Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  None of us liked it much that the film was ultimately titled Who’ll Stop the Rain—a reference to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song that was one of many Creedence hits that filled the soundtrack. When the movie premiered in 1978 I got the first good film review of my career. “An actor I never expected to praise gives a smashing performance,” David Denby wrote in the New York Times.

  Who’ll Stop the Rain was only a modest success at the box office, but it was an important film for me because I was able to display some depth as an actor and a complexity far beyond what The Deep had revealed. They didn’t sell the picture well—it should have been a real hit given how the war continued to eat at our collective consciousness, the excellence of Stone’s story, and the splendid work that Karel and actors Michael Moriarty and Tuesday Weld brought to the film. I wasn’t morose about how the film fared, however, because I was proud of how I had inhabited Ray Hicks. And for that, I thank Karel Reisz.

  CHAPTER 9

  Something to See

  EVEN MORE THAN FOOTBALL OR ACTING, WOMEN HAVE been the major passion of my life. I’m fascinated by them. Totally fascinated. And fascinated by myself in relation to them. Of course, men and women play a lot of games—fighting, testing. Some is for the sake of aliveness, but sometimes it heads toward destruction. But I love the fascination, love that relationship psyche. Beginning with the time when Kathy Carney captured my heart, then broke it in high school, I’ve been fascinated, too, by the sometimes strange and curious ways in which I relate to the women I love. I’ve often shown my women parts of me I’m not proud of. Yet I’ve felt wonderfully alive when I’ve been in love, even when that aliveness has taken a turn toward something destructive.

  My sporadic girlfriend of several years Karen Eklund and I began to encounter real trouble during the time we lived at the ranch and my career as a film actor was taking off. I had met Karen in Minnesota when I was mesmerized by her walking across the commons in a flowing white dress. She was part of the Excelsior group of friends who had followed me and occasionally lived out at the ranch. She had a history of being sort of a grifter and possessed a kind of wildness that could sometimes make me look like a choirboy.

  Though I was initially intrigued by her wildness, we weren’t really a couple and I finally told Karen to move out. I wanted her to leave—end of story. She wasn’t at all happy but later decided that $4.5 million in palimony would make her feel a lot better. She claimed she had been instrumental in my success and hired lawyers to file suit on her behalf. I believe it may have been only the second or third palimony suit in California, after Lee Marvin’s.

  It would be several years before the suit would finally be settled, but I soon became intrigued by a woman again. One evening I was in town with my friend Dino Conti at Carlos’n Charlie’s, a restaurant and discotheque on Sunset Boulevard. As we surveyed the action, Dino asked if any of the women we were observing interested me. I pointed to a young blonde who was bouncing all over the place and he nodded, then went over to her and whispered something in her ear. I never heard precisely what he said, but the young woman soon walked over to me and introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Sharyn,” she said.

  “You have nice, sleek legs,” I told her.

  “Thanks. Now give me a smile, sucker,” she responded, and before long the woman whom I soon began to call Legs and I decided to drive to the ranch in her car. She had some coke with her, which certainly kept the night rolling, and from that evening on we were inseparable.

  Legs was a city girl, however, and life out in the country cramped her style. I had to admit that she just didn’t look right standing in her little short-shorts and platform heels in a circle of the long-haired hippies who commonly hung out at the ranch smoking joints. So we moved to town, and nine months later, I called her from Phoenix, where I had been scouting movie locations, and proposed to her over the phone.

  “Let’s go for it,” I said encouragingly, and although Legs thought I was kidding, she flew over to join me. To convince her that I was serious, I chartered a plane to Las Vegas, where the pilot and his girlfriend were our witnesses at our $70 wedding at the Chapel of the Bells. I loved Legs and wanted to be married to her; I had the old-fashioned notion that the relationship couldn’t take either of us any further unless we were husband and wife. We struggled sometimes—she was fourteen years younger and very independent—but I found a kindred spirit in Legs. She was just as rowdy as I was.

  One day I was talking to Barbara Hand, my assistant at the time, in her office, and on the desk there was a picture lying upside down. I flipped the picture over and there was Legs at one of my movie premieres, twirling in a skirt with no underwear on. “Oh my God. How many of these did we have to bury?”

  She said, “A lot, otherwise the Enquirer would have published them.”

  I don’t know how much we had to pay during those years, but Legs would not wear underwear. I guess it was erotic in the cocaine days, but Jesus Christ. You don’t need to show it to the whole goddamn United States.

  It was a wild era, and for a couple of years coke ensured that everything was fast, furious, and crazy—I partook in the fun, too, don’t get me wrong. Like the time we left a party late one night and randomly decided it was the perfect moment to drive up to the hills to visit Jack Nicholson. We had no idea it was four in the morning, but the guard at his gate told us it was too damn early for a visit and turned the sprinklers on us. Deciding to let Jack sleep, we drove away, soaked to the skin and laughing like hyenas.

  PRODUCER ARTHUR KRIM HAD RECENTLY FORMED ORION Pictures with Eric Pleskow and Mike Medavoy, with whom he had worked at United Artists. The three men had guided that studio to three consecutive Oscars for best picture of the year—One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, Rocky in 1976, and Annie Hall in 1977. Krim possessed a very sharp-eyed understanding of the cultural importance of storytelling. The goal was to tap into an archetypal myth to get audiences to flock to see a story on a screen.

  On the telephone one day, Arthur asked, “Nick, what do you think about the Beats?” I’m not sure how the words jumped out of me in answer to him, but I said something like, “Well, sometimes cultures exist within a larger culture that beat with a truer vibration.”

  He must have liked how that sounded, because he followed it with a brief pitch. “I have a wonderful piece called Heart Beat, Nick. It’s written by Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady’s wife. I want you to play Neal, but the director just thinks you’re that hunk from The Deep. His name is John Byrum. Go to his house. Convince him you’re Cassady.”

  Byrum lived on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, and he wasn’t exactly elated to see me when I knocked on his door, as Krim had instructed. “John, Arthur suggested we have a chat,” I offered.

  He warily let me in; we sat down and we shared some coke I’d brought along, then I did my thing. John was familiar with Who’ll Stop the Rain but unaware that I’d played Ray Hicks, and that single detail seemed to change the tone of our meeting pretty quickly. We ended up on his roof, where I embellished my many exploits over the years in places like Omaha, Arizona, Mexico, and Southern California. I wove impressive yarns only partially fabricated as the hours passed; a whole night passed, in fact, and at some point, John finally announced, “Jesus, all right, all right! You really are Neal Cassady.” As pleased as I was, I had to tell Byrum as I was leaving, “You know, John, you’re gonna take a lot of flak for this film.”

  Sure enough, when word spread that we were bringing Carolyn’s memoir of her life with her husband and Jack Kerouac to the screen, the surviving Beats began to carp. Allen Ginsberg made it known that he’d shut us down if we used his poetry. Ken Kesey was traveling with the Grateful Dead in Egypt, from which location he labeled us “Hollywood necrophiliacs,” which seemed to me like a ridiculous thing to say except that I very much admired Kesey’s extraordinary novels and thought he was one guy who could get away with saying whatever he damn well wanted.

&n
bsp; Neal was precious to the Beats. They’d been wowed by him, fallen in love with him, and mythologized him after his death. In some ways, Carolyn was a Yoko Ono–like figure, not so much because she stole Neal from his friends, but because instead she forced them to reckon with his humanity. Yes, he was a free-spirited, sexually liberated nonconformist. He also battled serious addiction issues and harbored a deep, secret yearning for the home he never knew. These less glamorous traits didn’t support the myth, one that turned him into a caricature of himself. Carolyn loved Neal in his entirety, and I deeply respected that, hoping that we could explore not only the mythological side of Neal but also the personal side that Carolyn knew like no one else.

  I personally identified with Cassady far more than the film’s writers did. He was drawn to big experiences, most of which were not condoned during that era. I knew from my own story that you could jump into a car and leave your hometown in the rearview mirror. Of course you could, yet it’s hard from today’s vantage point to understand what a radical concept that was in 1950s America. Cassady lived according to his own theory that anyone can move beyond what is socially acceptable and still live an honorable life. It can be a tricky proposition, one that’s fraught with unknowable consequences.

  Most people pull up short of those societal boundaries. I have a thousand times, only to remember that I couldn’t turn around, that forward was the only direction open to me. Neal was apolitical, as I am, and his rebellion was innate; it was simply his soul’s nature. And Cassady was a trickster, unabashedly present, and therefore capable of goofing with reality as it unfolded. Naturally, I was a guy who could relate.

  From the outset of the project, the producers; John Byrum; Sissy Spacek, who played Carolyn; and all of us in the cast were in agreement about taking major liberties with the particulars of Neal’s life in order to get at his essence. In our story, Carolyn is in love with Neal, Jack Kerouac is in love with Neal, and Neal doesn’t show much love to either of them. Jack swings from left to right, politically; Neal runs off with the hippies, goes out on the road, then comes back to Carolyn.

  How true was it? Only partially. Some of our fictionalizations were forced on us by Allen Ginsberg’s disdain for our project, and Carolyn’s own vacillations were responsible for others. Ray Sharkey played a character named Ira, who was a fictionalized Ginsberg. We reimagined an event, for example, in which Carolyn famously caught her husband in bed with his ex-wife LuAnne and Ginsberg. In the film, it’s Carolyn who’s in bed with the two fellows, and we had to determine the sexual logistics. Would Carolyn lie in the middle, or—acknowledging Cassady’s real-life bisexual relationship with Ginsberg—would he be in the middle, flanked by his different-gendered lovers?

  When it was time to shoot the scene, I remember Sharkey asking me if I was going to play the scene nude. With my tongue very firmly in my cheek, I told him no, I wasn’t, because the camera would be constantly on me and the sight of my dick would be too distracting for the audience. But I also said I recommended it. “You should try it, Ray,” I continued. “I’ve done it. It’s the most liberating thing in the world.”

  Ray thought about it, then decided to go for it, and I warned Byrum to prepare himself because Sharkey was determined to play the scene au naturel. The best part of my prank was seeing Ray walk out of a trailer after he’d watched the dailies of that bedroom scene. He was white as a bedsheet, mortified, just beside himself. I think he’d gotten nervous as the whole crew watched him work in the nude—and didn’t appreciate how his “liberation” looked on camera.

  Heart Beat was an old-fashioned-looking film when the editing was completed. Byrum used a lot of pinhole dissolves—a very dated technique where the scene ends by the frame closing in progressively to black before disappearing—and although our scenes played well, the conflicts between the characters never became real enough. I approached Cassady’s ghost with my full energy, and, by and large, came up empty-handed. A few critics had glowing things to say about the interplay between me, Sissy, and John Heard as Jack—but our characters didn’t do anything except move from place to place, and audiences didn’t care about them. The film flopped, and I was beginning to learn by then that you can’t get too attached to the success or failure of your films, you just have to move on, chuckling at the good times.

  WHILE WE WERE SHOOTING WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN IN THE state of Durango in Mexico, we had lots of time to create a kind of hippie heaven like the one Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had built in La Honda, California. Like the Pranksters, we hung lights in the trees surrounding our compound and filled them with speakers from which we could play jammin’ music all day and all night. It was wild—and everyone experimented with free love, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, pills, pot, alcohol, beer, speed, and anything else that came our way.

  One day in the middle of this, I was sitting under a tree reading former Dallas Cowboys receiver Pete Gent’s novel North Dallas Forty. My friend and fellow actor Anthony Zerbe walked over and pointed to the book and said, “That’s your next film.” Anthony was a mentor and guide to me and many young actors in those days, and I was intrigued by his suggestion.

  “Could I do this?” I asked incredulously.

  “Absolutely!” he answered, and I believe this epiphany changed the course of my career. My acting life had allowed me to explore great writing, and now perhaps I had risen to a level where I could pursue my own material. From the moment he made that pronouncement, I knew I had to turn that terrific football novel into a movie.

  When I returned to Los Angeles, I marched into International Creative Management (ICM) to have a sit-down with my agent Lou Pitt and manager Mimi Weber. I dropped a tattered copy of North Dallas Forty on Lou’s desk and announced, “This is my next project.”

  Lou shook his head. “No, no, no. You can’t do that. You don’t own the book rights.” Mimi joined in and the two of them worked me over. “Nick, you don’t know how the business runs. Offers are pouring in,” Mimi assured me. Lou added, “Nobody is going to be interested in North Dallas Forty. Let’s take a look and decide your next move together.” They were incredibly discouraging, and when I’d heard enough, I said, “All right, I’ll see you later,” and walked out the door.

  I was defeated and angry, and I dropped out of sight with the phone off the hook for a while. The Deep had made $100 million, and I was a very hot property at the moment. Anything was possible for me, but my agent and manager were sure they knew better.

  Yet instead of simply acquiescing to Mimi and Lou, I pitched the idea to Hal Hauser, a friend I’d met back in my Phoenix theater days. Hal was older than me and a successful advertising executive who had cofounded Kama Sutra, making a fortune on sensual oils and creams. He was the kind of guy who could make money easier than some people can pee, but his ambition to break into the movie business had been stymied up to that point.

  Hal had bought a place not far from my ranch when Kama Sutra took off, so we got together and hatched a plan to find enough money to make the picture ourselves. We would write the screenplay together, too, we decided, and see if we could garner enough attention off of it to get one of the studios to bite.

  I had agreed to help Hal dig a bass pond on his ranch for fishing, and we would begin each morning shoveling dirt out of the ground as we chatted and dug ever deeper into the story we wanted to tell. We’d hash things out for a few hours, then Hal would go inside and write while I continued to shovel. He finished the script in nine months, but bass had been swimming in his pond for four.

  Early on, we agreed that it was a no-brainer to follow the story arc of the book. Its thrust and themes had the makings of a good film. Our job was to narrow the scope. Gent’s narrative included a broader commentary on America at large, and a racially motivated murder was part of the plot, too. But Hal and I decided we’d stick to football, concentrating on the exploitative dynamic between ownership and coaches on one side and players on the other. Hal and I were both anti-authoritarians to our c
ores, so the film was destined from the outset to strongly take the players’ very pissed-off point of view.

  I kept a copy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in my back pocket like a kind of bible. Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey’s second and equally brilliant novel, also influenced Hal and me—both were inspired, rebellious books, and we were writing a screenplay that would make it clear that NFL football was a racist, corrupt, and dictatorial affair.

  Word got out, as it always does. The phone rang and I decided it was time to pick it up. Michael Eisner was on the other end. Eisner was a producer whom I’d first met on Rich Man, Poor Man when he was working for ABC, but I was so out of touch that I didn’t know he had been promoted to president of Paramount Pictures. He and I would work together a fair amount in the years to come.

  “What’s this I hear about North Dallas Forty?” he inquired. I told him I’d drive our script right over, and once in Eisner’s office I launched into a wholehearted sales job that went on for a good while. When I ran out of breath, Michael simply said, “I’m interested. Leave the script on my desk. I’ll call tomorrow with a yes or no.”

  True to his word, he called the next day, telling me the script was a good one. He didn’t seem at all concerned about acquiring the film rights—but he added that if we moved forward together, we would have to agree to a Paramount-appointed producer and director. I asked if I could choose among several and he assured me that I could. “Yes, we’ll get you some quality film people to choose from, Nick.”

  That was it. We were green-lit, and the next order of business was for me to make a couple long-brewing telephone calls. I reached Lou Pitt and said, “Lou, I’m sorry, but you’re fired. I just got a call from Mike Eisner. North Dallas Forty is a go picture at Paramount, and you’re fired.” And then I called Mimi and said, “Mimi, I’ve just got to let you go, because you said it was impossible to do, but I’ve got a go picture at Paramount from Michael Eisner. I can’t continue our relationship.”