JACK NICHOLSON, DOWN TO THE LAST DETAIL
By: Guy Flatley
February 10, 1974
New York Times
In 1974, when Jack Nicholson was in
"I've felt weird all day long, like I'm standing aside
and watching myself. And I look strange. What do you suppose this bump is on
the side of my face? I've never had anything like that before. And my eyes feel
all squinty. I must look like some guy doing a Bufferin
commercial."
His eyes do look a little squinty, but he could never pass
for a guy hooked on Bufferin. Nor does he look much
like Jack Nicholson, the blissfully blunt, boyishly
lewd cut-up of "Five Easy Pieces" and "Carnal Knowledge."
Yet it is Jack Nicholson sitting there on the lumpy hotel sofa, slumped sideways,
droopy-eyed, thin-haired, decked out in conservative
gray slacks and a red-and-blue plaid shirt like the one you gave your dad for
Christmas back in the fifties.
But after a while, just about the time the aroma of pot has
disappeared, telltale signs begin to surface--a cynical smile here, a sudden
flash of wicked laughter there, an obscenely accurate appraisal of one public
official or another. He's the same bad boy who made good as a boozy dropout in
1969's "Easy Rider," all right, and he's nipped into town now to
promote "The Last Detail," a salty saga in which he is so good as
"bad-Ass" Buddusky--a sweet-souled, sewer-mouthed, trigger-tempered, beer-belching,
skirt-chasing sailor--that he's sure to grab the Oscar nomination that
Hollywood mysteriously denied him for his knockout performance as Jonathan, the
kinky womanizer, in Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge."
"The Last Detail" opens today at the National and
Coronet, and like a good boy, Nicholson is here to spread the hoorays--partly
because he's in for a percentage of the profits. But it's clear that an
interview is the last detail he really wants to bother with. "Oh, my God,
I've been through this a million times," he sighs, not genuinely vexed,
just sort of embarrassed. "'Born in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1937...got a
job in the cartoon department at MGM...acted on television and in horror
movies...kept company with loose women...got into drugs...became
quasi-political...' And then the reporter simply figures out the best stylistic
way to say it all over again."
Well, just tell me if my questions get out of bounds.
"Nothing's out of bounds. You take your chances, and
I'll take mine."
Your father abandoned your mother when you were born?
"My father and mother separated when I was a baby. I
saw him extremely intermittently. He was a nice man. He's been dead for some
time. My mother is also dead. So I'm an orphan."
It's also been said that the formative days and nights of
Jack Nicholson were devoted to raising holy Ned in
Although Nicholson--more charismatic than conventionally
handsome--is considered by the Playboy set to be the bachelor's bachelor, a
free and frolicking agent with his pick of Hollywood's prettiest, the truth is
that he got married in 1961 and did the domestic drudgery bit for five
frustrating years. He is also a father.
"Jennifer is 10 now," Nicholson says in his quiet,
nasal drawl that seems more
Nicholson also finds it easy to talk to Anjelica
Huston, the dark and fetching daughter of director John Huston-possibly because
Tootie, as Nicholson calls her, is seldom more than a
whisper away. Even now, she is in the very next room. Would Nicholson, a lotharian legend in his own time, care to take a stand on
the sticky issue of sexual fidelity?
"I don't think you can have a policy about it," he
says after a second or so of meditation. "I think everybody is
possessive--it's one of those things than enhance male-female feelings. Of
course, being overly possessive is obviously going to irritate the person
you're having a relationship with. But I don't like to share my lady, really.
And I assume she feels the same."
Nor does he necessarily want to share a marriage contract
with his lady. "It's not that I'm dead set against marriage. But I really
do find--except for the purposes of an interview--that it is not the least
rewarding to have opinions on these things. Once things start happening, you
will do what you will do, no matter what pronouncements you've made in the
past."
Spoken more like an elder statesman than a
raunchy rebel. Is Father Time playing some premature trick on Nicholson?
"I'm aware that I'm getting older--I'll be 37 in April. I don't really
think much about it, but there was a song at the Dylan concert--I think it was
called 'Forever Young'--that started me wondering just how much anxiety I do
feel about growing old. I try to feel that it's just the actual meat that's
getting older. I gain extra weight and I wonder if maybe this time I won't lose
it again. There are dark circles under my eyes that may not go away. My hair is
going away. Of course, if I weren't a maniac, I wouldn't be noticing these
things.
"Old age--so what? If a truck hit me, I'd be gone right
away. And if there were cures for cancer and the other diseases, I'd start
worrying because I'd know I was going to die a violent death. Anyone who
reaches a certain age senses a loss of his powers. I just did two movies back
to back, and some days I was so tired that I knew I couldn't do what I was
supposed to do. That never happened to me before. Oh, I went ahead and did the
work, but not really. I guess we all have an anxiety about growing old, about
being excluded. Thinking, 'Am I the wrong age now for this kind of
behavior?'"
Sad to say, flocks of feminists equate Nicholson's kind of
behavior with the behavior of a male chauvinist pig. Maybe it's because he's so vividly vile as the man who treats women as sex objects. The
unsettling images of him ditching Karen Black in the ladies' room of a gas
station in "Five Easy Pieces" and bully-bruising Ann-Margret to the brink of suicide in "Carnal
Knowledge" cling stubbornly to the brain.
"I played those characters; I didn't editorialize
them. They are legitimate representations of male attitudes of our time,
attitudes which result in crippling negativism. I didn't try to make those men
any more or any less palatable to the audience than others I've played. That
would be pandering and pandering is the deadliest disease of the artistic
community. I don't try to force the audience to feel one way or the other.
"A certain segment of women say we can't know them,
because we're men. Well, they're hurting themselves with their rhetoric and
their propaganda. And I'm not talking on a theoretical level; there has been a
very real backlash. Men are writing fewer female roles than ever before because
they're made to feel that if they do write about women, they must give those
women a point of view about the movement. And that is very limiting. I'm afraid
it will be another five years before this quasi-dance of seduction between the
opposing political forces comes to an end. I myself try to duck conversations
about sexism. It's all so dehumanizing.
"I was a feminist long before women's rights became a
fashionable topic for discussion. I was talking with Bertolucci
last night after the Dylan concert and when I made some intimate little gesture
to Tootie, he said, 'Ah, you really do understand
women, don't you?' 'Of course,' I said, 'just as you do.' And then he said
something which I find to be so true. 'You can write a book or a play or do
almost anything,' he said, 'but you cannot make a movie if you don't appreciate
women.'"
Maria Schneider, the awesomely liberated sex kitten who is
amply appreciated by Bertolucci and who helped him
hugely in making his "Last Tango in Paris" the red, hot and blue
firecracker it became, will no doubt generate megatons of heat as the recipient
of Nicholson's passion in"The Passenger," a
top-secret flick directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
last year in London, Munich, Barcelona, Almeria and
the Sahara Desert.
"Working with Antonioni has
its ups and downs."
Could the downs possibly have anything to do with the
Maestro's celebrated habit of viewing actors as sticks of furniture?
"Oh, I didn't mind that," Nicholson says, somehow
managing to wink without so much as batting an eyelash.
Forget Antonioni. What do you do
with a problem like Maria?
Maria and I were old friends. I'd been out with her. I
always think of her as a female James Dean--she's a great natural. It's
funny--Tony Richardson told me he asked Maria what she thought of me and she
said, 'Well, Jack is a professional. He likes to know what he is doing. I do
not.'"
And, professionally speaking, Jack is doing plenty these
days--perhaps in an effort to make up for a slight dip in popularity stemming
from "Drive, He Said," a bleak look at lust and lethargy on campus
which Nicholson directed, but did not star in, in 1971, and "The King of
Marvin Gardens," Bob Rafelson's enigmatic 1972
drama in which Nicholson was cast as the sexually insecure brother of superstud Bruce Dern. Although
the public spurned this somber side of Nicholson's talent, both films have gone
on to achieve cult status among discerning buffs.
Not that Nicholson didn't have his pick of
the plums. "I passed up Michael in 'The Godfather' and I passed up
'The Sting.' Even though I am a non-mercenary artist, I had a pretty good idea
of the commercial worth of those properties. But, creatively, they were not
worth my time."
Presumably, "
And, with a little bit of luck, it will not be so bloomin' offbeat that they'll ban it in Georgia--as they
did "Carnal Knowledge"--on the grounds that it is pornography, a
judgment made possible by the recent Supreme Court rulings on obscenity.
"They're crazy! All I've got to say is I wish the
people who bring the actions against a movie like 'Carnal Knowledge' would have
to appear at these tribunals and give their reasons in their own words. No, I
take it back. I don't wish that at all. They'd just make fools of themselves
and then I'd feel sad. Let them stay hidden out there with their dumb
ideas."
Nicholson feels that dumb ideas have been bouncing about the
land for some time now, none dumber than the idea that "Easy Rider"
was guilty of glorifying dope dealers. "The kind of dope
dealers shown in that movie need a little glorification. Those guys
aren't even in business any more. Their use is up. Today, the big money is in
hard drugs. I myself am not a heavy drugger. I know
it's not fashionable to be an old pothead, but what can I do? That's pretty
much my level.
"The whole repression-of-drugs movement has had the
exact opposite effect of what was intended. Drug experts advised Nixon against
it, and they were proved right. Ever since he began cutting them off at the
border, there has been an extreme increase in the use of cocaine. But
Nixon...oh, forget Nixon, it's the whole country."
Nixon, however, is not an easily forgotten man. "I, for
one, don't want him to resign. I would like him to turn upon his constituency
and fight for his life and reveal the pressures that have motivated him. Let's
get a good look at the man, let's not accept some political step-down that is
made 'for the good of the government.' If we let that happen, everything will
be the same as before.
"I say this guy is running for a third term. I wouldn't
put it past him. And I'm sad to say the reason he still has his job is that
there is no one around who is willing to step up and say 'I'll do the job.' If
I were Nixon, I'd say, 'I'll put the issue before the public--they'll believe
me. I'll tell them I want a vote of confidence, that
this whole Watergate thing is nothing more than a muckraking media plot.' I
mean, who's going to run against the man? All the politicians are too busy
eating each other.
"I've hesitated saying these things about Nixon in the
press because I've been so afraid he'd like my ideas and use them," says
Nicholson, shaking his head in despair. "Come to think of it, I may be the
only man to fill his job. I'd better get on the phone--quick!"
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