Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  When Lorenzo’s Oil was finished I immediately flew to Florida and bought a house down the street from Rebecca’s. I started to hang with Brawley. At first, when we began to spend our days together, he wouldn’t talk about anything. I purchased a big-ass ragtop convertible Cadillac and the two of us drove around Florida together. When he realized one day that we were approaching his psychiatrist’s office, he freaked out, shouting at me that he wouldn’t go in. “No. No. No!” he yelled.

  “Come on, Brawley,” I said, “it’s no big deal. We’ll just go in and if he doesn’t have an answer for us, we won’t stay. It’s no big deal.” I succeeded in getting him inside and Brawley stonewalled, refusing to say a word until I took him down on the carpeted floor of the psychiatrist’s office and began to tickle him mercilessly. He tried to escape, and when he couldn’t he started to hit me and cry and finally let loose a flurry of words. “I don’t want to be here, Dad. I don’t like this place, I don’t like my mom, I don’t like this guy, I don’t have any friends here. I wish I had superpowers.”

  I kept teasing and tickling him. “If you would eat your Wheaties, then you might have superpowers,” I said, and it made him laugh, and all his frustrations flooded out of him with his laughter. The psychiatrist had been paying very close but silent attention, yet now he interrupted. “We’ve been working together for almost a year and this is the most he has ever said. But now that he has expressed himself, I see that Brawley is not ADD,” he said, reassuring us, and said he would call Rebecca and Brawley’s school that afternoon to say that he was just fine.

  FOR THE FOLLOWING SIX YEARS, BRAWLEY CONTINUED TO live in Florida with his mother, staying with me in Malibu or on set whenever he could. But on the day of his twelfth birthday, he called a limousine service and arranged for a pickup. Then he called the airport and purchased a one-way plane ticket with allowance money I had sent him every year, and held an impromptu birthday party for himself with a few friends. As his friends were leaving the house, Brawley explained to his mother that he would be leaving for the airport in half an hour. He was flying to California, where he would live with me, and he would come stay with her, he explained, on holidays and during the summer.

  When Rebecca told him he couldn’t do that, Brawley was ready. He knew the law, he told her, and now that he was twelve it allowed him to decide with which parent he wanted to live. It was time to experience life with his dad, and he was ready, he told her, and the limo arrived and a few hours later I met Brawley at LAX, and from then on, he began a new life on his own terms. He had his power back and he was fine. He was strong.

  CHAPTER 13

  Turning of the Tide

  I TAKE STORYTELLING SERIOUSLY. I’VE TURNED DOWN MANY roles during my career and I’ve sometimes been called an asshole for doing so. Yet I’ve always followed a couple of my own rules. The role I’m being offered must be significant somehow; it must have substance to it and pose a challenge for me. And secondly, the story must be worth telling. If you’re going to be an actor, then you must be into literature, historical events, and life stories.

  When the line producer on the Sidney Lumet film Q&A asked me on set one day in 1989 whether I’d read Pat Conroy’s bestselling novel The Prince of Tides, I confessed that I hadn’t. He pressed a copy of the book into my hands and told me I was in for a wonderful experience. I started poring over it, and Jesus, he was right! It was a hell of a book. I could feel something was up, but I didn’t know what. Right from the beginning of my read, I felt powerfully linked to the character Tom Wingo, who narrates his family’s story.

  I imagined that someone would certainly make a movie from it, but which of the book’s many characters would a film focus on? How many of the book’s extraordinary stories could one film tell? I asked if anyone had drafted a screenplay yet, and the producer said yes, he would get me the script. The script was very good, very focused, and it centered on Tom and the women in his life.

  When I next spoke with my agent Sue Mengers I asked if I could meet whoever was planning to direct the film.

  “Yes,” Sue told me by telephone, “you can. It’s Barbra Streisand.” Sue may have thought the possibility of working with a female director of Barbra’s notoriety would give me pause, but it didn’t.

  “Okay. Is she going to play a role in it, too?” I asked.

  “Yes, she’s going to play the psychiatrist Lowenstein, but she’s directing, too.”

  I said, “I’ve seen her films. They’re good.”

  “And she’s seen you,” Sue said, “and she’d like you to come over to her house tomorrow night, have a cocktail, and introduce yourself.” Once more, it seemed good fortune had come my way. I was in New York, still filming Q&A, and I was eager to hear more about Barbra’s vision for the book.

  When I knocked on her door the next evening, she answered it, and she seemed a bit surprised to see me with jet-black hair and a moustache so big and thick that it hid my mouth. I did not look like her image of Tom Wingo, nor my own for that matter, and I quickly explained that I was playing the role of a New York cop in a Sidney Lumet picture at the moment. She invited me in and asked if I would like some wine.

  “Yes, I’d love some red wine, if you have it,” I said, and she poured me a glass before she showed me around her apartment, which occupied an entire floor of a park-side building in Manhattan. White carpet lay everywhere, and I could tell Barbra was nervous about the possibility that I would spill my wine—so concerned, in fact, that she seemed unable to think about anything else. I made small talk as best I could, getting a kick out of the way in which I was worrying her with the wine in my hand.

  Finally, I told her that I loved the material for the new film but I’d better get going—I had an early call in the morning. I tipped back the wineglass and chugged it—not spilling a drop—and I could see the instant relief on her face. Her carpets were safe.

  ROBERT REDFORD HAD OWNED THE FILM RIGHTS TO THE Prince of Tides for a while, but he’d had a very different vision for the film’s storyline than Barbra. The script that she had created with the help of the novel’s author, Pat Conroy, and screenwriter Becky Johnston really found the heart of the material by letting Tom tell the story of the women in his life. It was going to be an epic role for me and I knew I had to prepare for it as immersively as I could.

  I moved into a house above Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, not too far from Conroy’s hometown of Beaufort, and began to dive into that watery Southern world of kudzu, shrimp, sand, and tradition. I tried to trace Pat Conroy’s writing of the novel, which became sort of a massive detective job. Conroy talks about not only Beaufort, but all of the South. Beaufort is a little bit of an exclusive Southern town, so I asked Conroy himself to help me understand a place that seems to always withhold its secrets. With his help, I got permission to teach some classes at Beaufort’s high school—because Tom is an English teacher and football coach—and because Tom’s father is a shrimper, I spent a month or more hauling nets on the shrimping boats. I got so tan that Barbra worried that my face would be difficult to light next to hers when we started shooting. I attended a couple of parties in Beaufort at Pat’s suggestion, too, and I was surprised to encounter some people who were hostile to our project, worried that we would turn their world into a cartoon, and convinced that Barbra was arrogant and that I was a kind of cowboy they wanted nothing to do with.

  Before we began shooting, Barbra came to me with a proposition. The studio had balked at spending an unanticipated million dollars on an added scene, one she thought would contribute a lot to the film. But Barbra never backed down if she could help it, and she explained that we could have our way if each of us kicked in $500,000 so we could shoot it. I agreed to contribute the money—reducing my fee for starring in the film dramatically—because I knew that if I had said no she would have viewed my response as a lack of commitment to the project. I’m not sure the scene ultimately even got in the film, but my show of support did.

  From that moment unt
il the film wrapped, I was immensely impressed with her artistic vision, her passion, and a kind of genius she brought to virtually every aspect of the enormously complex business of making a movie. Barbra had something of a reputation at the time for being mean, but it wasn’t that at all. She demanded a lot of everyone with whom she was collaborating. She was totally thorough and prepared, and she did a lot of research. She knew exactly how she wanted to tell the story and was tremendously connected to the material. I liked her discipline. She was never satisfied, and she would always search for more.

  My character Tom Wingo’s world is shaped by women, and in real life I’ve tried to understand the strengths and vulnerabilities and needs and beliefs of the women with whom I’ve been close, albeit not always successfully. Even though I haven’t created a fifty-year relationship with one woman, I’ve been satisfied with my relationships. Some have been fated from the beginning—much like the Lowenstein-Wingo relationship in the film—with a constant underlying tension between romantic love and something that is more human, more enduring. One reason I resonated so strongly with the character of Tom is that he projects Lowenstein as a lover, confidante, mother, nurturer, confessor—everything.

  Barbra and I talked extensively about our characters’ relationship and about romantic love versus the pull that Tom feels to return home to his family. I had had those conversations about characters’ motivations at times with male directors over the years, but this was the first time I was working with a female director. With men, I’ve always created a kind of collusive agreement about the emotional points of particular scenes and character arcs, but with Barbra, the two of us had to continually explore, and we both welcomed that.

  Barbra’s incredible determination and willingness to get down in the trenches and fight for what she believed was necessary came from her feminine response to a heavily male-dominated artistic environment. The passion she brought to that battle was part of her brilliance. People on the set would complain, “Oh my God, she’s got four versions of this scene!” when she insisted on multiples—planning to select the one that would make the cut only in the editing suite. And it was an agonizing process, and I sometimes grew frustrated, but ultimately, she always knew the right way to go.

  During our shoot, Barbra told a journalist that I had been her pick to play Tom from the beginning, saying, “Nick approaches a role with raw ferocity, with no concern for how he can get the audience to like him, and that’s very admirable. Underneath, he’s very complex—full of pain, anger, sweetness, and enormous vulnerability.” I was powerfully drawn to her just as she was to me, so much so that I knew that early on we needed to talk about the reasons why we shouldn’t slip into a romantic and sexual relationship with each other as we worked.

  “You know, Barbra,” I told her, “if we get into a situation where we want to cross the line physically, we shouldn’t do it, because it’s too dangerous for the film to have to carry a relationship and the story at the same time. We can live in the fantasy of a relationship, and that will survive. But an actual physical relationship might not survive the film. That’s been my experience.”

  She kind of dismissed me at first, saying, “Oh, well. Yes, you’re probably right. Let’s think about that.”

  “The reason to talk about it now,” I continued, “is because there are going to be moments when it’s incredibly tempting, and we have gotten very close.” I gave her books by Robert A. Johnson, the Jungian psychiatrist, because he talks about how Chrétien de Troyes describes romantic love as killed when Lancelot seduces King Authur’s queen, Guinevere. The minute you have physical contact with the object of your love, you’ve lost the beauty of your faith. I was trying to be pragmatic. You can love the queen, but you can’t touch the queen. And you can worship the queen and fight for the queen. But if you have sex with the queen, you’re not half as good a fighter as you would be living on faith.

  As the filming of the two characters’ growing relationship got under way in earnest, I couldn’t help but notice that she would always want me to be naked while she was covered under about ten layers of sweaters. So, I asked, “How come I’ve got to show my ass and you never show anything?”

  “They don’t pay me enough for me to show these tits,” she teased.

  “They must be some tits,” I responded, and we had a good laugh.

  DURING THE LONG MONTHS THAT BARBRA EDITED THE FILM in Los Angeles with Don Zimmerman, she telephoned me at home one day and said, “Come out and live with me.”

  “Barbra, I can’t,” I told her. “You know I have a son and—”

  “I want to be with you,” she interrupted. And suddenly I knew what had happened. She had been watching dailies and working toward creating a final cut day after day for many weeks, and in the process, she had fallen in love with Tom Wingo.

  “Barbra, I can’t do that. I can’t do that,” I softly told her.

  “Well, what do you want to be to me?” she asked.

  And I said, “A good friend.”

  “You don’t know what I ask from my friends,” she retorted.

  The Prince of Tides was one of the peak experiences of my life as an actor. Critics and audiences were deeply moved by the film when it was released on Christmas Day 1991. A couple of months later, Barbra was nominated for a Golden Globe for best director and I was nominated for best actor. We received seven Academy Award nominations, but unfortunately, Barbra was omitted by her fellow directors because of something political that had happened earlier on an entirely different film.

  Barbra was wounded by the snub, and although the Golden Globe nomination meant something to her, ultimately not winning in that category made her pain sharper. I won a Golden Globe for my role as Tom Wingo, and she and I and others in the cast and crew won a number of other awards that winter.

  It feels wonderful to be recognized for the quality of your work on the stage or screen—it’s tremendous, of course. But I didn’t like—and still don’t—the concept, the competition of picking which actors have made the best performance of a given year. You just can’t make that kind of judgment. It’s a popular spectacle and it’s highly commercialized—and it smacks of unfairness. I have nothing against a group of actors getting together to honor each other’s good work for the year, but I’m opposed to allowing the whole world in on the process. That year I was also named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” which now seems like karmic payback for my grumpy view of awards.

  Barbra was a force of nature to work for, and she made a damn fine film that will be watched and appreciated for many years to come. And like Lowenstein, she helped facilitate a period of my life where there was a balance between what I gained from the stories I inhabited over the years and how much I was willing to contribute of myself.

  CHAPTER 14

  Against Type

  WHEN BRAWLEY CAME TO LIVE WITH ME IN MALIBU when he was twelve, I gave him two options as we began this new phase of our lives together. “Do you want an open house or a closed house?” I asked. “In an open house, we allow people to come in, but we have rules. There’s a bedtime rule during the school week and we allow a certain limited number in the open house. But in an open house, you can have some friends living with you. In a closed house, there’s none of that. You go to school. You can have friends over for playtime, but they go home by six.”

  I think he was knocked sideways by my willingness to let him make such a decision, and I wasn’t surprised a bit when he said he wanted ours to be an open house. It made sense to me as well, having grown up in an open house myself. Soon after, I became a kind of de facto godparent to two kids who were friends of Brawley’s and whose parents needed to move away from Southern California, at least for a time. I hired a tutor for the group—and she was excellent—and other friends who didn’t live with us would come over to get the tutor’s help with their studies as well. I took great joy in partaking when I was able, teaching them about biology through looking at our own live blood under a dark-
field microscope and other hands-on adventures in science.

  In 1999, I took Brawley with me to England, where we shot the Merchant Ivory film The Golden Bowl. I assured his mother that he would only be gone three months, and that he would study while he was away, and that when we returned we would all reassess the big picture of his education. In London, I had the good fortune to encounter a brilliant tutor named Matt Tromans, whom Brawley loved to be with. I wouldn’t see them for days sometimes, and on occasion they wouldn’t get home from an excursion ’til the middle of the night. On the days when Brawley would hang out on the set, the art director and wardrobe folks would fight over which department in the film they were going to make him part of—it was great, and you can imagine how pleased and proud I was that my son was doing so well.

  As we left a pub one evening to walk back to our hotel, he said, “You know, Dad, I’m not sure if I’ve really learned much while I’ve been here.”

  “Well, Brawley,” I told him, “this hasn’t been that two-plus-two-equals-four kind of learning. This isn’t that kind of education; it’s the kind that seeps into you. It’s about knowing where you are from. Seeing yourself in the world. You get a different view of America, where you come from, when you’re away.”

  “Yes,” he said, understanding something of what I meant, “America is prudish in places, isn’t it?”

  When we got back to California, we discussed his situation with officials at his school and everyone agreed that he would only take three classes because he was so advanced, and the following year he went to college. At nearby Pierce College in the valley, he enrolled in classes, and I got a call from the professor, who said he had never had a student so young and he wanted to make sure fifteen-year-old Brawley didn’t have an unpleasant experience. I told him that college was what Brawley was interested in, then explained more about his background and the kind of educational experiences he had had over the years.