Title: King leer. (actor Jack Nicholson) (Cover Story)

Date: 1/8/1993; Publication: Entertainment Weekly; Author: Kaplan, James

So vivid are the wild images of Jack Nicholson--McMurphy, hair and hospital gown askew, manning the spray nozzle in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jack Torrance grinning demonically as he puts a fire ax through a door in The Shining--that it's almost shocking to encounter the man himself, striding into his Mulholland Drive living room one sunny noon (quite early in the day for him) toward the end of the Bush administration: a cozy, bulky, slightly sleepy-looking fellow in an orange, buttoned-to-the-neck golf shirt under a brown cardigan. He reaches over to shake; he has big, strong-looking hands, golf hands, and an easy grip. His smile appears straightforward and friendly, its usual insinuation tamped down. With his clubhouse outfit and sparse M-shaped hairline he might almost be a bank executive on his day off--but then you see the extravagantly peaked brows and poly-ply eyelids, the level, veiled green-eyed gaze. No bank executive looks like this. Nobody else looks like this.

Nicholson's 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Lorraine, has entered with him. Moon-faced, pale-skinned, staring, she's the image of her mother, actress Rebecea Broussard, whose three-year relationship with Nicholson recently ended. As her father and I settle into big felt chairs in the comfortable, painting-and-book-filled living room (you have to look hard to find the two Oscars, for Cuckoo's Nest and Terms of Endearment, on an upper shelf), the child grasps his sweater, gaping over his arm at the visitor. "I want a bottle," she whines. Nicholson takes a Marlboro Light from a wooden box, lights it, exhales a big cloud of smoke. "Go ask [the babysitter], she'll give it to you," he says, his voice grainy and tired.

"No, you."

"You--I'm workin' here. Go ahead."

Thus the wheel has turned: from Jack Nicholson, obscure B-movie player, to Jack Nicholson, superstar and Hollywood wild man, to Jack Nicholson, grumpy dad. No doubt his mood would be better if the chair opposite him were empty. Nicholson gives interviews with the enthusiasm of a man undergoing minor surgery.

"Look," he says, in the patented, measured Nicholson cadences. "I'm not great at this, I don't like it, it's caused me"--he laughs, a little--"nothing but aggravation; [but] it's good for the pictures--if you do none, people think you don't endorse the product."

I ask why he won't appear on TV.

"I don't want people to know what I'm actually like," he says, with some asperity. "It's not good for an actor. They get to put you in their bedroom, turn you on and off, they form a lot of ... more concrete misconceptions about what they think you're all about. You know, anybody can fool the audience in one picture. The hardest thing is after they know you, how do you reconvince them that you're not you but Jimmy Hoffa? Or Nathan Jessep, in A Few Good Men?"

It's beyond me, I say.

He sits up straight and smiles faintly. "Well," he says. "It's the pro game. It's the real reality. It's the part they can't teach you in acting school."

There are many stars who are better left unmet, stars whose best selves are 20-foot images, scripted and lit and made-up. Then there's Jack Nicholson, himself as rich a character as any he has played. To whatever degree he manages to convince us he's Hoffa or Colonel Jessep (or Charley Partanna, or Garrett Breedlove, or Daryl Van Horne, or the Joker), Nicholson remains Nicholson: at once our foremost common man and our great outsider, our national rebel and rake. He'll never be overwhelmed by his roles; his chief professional jeopardy is always that his roles will be overwhelmed by him.

There's a bad moment early on in A Few Good Men, for example, where it seems that's about to happen: The slightly devilish rise of Jessep's very familiar eyebrows, as he tries to intimidate Demi Moore's character, feels a little too much like generic Jack--it might as well be Bobby Dupea ordering that chicken salad sandwich, hold the chicken, in Five Easy Pieces. Conversely, when Nicholson later explodes in resentful rage during a court-martial scene, his fury is given force by all the weight of his years--and by the very fact that it is so unlike the naughty, lovable Jack we'd grown almost too used to. He carries the same kind of power, at greater length, in Hoffa. "I'd never gotten to play anybody you could actually watch on film before," Nicholson says. It is his triumph, whatever the movie's limitations, that he's able to convey Jimmy Hoffa's overwhelming personality through his own.

"It's a portrait," Nicholson says, testily, when I ask if watching footage of Hoffa made it hard to avoid impersonation. "I mean, I got inside the guy, I believe. I like to try and, you know"--all at once he's doing this scary Nicholson face, lowering his chin and glowering at me in three-quarters profile, threatening to raise the hair on the back of my neck--"change." Back to normal. "This was fun for me," he says, "because it's a complete performance. You know, there's a lot to do."

Why do we love Jack Nicholson?

He does what he pleases; he is exactly who he is.

He has aged with utter honesty, endearing him to men; at the same time he remains devastatingly attractive to women, not from any carefully cultivated vanity but because of the sweet devil in his eyes.

He started poor but became very, very which.

He gives his all but withholds much.

John Joseph Nicholson, of Neptune, N.J., springs from pure American subsoil: He seems to come from '30s roadside America, a time before our regional and social differences began to be whittled down. His speech is the drawling swagger of a carny performer or traveling salesman, a bit of a lowlife and a bit of a poet, too.

It all flows naturally from an improbable background, Fellini crossed with James M. Cain. Born in 1937, Nicholson grew up in a post-Depression Jersey-shore household dominated by a beautician named Ethel May Nicholson, who he thought was his mother, and two much older "sisters," June and Lorraine. Ethel May had an itinerant, alcoholic husband named John Nicholson, whom the young Jack believed to be his father.

Not till he was a movie star, just after the release of--eerily enough--Chinatown, did he learn, from a TIME researcher helping to prepare a cover story on him, that Ethel May and John Nicholson were actually his grandmother and grandfather, and June and Lorraine were his mother and aunt. He would never find out the identity of his real father ("an X factor," he says), who impregnated June when she was 16. It is an explosion that still reverberates. To this day he refers to June as "my sister."

June Nicholson became a showgirl, and wound up in Los Angeles where the 17-year-old Jack went to visit her on a post-high school jaunt that turned permanent. "I always kinda thought I'd like to see California before I knuckled down, so to speak," he says. "I thought I'd return to school. In the East--I had a few places I could go to college. That was my rough plan."

Instead, he would up working as an office boy in the MGM cartoon department (under the legendary William Hanna), his main ambition in life, to have fun and gawk at movie stars. The gregarious young man struck up conversations with everyone, great and common alike, including the producer Joe Pasternak, who one day asked him if he wanted to take a screen test.

"I said no," Nicholson says. "[Pasternak] called my boss, Bill Hanna, Bill Hanna called me in the office, says, |what did you say." |I said no.' He said, |Well, what do you want to be the rest of your life, Jack--an office boy?'"

Nicholson tested. But whatever Pasternak had detected didn't translate into a fast career track.

"My first acting interview for a job," Nicholson recalls, "the man said to me, |Well, Jack, you're such an unusual person that I don't know exactly how we would use you, but when we need you, we'll need you very badly.'"

He half smiles. "To a guy who's 20 years old and doesn't understand much of what's being said to him, that's kind of an odd slap in the face--|You're too strange for almost anything.' I did not, quite frankly, think of myself as that strange, just as I don't today."

The new line of work panned out, just barely. There were a few small parts in studio movies, then larger (but low-paying) roles in a string of B pictures, beginning with The Cry Baby Killer in 1958. These were movies on the cheap, the sort that Roger Corman specialized in then--The Terror, The Raven--often starring Vincent Price and/or Boris Karloff. With his smooth face and devious eyes, Nicholson played a lot of psychos and henchmen. "I wasn't interviewed for boy-next-door parts when I was the boy next door," he says.

By the mid-'60s, says Sandy Bresler, Nicholson's agent for more than three decades, "he'd been acting nearly 10 years, and I just couldn't get him meaningful work." The crisis was a big studio picture called Major Dundee, into which Bresler tried, and failed, to get his client. "I said, |You've got to get another job,'" Bresler says.

Fortunately, his client didn't listen. "Jack was happy with it," Bresler says. "He grew up with hard times. The economic hardship of being a struggling actor never fazed him."

Something was happening in Hollywood, however, that would end the struggling. The days of big studio pictures were numbered, the old Hollywood order was changing, and so was the rest of the world. After hanging out for years with a group of independent-minded screenwriters, directors, and producers--people like Corman, Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson, Carole Eastman, Robert Towne, and Bert Schneider--Nicholson had begun doing some screenwriting and producing himself. There was The Shooting, "a McLuhan mystery" (Nicholson starred and coproduced), and Ride the Whirlwind, an existential Western" (Nicholson started and wrote the screenplay).

And then there was The Trip, the story of a TV-commercial director who experiments with LSD, which Nicholson wrote for director Corman. The script was supported by ample research. The screenwriter had been an enthusiastic recreational drug user since the '50s, and the times were finally catching up to him. When The Trip's stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, respectively produced and directed and cast themselves as the leads in Easy Rider, they hired Nicholson to play the boozy, disillusioned Southern lawyer George Hanson, who switches to pot and joins Captain America and Billy on their ride.

"I felt strongly that the movie was gonna be a very big success," Nicholson says. But he never anticipated the precise nature of that success. When the lights came up after Easy Rider's screening at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, the audience was cheering wildly--for him. With one role, the B-movie exile had become an international movie star. Overnight, after 11 years.

"Changed my life," Nicholson says, simply.

"When we need you, we'll need you very badly."

The role was closer to the bone than anything he'd done. For the first time he was able to bring to bear his intelligence, humor, and poetry, all whetted by a decade on the outside. The balding young man with the suave drawl was hipper than the hippies. At 32, he had finally become Jack Nicholson.

In the '70s, he was our favorite Bad Boy, the movie star for people who didn't believe in movie stars. Career and myth intertwined: Jack running with Warren, with Roman-Jack doing just what we'd dream of doing if anything--anything--were possible. At the same time, his longtime liaison with Anjelica Huston, which began in 1973, seemed like the stuff of cinema royalty--a class act, to the credit of both, even as the relationship's openness, and the daunting effect of his vaulting success on her nascent acting career, slowly undid them. And somehow, all the while, his play ethic never dented his work ethic.

Jack Nicholson is talking about a fellow hardworking blue-collar hero, Jimmy Hoffa, and the difficulties--difficulties he understands all too well--of mythic status. "As Hoffa said in many interviews, don't listen to what people tell you with fancy words, and what they write," Nicholson says. "We now know that what he's saying is true--I mean, I'm certainly less controversial than Jimmy Hoffa, and I can tell you that a large percentage of what is believed to be absolute truth about me, isn't."

A more cynical way of looking at it might be that Nicholson, once extremely active in promoting himself, now no longer needs the notoriety that brings. "The image thing--he just ran with it for a while. I guess he thought he'd see what it could do for him," says Michael Keaton, Nicholson's costar in Batman, and a friend since they worked on that film. "There are parts of Jack's personality that people would be very surprised about. He's quite conservative in certain areas. We were talking about aging in Hollywood--who's still got the great looks, male and female. And he said, |Ah, Keats--the ladies, they got it a lot harder than us.' Now, some people would think he'd be the last person to say that. But in fact he's the first. I'm not saying the guy's a saint. He's just different from what a lot of people think."

"Why do you work so much?" I ask him. "Is it money?" For a second I think of W.C. Fields, who also grew up poor, and left secret savings accounts in every town he played in his vaudeville days.

One corner of Nicholson's mouth rises briefly. "Well, you know, money hasn't really been the issue with me for quite a while," he says. (His take from Batman was an estimated 50 million; then there's the reported $10 million per picture, plus percentage of grosses, he has been banking for a few years.) "I just do what I feel like--that's all there is to it. I've always enjoyed the work; I mean, I had been of late looking for more time off, because of children and so forth. But you know, these jobs here, they're all with people that I've known for quite a while."

Danny DeVito, director and costar of Hoffa, first met Nicholson when they worked together in Cuckoo's Nest; the two bonded when Nicholson found DeVito was also a Jersey-shore native. "Why has Jack lasted so long?" DeVito says. "The first thing is, he's a very wonderful actor--his chops are up there at the top. Plus, he's made really great choices of material. He's very committed to the work." De Vito pauses, momentarily at sea in the abstractions, then a light bulb comes on. "You know what I think it is? You always like him. What can you say? The guy played the devil! You gotta love him!"

"I've only done a few movies, but I find myself getting more and more negative about the business," says Tim Burton, who directed Nicholson in Batman. "Jack knows exactly what's going on--he has this incredible history behind him--and he enjoys it all. I mean, he is who he is for a reason, you know."

Jack Nicholson is showing me his paintings. This is no light matter. "Jack," a friend of his has joked, "lives in a $500,000 house with a $100 million art collection." The joke isn't far from the truth, yet his art, which is truly phenomenal, is no more for ostentation than his startlingly modest, two-story '50s-modern house: He buys what he wants because he loves it. He started collecting certain L.A. painters when he was still poor, because these painters were his friends. He will pursue a desired picture to the ends of the earth, and when he gets it, he knows it down to the last brush stroke.

"I like this," he says, pausing by a small canvas at the foot of the stairs, "because you see a lot of palette-knife work--it shows you why Picasso is Picasso. Look at how clean this is--this is a sure hand if ever there was one."

We stroll from room to room, upstairs and down. Nicholson narrates with a wary yet loving authority: "This is [Martin Johnson] Heade, the Brazilian period; these are all primary American Luminist painters, and they're all magic-hour pictures, which they should be."

Of course, walking from room to room in Jack Nicholson's house, one doesn't just think of paintings. "This I find charming, this Grosz here," he notes casually as we enter a bathroom. The watercolor is of two nude women with their tongues in each other's mouths. Vistas of Nicholson fantasy open up. Not to mention the Nicholson legends--Ping-Pong paddles! Silk sheets! Peanut butter sandwiches! All of which is difficult to reconcile with the particulars of these domestic, even disheveled, surroundings. Homely details keep catching the eye. A stack of golf-instruction tapes by a big-screen TV. An overflowing rack of ties in the master bedroom. An unruly line of shoes and ski boots on the floor of a guest room. A toilet seat with an actual rattlesnake embedded in the Lucite lid. A collage over the commode that reads, "Does size matter?"

There is much more I'd love to see; Nicholson has other plans. "And that's this house full of pictures," he says pointedly. We go back downstairs. Standing in Lorraine's bedroom, he consults as the babysitter helps the girl gets dressed: "You better wear a sweater, it's chilly out." (Nicholson shares childcare duties with Broussard; the former couple also have an 11-month-old son, Raymond.)

Nicholson walks me out to his driveway. It's an astonishingly clear day in Los Angeles: A rainstorm has swept out the air, and you can see north over the Valley, past the Santa Susanas to the snow-covered peaks beyond. Early on, I'd asked what has changed about Hollywood in Nicholson's nearly four decades here. Now he admires the view and sweeps an arm. "This is what's changed," he says. "When I moved here there was only one freeway. You could see through the air then."

He takes a deep breath. The air is clean; the inquisition is over. He can get in nine holes before dark. He looks out over the town he came to visit 40 years ago and has come to rule. And he gives me a full Jack Nicholson smile at last. "It's still the greatest place, isn't it?" he says.

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