by Nick Nolte
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, so I turned down the film. Five years and a ton of vital experience later, I knew better, and I was surprised that the story still hadn’t become a film. I was able to reach Katharine by telephone in New York, and she was quite cordial. “Listen,” I told her, “if you don’t like me anymore, that’s all right, but if you do like me and you want to make that movie, you choose the director and I will accept whomever you choose. You know the type of director this material needs and I don’t, so I will accept who you want.”
Rather miraculously, Katharine was still very keen to make the movie. She chose Anthony Harvey to direct. He had directed her in The Lion in Winter back in 1968 and was a close friend of hers, if not a superb director, yet I knew he could handle this particular material well, so I quickly agreed to do it.
When I met Katharine for the second time at her apartment in New York, she graciously invited me in and asked me to pick the chair in which I wanted to sit. I chose a big, overstuffed armchair, and she lit up. “Ah, yes, just as I thought you would,” she exclaimed. “You picked Spence’s chair!” She was referring to her long-deceased love, Spencer Tracy. I was utterly charmed. During the time I spent with her that afternoon, she shared her strong belief that a person can’t have a successful relationship and be an actor.
“What about between roles and films?” I asked.
“There is no in between,” she sharply announced. “There should be a law against you having a relationship, because you love your work, and it’s not going to be fair to anybody. You know, Nick, these relationships that we get involved in, people have stereotyped thinking that they are husband and wife and they are going to be together ’til death do you part, and that is not the way life works. Spiritual love is what love is. Relationship love is not love because it breaks down and decays. Acting is such a self-involved thing that there is really no place for a partner.” My divorce from Legs wasn’t yet final but soon would be, and that day I realized Katharine was not only a superb actor but also someone who was quite wise. She was amazing.
We weren’t under way with the new film for long before its title began to be problematic. “Ultimate Solution” was simply too reminiscent of a Nazi phrase for the extermination of Jews, and the much simpler Grace Quigley became the better choice, especially because Israeli producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan and their company Cannon Films had acquired the rights from Ashby and Zwieback during the long hiatus since I first read the rain-wrinkled script.
The story is a black comedy about an elderly widow who lives alone in a dreary New York City apartment, and who has twice tried and failed to commit suicide. When she sees my character, a Vietnam vet named Seymour Flint, conducting a professional hit one day, she decides to blackmail me into killing her, but not before I off several of her friends who are old, alone, and tired of living, too. It was a suicide-by-hit-man piece, and it could have been dreadful without someone of Katharine’s stature and talent holding it together. Grace Quigley was her final leading role for the big screen, and more than three decades later, I’m still hugely grateful for the opportunity to work with her.
She was unique, of course, and always full of surprises. When one of our producers made the mistake one day of asking her how she planned to play a particular scene, she retorted, “What do you mean how am I going to play this? Do you know how you’re going to do something before you do it? That’s a stupid question!” She did not suffer fools and always spoke her mind—as a result she was fired from eight different films, and once bought her way out of a Broadway play she determined was destined to be a dismal flop.
I received her wrath more than a time or two—like the morning when I showed up hungover and inexcusably late for a scheduled shoot after a long night of carousing with friendly FBI agents who had been showing me the underbelly of the city. She was as angry as she could be and she dressed me down in her raspy staccato. “You are irresponsible, Nick. You don’t care one bit, do you?”
When I told her I was sorry, she snapped back, “I don’t want to hear da, da, da, Nick. I won’t have it!” Later, when she had calmed down a bit and we had finished the morning’s scene, she approached me more softly. “Now listen, Nick,” she said, “you know Spencer drank, and we had a dickens of a time with Spencer. But he never drank when he was working. You’ve got to have plenty of sleep. I can get you some Thorazine.”
She was kidding, of course—Thorazine would knock me or anyone out for a week! It was for psychotic people who break down so badly they must be strapped down. So when she walked away, I thought, Wow. Okay, tomorrow no more booze. Point taken, Ms. Hepburn.
KATHARINE HEPBURN WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON WHO WAS worried about me at that time. During my marriage to Legs, and for many years before, for that matter, I had been working hard and playing hard, and often combining the two in ways that led to some pretty creative kinds of chaos. My career as an actor had skyrocketed to heights I had never imagined, but instead of finding peace and a degree of meaning in my success, I continued to find life offstage and away from the cameras challenging.
I had grown up among drinkers. Like the rest of their generation, my parents and their friends would party throughout entire weekends, and us kids would watch. Cruising in the car, my mother would put the glove box down and put the box lock on. The ice was there, the booze, the mixing glasses, and she would whip up drinks for her and Dad. It was a 1948 DeSoto, and I’d be in the backseat underneath the blankets, scared to death. That was the way you were supposed to travel. That was not against the law. If an officer stopped you and he saw a family having a few drinks, he wasn’t going to say a word. There was no reason to separate the activity of driving and drinking. It wasn’t until later when that changed.
Learning the craft of acting and working diligently to perfect it for several decades had given me purpose and focus and a sense of self-worth, but with increasing levels of success had come ever bigger internal trials that I wasn’t good at solving. I was still anxious, shy, and highly sensitive. So, I drank—and often drank prodigiously—and self-medicated with drugs in ways that, by the time of the Grace Quigley shoot, caused a number of people close to me to presume I was in trouble.
People magazine published a 1984 article in which my friend and fellow actor JoBeth Williams averred, “The man does know how to drink. He’s a real good-time guy, but underneath it all there’s a danger—that sense that he might explode.” My longtime buddy Gary Busey—who often flirted with the abyss himself, of course—saw it a bit differently but essentially agreed with her. “I wouldn’t say Nick has a drinking problem. I see it more as a drinking opportunity. It gives him an opportunity—through drinking—to see the best in life.”
I drank in those days in order to deal with anything I found difficult—relationships, failed projects—using alcohol as a pain medication, suffering medication, love medication, even as a tonic against loneliness and the ironic kind of isolation that celebrity often brings. I used it for everything and, in my version of my life story at the time, saw it as a friend.
I’m not sure when I first tried cocaine. My generation had embraced psychedelics, and if marijuana seemed to promise the euphoric enjoyment of life, then peyote, mushrooms, and LSD clearly offered enlightenment. I respected plant medicine and the connection it brought to the natural world. But coke was simply an enabler, allowing me to push the limits of my adventures and antics to extreme levels.
I moved in a very fast world in L.A., and I worked in an industry that emphasized things that simply weren’t that important—so the coke fit right in. It mimicked a certain kind of creative fire that ultimately burns you out, and, for me, it narrowed my awareness rather than expanding it.
The reason I started taking drugs early in the sixties was to expand my consciousness. As long as they provided me that feeling, they worked well. But through the years it became a self-centered activity, and I started using harder drugs to close off the pain and suffering of life—i
n other words, to escape life. Yet for a long time I was able to convince myself that all coke did was make me a better creator, a better actor, as well as intensify my experiences and crank me up in ways I’d enjoyed since the grade school days when my mom would give me a speed “vitamin” to get me to go to school. Much later I learned when the addict finally gives up drugs/goes clean, the whole world opens up emotionally, because he has closed himself down so much.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE GRACE QUIGLEY SHOOT BEGAN, I again called Rebecca Linger, the young woman in West Virginia who had hidden me in her bedroom at her parents’ house a few months before. I had been thinking about her and found myself missing her calm presence. “You’re not here,” I told her. “I wish you were here.”
Rebecca said she appreciated my calling during the summer, as I had promised, but I hadn’t called again, and she couldn’t presume that I would, so she had enrolled for a new semester of college, which would begin before long, and in the meantime she was continuing to work in her father’s medical office.
“Well, you can always go to school,” I advised. “That’s no big deal. But I’m up here, and New York is very nice in the fall. Please come up and stay with me. I’d love that.”
When they had met me a few months before, Rebecca’s parents had encountered a strung-out Hollywood actor who was married and who looked like a wild man—this I understood. And when they learned that I had invited their twenty-three-year-old daughter to join me in a romantic liaison in New York City, they might have gone through the roof, telling their beloved Rebecca that she would be crazy to say yes to my offer. They might have forbidden her, futilely, to go—but they trusted her and did neither. Soon Rebecca was with me at the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West, and I was happy.
Yes, I was still drinking hard at the end of virtually every day’s shoot, and yes, there was always plenty of coke around. Dancing on the edge seemed to be a requirement of the creative work I did. Booze and coke helped me stay internally off balance, and the more off balance I was, the more dangerous I could make things for myself, the sharper my concentration as an actor. And Becky was drawn to that. She believed she could help me—at least a bit—and that perhaps it was her role to try.
Becky got pregnant during the Grace Quigley shoot, and when she shared the news with me I was profoundly happy. I had fallen for her and I felt calmer and more secure with her than I had in a very long time. Everything was less chaotic somehow, and I loved the idea of creating a family with her. My divorce was final, and then I had another picture to shoot—this one a kind of Broadcast News set in the classroom. I would have the lead role in Teachers, which was directed by Arthur Hiller, whose films included Love Story, The Hospital, and Silver Streak. Rebecca joined me in Malibu and Charleston during the short break I had between movies, then traveled with me to Columbus, Ohio, where we shot Teachers in a classic old Midwestern school.
In the midst of the shoot, I was able to finagle a few days off—a real luxury that normally wasn’t even thinkable. But Becky was five months pregnant and it was time to make her an honest woman. I rented a Lear jet and we flew to good ol’ Lake Tahoe, where a few friends and family members joined us for a simple ceremony. At twenty-three, it was Rebecca’s first marriage; it was my third at forty-two, and I believed that starting a family with Rebecca was going to give my life something essential it had always been missing.
Becky’s pregnancy was a normal one, and both of us grew increasingly excited as the baby’s birth approached in May 1984. But as she went into labor in Charleston, West Virginia, Rebecca expressed concern that the baby wasn’t moving every few minutes, as it had for many months before. Doctors examined her and pronounced everthing fine, but she remained really worried.
Rebecca’s parents had arrived and her father, a physician, examined her, and he could hear a strong heartbeat and was sure the baby was fine. Her brother, a doctor, too, also was certain there was nothing to worry about, and we did our best to set our minds at ease as Becky’s labor intensified.
I will never forget the moment when Rebecca’s obstetrician found me in the hospital’s expectant-fathers waiting room, walked over, and informed me in a sad but matter-of-fact voice that the baby—a girl—had died sometime before she was delivered. He couldn’t pinpoint the cause, he said, and he told me how sorry he was, and there was virtually nothing else that could be said. Needless to say, we were devastated.
When Rebecca was strong enough to leave the hospital a day or so later, we moved her to her parents’ house, and her father gave her an injection of Demerol. When her parents left us alone, I gave myself a matching injection of Demerol, and for the following two weeks, the two of us curled up together, never leaving the bed in which we lay.
We were shattered. There is simply no other word to describe it. Rebecca had to physically recover, of course, and both of us had to find the strength to carry on emotionally, as a couple and as individuals. I was numb, then terribly depressed, then angry. I prayed a lot, which was something I never otherwise did, and with the help of a synthesizer keyboard, I even composed a sad song—a Western, cowboy-loses-it-all kind of thing.
By the time we got home to our house in Malibu a few weeks later, I had begun to drink heavily again. Virtually nothing—even my life with Rebecca—seemed to matter, and it was hard to imagine the future. I didn’t a give a fuck about anything, and I spent my days chain-smoking, drinking, questioning my existence, and wishing I could find a way to make the searing pain go away. Rebecca did what she could to remind me that we remained the best things that had ever happened to each other, and, of course, she was right. But I was still diving into dark, dark waters.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, A PROJECT CAME MY WAY THAT I couldn’t turn down. Touchstone, the new company at Disney that had been formed to make pictures for adults, was beginning its run with a satire based on the 1932 French comedy Boudu sauvé des eaux. The new film, written and directed by the renowned filmmaker Paul Mazursky, was to be titled Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and the part Paul offered me was the guy who was down and out. Jack Nicholson had said no to the role, and I wanted to do it. I had to begin working again at some point; we would be shooting at home in Southern California, my costars would be my old friend Richard Dreyfuss and the singular Bette Midler, and the opportunity to work with a writer-director like Paul seemed to be an enormous one.
The smart money at the time was on the likelihood that Touchstone would fail. Wall Street was convinced that the Disney brand had been exclusively linked to children for too long, and that a Disney adult division would never work—regardless of the quality of the films it produced. But Michael Eisner had left Paramount to head Disney, in part, to prove the smart money wrong. And he had done something brilliant, it seemed to me, by selecting Paul to direct Touchstone’s first picture.
Paul had grown up in Beverly Hills, and it made perfect sense to adapt the original French story of a rich but dysfunctional couple who save the life of a suicidal homeless man, and set it in a place he both loved and hated, and that he knew so well. It was one of Paul’s best satires, and he was a satirist, no question about it. He had a lot to say about society.
The story begins with my character Jerry Baskin wandering into the backyard of the palatial home of Dave and Barbara Whiteman, jumping into their pool to commit suicide. But Dave, played by Dreyfuss, saves Jerry and becomes intrigued by his past and how he spiraled so “down and out.” Paul encouraged me to draw from my own background as I created the Jerry character, and that was a big help. It was damn funny irony that Jerry’s most recent setback is that he has failed at becoming an actor! I dug in, injecting elements of my own life story into my character—which I did as often as my directors would let me get away with it, and in this case Paul told me to go for it. One such moment came as my character eats a real meal for the first time in months and he explains to Dave that his troubles began long before, back when he was busted for selling fake draft cards and was convicted of a felony. S
ound familiar?
In order to really get into the role, I was sleeping outside in a homeless section of Los Angeles for two nights before getting a bed in a mission shelter. But it didn’t take me more than about seven hours out on the streets to turn into a space cadet—it was intense—and when I tried the shelter, I discovered that I couldn’t have a bed. I didn’t have the seniority.
I didn’t bathe for a couple of weeks. I never want to wash a character off, so to speak, at the end of a day’s shoot. There’s an important feeling I get from a certain amount of dirt. And it’s very difficult for me to take a shower and scrub myself clean one day, then come back the next and put on fake dirt and pretend that I’ve been sleeping outside. You’re not physically in touch with it, not emotionally in touch with it. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up with the sun on your face.
But Bette was disgusted by me. “He’s filthy! I can’t work with him,” she complained to Paul, who then winked at me. “Keep it up!” he said. “She’s already into her part and we haven’t shot anything yet.” Needless to say, Bette and more than a few others on the set were also horrified when they saw me eating real dog food—something my character Jerry is forced to do to survive. I had to search around a good bit to find canned dog food I liked better than the Dinty Moore beef stew I was provided, but I finally found some.
And wouldn’t you know it? Mike, the border collie who played the Whitemans’ beloved pet Matisse in the film, was a vegetarian and had never eaten meat in his life. His trainer was quite upset that I had meat in my portion in a scene in which the dog and I eat from side-by-side bowls, but it turned out not to be a problem because Mike wouldn’t go near my meaty stuff. He only wanted to eat from his bowl—and I ate from mine. No kidding.