Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  There was a particular cantina where I liked to eat, drink tequila, and listen to mariachis play, and nearby was a whorehouse I started visiting. I always found the whorehouses the safest place to be. There I could overcome all the sexual inhibitions that the adults tried to lay up on my generation. It was not free love or anything like that. I was looking for something other than just getting laid; I wanted a sexual education.

  That’s when I fell for a pretty, pregnant girl. She was dark and exotic and I quickly seemed very special to her. She convinced me to stay for a while and I lasted in Agua Prieta for a month or so on summer break before my money ran out and I knew I had to be going. I still remember—as if it were a scene from a movie—that sweet sloe-eyed girl standing on a low hill, wearing only a thin white slip, crying as I drove away. Something stuck in my throat as I waved into the rearview mirror and crossed the border back into the United States and a return to real life, and I remember thinking that it was a scene I should have played out with Kathy in Omaha if the world had made any sense.

  There was a Mormon girl back in Safford, too, who thought I belonged in her future. I wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea, but Coach Beaks was. He was wise enough to know that the two of us were oil and water, and he let me know I was not invited back for another season and made the successful case to me that I ought to head home to Nebraska. I figured I would find my way in due time to another college—just taking enough classes to be eligible to play before I was kicked out for never attending any—but wasn’t in a huge hurry. My teammates sent me off with a pillowcase full of beer.

  I had no idea what I’d do once I returned to the Midwest and my parents didn’t push, but I needed some kind of work—or income, at least—and I fell into selling fake draft cards to underage kids who wanted to use them to buy booze and get into bars. Back in those days, draft cards didn’t include photographs and they weren’t laminated or plastic—just a stiff piece of paper on which I could type a name and birth date, then add a counterfeit stamp.

  It was crazy, yes, but it paid awfully well. From a contact in Lincoln, I could buy a packet containing a blank draft card, birth certificate, and driver’s license for five dollars. It was the draft card that was prized but I was happy to counterfeit all of them, and I would take orders at fraternity houses and hamburger stands and diners, wherever I could find fellas younger than twenty-one who were eager for alcohol, selling them for anywhere from twenty-five to fifty dollars a packet.

  The money rolled in for a year and a half or more, and I took on a kind of criminal style, driving an old black funeral limousine, bleaching my hair white, and exclusively wearing black jeans and a black shirt and trench coat. I looked weird, but for some reason no one seemed too concerned with my nonconformity nor my livelihood.

  But then one night when I was feeling particularly festive, I rolled my limousine off a hill and it landed right on the green of the ninth hole at the local country club. Scattered across the green were more than a thousand blank IDs—each one with the very same serial number—and it was the fact that the old limo was registered to me that led the FBI to find me a few days later and begin to ask some questions. Could I identify the guy in Lincoln who sold me the cards? No. Did I know who Chairman Mao was? No. And what was my opinion of the conflict in Vietnam that had begun to make the news? Huh?

  I had barely heard of Vietnam in the spring of 1961, didn’t know the first thing about communism or any other -ism, for that matter, and when those FBI agents started talking to me about the conspiracy in which I was involved, I didn’t know what in the hell to make of anything they said. And they, in turn, must have felt that I was the worst master criminal they’d seen.

  The word “arrest” hadn’t been spoken yet, but my parents were starting to receive telephone calls from well-meaning friends warning them that Nick could be in some serious trouble. My dad didn’t seem too concerned because very little truly bothered him, as I’ve explained, but my mother really freaked out. One day she announced that we had to leave immediately for Uncle Cole’s farm in Redfield, Iowa.

  “Did he die?” I asked.

  “No,” she explained, “but it’s just time for us to go and get you someplace where people won’t find you.” So, off we went, and it was a long time before I realized that Mom thought the best thing for us in the face of that trouble was to go on the lam. It’s funny to think of now, but it was far from humorous then. Once we were at Uncle Cole’s it was decided we would return and face the consequences. It took almost a year, but I was arrested and charged with seven counts of selling counterfeit state and federal documents. I was twenty years old.

  The FBI still believed my mission had been to keep my contemporaries out of the army and far from Vietnam—a mission the judge at my sentencing referred to and called by the name treason. Yet it wasn’t a political act of defiance. As far as Vietnam was concerned, I had zero interest in going or fighting anyone there—but I had sold cards so that frat boys could buy beer and whiskey. I merely wanted to make some good money. My goals were no greater than that.

  The judge listened to me, then sentenced me to a $75,000 fine and seventy-five years in jail. When I heard him, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think other than to be sure this was some kind of nightmare, and I almost didn’t hear when the judge continued, explaining that he was also going to suspend my sentence, and that under the terms of the Youth Corrections Act, I would be on probation throughout the length of the Vietnam War, but he wanted me to understand, too, that if I got into any further trouble, I would be jailed for a very long time to come.

  I’M SURE THAT A FEW OF MY PARENTS’ FRIENDS MUST HAVE believed that I sure as hell should have been sent to prison, that Lank and Helen’s boy had turned out to be one of those rebels, but the truth was that I was still trying to make sense of life. I did develop an understanding of what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, and like so many of my contemporaries, I thought the war was wrong in virtually every way. My sense of racial injustice had been encouraged by my mother since I was very young, as she made sure we always knew African-Americans, so the civil rights movement grew increasingly important to me as well—at least as an idea, as an abstract kind of cause.

  Yet I didn’t become an antiwar protester or a civil rights activist. Instead, later that year I joined my good friend Garth Peterson, a mysterious and fun guy who had grown up in L.A., in taking a class called Cooking and Food Preparation at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. It was the only class in which we enrolled, and we did so because Garth knew it would be full of girls. It was a great plan, and a successful one, and I fell further under Garth’s cool influence when I began to read Jack Kerouac and poets like Corso and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, and I started wearing a little fake Beat hat, and Garth and I would go to the black districts in Omaha, where we would listen to jazz and smoke and drink highballs, exploring the rejection of American materialism and opening our minds to spiritual quests and the improvement of the human condition.

  But the truth was that I wasn’t done with football yet. It wasn’t surprising; I’d been an athlete for a couple of decades and a hipster for no more than a year. Football had been the crucible in which I’d ground out my fears, frustrations, and triumphs. I was still young; the game—playing the game—still moved me like nothing else could. My parents had relocated to Glendale, California, where my mother had accepted an offer to become a buyer for a prominent department store; my good buddy Chuck Freeman had decamped from Omaha to go make a career for himself in Hollywood, so joining them all in Southern California sounded great. And yes, said the letter from the head football coach at Pasadena City College when he responded to my inquiry, he would be glad to have me walk on to his program as a junior that fall, and together we’d see just what kind of football player I was.

  CHAPTER 6

  Little Theatre

  IN THE YEARS SINCE MY FIRST HEARTBREAK, I HAD VENTURED out of the Midwest and had a brief taste of life. I had slept in a jail c
ell for a month and a Mexican whorehouse for a month. I’d been convicted of a federal felony and escaped a life of imprisonment by the skin of my teeth. I’d bounced from one junior-college football program to another, then had begun bouncing my head against cars for reasons neither I nor anyone else could explain other than it relieved pent-up stress. Some street-savvy men had taught me how to punk steel and I’d learned a very uncomfortable casting-couch lesson as well. I’d had my eyes opened wide amidst the revelries of the artists of Laurel Canyon, and I’d passed out on the tarmac of Santa Monica Boulevard way too many times, too.

  Bryan O’Byrne, almost magically it seemed, had engendered in me an intense interest in acting, then had called my parents to tell them their son was deeply in need of a place to reconsider his life. While my contemporaries would have been in their junior years of college, I had locked myself in a room in my parents’ house in Phoenix, talking to virtually no one except my senile grandmother. Alone and tormented, I had begun to read, then reread, every book I could find on the theory and practice of acting.

  Then, at last, I had tape-recorded for my parents a lengthy indictment of the myriad ways in which they and their generation were responsible for all the confusion and fear that had led to what I had begun to call my “crack-up.” I had blamed them for not teaching me the skills to deal with my burgeoning new self and the life outside of sports I now wanted to live. Luckily, they heard me out and simply shook their heads. They knew it was a process I needed to do to break away from my childhood a little and become my own self. Once that deeply unfair and insensitive little project was completed, I was ready to leave the four walls in which I’d confined myself and march out to investigate the compelling world of acting.

  I was full of a vibrant new momentum and my first stop when I left my parents’ house was the Phoenix Little Theatre, which had been operating since 1920 and was one of the oldest continually operating theaters west of the Mississippi. I was able to wander into the five-hundred-seat venue, which was housed in a midcentury modern complex that included the Phoenix Art Museum, in the middle of the day. The empty stage stood before me like a blank slate in my new life, and I remember making a couple of private promises before walking out into the glaring desert sun again.

  As I departed, a man with the unlikely name of Kit Carson encountered me and introduced himself. He didn’t seem concerned by my presence, but he eyed me quizzically nonetheless; I was an unlikely visitor. I launched into an overheated explanation of why I was there, but he slowed me down long enough to invite me into his office.

  Olan K. Carson was the house director, I quickly learned, a congenial and talented guy who had left Seattle in 1963 to accept an offer to lead the remarkably successful regional theater that was commonly known as the PLT. Once seated in Kit’s office, I emptied my guts, telling him everything I could about football and draft cards, the gang at Barney’s Beanery and acting lessons in Laurel Canyon, about my newfound reverence for Stanislavski and the year I’d just spent in my bedroom.

  Kit listened with interest and more than a little empathy, it seemed, until at last I ran out of gas. Then, just like that, he offered me a role in the company’s upcoming production of The Hasty Heart, a play by John Patrick. I didn’t have to audition, didn’t have to prove to him that I had talent; he simply heard something in me, and he must have seen something, too, and he became an important mentor and friend from that first afternoon.

  The play was a drama that contained some intentional humor, and it was set in a British military hospital during World War II, but Kit and the PLT had Americanized the story. The character I would play was Digger, an outsider and loner, and I couldn’t have imagined a better opportunity for my stage debut, because given my recent past, I certainly didn’t have to stretch. I was the second-youngest member of the cast, and I didn’t know anyone yet, so playing someone estranged from his companions was easy to pull off, too.

  I had read and reread all the acting books. I was totally stoked—my first time onstage, I was going to be acting with a highly respected professional repertory company in a major American city—but about an hour before the curtain came up on opening night, I panicked. Surely, I had no business being there! Did I?

  I understood that an actor—a real actor—must drag himself out there, whatever his baggage, whatever the cost. But I was terrified, and as I listened behind the curtain as the audience settled in and people laughed, coughed, and chatted, my anxiety soared even higher. I couldn’t focus my concentration on Digger, couldn’t crawl inside him, so I spit on the red curtain that separated the audience from me. It worked. The curtain represented the fourth wall to me—a conceptual barrier between the actors onstage and the audience—and interacting with it was a way to claim my territory. When it seemed I was in such danger of exploding that I didn’t have any other choice, it helped.

  By the time the curtain opened that night, my stage fright had transported me into a kind of blank space—a zone in which thinking and feeling disappeared and were replaced by the opportunity to briefly become someone else. Instead of flooring me, that blank space actually felt pretty great, and inside of it—or so I was told—I played the part of Digger as well as anyone could have imagined.

  But when the curtain dropped, I had no clue about what had just transpired onstage. The troupe met for drinks after the performance, and my new cohorts replayed the evening and assured me that I had done well. Kit Carson congratulated me and wanted me to know that he had known from the moment he’d met me that I had what it took. Thanks to him, I now had a hell of a reason to get out of bed every morning, and for the next few years, Kit cast me in dozens of roles that allowed me to learn, to stretch, to grow as an actor every time the curtain went up.

  He also encouraged me—no, commanded is a better word—to read every play by the astonishingly talented crop of American playwrights. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, William Inge, and others opened my eyes to how powerful theatrical drama could be, and how a brilliant performance of a fine play in front of a rapt and discerning audience was perhaps the finest artistic experience a collection of people could have.

  Kit taught me that acting is a precarious endeavor, one where the actor walks a razor’s edge between preparation and surrender, but this never bothered me because everything in so-called real life was very precarious, too, as far as I was concerned. Something about acting made it seem precious as well—vital and worthwhile in the best sort of way—and aided me with incredible stories that I could inhabit to explore sides of myself as yet undeveloped. When Kit suggested that I needed to start working in summer stock if I was going to truly advance my talent, I immediately agreed. Summer stock is an opportunity for actors to get their feet wet in small repertory theaters throughout the country during a summer season. With a glowing letter of recommendation from him and a phony résumé tallying all my acting experience, more than just the one play I had actually been in . . . I scored a position at the Little Theatre of the Rockies for the summer in Greeley, Colorado—far, far from Broadway—and I was thrilled.

  THE LITTLE THEATRE OF THE ROCKIES WAS BASED AT THE University of Northern Colorado, in a town whose nearby cattle feedlots give it the distinct aroma that is its chief source of notoriety. But the Little Theatre was renowned, too, in largest part because its director Helen Langworthy had a reputation as one of the best directors west of the Mississippi. Helen ran her program like a taskmaster, and she was a tough old broad. She was no fragile beauty, and she profoundly loved her work, frequently sitting back in the auditorium during rehearsals and barking instructions with a military bearing.

  Like most newbies, my inclination was to shout my lines in hopes that they would reach the last row of the big, thousand-seat space. But yelling took me out of character, made me sound spastic, and utterly destroyed any poetry in the piece. Helen taught me the trick of simply raising my energy level and letting it carry my voice. She was right; it worked brilliantly, but I never became tr
uly comfortable in a big house in the way I was in an intimate theater, and perhaps that explains why I ended up in film.

  Ms. Langworthy had hired me as a lead actor who would perform in eight plays that summer, one right after the other. I was paid so little that I didn’t need to bother with a bank account—fifty dollars a week and a room at a downtown Greeley flophouse—but the experience was extraordinary. I played both Biff and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and while Biff was a natural role for me, truly becoming his defeated father was the biggest challenge I had yet faced.

  But it was my role as Mio Romagna in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset that left a lasting impression on Helen Langworthy and the theatergoers of Greeley. Written in twentieth-century verse, the story surrounds Mio’s attempt to prove his father’s innocence after he is falsely convicted, then executed for robbery and murder. I dyed my hair black for the part and did my best to approximate an earnest, first-generation immigrant Italian. My own assessment was that my performance was far from stellar, but man, it was great to get so far afield from the Midwestern boy I remained off the stage, and I soared with enthusiasm for what I could accomplish onstage and how wonderful it could make me feel.

  I ARRIVED SEVERAL WEEKS EARLY FOR MY SECOND SUMMER season in Greeley and was kicking around town when I bumped into a friend from the theater program and he approached me with what at first seemed to be a brilliant idea. It was May 1965 and the march from Selma to Montgomery had taken place just six weeks earlier. Young people across the country were on fire with newly forged commitment to the civil rights movement, and, like thousands of others from virtually every state, my buddy suggested that we travel south for a few weeks to lend a hand with the voter-registration drives that were taking place across the South. Yes, I emphatically told him, I’d join him and we’d do our small part toward setting things right in our country.