Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  I’d known that the traditional American educational system wasn’t right for Brawley for a long time—that basic assembly line where every kid takes the same class and learns, or attempts to learn, precisely the same things. It’s a system that doesn’t allow young people to pursue either their long-held passions or their passing whims, but he had learned in a very unusual way and I wanted to be sure things went well for him when he went full-time into college—if, indeed, he truly wanted that.

  I called the admissions departments at five or six universities and spoke with their heads of admissions, learning that at schools like Stanford, Iowa State, and others, they often preferred homeschooled students over kids who had been educated more conventionally. They didn’t mean the kind of homeschooling where students took courses off the Internet; the kids they were eager to have come to their schools were those who knew how to investigate what they were interested in, kids who would dive in with both feet until they were saturated and ready to move on to something else that inspired them.

  Brawley was gifted, and a confident self-starter, and he was now joining his father and his grandmother in being outside of the constraints of a public education. I loved imagining, as well, the life my boy would shape for himself in schools and outside of them. Yet how could I have known back then that Brawley would dive into acting like his old man and appear in five films before ultimately deciding to enter medical school?

  IT MAY BE HARD TO IMAGINE ME IN A WIG. INDEED, MY FIRST Merchant Ivory film, shot in France in 1994, was Jefferson in Paris, and it was a departure for me in many ways. It was the first time I’d worn an eighteenth-century costume or portrayed one of America’s founding fathers. Director James Ivory originally had wanted Christopher Reeve to play the film’s leading role, but he changed his mind when Merchant Ivory created a partnership with Disney and Disney executives suggested me. Luckily, Ivory told the New York Times, “He seemed extremely thoughtful. He had the right personal dignity. The right age. Tall. Most of all, he’s a good actor.” I’m not sure about my personal dignity, but it was nice to hear he thought I was the right height.

  I liked James very much as well, and, together with his partner Ismail Merchant, his filmmaking reputation was unimpeachable, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with him. The story the film tells begins in 1784 when Jefferson’s wife, Martha, dies and he accepts an appointment as our young nation’s minister to France, taking the position that had been held for nine years by Benjamin Franklin.

  Jefferson sends back to America for some of his slaves, including Sally Hemings. She lives in the Jefferson household in Paris and begins a sexual relationship with the widowed Jefferson and becomes pregnant.

  During my research for the role, I had traveled to the University of Virginia and spoken with history professors as well as venturing to Jefferson’s home at Monticello, and everywhere people asked me, “Is this a movie about Sally Hemings?” With fingers crossed behind my back, I fibbed that no, the film would have little to do with Sally, because at the time all of us knew that their purported relationship was just a rumor.

  The New York Times wouldn’t break the news for four more years that a respected DNA study had conclusively linked Hemings’s children to the descendants of Jefferson, but our script, written by Merchant and Ivory’s longtime collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, nonetheless suggested that the two became intimate during their time in Paris. About halfway through the film, in fact, Sally becomes the predominant character—which I thought was appropriate.

  The more I read about Jefferson, as well as his own writings, the more impressed I was by his intellect and his energy. He was a man who was extremely interested in every aspect of the world around him, and someone who was very much of the earth. He drew inspiration for the liberty of man from his deep study of the natural world around him. He was extraordinary in the truest sense of the word, and I felt privileged to portray him.

  As time goes by, I find roles I play stay with me more and more. They become encoded into me. I figure the intense way I prepare in the first place makes it difficult for me to lose/shake off the character I’ve created after the shooting is done. Following Jefferson in Paris, for example, it was no accident that I had to have all my windows redone in a Jeffersonian style and a gazebo built on my Malibu property that matched Monticello’s. His style had inspired me.

  James Ivory remains legendary for his gentleness, his reserve, and his penchant for speaking few words. Alternately, his life and filmmaking partner Ismail, now deceased, was a bold and outgoing Indian guy. He was famous for asking casts and crews to come in on Saturdays for Indian food and dancing, and perhaps a bit of filming—his particular trick for getting more work than he was actually paying for. That recurring ploy landed Merchant Ivory at the top of a list of producers and directors we were warned not to work for. But everyone did so anyway—because the two men were great people, and they made fine films, and those Indian-food Saturdays were always pretty fun.

  WE SHOT THE GOLDEN BOWL IN LONDON AND SEVERAL LOCATIONS in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, and once more I found myself in a costume drama that necessitated a kind of stylized acting that I generally shy away from. But I had thoroughly enjoyed my first Merchant Ivory experience five years before, and Brawley was with me, and the material, based on a Henry James novel, was excellent.

  The picture tells the story of an extravagantly rich American widower, played by me, and his sheltered daughter—a terrific Kate Beckinsale—who separately marry, then discover that their new mates, a beautiful American expatriate and an impoverished Italian aristocrat, are actually in love with each other and are involved in an elaborate conspiracy of seduction and deceit.

  Set in England and Italy between 1903 and 1909, The Golden Bowl was Merchant Ivory’s third film based on a James novel. The company had developed notoriety and a devoted following for creating literary period films—winning more than thirty Academy Award nominations and six Oscars along the way. Uma Thurman, who plays the beautiful young American aristocrat my character falls in love with, is absolutely wonderful in the film. I am proud of The Golden Bowl because although the role is small, my character and his wealth and power are threaded through the other characters’ lives, ultimately taking charge of them in ways over which they have no control.

  When the film premiered at Cannes in 2000, we all were joined by Harvey Weinstein, the aggressive head of Miramax and The Golden Bowl’s executive producer. The Cannes committee was enthusiastic enough about the film that it had already been nominated for the Palme d’Or, and following its premiere screening the audience leapt to its feet and applauded for an incredible amount of time. At the party that followed, people were equally passionate in their reactions. When I found James among the crowd, I asked, “Have you ever had a response like this before?”

  “No,” he stated incredulously, and we were both enthusiastic until Harvey told us that although we had done “a good job,” the film had problems. They could be fixed with a series of cuts, he assured us.

  “I wouldn’t know what to cut,” James told him.

  “Well, I do,” Harvey said—then he did just that in the weeks that followed.

  Weinstein had a long-standing reputation as a producer who would ruthlessly edit films directors and editors had worked painstakingly to create, so we thought we were prepared for what might become of our film. We weren’t. Once Harvey and company had completed their “edit,” the picture had been reduced to shreds. The filmmakers were initially crushed, then became furious with the suggested changes.

  Cool-headed James eventually persuaded Harvey to sell the film back to Merchant Ivory for the $15 million it had cost to make it, but because of the rules of the industry and the academy, the film would not be eligible for consideration for the upcoming Academy Awards. Ismail and James opted simply to let it sit in the can for a year, a decision that was wise, in part, but lost us real momentum and a lot of buzz by the time the picture finally premiered in M
ay 2001.

  KURT VONNEGUT POSSESSED A TREMENDOUS WIT AND knowledge of humor and storytelling. In the years between my Merchant Ivory films, I did two films based on novels by Vonnegut, long one of my favorite authors. It was a young director named Keith Gordon who first imagined me as the lead in Mother Night, and Vonnegut himself, I learned, was enthusiastic about my being cast in the role of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American who moves with his family to Germany after World War I and eventually becomes a successful German-language playwright. As World War II looms, Campbell is recruited to spy for the United States, transmitting Nazi propaganda in incendiary speeches that contain hidden messages, which can only be decoded by Allied intelligence.

  Ten-year-old Brawley plays Campbell as a young man in the film, and it was great to have him as part of our team, yet Mother Night, in the end, was one of only three feature films in which he appeared before he concluded that show business just isn’t his deal—a decision that was just fine by me.

  When I asked Vonnegut why he ended up writing a World War II spy story, he said it was because he was in Dresden when it was virtually destroyed by Allied bombs. He was in the town, way underground hiding out in a meat locker, and just got lucky he didn’t get burned to death. Before the bombing, he told me, “I would go to cocktail parties and people would talk about spies, but nobody knew shit about spies. And it just caught my fancy that a spy could be right in front of me in that room—and be successful and a playwright, someone who got tweaked into all of this through his art.”

  That very thing happens to playwrights, actors, artists, too. When you think you’re telling the greatest story ever told, you’re often right on the edge of becoming a complete liar, because your story is only as good as the moment it’s told in. You may get caught in your own act. As Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition of the novel, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

  I was incredibly nervous about my role before we began to shoot. That used to happen to me a lot, but in Mother Night I would have to face a camera dressed in a Nazi uniform and spew horrible rhetoric about Jews—and it wasn’t an easy thing to do, even though it was only acting. I stayed up all night for five days and was drunk and hungover and really a wreck, but I finally pulled it all together. I think my internal anguish helped me play Campbell convincingly—as a guy who gets even Joseph Goebbels to believe he is as vile as the worst of the Nazis, all while passing vital intelligence to the West.

  When I saw Mother Night for the first time, I was in Montreal and Vonnegut was with me. It’s a very unusual picture, and at its conclusion the audience was just kind of stunned. No one was quite sure what to make of what the movie meant to be or to say. As we got into our limo following the screening, Kurt asked me, “They were perturbed, weren’t they?” I told him I thought the film perturbed the hell out of them.

  “Great. That’s great,” he responded. “That’s what you want. I could give a shit about whether they liked it or not. But that it perturbed them, that’s what you want.”

  The film received generally good reviews, and a few reviewers thought it was a singular and altogether extraordinary picture. But the studio stopped running ads a week after the film opened, preferring to put their eggs into the basket of another film they were releasing, Shine with Geoffrey Rush. I knew we were sunk. I asked the studio, “Please treat us with respect and don’t drop us in the ads.” But they did. So I called the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to see how much a quarter-page weekend ad would cost, and I think it was about $50,000 at the time—a price I told one of the studio heads I was willing to pay. He read me the riot act. “You can’t take out ads!” he shouted, claiming it was simply a mistake that they had been dropped. He assured me the ads would begin again, but he was openly lying. That’s what the film industry is about. You make some, you lose some—it’s a gamble.

  In the film adaptation of Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, which we shot three years later, I play a cross-dressing used-car-lot manager—a part that was just the tiniest bit against type and a role I was eager to take on. I told the film’s costumer that I wanted a dress that felt very sensual, the kind of thing men just don’t ever get to wear, silky and sexy. Together we came up with a sheer little red dress with straps that was big enough for me, but it wasn’t quite right until I turned it around and wore it backward so my nipples were exposed and I looked like a bare-breasted Phoenician woman—something I felt was key to my character Harry Le Sabre.

  I was dating comedienne and actress Vicki Lewis at the time, and Vicki was playing my wife, Grace, in the film as well. When I wore heels, my tits were right at her mouth, and she loved to go, “Nom, nom, nom,” like she was nursing. It was just ludicrous! Bizarre! Oh God, I had great fun doing it. And the legendary English actor Albert Finney was wonderful, too, playing the little-known science-fiction author Kilgore Trout.

  After our first day of shooting, Albert suggested that we go for a drink. I said sure, but I told him I could only have one drink. He didn’t like the sound of that and said, “Oh, that’s going to be a real pisser,” but I told him to be patient. After about an hour or so of joking around, we had drunk several bottles of wine, and I asked, “Albert, how many glasses of wine have I had?”

  He looked at my glass and said, “Only one. You’ve never been empty.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I meant!” I told him.

  Bruce Willis plays the film’s lead as car-lot owner Dwayne Hoover, and I thought he was terrifically funny. We were directed by Alan Rudolph, whom I had worked for in his earlier film Afterglow. Alan wrote the screenplay, but many people felt it unfairly turned the dark satire of Vonnegut’s namesake novel into slapstick humor. Entertainment Weekly gave the film an F rating and claimed that “Rudolph, in an act of insane folly, seems to think that what matters is the story. The result . . . is a movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.”

  Hate it? Well, we certainly had a ton of fun making it. And any time I had the pleasure to work with Finney and Rudolph and Vonnegut was time well spent in my book.

  I HAD MET THE LITTLE REDHEADED VICKI LEWIS WHILE WE were filming the James L. Brooks comedy I’ll Do Anything five years before. She and I laughed a lot together and she joined me at my place near Zuma Beach in Malibu, where we lived for a number of years. We never considered marriage, in large part because she preferred to be involved in at least two relationships at the same time. Truly. It was an imperative for her; she couldn’t help it. And one of her men at any moment had to be a comedy writer—because she was always in need of material. An actor like me was a fine choice for fellow number two because I could help her get publicity when we appeared out together.

  I understood Vicki’s needs, and accepted them, and thought she was great, although her domestic necessities sometimes created real chaos. Vicki had been part of the cast of the hit television series NewsRadio, and when its star Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, the entire cast was devastated. The intensity of cocreating a show at such a high comedic level had generated great stress among the group, and everyone was already in danger of burning out. When they lost Phil so suddenly and tragically, things hit a breaking point.

  Vicki’s costar Andy Dick had a son who was about seven years old, and he hadn’t seen his father in several weeks because of the show’s hectic schedule. He wasn’t going to school and couldn’t read yet, and Vicki was very concerned about his welfare. She brought him out to Malibu to stay with us, and the boy began to work with Brawley’s tutor each day. He was here for a couple of months before NewsRadio was finally canceled, and following the cancellation, Andy was able to devote the time to his son that the boy desperately needed.

  Vicki was wonderful to children and friends who were in need, and our relationship flourished, too, for most of a decade. It was a time during which I became very interested in the state of my health and the ways in which I could get back into shape. I hadn’t been goo
d to my body for many years, and it was time to show it some TLC.

  It was during the filming of Lorenzo’s Oil back in 1992 that I first began to explore alternative approaches to health and wellness. That film was based on the true story of parents whose selflessness led them to discover an herbal cure for their son Lorenzo, who suffered from adrenoleukodystrophy, a degenerative nerve disorder. Little Lorenzo’s real parents and several consultants on the film were responsible for opening my eyes to what was unfolding in the alternative medical world.

  Then, when I was making the Oliver Stone film U Turn five years later, I met an anti-aging physician who introduced me to hormone imbalances and replacement strategies, immune system function, and the possibility of using human growth hormone therapy as a way to stay youthful and full of energy. And so, I went with him on a journey.

  Under this doctor’s care, I began injecting HGH into my stomach every day and getting impressive results. A man’s natural production of HGH begins to fall off as early as eighteen or so, and by the time you’re middle-aged, its dramatically lower levels begin to cause all kinds of problems. But with the use of HGH injections, I discovered, your testosterone levels rise, fat falls away, and your body begins to repair itself.

  It was enormously expensive therapy—two or three thousand dollars a month—but it was worth it, and I remember the doctor telling me, “After a year’s use, you’ll be wondering why you’re sticking this needle in your stomach every night, because you won’t remember the way you used to look and feel. But if you stop for a couple of weeks, you’ll start to feel ugh, ugh—you’ll see and you’ll feel your body start to fall apart again.” And he was right.