by Nick Nolte
In the end, there wasn’t a damn thing Mimi could do about where I chose to call home, and it was as easy for me to get to the studios—especially when I raced to town on my motorcycle via the Mulholland Highway, a killer stretch of dirt road in those days that I would ride as fast as I could. One night I did flip my 500 cc Triumph and ended up in some guy’s yard, the bike still running and in gear and grinding up his grass. I popped both heels off the cowboy boots I was wearing, but otherwise I was fine. I got the bike up and mounted it again and made it back to the ranch hardly the worse for wear.
Steve McQueen, a far better motorcyclist than me, was part owner of a place nearby, one he used primarily as a destination—just to see how quickly he could reach it via Decker Canyon Road, up and over the mountains on his bike from his main house on Broad Beach in Malibu. He could make the trip in something like eight minutes, he said, which meant he was taking hairpin turns at an ungodly crazy speed, and it was Steve and his biker mystique that ultimately turned those canyon roads into the motorcycle mecca they remain.
There was something special about living in the country in those days and I loved its back-of-beyond feel. I shared the big house with a regular gaggle of hippie friends who followed me out from Excelsior and would crash for a few nights or a few weeks. This little commune included a gal named Karen Eklund, who became an on-again-off-again girlfriend for several years, as well as my longtime pal Rocky. Throughout my life, I have always thrived in an open home where friends could come and go. A little chaos around keeps me sane.
Friends ground me, too, and Rocky was one such special soul, an innocent who wrote in hieroglyphics and wandered the hills with my dogs. He wasn’t allowed to have a driver’s license, but he could legally drive on my property, of course, and we had lots of fun on the off-road motorbikes I bought for everyone to play with. We also enjoyed sneaking out under the cover of darkness to shoot out the lights that the road department was installing alongside Kanan Road as it was widened into four lanes. The development of the road and those goddamn bright lights meant we were losing our little Eden, and it was wicked fun to destroy them as soon as they went up, at least until the day when a SWAT team appeared in the area, determined to find out which vengeful mountain folk were destroying the state of California’s property. A few years later, I found out that Rocky had died in a fire in a little squatter’s cabin he had built down the road. It breaks my heart to this day. I still feel the sting of responsibility for being the pied piper who drew those kids out from Excelsior to L.A. I know we each choose our own path, but Rocky and I had shared one and I wish I could have protected him.
It wasn’t unusual to have friends and colleagues from the film industry drive out to visit. I’m sure many of them thought I was a bit deranged to want to live so far from the action—yet others were quite impressed by the Agoura countryside and its lack of any pretense. Peter Strauss, my Rich Man, Poor Man costar, was so taken by the area, in fact, that he asked me to help him find a place of his own.
I knew of a twenty-acre ranch for sale, a place where a bunch of hippies were crashing, just across the road from the store and tavern McQueen had helped Tom Runyon open in 1970 out of the ruins of Hank’s Country Store and the old Cornell post office building. Runyon called his new place the Old Place, and it was special. Peter settled in nearby, and I was just up the road, and we all used to gather at the Old Place to play horseshoes and eat steaks and drink late into the night.
THE SUCCESS OF RICH MAN OPENED MANY A DOOR. OFFERS poured in. Unfortunately, they generally were crap. Studios attempted to lure me with a succession of three-picture deals, but when I would ask about the scripts on which those movies would be created, the studio suits would say, “Don’t worry about it, Nick.”
I was smart enough to know that multipicture contracts were career killers, so I just bided my time at the ranch, despite the fact that I was developing the kind of reputation you don’t really want to have. When producer David Susskind asked me to star in Fort Apache, I read the 340-page script in which nothing really happened, and then I told him no. Susskind wasn’t accustomed to being turned down, and he had offered me a million dollars—real money in those days—a rejection that led him to publicly muse, “Who does this Nick Nolte think he is, turning down a million dollars?”
There was an offer on the film Superman, but I shut it down quickly. I said, “If I can play him as he truly is, a schizophrenic, I will do it.” They were floored. I said his change of personalities makes him a schizophrenic hero. Luckily, that scared them off, as I didn’t want to walk around in a muscle suit anyway.
The producers of a film called The Deep pitched me with a handsome offer. But my answer was again no, something that drove my manager, Mimi Weber, wild with frustration. I’d already made her crazy by turning down an opportunity to star in the sequel to Rich Man, Poor Man, but for God’s sake, who was I going to play? They had killed off my character Tom Jordache, and no, thank you, I was not going to come back from the fucking dead!
What I wanted was to find a piece with real artistic merit, and there were three upcoming films I had my eye on. The first was Slap Shot, and I was a Paul Newman fan, but I couldn’t manage to go from recreational ice skater to professional hockey player. Director George Roy Hill was kind enough to give me a couple months to learn, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it and I lost the part. William Friedkin was set to direct Sorcerer, and he took the time to meet me. But as soon as I sat down, he told me he’d already cast Roy Scheider in the role that would have been mine. Strike two.
Francis Ford Coppola’s talent and track record attracted every up-and-coming actor in Hollywood when his film Apocalypse Now was announced. I felt I was a perfect fit, but the audition was a damn doozy. It was held in a warehouse and the massive group of incredible talent was required to improvise in front of our competition. I watched Sam Elliott, Tommy Lee Jones, Martin Sheen, and many others, and as I sat the pressure grew overwhelming. At a certain point, I approached Francis and requested some beer to cut the tension.
Sure enough, trash barrels full of ice and cold cans of beer appeared in no time. It helped all of us loosen up and begin to free ourselves. Hours later and quite loose, I drove home without a clue as to how I’d done. Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, with whom I’d acted in Rich Man, Poor Man, telephoned the night before it was announced to tell me it looked like I’d gotten the part, but she turned out to be very wrong. I must admit I was disappointed when Harvey Keitel (later replaced by Martin Sheen) got the role instead of me. Decades later, Francis sent me a video recording of my audition, and it was still a strong audition.
The sequel to Rich Man, Poor Man was about to be broadcast—without me—and I was beginning to feel the pressure to find a new film when I decided to have my agent circle back to The Deep, which was based on a popular Peter Benchley novel. I was concerned the story was beyond redemption, and I felt a bit of a sellout, but Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands was paradise, the surrounding sea was some of the clearest and most exquisite water in the world, and my scuba instructor was an expat from Texas who had me diving confidently in no time.
By the time the full cast and crew arrived, the script was getting an on-set rewrite, and although I was hopeful, my attitude continued to stink on the afternoon when we did a full read-through. I was sitting at the bar when in walked Tom Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who’d been hired to salvage the thing, and I threw my copy of the script, yelling, “There isn’t a character in this whole goddamned thing!” There was an awkward silence.
Robert Shaw, the British character actor whom American audiences had recently gotten to know in Jaws, came over and put his arm around me, saying, “It’s a treasure picture, Nick,” then he added, “Come on back to my place. We’ll have a jar and read my novels and it’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know at the time that, in addition to his success as an actor, Shaw was an award-winning novelist and playwright, nor did I understand that a “jar�
� was a full pint of straight vodka poured into a glass tumbler. He was an epic drinker—who would be dead in a couple of years—and after he had shared a page or two from one of his novels, we simply sat and talked and drank several jars. Like me, Shaw had been older when he had finally broken through in the business, and he had watched his contemporaries, like Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, and Richard Harris, become international stars while he languished for thirty-nine episodes in a forgettable British TV series called The Buccaneers.
Yet Shaw had learned how to enjoy himself; he was determined to have a hell of a good time in the islands, and he suggested that I simply relax and join him. I was wise enough to take his advice, and in celebration of my change of attitude, the next day I mooned Peter Benchley, who was the credited screenwriter despite Tom Mankiewicz’s recent work. On my left butt cheek, I’d had my makeup man write “The” in big, grease-penciled letters, and on the right, he’d written “Deep.” Benchley seemed to think it was very funny, and I was determined to fully enjoy the rest of the shoot.
Although I now had the film in the right perspective, which made the shoot easier for everybody, we had other serious problems. The water was the clearest seawater in all the world, but film technology wasn’t up to par yet. Because of the depth, the scenes looked dark and opaque once on film. This was very much a treasure picture, as Shaw said, a diving picture, and if it was going to be successful, our underwater scenes had to be exquisite and groundbreaking. Our British cinematographer, Chris Challis, had an idea. He flew to London to pursue the fix he had in mind, then was back on Peter Island in about a week with a bank of waterproofed ten-thousand-watt lights.
Chris’s plan was simply to light up the whole fucking ocean, plain and simple. On the first day that underwater filming resumed, he tossed a couple of lights into the water and flipped a switch. They worked! It was time for us to start shooting, but not one of us was willing to get into the water. Our chances of getting electrocuted appeared awfully high. Exasperated with our gutlessness, Chris himself finally dove in. He swam over to the lights, adjusted them, dragged them with him as he moved about, and fully convinced us it was safe to return to the water. We went back to work and the test shots looked incredible the following day—no one had ever shot underwater footage as beautifully before.
But if Chris saved The Deep, Jacqueline Bisset made it a success. Her see-through white T-shirt transformed derivative schlock into a blockbuster. If people remember the movie at all, we can thank Jackie. Her T-shirt clings to her like a second skin as she climbs out of the water. It was the talk of the movie trade for a long while, and Peter Guber commented for years afterward that that T-shirt had made him a rich man.
Moviemaking is a bonding experience. People from the most disparate backgrounds imaginable come together, build an alternate universe, and inhabit it until the shoot is complete—after a month, often after six months or even more. You end up getting close to people you otherwise wouldn’t meet in a million years. Throw in an exotic, faraway location and the real world feels like a past life. Working on The Deep, we spent six months in a virtual paradise; we were practically naked every day, we had tons of downtime, we were unsupervised adults—and people were bound to mingle.
Sparks began to fly between Jackie and me early on, and then a very groovy romance bloomed. She was more than just gorgeous and classy—she was a great sport. But Jackie called things off before we finished shooting, saying I slept with every girl on the island. It was an accusation that didn’t seem fair, particularly because she flew off as often as she could manage to spend time with her French boyfriend. But we ended our tryst amicably and remained friends despite the many challenges of the remote location, the underwater work, our skin being burned and coarsened by overexposure to the sun, fire-coral rash, and our GI tracts being bombarded by parasites.
Peter Yates was an English gentleman, someone who never appeared bothered by my pranks. He supported me patiently throughout the shoot, and I appreciated it. Renowned for his direction of the series The Saint on British TV, he went on to direct many films and he was also the catalyst for a satisfying turn in my career when he invited his friend Karel Reisz to visit the set while we were shooting The Deep.
Karel was with us on a day when something went wrong and we had to endure one of our seemingly constant technical delays. I got into a foam-gun war with some guys in the prop department. The guns were designed to simulate the foam of an agitated ocean, and we turned them on each other, creating a crazy mess. As I finally walked away from the monkey business, Karel approached me, introduced himself, then asked if I’d read Dog Soldiers. I said yes, adding that Robert Stone was an author I very much admired. Hearing that, Karel explained that he was going to direct the film based on the Vietnam novel, then added, “I’d like you to play Ray Hicks for me.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I wanted to seal the deal before he thought better of the idea. I put out my hand as I said, “Well, I tell you, Karel, I would really like to do it. I don’t want to continue to do these big, gigantic films like this. I want to do meatier work.”
We agreed to meet in Los Angeles after The Deep wrapped, and I was so filled with adrenaline that I could have sprinted a lap around the entire island. But Karel wanted to say something else before we parted. “You know, Nick, I’m going to ask you to find a real quiet place in yourself when we work together,” he said calmly and very directly, “because you’re wasting energy, and we’re going to need to put that on-screen. If you engage with the crew too much, you give your energy to them and it doesn’t get on the screen. That’s just something to think about.”
I understood, and we said goodbye. Our final weeks in the Caribbean were uneventful. I did my job and I couldn’t wait to go home, because the role of a lifetime awaited.
FOLLOWING ITS RELEASE, THE DEEP BECAME A SMASH HIT despite being panned by the critics. As I had feared, the critics clobbered me, saying I was just a “blonde cutout,” “another pretty boy,” and an actor with “no depth”—pun intended. Sometimes life makes choices for you that turn out better than you’d make for yourself. The Deep was one of those times for me. I’d had an amazing experience in the Caribbean, and I’d successfully made the leap from television to film despite the shitty reviews—and my next film was going to be one of which I was very proud. Not bad for six months’ work. Providence had smiled on me again.
CHAPTER 8
A Quiet Place
KAREL REISZ STAYED AT THE CHATEAU MARMONT IN Hollywood when he flew in from London to meet with the producers of Dog Soldiers. He telephoned me, wanting to get together to talk at length about Ray Hicks, the character I was going to play, so I cruised into town on one of my big bikes. Mulholland Highway was still a dusty road, and helmet laws were still a ways off. When I reached the hotel, the wind and dirt had turned my hair into a madman’s, and Karel said he loved the look. I would still have to search for both the physical and interior essences of Ray Hicks, and right from that moment I knew he could help me find them.
Karel was a Czech who had narrowly escaped the Nazis before his parents perished in Auschwitz. Although he studied natural sciences at Cambridge, Karel became fascinated by film, making his first documentaries in the late 1950s, then moving to feature films when he produced This Sporting Life, starring Richard Harris. Harris was electric in it, and the movie knocked my socks off. I was thrilled that Karel wanted me to star in his new picture.
When I’d met him in the islands, I’d liked him right from the start and somehow knew I could trust him implicitly. As we talked at the hotel in the Hollywood Hills, he pinpointed the challenges that playing Ray—a merchant marine who agrees to help a disillusioned war correspondent smuggle heroin from Saigon to San Francisco during the Vietnam War—would present to me, then suggested techniques that would help me immensely in the end. “Hicks will require stillness,” he calmly stressed that day. He was very aware of my tendency to make twitchy gesticulations, and he coached
me on how to corral it. “Just sit there and talk. Don’t use your hands,” he insisted—and he was right.
He was relentless, but I was uncharacteristically receptive to the drilling because it came from the right place. This was no power trip. He taught me to focus my attention on a visual spot, then transfer it to a single thought. It sounds simple, and it might be for some, but it wasn’t for me. I worked at it, and eventually I could pull it off as the cameras rolled.
In turn, I introduced Karel to Topanga Canyon, a real Dog Soldiers kind of locale. Mountains separate the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles County’s beach communities. Tucked into the middle, Topanga Canyon and its residents were considered the mountains’ soulful epicenter by many people who knew and loved the place. Others referred to it as a hippie haven or called it the “commune corridor.” Personally, I’ve always been attracted to the ramshackle ingenuity of these “mountain people.”
In the novel, Robert Stone describes “canyon consciousness” that includes some pretty shaky morality, and he wasn’t wrong. Stone’s character Ray Hicks is neither a druggie nor a believer in the counterculture. His rebellion comes from a simple fear of being forced into a box that doesn’t fit him—more than a bit like me, I’d wager, and I told Karel so as I drove him around in my 1948 International Harvester truck.
That wonderful old rig’s gearbox wasn’t synchromeshed, so we settled into a jolty and jostling ride. We navigated dozens of roads and trails that wound into and around Topanga. Karel was carsick much of the time, but that didn’t stop him from declaring that Hicks would have to drive a similar truck in the movie. We ended up using a beat-up old Land Rover, which suited me fine, and the whole experience with Karel and the film filled me with a sense of purpose and direction.