Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  The Theatre on the Square in San Francisco was the venue where we would perform, but the production was staged by the Magic Theatre, the company where Sam got his start as playwright-in-residence back in the 1970s and where his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Buried Child was first performed. He was returning to the Bay Area after a long absence to stage The Late Henry Moss for the first time, and Sam’s reputation plus the quality of the cast he had assembled had created real buzz. We would play for only a six-week limited run, yet well before we opened people were already hocking tickets for two and three thousand dollars apiece.

  Set in Shepard’s mythic American West, Henry Moss is the story of two brothers who return home to confront each other, their violent past, and the death of their father, Henry Moss, played by Gammon, for whom Shepard had written the role of the deceased father who is, despite his death, a constant presence onstage.

  After an early workshop production in New York, Shepard had looked for a home for a full production of the play, and the theater where his career truly took off made perfect sense. He approached Sean, who lives in nearby Marin County, and he was quickly on board because, in part, doing the play would allow him to work near home. Sean suggested me as the elder Moss brother and his rival. Sam liked the idea; by then, I had appeared in the film version of Shepard’s Simpatico, and he liked my work in it and apparently no longer thought of me as an asshole. It took no time at all for the two men to reel me in.

  Sean and Woody had well and truly buried the hatchet by then, and Sean encouraged Woody, who lives in Hawaii, to call Sam about a small role that was still available. He did, and got the part, and Sam very quickly had a hell of a cast on his hands.

  The only problem for me was that my leg and foot were in a walking cast and I was still using crutches much of the time—something we couldn’t adapt to the character. I would just have to bite the bullet and endure the searing pain when I walked during each performance. I appeared in only acts 1 and 3, so I iced my leg during the entirety of act 2.

  Because they made me groggy, I couldn’t take my pain pills until after the show each evening. So I would have them laid out and ready for me on my makeup table following each performance, and I would pray like hell that the audience wouldn’t want too many curtain calls. Two performances in a day were absolutely out of the question, and Sam and the play’s producers accepted my inability to perform in weekend matinees. When Sean announced that if I wasn’t doing matinees, then neither would he perform on weekend afternoons, things got a little tense for a time, but the show remained a success even without the matinees.

  I was surprised when Sam limited his direction to stage placement. He’d move each of us where he wanted us, then let us do our thing. “I want you, Nick, to be down to here for this one line you have to say. That’s all the limitation I’ll put on it.” I tussled with that, because I didn’t know how to get down there. If you get downstage and you don’t know why you’re supposed to be there, you can feel really naked.

  Despite his unfounded worry that his talents didn’t match those of the rest of us, Woody virtually stole every performance as a clueless taxi driver; Cheech Marin’s mejicano sidekick shtick made audiences roar as well, and although my character Earl Moss wasn’t every theatergoer’s cup of tea, my grunting and slouching were well received.

  By the end of our short run, my leg and foot were still killing me but I could also claim that special euphoria that comes when a group of people who care about each other collectively pull off something special. My return to the stage after thirty years reminded me how much I had loved it long ago, and it reminded me how much the stage remains the place where an actor foremost practices his art. I had come a long way.

  IN 2002, I HAD SET ASIDE ALCOHOL AND COCAINE; MY PNEUMONIA was long gone, and even my slow-healing leg was finally on the mend. I had weathered the loss of my mother, although her absence was something I still felt every day. My sixteen-year-old son, Brawley, remained my life’s greatest joy, and watching him grow was something I loved to do at very close range.

  Neil Jordan, the Irish director of such fine films as The Crying Game, Michael Collins, and The End of the Affair, had offered me the lead in a film he had written called The Good Thief, based on a 1956 French film called Bob le flambeur, about an aging gambler who, with the help of a team that includes a young Russian prostitute, is about to risk everything on a spectacular casino heist while under the watchful eye of a policeman who might just choose to save his longtime opponent rather than arrest him.

  Exquisitely shot on the French Riviera by cinematographer Chris Menges, the film is seductively stylish, intense, complex, and filled with excellent performances. I loved playing the role of Bob Montagnet, a brilliant gambler and thief who is also addicted to heroin. In order to portray Bob convincingly, I chose to become him in as many ways as I could—including using a bit of heroin during our eight-week shoot.

  The decision made sense to me, and I never felt out of control. Although the film was a box-office failure, audiences and critics applauded it. I felt free throughout the shoot—unhindered and liberated to play the hell out of the role—and I discontinued the heroin as soon as our France and Italy shoots were complete.

  Playing the role of the young prostitute was nineteen-year-old Nutsa Kukhianidze, who was from the city of Tbilisi in Georgia, which had been independent from the Soviet Union for a full decade by the time we made the film. Nutsa was from a prominent Georgian family; her grandfather owned all the movie theaters in the country, and so, of course, when the film was released internationally, we scheduled a press tour to Georgia to help make the most of the huge interest Nutsa’s role in the film had generated.

  But Georgia resembled the Wild West in the spring of 2003 and the moment our plane landed Nutsa’s father-in-law stepped up and said, “Nick, these will be your nine bodyguards.” And I said, “What? I don’t have bodyguards.” I knew this was going to be a film junket like no other. We raced from the airport in a multicar caravan, running red lights as we went. I had brought Brawley along with me on the short trip, and he was as astounded as I was when one of the thugs assigned to protect me explained that the cops we saw stopping cars everywhere along our route were actually robbers, simply men doing their everyday thievery.

  The American ambassador to Georgia met us at the Holiday Inn where we would be staying—a short, fat American guy in a suit, surrounded by ten marines with arms nineteen inches around cradling M15s. I wondered how much protection they really offered him when I asked if we could visit the house where Stalin had been born and was very quickly told, “No. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Okay,” I said, as calmly as I could, “then what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going for a picnic up in the mountains,” was the answer I got from my bodyguards—so off we went. But during the picnic, out came the vodka, and they all got drunk as shit. Getting drunk made them want to pull out their Glocks, of course, with which they played a game by seeing who could shoot the most bottles. And they just couldn’t hit anything.

  Always up for an adventure, I said, “Let me have a try,” and they were instantly accommodating. Poom, poom, poom, poom, poom! I took five quick shots and shattered five bottles, and my guys were very impressed. “What war were you in? What war were you in?” they asked, and I simply smiled and told them it wasn’t a war. I was in the movies, I said. They nodded appreciatively.

  On the way back to the hotel, a couple of members of my Georgian entourage—who apparently were related to Nutsa somehow—asked if I wanted to get a pain shot. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but when one of them asked a second time, I said, “A pain shot? Sure. I could use one.”

  So, before long, Brawley went to his hotel room, and I was in mine, watching as a guy named Alexander was seated on the couch, tying up, and about to insert a needle into his vein. His pal Malkhaz tied off my arm and asked, “You do this before?”

  I said, “Yes. But it’s never l
ooked like that.” The syringes contained something that was crystal clear, and all the heroin I’d ever seen was like tar. I was about to back out because this was obviously pure heroin, but just as I began to say no, Alexander fell to the floor. Boom! He was out. Malkhaz looked at his friend but wasn’t concerned. He emptied his syringe into me, pulled it out, and in about two seconds, boom! I was out, too.

  I learned some hours later that I turned blue-black during the fifteen minutes or so Malkhaz worked to revive me. Then, all of a sudden, I went, “Ughhh, huh,” and came back to life. Alexander was still lying on the floor when Malkhaz ran to get Brawley, and I remember him loudly instructing him, “Brawley, do not let your father fall asleep! Keep him walking. All night if you need.”

  Brawley wanted to know what had happened and I told him I didn’t know, but that evidently someone had tried to kill us. I kept repeating those words—someone had tried to kill us—as we watched Malkhaz pulling Alexander’s arm over his shoulder and hauling him out of the room en route to a hospital.

  The next day, from up on the floor where my room was located, I could look down and see the preparations for the scheduled press conference. The bar and tables of food, the special tent that had been erected, and all the assembled media. But there was no way I was going to go down if someone was trying to kill us. I could see Alexander and Malkhaz looking up at me, motioning for me to join them—but I wouldn’t do it. I was spooked.

  They finally came up to the room, knocked on the door, and pleaded, “Look, Nick, you got to come down, no matter what. What happened yesterday not happening again. Not happening again. You got to come down because we promise a lot. We have . . . obligations.”

  I finally relented and went down and did my duty, and the press event went off as planned. I felt safer, somehow, in young Nutsa’s presence. Her “cousins” Alexander and Malkhaz repeatedly assured me that there would be no more injections, and Brawley and I ultimately flew out of Georgia and home without any more pain relief or excitement.

  BEGINNING BACK IN MY EARLY YEARS, WHEN MY MOTHER would give me a “vitamin” to get me energized to go to school, I had consumed drugs or alcohol as part of my everyday experience. Much later in life, I became deeply interested in alternative medicine and the use of human growth hormone and dietary supplementation of many kinds. I had always struggled to be at ease in my own skin and to relax and simply accept what came my way. So it wasn’t surprising that in the new century a substance that was readily available at health-food stores called gamma hydroxybutyric acid captured my attention.

  Commonly known as GHB, it’s a naturally occurring neurotransmitter that can also be synthetically produced in labs. Chemically closely related to GABA, it acts on both the GABA receptor and on the GHB receptor in the brain, where it can induce relaxation, mild euphoria, pain relief, and enhanced libido, as well as increasing growth hormone levels throughout the body. It was not considered a drug. It was an underground medication and aboveground commercial product.

  In the late 1990s, GHB was entirely legal virtually everywhere, and my doctor prescribed it as a nightly sleep medication, which I used successfully for four years—sleeping much more soundly and deeply than I otherwise could. GHB was used medically as a general anesthetic and as a treatment for cataplexy, narcolepsy, and alcoholism. But the problem with GHB is that it is very dose specific, affecting everyone in diverse ways, and it is an incredibly easy substance to abuse.

  I began to use it not only for sleep but also to help me relax and feel euphoric, to maintain my human growth hormone levels, and as an analgesic to reduce muscle pain during long and vigorous workouts. You don’t feel the pain of tearing down the muscles when you work out for six hours. It adds a little euphoria. That’s why it was in all the protein powders. Early in the new century, I wasn’t drinking, wasn’t doing coke or pot or other recreational drugs, but I began to increase my daily intake of GHB significantly.

  The media had increasingly begun to refer to it as the “date-rape” drug, because some men were combining it with other drugs and pouring it into the beverages of women they hoped to take advantage of. The women would be so groggy that they could be sexually abused without fighting back or remembering what had happened to them the next day. If I had too much, I would fall deeply asleep in inappropriate places. Like park benches. Like cars.

  On September 11, 2002, I had done something I often did—take GHB prior to going to the gym for a long workout. A strong dose made me feel great, yet I knew that I was dependent on it, knew that I was repeating with GHB the addictive cycle I’d been in with other substances in the past, and I was determined to get off it.

  I knew there was a nooner Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a nearby church, and I drove there and parked. I sat in the car and watched friends and strangers go into the church one by one, but I kept talking myself out of doing the same. I was just too fucked up to go to the meeting, I thought. Well, that’s when you’re supposed to go in. So what did I do?

  Instead of simply leaving and driving the back roads home, for some reason I decided I’d take the direct route down the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. The highway was busy at midday, and all was well—or at least I thought it was—until I realized I had driven right past the turn-off to my house and I had no idea where I was going. I’m told six different drivers had called 911 to report that a big sedan was weaving on the wrong side of the road.

  The California Highway Patrol dispatched a couple of cars to herd my car to the side of the road before I killed anyone or injured myself. I remember that before the first patrolman walked up to the car, I felt a sense of profound relief. I needed help.

  I was a mess and the patrolmen, of course, presumed I had been drinking. I hadn’t had a drop to drink in a long time. I knew that New York and Los Angeles were the only jurisdictions in the country that had just started testing for GHB, but it was so new, I presumed I wasn’t in too much trouble. I was euphoric enough, in fact, that nothing really concerned me. They had me in the police station and I was feeling no pain. I mean, the police wrote things like, “He was drooling,” and I’m sure I was. There was a paparazzo holding a camera over the fence, shooting photographs of me from the trailer park near the station. Someone took that crazy booking photograph that went instantly viral worldwide—my hair wild, my expression unsettling, and the overall effect making me look like an asylum inmate out for a lark in his flower-print Hawaiian shirt.

  In 1992, People magazine had named me the sexiest man alive, and now, ten years later, I looked to all the world like a madman—and I couldn’t be sure which of the two kinds of notoriety was worse. Yet that was of little concern that September. When I was released on bail a few hours later, I was cogent enough to call my lawyer and make some immediate plans. I made a call to a renowned East Coast psychiatric institution known for its addictions program, where I was told I could be admitted immediately. So I booked a private jet for the following day, then sat down with Brawley to talk.

  He was sixteen by then, and still living with Vicki Lewis and me. He had a sound understanding of GHB, the ways in which it was beneficial to me, the drug’s dangers, my physiological predisposition toward addiction, and the fact that I’d known for a while that I needed to get off it completely. There was a possibility that I would go into withdrawal, I told him, adding that a hospital dedicated to helping patients overcome addictions to a variety of substances would be the very best place for me if that occurred. He was supportive and resolved to keep up his studies with his tutor and the several other friends who were currently living and studying on our compound.

  But when I reached the hospital and we began to discuss a treatment plan, I quickly learned that GHB was not something the hospital staff had experience with. In fact, the first thing they did was to investigate it on a government website, then inform me that withdrawing entirely and successfully would probably take two years, and that I would likely die in the meantime. To be honest, I knew lots more about GHB than anyone
on the hospital’s staff did, but they had addiction-recovery expertise that I really needed. So I stayed, and easily weaned myself off GHB, then flew home thirty days after being released. I was a renewed and fortunate man. My old identity had worn me out and I was grateful to have freed myself from its grasp. It was time for reinvention and reentry into the world.

  THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY FOR REINVENTION ARRIVED IN 2003 when I took a call from Terry George, the Irish screenwriter and director who had been imprisoned in the late 1970s in Northern Ireland’s notorious Long Kesh Prison for allegedly antigovernment activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army. In the years since, he had made a name for himself writing and directing films like In the Name of the Father, Some Mother’s Son, The Boxer, and A Bright Shining Lie—pictures with a political consciousness and fiercely left-leaning point of view. I didn’t know Terry, but I knew his reputation and I wanted to hear what was on his mind.

  “You know, Nick,” he said during our first conversation, “there are some films we do for money. There are some films we do for art. And then there are films we do because they just might kill us. And that’s why you’ve got to do this with me.”

  “Holy shit,” I responded—already halfway in after hearing a pitch like that.

  “Well, it’s genocide. You’ll get the script. It’s not a huge role but it’s a significant role. Read it. That’s why I’m doing it. I have to. And Don Cheadle is doing it.”

  I immediately liked Terry’s style. He seemed like a straight-ahead kind of guy, someone who approached things a lot like I did, I suspected, and he didn’t appear to be shy about anything. As soon as I read the script, I was committed as well.

  The Rwandan genocide was the 1994 mass slaughter of African Tutsi tribespeople in Rwanda by members of the Hutu-majority government. Nearly a million Rwandans were killed between April and July of that year—almost 70 percent of all Tutsis and fully 20 percent of the country’s total population. The widespread slaughter only ended when the Tutsi-backed and heavily armed Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of the country, and an estimated two million Rwandans, mostly Hutus, were displaced and became refugees.