, you can’t ask those questions. I also found that people really don’t want you to try to fit in. They’d much rather fill you in. People like to have someone to tell their stories to. So if you’re willing to be the village information gatherer, they’ll often just pile material on you. My one contribution to the discipline of psychology is my theory of information compulsion. Part of the nature of the human beast is a feeling of scoring a few status points by telling other people things they don’t know. So this does work in your favor.
After that, when I did The Pump House Gang, I scarcely could have been in a more alien world. I did the whole story in my seersucker rig. I think they enjoyed that hugely. They thought of me as very old. I was thirty-odd years old, and they thought of me as very stuffy. They kind of liked all that—this guy in a straw boater coming around asking them questions. Then it even became more extreme when I was working on Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I began to understand that it would really be a major mistake to try to fit into that world. There was a kind of creature that Kesey and the Pranksters, practically everybody in the psychedelic world, detested more than anything else, and that was the so-called weekend hipster, who was the journalist or teacher or lawyer, or somebody who was hip on the weekends but went back to his straight job during the week. Kesey had a habit of doing what he called testing people’s cool. If he detected the weekend hipster, he would dream up some test of hipness, like saying, “Okay, let’s everybody jump on our bikes and ride naked up Route 1.” They would do that, and usually at that point the lawyer, who didn’t want an indecent exposure charge on his life’s score sheet, would drop out. Kesey explained this theory of testing people’s cool, his notion that there’re lots of people who want to be amoral, but very few who are up to it. And he was right.
How did you come across the third great awakening and the Me Decade? Was that originally a lecture that you were doing?
I think I did it for The Critic; I used “the third great awakening” in that.
One of the few things I learned on the lecture circuit, which I have abandoned for the most part, was the existence of these new religious movements and some insight into what they were like. I would begin to meet members of religious communes who had come to my talks in hopes of hearing about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, whom I was not talking about any longer. I would talk about art, and the first question would be, “What’s Ken Kesey doing now?” And I can’t tell you how many times that happened. I began to see that I was perceived as a medium who could put them in touch with the other world. And all these people were patiently listening just to get to the question period, or to get me alone to ask, �
��What’s Ken Kesey doing now? What’s he really like? Where can I find a commune? Are we running our commune correctly?” God, I used to get all these letters —I could have started a column like “Dr. Hip Pocrates, Advice for Heads.”
Well, the other question that everyone asks, I recall, is how many times you’d taken acid in order to do ‘Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ and you said you hadn’t, which disappointed everyone greatly.
Yeah, I think they really wanted me to be on the bus. In fact, I never was.
You went off in private and took acid, just to see what it was like?
Well, I actually did it once during the writing of the book; I’d started writing the book, and then I thought, well, this is one little piece of reporting I haven’t done. So I did do it; it scared the hell out of me. It was like tying yourself to a railroad track to see how big the train is. It was pretty big. I would never do it again. Although at several places I went to lecture in the years that followed, people would put things in the pie that was cooked for dinner—not LSD, but a lot of hashish, marijuana baked into things, or methedrine. People would pop poppers under my nose, things of this sort. They thought they were doing me a favor. But one of the reasons I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of the reasons I thought it was important enough to write about, was that it was a religion; Kesey’s group was a primary religious group.
And you could see how just such a group developed, as if you’d been able to have been a reporter when the early Christians were forming and then again, running into students who would tell me they had formed communes, and who were very frankly religious and would call themselves Jesus people. They said they didn’t use dope, but they all had. In the beginning the whole Jesus movement was made up of former acidheads, and when they said they didn’t use dope, in most cases they really meant they didn’t use chemical dope. Anything you could grow was quite all right. That mean that marijuana was okay, peyote was okay . . .
. . . mescaline was all right, mushrooms, etc.
Yeah, if you would go to the trouble of making it. Those things were all okay. The people in the psychedelic world had been religious but had always covered it up. There was such a bad odor about being frankly religious. I mean Kesey would refer to Cosmo, meaning God; someone in the group used the word “manager.” Hugh Romney [a.k.a. Wavy Gravy] used to say, “I’m in the pudding and I’ve met the manager.” Or they’d say, if they were getting into a very religious frame of mind and began to notice a lot of—what’s the word when two people pick up the same thought at the same time? Probably “coincidence” is the right word, but they had another name for it—they would begin to say, “Well, there’s some real weird shit going down,” or “Brothers, this is the holy moment,” or anything like that.
In the early Seventies, the mood of all this began to get more and more frankly religious, and the idea that this was the third great awakening popped into my head. Because I had remembered from graduate-school days the first awakening and second great awakening, out of which came Mormonism. Then I began to read about it. I saw that the Mormons, for example, had been just like hippies and had been seen as such. Just wild kids. They were young when they started. You think of Mormons as being old and having big beards. They were children. They were in their early twenties. Joseph Smith was twenty-four years old—he was the leader of the band. And they were just hated, more than the hippies were hated. And Smith was lynched. He wasn’t hanged, but he was in jail in Carthage, Illinois, and it was invaded by vigilantes and they shot him to death. That’s why Brigham Young took the group out to the woods of Utah.
And I think that movement is growing bigger and bigger. There’s such a . . . yearning in everybody—there always has been—for blind faith. There’s no such thing, I think, as rational faith. It isn’t faith. And people always want it, one way or another, me included, although I hide it from myself, as do most people who think they are really sophisticated and learned. But this is something people really want, because blind faith is a way of assuring yourself that the kind of life that you’re either leading or intend to lead is inherently and absolutely the best. That’s really what it’s all about.
Now is a great time for new religions to pop up. There are people who get religious about jogging, they get religious about sex, and you talk to some of these people who are avowed swingers—they’ll bore your head off. God, it’s just painful to listen to them. Fifteen minutes in a roomful of these people is like turning your head into a husk. Health foods have become the basis of a religion. Let’s see, ESP, of course, flying saucers, anything is fertile ground now. There’s a new messiah born every day. That’s why Jimmy Carter made such a colossal mistake in not preaching. He’d gotten away with murder as it was, getting elected as a born-again Christian. That’s what people wanted. If he had just ranted and raved for the last three years about the depravity of the people, they would have loved it.
Tell me, where are you going to turn your eye next? Are you at loose ends, or casting around?
I’m doing something that I’ve had on my mind for a long time, which is a Vanity Fair book about New York, à la Thackeray. When I went to Leonard Bernstein’s party [to report on Radical Chic], it was with the idea of gathering material for what was going to be a nonfiction book, which could be done, incidentally, if you could find enough events or scenes like that to move into. My impulse now, though, is to try to do it as a novel, since I’ve never done one, and to just see what happens. I’m also very much aware of the fact that novelists themselves hardly touch the city. How they can pass up the city I don’t know. The city was a central—character is not a very good way to put it, but it was certainly a dominant theme—in the works of Dickens, Zola, Thackeray, Balzac. So many talented writers now duck the city as a subject. And this is one of the most remarkable periods of the cities. Who has been the great novelist of New York since the Second World War? Nobody. Or Chicago or Cleveland or Los Angeles or Newark, for that matter. My God, the story of Newark must be absolutely amazing.
So you’re going to be out prowling the streets?
Well, I don’t know if I’ll be charging into people’s houses, but I will have to do a lot of reporting. There’s more good material out there than in any writer’s brain. A writer always likes to think that a good piece of work he has done is the result of his genius. And that the material is just the clay, and it’s ninety-eight percent genius and two percent material. I think that it’s probably 70 percent–30 percent in favor of the material. This ends up putting a great burden on the reporting, and I don’t think many fiction writers understand this.
JACK NICHOLSON
by Nancy Collins
March 29, 1984
Garrett Breedlove, the astronaut you played in ‘Terms of Endearment,’ is hardly a matinee idol. Any qualms about playing a clearly middle-aged, out-of-shape guy?
No, because I’ve always wanted to play older. Some of my early heroes are Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, Charles Bickford. They didn’t have any problems with it. This middle-life thing has become a phobia; people think it’s got to be a big problem, when it’s simply not. I know from real life that middle-aged people are very attractive. I feel I’m beating out all those guys who stay on rigid diets. They run; they go crazy; their skin is always in fabulous shape. I feel like I’m going to scoop the pot going the other way. Besides, I’ve been physically dissected more than any frog in a biology class—it’s my eyebrows, my eyes, my teeth. And now it’s my stomach. For twenty-five years, they’ve been writing that I’m totally bald, and now they’re all bald and—have a look [points to his head].
I’ve been overweight since I was four years old. Of course, I have all the normal defenses against it. But it’s always bugged me. I don’t want to overinflate my role and my job, but isn’t there more to me than what I weigh?
One of the themes of ‘Terms’ is middle-aged sexuality and crisis. You’re forty-six. Have you suffered any form of midlife crisis?
Oh, sure. You’re aware
of the rings in your tree. It’s like when Mick Jagger says it would be terrible to be singing rock & roll at forty. Well, it’s not so terrible, as he now appreciates. I’m aware that in the job I do, age is a big factor, so it’s the first time in a professional way that I’ve accepted any limitations. I don’t want to be a man who, just past a certain point of physicality, believes it when young women say they actually prefer you this way. It’s an image I’ve always feared. I hope I’m not that vulnerable, but I could be. It’s a goofy, clownish part. I don’t mind acting it, but I don’t want to be it.
I gather you know you have a reputation as a womanizer. Is that guilt by association, because of your friendship with Warren Beatty?
That’s right, guilt by association. I mean, what night is this? Do you hear women calling me on the phone? They know I’m here, don’t they? Look, that’s just bullshit. I can’t go around saying I’m not a womanizer, because that’s silly. First of all, it’s good for business if people think I’m a womanizer. Beyond that, I’ve no motivation to deny it, unless it begins to dominate the reality of my situation.
As a child, I had one of those scaldingly embarrassing experiences when I realized that all these other boys were lying about their sexual prowess. I always assumed they were telling the truth. I believed them when I was six through ten, and at eleven, I said, “Those guys are lying.” The result of that lag is that it’s very hard for me to lie about my prowess or my experience. It’s apropos of my reputation that I’m a little embarrassed that people look at me that way, because they’re giving me too much credit.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 20