by Nick Nolte
The desert by now had begun to feel like home, but I remained a proud Midwesterner at heart, and because Excelsior was anchored to the shore of Lake Minnetonka, a large lake and a very fine place to fish, I thought I’d come to Mecca. The 2,500 year-round residents of Excelsior embraced me like I was a native son and I fit right in. It was wonderful.
In the middle of nowhere, but only a twenty-minute drive from the Twin Cities, the Old Log’s six hundred seats were always full. I found a cool basement apartment on Main Street next door to Pete’s Pizza, where I built twenty-six-inch bass-reflex stereo speakers that could make Dr. John and the Night Trippers so loud they would take your head off. I got to know lots of local kids—most of whom were a few years younger than me—and I was often found hanging in the college’s commons area sewing flowers onto shirts for anyone who wanted them and getting to know the community. I met a great group of friends and together we did our best to look after boys coming home from Vietnam. After what they had been through in Southeast Asia, these soldiers’ reentry into Minnesota life was never easy, and we would do what we could to help by hijacking them at the airport before their families knew they were back, then keeping them safe, surrounded by the buddies they had known all their life and full of booze, until they settled in and were ready to try home life once more.
Sheila made a few visits here and there that year—but only briefly on breaks from my responsibilities at the Old Log, as I was ultimately a member of the company in Excelsior for three full seasons. Although we missed each other, our relationship had always had a fated feeling to it, as if we both knew it served us deeply yet was for a limited time. When I was offered a Prestone antifreeze commercial that was scheduled to shoot in New York, I phoned Sheila, and she wanted me to come home to Phoenix, but I flew east instead. On my arrival, however, I learned that filming the ad had been postponed for six weeks. I knew I should return home and face her, let us go our inevitable separate ways, but I chickened out and focused on my next job. I did some modeling and audited the acting classes of Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler, both of whom deserved their reputations as extraordinary teachers. I remember Stella explaining to a young actress who was struggling with a Tennessee Williams role. “No, no, no, dear,” she told her, “with Tennessee, we’ve got to wear the poetry.” That seemed to me excellent advice no matter who the playwright. To be a good actor, you must wear the poetry, the rhythm, as if they are your clothes.
Before I left New York, as a way to help keep my head above water, I did a Clairol print commercial with a young blond model. The ad for Clairol’s “Summer Blonde” was such a hit that the company later used the photograph—the two of us mugging on a piece of driftwood—on the box of dye itself, the only time a guy’s ever appeared on a woman’s hair-color package, as far as I know.
At last, however, it was time to return to Arizona, as Sheila had sent me divorce papers. She had the divorce all figured out, just like the marriage. Sheila came over to the ramshackle desert rat’s spread I had rented on several desolate acres and said, “I have thought this all out. You don’t have anything and I don’t have much—but it will be all clear, all you have to do is sign.” Then, as things happen, we ended up falling into bed one last time. Instead of a nostalgic romp, however, it turned madcap as a large wooden sculpture above the bed fell down and hit her on the head. It was just one of those embarrassing, crazy moments. The last go, and boom! We had had a great ten years; I learned a lot from her and we played many roles across from each other. I brought her ice and we both shared a bittersweet laugh.
I moved out the remaining items I had in her house and I continued to see Sheila’s son, and because my parents were living in Phoenix by the early seventies, Sheila and my mother remained close for many years. But the two of us were done; we both knew it, accepted it, and moved on.
IT WAS EARLY IN 1972 WHEN DESTINY STEPPED INTO MY LIFE again. Keith Anderson, a Phoenix-based director I knew, got in touch to say that he and Bob Johnson, producer of the city’s new Southwest Ensemble Theatre, were planning the world premiere of renowned playwright William Inge’s The Last Pad. It’s set in a prison’s death row on a night when a young man is scheduled to be electrocuted. Keith had me in mind for Jess, the lead, a wife-killer who is living his last hours. I desperately wanted the role before I’d even read the play. Inge was a master, one of contemporary America’s great playwrights, and I hadn’t had a role this meaty, this challenging, this consequential in a very long time. And a world premiere! My God, this was why—already into my thirties—I continued to be committed to this craft that had rather literally saved my life more than a decade before.
A Kansan by birth and the recipient of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for his play Picnic, Inge examined the human condition with subtle penetration. Yet Inge never achieved the fame he sought, and he always struggled personally with his closeted homosexuality.
Early in the 1970s, Inge was teaching playwriting at the University of California at Irvine and sinking ever deeper into depression. With The Last Pad, he appeared to be making a conscious decision to kill off his archetypal characters, each of whom was also a side of himself. Jess, the role I would play, is very reminiscent of Inge’s character Hal in Picnic, a young man who pretends boldness and confidence yet is ready to collapse in defeat and self-doubt. The two other inmates scheduled to die are a cynical gay inmate and an old philosopher who is the only member of the trio who can simply accept his fate.
Two fine fellow actors, Jim Matz and Richard Elmore, joined me onstage when we opened very inauspiciously at the Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale before moving to the Unitarian Church in Phoenix when the play proved to be a big hit and our run was extended. Inge himself drove over to see us perform when word reached him that we were doing a hell of a job, and he was hugely enthusiastic about what he saw. “You guys have just nailed this,” he gushed, and soon he insisted that we find a way to bring the play to Los Angeles.
I was still in the shacklike house in the desert on two and a half acres, hanging out with local Indians and wandering with my dogs alone. I had developed a relationship with castor beans. Castor beans could grow anywhere and if you have ten feet of them, you have a canopy that is dark and twenty degrees cooler than the Arizona heat. Mom came to visit after the initial Phoenix success of The Last Pad and we sat out on beat-up old chairs in our own private jungle. No one could hear us and there was blood dripping off every other tree from blood bags that a couple of local nurses would give me, as blood meal is great nutrition for the plant.
She said, “So this is the way you are going to go. To L.A.?”
I was likely going to go; I knew having an invitation would change everything. I knew it for sure. And just to play around with her, I said, “Well, I don’t know. I might stay with these castor beans, it sure is peaceful.” She smiled, not letting me get her goat at all. If anybody knew about tempo and rhythm, the time when you should do things and the time when you are out of sync, it was her. My mother believed in destiny. We both knew I was going.
Our production moved to Los Angeles in the early summer of 1973 and opened at the prestigious Contempo Theatre, now the Geffen, in Westwood, on June 15. Little did we know that tragedy would hit just four days before we opened, as Inge killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Some say he orchestrated his departure to help give his beloved final creation a bit more attention. The Last Pad is a very fine play in its own right, but the world lost a brilliant voice the day Inge took his life. We were deeply shaken, and I’m sure that added a level of intensity to our performances of his last work.
By the second week of our run, the good buzz made sure we were sold out for dozens of weeks to come, Time magazine was doing a story, and agents were swarming around. Actors like Elizabeth Taylor and Sidney Poitier were attending, then coming backstage to say hello. But I wanted no part of that—I simply would not open my dressing-room door, no matter who wanted to see me.
Finally, my old friend and acting coach
Bryan O’Byrne, who had lit the first spark of interest in acting in me long ago in Laurel Canyon, came to the playhouse and tried to talk some sense into me. I explained to Bryan that I was shy, and what in the hell did I have to say to Elizabeth Taylor anyway?
“That’s ridiculous!” Bryan laughed. “Everybody is shy, for Christ’s sake. You can’t do this anymore, Nick. All they want to do is congratulate you. Of course you don’t know Elizabeth Taylor, goddamn it. Just be gracious to her.”
That posthumous production of Inge’s The Last Pad was about to change everything for me professionally, and like I’d done with Kit Carson and Helen Langworthy and John Willcoxon and Don Stolz and many other mentors in regional theaters around the country over the previous decade, I did my best to truly take Bryan’s wise words to heart. At the Contempo Playhouse, I continued to act my ass off as Jess, the convict condemned to die, and I didn’t move away from Southern California ever again.
CHAPTER 7
Rich Man
ABC STRUGGLED MIGHTILY IN ITS RATINGS WAR AGAINST its competing networks in the mid-1970s—and it regularly lost. But its position as the nation’s underdog network led legendary television producer Fred Silverman, who joined the network as head of ABC Entertainment in 1975, to take some big risks in hopes that things might turn around. He approved a project planned as a brand-new concept for television. It was going to be called “movies for television,” a multiple-hour television drama whose entire run would last just a few weeks. The first series Silverman wanted to create was based on a very popular novel by Irwin Shaw titled Rich Man, Poor Man, a story that followed the divergent lives of two brothers whose parents were impoverished German immigrants to the U.S.
Early on, the producers thought that Peter Strauss, a successful young actor who had appeared in several recent series, would be ideal as Rudy Jordache, the ambitious brother. And although I was much less well-known, director Hank Schloss, whom I had worked with on a number of small film projects, fought hard on my behalf to convince the producers of the series that I would be the perfect choice to play Tom, the rebellious brother who fails at most everything.
In the two years since The Last Pad had made such a mark on the Los Angeles theater scene, Bryan O’Byrne had been pumping The Last Pad reviews onto casting directors’ desks left and right and people wanted to see what I looked like on film. As a result, I’d gotten cast in some fun little television and film roles, including episodes of Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Gunsmoke, and Electra Glide in Blue, in which I played the part of a hippie—without any credit.
By the time Rich Man, Poor Man was announced, I had gotten a little repute; the William Morris Agency was hot on me. But they held off on signing me so I went with another agency. I had an agent, Lou Pitt—whose clients included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee, Dudley Moore, and Jessica Lange—and a manager, Mimi Weber, who once had represented Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant and now was managing newcomers like me who were trying their luck at the business. I had worked with a director at Universal who brought me in without an interview for the role of Tom—and I wanted it. The buzz about the ABC project was big, and I had set my eye on it.
On the day they screen-tested me, I was matched with Strauss, whom I hadn’t met before. We went over our lines for a while, then gave it our best shot in front of the studio guys, and I was already so far into the role that I knew we had just nailed it. As we walked to our cars I told him I looked forward to seeing him when we started shooting. He reminded me that we hadn’t been given the parts yet, but I knew better. “Hey, it’s going to happen,” I told him. “We’re doing this thing.” And so we did.
Rich Man is a rangy piece, and the true challenge for both of us was that we had to portray our characters from teens to middle age. Tom, my character, goes from sixteen to forty-five, and it was playing a rank teenager that gave me some pause. During rehearsals, I paid attention to the ways in which Peter lightened his voice and shifted some of his mannerisms as a way to become younger, but I was sure that approach wouldn’t work for me. I was thirty-five! I looked young but not that young, so I spent a lot of time trying to access the true qualities of youth before it came to me that—in addition to dropping my weight down to the 150 pounds I carried when I played high school ball—I simply had to react to the world I encountered. Kids don’t think; they just react. Tom is a reactionary, and he’s troubled, and I began to understand him very well.
Man, I must have run around the Hollywood Reservoir a thousand times to get my weight down—even in the middle of the night. And to help me express Tom’s teenage malaise, I put cotton in my ears so it seemed I was deep in my adolescent fog. At least that’s what I did until Dorothy McGuire, who played Tom’s mother, found me out and threw a fit, telling me in no uncertain terms that the cotton was a trick, and that actors—good actors—didn’t use tricks. I rolled my eyes like a teenager and continued on in my fog.
THE EARLY BUZZ WAS ASTOUNDING—SO MUCH SO THAT ABC decided to reshape the production just as we began shooting. A huge audience by today’s standards was expected; this was still an era of rabbit-ears antennae and only a handful of channels. The suits believed it was a critical point in television, and they could reposition themselves among the competition while making bundles of money from advertisers. When I was hired, my contract had stipulated my performance in three two-hour movies that would air on three separate nights. But soon after we began shooting, producer Jon Epstein called me in to say, “Look, Nick, this stuff is so good we want to stretch it out. We think it’s so captivating that we can stretch it to twelve one-hour shows.”
I told Jon I wasn’t a fan of that idea. I thought making the change would diminish it terribly—the show would seem just like any other TV show if it ran for only an hour each week. But he worked hard to convince me, assuring me that the production was going to be something special, the kind of thing that never had been done before. No single episode would stand alone; all of them would be part of a cohesive narrative arc. It was the first time I remember hearing the term “miniseries.”
Irwin Shaw, author of the novel, disliked the plan, too. He was upset enough that the tension between him and the studio was palpable, yet he didn’t bolt and he continued to oversee the scripting of each hour—and the writing remained excellent. For my part, I decided just to go back to work and try to make the role of Tom Jordache my best performance yet, and the hard work that all of us put into the show really paid off. Rich Man, Poor Man was spectacularly successful; ABC’s stature as a network was transformed forever, and Fred Silverman was made out to be something of a genius.
I always used to drink beer. And that was against the rules at work. But I’d drink beer. When it was time to shoot the final episode, I decided to prepare by drinking a ton. My final scene called for me to be drunk, and I had decided to play it while I was shit-faced. It was a great scene, and I didn’t miss a beat, but evidently some of the studio executives had come down to watch the final shoot and they were not happy to find me inebriated.
Once we wrapped, director David Greene and I were sitting on our butts in a studio alley drinking a celebratory beer, and David told me that the producers weren’t happy with me, adding that I was good enough that I hadn’t needed to get drunk to play Tom as a convincing drunk. I told David I knew that, but I added that I wanted my last work on the show to be special, and so I’d simply decided to turn to the beer.
Not long after, the suits at Universal announced that henceforth no actor in a drinking scene would be allowed to consume alcohol. It seemed silly to me, but that’s what they decreed—likely because of me. By the time the final episode aired—on an evening when the United States Congress was meeting in closed session—interest in the miniseries was so huge that the legislators were interrupted by the announcement, “Tom Jordache was killed by Falconetti on ABC tonight.” Evidently, no one informed the elected officials that both Tom Jordache and Nick Nolte had been drunk when the crime was committed.
IF MY PE
RFORMANCE IN WILLIAM INGE’S THE LAST PAD HAD gotten me back to Hollywood, it was my role as Tom in Rich Man, Poor Man that fundamentally changed my life as an actor. I’d been offered a very fine part and I’d created a character who was rebellious, hyperactive, irresponsible, yet filled with overpowering emotion. After thirteen years as a professional actor, I was pronounced an “overnight sensation”; my stock rose sky-high, and I was in immediate demand for an array of intriguing new roles. But I was wary of Hollywood and losing myself in the falsehood of fame, so I retreated to my childhood sanctuary of nature and got the hell outta Dodge.
I’d found a fantastic old house about twenty miles west of Los Angeles in an empty expanse of grassy brown hills and scattered California oaks near the spot where Triunfo Canyon Road met Kanan Road in what is now called Agoura Hills. Almost as soon as I saw the place—a big Normandy-style house with gun sights built into the basement by an eccentric German who’d been convinced that the Nazis would win World War II—I knew I wanted to live there, and that it would ground me. I quickly purchased it with money I’d earned from Rich Man, Poor Man.
My manager, Mimi Weber, was not pleased. She was certain that because of my television star turn she now had quite a hot property on her hands, and she informed me that I could not move away from L.A. I explained that twenty miles west was hardly “away,” and that it was a straight shot east on the 101 freeway to the Burbank studios. I could get to work in thirty minutes—back in an era before the 101 became a virtual parking lot a couple of times each day—and that was less time than it often took to drive to the studios from Laurel Canyon or many other in-town locations.