by Nick Nolte
It was such an elaborately planned gag that Woody had three officers working with him: two in uniform, and one dressed as the tough guy who had caused the car accident. He was a rough-looking Aussie, covered in tattoos, and he and everyone else delivered Oscar-worthy performances.
Sean arrived and was directed to the back room. There, he joined one officer, the phony criminal, and me. The policeman told Sean the circumstances were only a formality and not to worry. All Sean needed to do was verify my identity while we waited on the results of a blood-alcohol test. Sean looked worriedly in my direction, but I shook my head. No, I hadn’t been drinking.
Soon, the policemen who had been at the front desk entered and escorted the tough guy from the room. As they made their way down the hall, we could hear a vicious verbal confrontation. The officer still in the room sprang up and took off toward the terrible ruckus, his gun drawn. Things got even louder and more intense, and Sean, being Sean, crept out into the hallway to sneak a peek.
Boom! Boom! Suddenly two gunshots echoed loudly, and Sean came hauling ass back into the room and ran to the back door, trying to get out. But it was locked, so he tried the windows, and they were locked. At that moment, the tattooed guy rushed in, shouting, “I’m getting the fuck out of here, motherfucker! And I’m going to kill somebody if I have to! You, you’re going to drive me out of here!”
Sean had fallen to the floor but now he cautiously stood, saying with all the control he could muster, “No reason to shoot. I’m going to take you wherever you want to go. Don’t shoot anybody.”
One of the cops nervously said, “The keys . . . on the desk,” and Sean took them, unlocked the back door, opened it—and there was Woody with his camera in his hands. He shot a quick photograph of Sean—still scared out of his wits—then pointed at two video cameras that were recording the scene, and began to chant, “I am king! I am king!”
It was a great gag, maybe the best gag I’d ever seen. How Woody ever convinced the cops to help him pull it off, I don’t know. It was just crazy. Sean most definitely did not laugh, yet he was enormously relieved that the situation had not been real. All he could say was, “You know, if I had been in L.A., I would have had my gun, and somebody would have been killed.” He was completely freaked out.
Woody left town for a bit soon thereafter, but before he did everyone on the set kept an eager eye on what kind of retribution Sean would exact. Nothing had occurred before he left, but his children remained in town. Woody was a strict vegan, and his kids had never eaten meat in their lives, so when he returned he was knocked over by the news that they loved the delicious beef soup they lately were being served each day. Woody was really pissed off.
Woody’s eyes emit a mad intensity, even when he’s relaxed. I would never fuck with him, ever. And apparently, he was headed directly for Sean with a murderous look when Terry’s wife, Ecky, intervened. Without knowing about the kids’ dietary restrictions, she confessed to having been feeding them a steady supply of ham sandwiches the whole time they had been in Port Douglas—so the beef soup wasn’t the half of it! Her confession at least momentarily blunted Woody’s anger and allowed him to regain some self-control. Sean stopped needling him, and the two settled into an edgy truce—because it was time to get serious.
AS OUR SHOOT PROGRESSED, TERRY CONTINUED TO STOP filming scenes before they were finished—the very thing he had assured his actors he would stop doing. He would shoot the spine of the scene, the beginning and middle, but not the end—and this happened time after time. And virtually every day, he would do something curious, too. When only a couple of hours of daylight were left and the light had grown soft and rich and full—“golden light,” as it is known in the industry—Terry would stop whatever scene we were shooting and want to revisit one of the unfinished scenes. He wasn’t concerned about his actors’ performance continuities, or that the light that closed a scene would be very different from the light in its opening, or even that the earlier footage was shot in another location—which naturally drove cinematographer John Toll totally crazy.
I was paying close attention to how all of this was playing out, and finally I was sure I understood what Terry was trying to do. He wanted as many scenes as possible to end in “golden light,” regardless of the discontinuity. This was time and cost prohibitive, and may have gotten him fired from the film had the studio heads gotten wind of his intention and the reason for his secrecy.
I told Terry that I was onto him. But I assured him I believed in his methods and his track record as a director, and, in turn, he revealed some of his reasoning. He explained that he wanted to go beyond a conventional writer’s concept of how you made a film, beyond the conventional director’s vision, beyond what was normally done by everyone in front of or behind the camera. His goal, he said, was to get all of us to let go of the choices we made as we prepared and simply face the unknown. He didn’t want his actors, for example, to search for a particular emotion they had established a day or a week ago. He only wanted us to move toward the discovery of new truths. I suggested he must be seeking divine inspiration, and he agreed with a mischievous grin.
My character, Colonel Gordon Tall, had been imagined by James Jones as a West Point graduate who’d come of age at a time when the concept of the noble warrior had become outdated but not yet extinct. Before World War II, Tall was overwhelmed by the fear of an empty destiny—a fear so total that by the time the Battle of Guadalcanal occurred, he had completely lost sight of the war’s objective, replacing it with nothing more than a personal obsession. The men under his command were simply pawns in his own selfish drama.
Tall’s antagonist, Captain Bugger Staros, played by Elias Koteas, makes an argument for saving the lives of his men and refuses Tall’s orders for a direct frontal assault on a hill they are attempting to capture. Staros will not simply sacrifice his men for the sake of a hollow objective. But the Japanese resistance weakens in the face of the company’s heavy assault, and with terrible loss of life on both sides, the battle is won. Tall revels in his achievement and basks in his ownership of the hilltop.
However, as he comes down from the hill, soaking in his moment of imagined glory, his eyes can’t avoid the severed and mutilated bodies of soldiers strewn all over God’s garden. He sees the carnage he alone has created, and Tall is devastated, breaking down under the weight of his own reckoning, and is perhaps a little redeemed by the emergence of his own humanity.
It’s very powerful stuff—a profound challenge and the very reason why this work has always compelled me in the way it has. But that said, I had as much fun inside the character of Gordon Tall as any I ever played. Terry and I established a rhythm that was exhilarating. He would come up with new lines in the middle of a scene and yell them out to me. Some days, he’d drop five pages of poetry on me or throw out Latin phrases. He didn’t want us to learn our lines by rote; put in your words, they just might catch fire. The entire process was a gas—and a highlight of my professional life.
I was struck as we made the picture that—in their separate media of book and film—James Jones and Terrence Malick essentially created a love story. In a dilemma that is virtually incomprehensible for most of us, a combat soldier uses his rifle to try to kill the people who are hell-bent on killing him. In those moments, you create a bond with your comrade fighting beside you that is the most profound kind of love humans can experience. You do your best to keep your buddy alive, and he strives to keep you from being killed, and each of you is willing to die to protect the other. As far as Jones and Malick were concerned, there simply is no other love that’s more powerful, more fully etched with life’s great meaning. It is the only meaning-filled thing that war offers us. And its beauty is almost entirely obscured by the fact that war also destroys everything it touches.
I often wished while I was making The Thin Red Line that at long last I could talk with my late father about the war. It was something he never wanted to discuss, so perhaps even in my middle age there wo
uld have been almost nothing he would have been willing to share. He and his contemporaries certainly had reason to be circumspect, if not entirely silent. Virtually each one of them had had to deal with horrific experiences. Many of them also came home killers, and they did not want to be killers. They didn’t talk to their sons, didn’t talk to anyone—even among themselves—because what could possibly be said about the inhumanity of which they had been a part?
THE THIN RED LINE WAS NOMINATED FOR SEVEN ACADEMY Awards in 1999, including best picture and best director. None of us from the big ensemble cast received an acting nomination, which was surprising, yet we all were thrilled that Terry received the recognition he deserved after a twenty-year hiatus away from making films. And perhaps more than anything, it seemed wonderfully fitting that the film won the Golden Bear, the highest prize awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival.
My mother’s health had begun to decline significantly by the time The Thin Red Line premiered, and I doubt she saw the film. Over the years, she had paid attention to my career, and she enjoyed watching me act on-screen. She claimed she had always known that I would be successful at whatever endeavors I pursued, but my celebrity certainly didn’t mean much to her. She thought it was fun, but she had no interest at all in joining me at premieres or award ceremonies, and she’d never been someone who vicariously reveled in her son’s accomplishments.
My mother had remained in Phoenix during her last decades. She and her good friend Helen Buda had operated an antiques store called the Little House, and it was well-known and very successful. Neither of them had a background in antique furniture, but both women had great taste. I always enjoyed going to auctions with my mom. It was uncanny, I thought, how she always knew what would sell and what wouldn’t, and what was real and what was not. She was a natural.
Yet Mom had a tough time with old age, largely because she had so much pride. She wouldn’t fly anywhere because that meant negotiating her way through airports. She couldn’t walk far and she refused to be seen in a wheelchair, even briefly. She became so reclusive that when Brawley and his cousin, Nancy’s son, Eric, would drive over from California to see her, she wouldn’t open her door for them. She began to tell Nancy and me often that she loved us—something she had seldom done over the decades—but when Nancy asked her to move in with her, Mom immediately rebuffed her and wouldn’t speak of the possibility again. No parent should be a burden to their children, she explained.
When I learned in September 2000 that she was failing dramatically and wouldn’t live much longer, I responded to the news by doing something crazy—blowing out my calf and the plantar fascia in my foot by trying to move a four-thousand-pound machine as I leaned into it on my toes. Bullooom! My leg was instantly torn apart. That white light people report as death approaches? I saw that light and it knocked me flat out. I woke up six hours later. I know I did it intentionally. I was running from the loss.
I was recuperating at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica when I received a call from Mom on a Monday, asking me how soon I could be in Phoenix. When I told her I could get there by Friday, she said, “That long?” then hung up. Her time had come.
Matt Tromans, once Brawley’s tutor, had become my assistant and was visiting my hospital room as I briefly spoke to my mother, and as soon as I put the phone down, I told him, “We can’t wait ’til they release me Friday, I’ve got to get to Phoenix. Now.” Matt collected my clothes, my meds, and some crutches, and we snuck out of the hospital.
I had been observing closely as my mother steadily declined for a number of years, but I was caught totally off guard by the state in which I found her at her house in Phoenix about six hours later. Toothless and frail, she seemed to be caving in on herself. She was clutching her jutting collarbones and her pain was visibly intense, yet she continued to live despite suffering from pneumonia and gangrene in her right leg. This was the same leg I’d injured. Coincidence or something deeper? It was impossible not to mull over the connection.
Nancy had been by her side until she was forced back east to deal with a household emergency for a few days, so I was alone. I sat down next to my mother’s bed, stroked her hair, and whispered that everything would be okay. She heard my voice, opened her eyes, and said, “Oh, you!” Hilariously dark to the end, she simultaneously scowled and pleaded for some form of pain alleviation.
Because of my injuries, I had traveled to Arizona with a wide array of pharmaceuticals, and it was fortunate that I had them with me. I crushed several tablets of OxyContin, morphine, and Lorcet, then stirred the powder into a glass of vodka, orange juice, and cranberry juice. I topped it off with a drop of GHB, a relaxant and analgesic I had discovered about the time I quit drinking and that, to my mind, was the best painkiller yet known to humankind.
My makeshift concoction hit the spot. Soon after beginning to sip it, Mom nodded her head in silent approval and her hands released their death grip on her collarbones. Matt and I made sure that some of this special cocktail was always at her bedside. We spent most of the next three days doing what little we could to make her comfortable. She and I virtually never spoke, choosing not to talk about the lifetime of memories and shared experiences that hung in the air, letting the silence be the thing that connected us.
On Friday, five days after Matt and I had arrived, I sensed that it was time to do something else, something I thought might subtly lend her a hand. I bent over and kissed her cheek, then told her that I needed to step out for just a bit. “Don’t worry though,” I added. “Do whatever you need to do while I’m gone.” When I walked back into her bedroom fifteen minutes later, my iconoclastic mother, Helen King Nolte, had left the building.
CHAPTER 16
H, GHB, and the PCH
WHEN I FIRST MET PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR SAM Shepard, he didn’t like me and I didn’t much like him. I had just made Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, in which Sam’s longtime life partner Jessica Lange played my wife. She and I always got along beautifully and she’s a wonderful actor. Sam, who had accompanied her to an event honoring Scorsese and Robert De Niro, was already well oiled when I walked up to say hello to the two of them. He promptly announced that Cape Fear was a “horseshit Hollywood film.” The remark made Jessica uncomfortable, I could tell, so I attempted some small talk by asking him, “How’s your farm?” He dismissively turned to Jessica, saying, “Did you hear this idiot? How’s your farm, he wants to know.” Then he turned back to me and said, “I live on a ranch, asshole.”
Honestly, I was only vaguely aware of who Sam was at that point, which probably had something to do with the competitive jealousy of contemporaries, but I had paid little attention to American theater since I’d left it in the early seventies. Even then, I ignorantly assumed that there hadn’t been any American playwrights worth a second look since the heyday of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge. But, boy, was I wrong.
It was Albert Finney who introduced Sam and me professionally, so to speak. Albert and I had worked together on Breakfast of Champions, and a couple months following that shoot, he sent me a script called Simpatico, written by Sam Shepard. I liked it, agreed to take part in the project, and felt like I should bone up on Shepard’s writing. I soon read everything he had written. I was floored. If he isn’t the best American playwright of the second half of the twentieth century, I don’t know who is.
Sam believes theater is a superior art form to film—full stop. Over time I changed my mind entirely about the man, his talents, and his artistic integrity. When, not long before my mother’s death, Sam contacted me to see if I would be interested in joining my friends Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson—their feud long settled by now—onstage in the San Francisco world premiere of Sam’s play The Late Henry Moss, I jumped at the chance.
But in September 2000, my beloved mother had just died, I’d terribly injured my leg and foot, and I’d come down with pneumonia during the few days I spent at my mother’s bedside. I was a physical and emotional
wreck. I sent my assistant Matt back to California and I checked into Phoenix’s Arizona Biltmore Hotel, where I slept for about thirty hours without waking. My sister, Nancy, repeatedly tried to reach me by phone from New Jersey, and when she couldn’t she finally convinced the hotel’s manager to open the door to my room to see if I was alive.
I was, it turned out, but I was in bad enough shape that I was immediately transferred to a Scottsdale hospital, where I slowly began to recover. On a Thursday, still less than a week after Mom’s death, I remembered that I was scheduled to be in San Francisco the following Monday to begin rehearsals for Sam’s play—something that seemed virtually impossible, given my condition. I reached Sam by telephone and tried to explain.
“Sam, my mother died. I’m in the hospital with walking pneumonia. And that’s goofy, because I can’t move without a walking cast because my leg is busted up,” I explained. But before I could say more, Sam shot back without sympathy, “My mother has died. I’ve had pneumonia. Let’s pretend none of that happened. And we’ll see you in San Francisco on Monday.” Then he hung up.
I still don’t know how I managed it, but grieving, sick, and hobbled, I presented myself at a read-through of the play at the Theatre on the Square in San Francisco four days later. An incredible cast had been assembled, including my old buddies Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson, and James Gammon. Gammon was a legendary stage and film actor who had directed me in my last theater performance, in Picnic, almost thirty years before.