Title: A RARE AUDIENCE WITH KING JACK

Date: 12/1/1995; Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Author: William Arnold; 1995, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

12-01-1995

IT IS the late afternoon of a cloudy day in America's poshest city, and I am sitting in the presidential suite of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel waiting for my audience with Jack Nicholson, the supreme movie star of the postwar generation.
I have hotly pursued this interview, and never really expected to get it. Nicholson rarely meets the press these days (only a handful of interviews in the '90s), and he rigorously screens the names of the select few who gain access to him. To promote the opening of his new film, "The Crossing Guard," he consented to only three interviews.

And now that my moment is near, I am wondering what I have gotten myself into. For much of a week, I have been reading up on the star and talking to people who know him, and the picture that emerges is of a man isolated by wealth and fame, numbed by years of drug-taking, and increasingly hostile to journalists. One of the last reporters to interview him wrote of "his penchant for evading direct answers by launching into rambling, discursive, almost bullying narratives."
But just as I am seriously considering a retreat, a publicist enters the room and motions me to follow her down the suite's long hallway and into a wood-paneled den where a man is eating a late lunch. The man rises, offers his hand and says, "Hi, I'm Jack Nicholson," as if there could be any doubt that those arched eyebrows, squinty eyes, wild thinning hair and killer smile could belong to anyone else.
My first surprise is that Nicholson is not (many rumors to the contrary) especially short - maybe 2 or 3 inches under 6 feet. The second is that he could not be more hospitable or pleasant or chatty.
I ask the obvious question: Why is he doing this interview? And the eyes narrow and the smile widens with irony, until all his upper teeth show, and he says: "I want to sell this picture."
He means "The Crossing Guard," in which he plays a man unable to get over the death of his young daughter at the hands of a drunken driver. "I think Sean (Penn, the director) did a hell of a job with it, and it's the kind of small character film that gets lost in today's movie market. It needs whatever help I can give it."
He goes on for a while about the merits of the film, and it is like a scene from a Jack Nicholson movie. He seems almost to be playing the character, peppering his conversation with a little "heh-heh-heh" staccato laugh, arching the devil eyebrows to emphasize points, occasionally breaking into that extraordinary, irresistible Nicholson smile. And he has that lazy, vaguely stoned but amazingly precise manner of speaking that is such a treat to the ear.
"I originally came out here (to Hollywood) in 1954," he says. "I had just finished high school (in Neptune, N.J., where he was born) and had no clue what I wanted to do. Whether I would go to college or whatever. I was just here visiting. And I sort of took to Southern California right away. I stayed on and eventually got a job working as an office boy in the old MGM animation department."
A natural ham and more traditionally handsome as an 18-year-old than he would turn out to be as an older man, Nicholson was urged by friends to try acting. He studied with acting coach Jeff Corey, got his feet wet with a few minor TV parts ("Matinee Theater," "Divorce Court"), and within a few years was starring in his first picture, a 1958 Roger Corman B-movie called "The Cry Baby Killer." "You don't want to see it," he says.
He spent most of the '60s working as an actor in low-budget quickies - teen problem movies, horror movies, biker movies, hippie movies, war movies, Westerns. As the decade went by, however, he became less enchanted with acting and more interested in writing and directing - contributing the scripts to Corman's "The Trip," Monte Hellman's cult Western "Ride in the Whirlwind" and the Monkees' "Head."
He had all but given up on acting when Rip Torn fell out of an inauspicious biker movie called "Easy Rider," and he became the last-minute replacement. That movie, of course, went through the roof, his performance as a drop-out lawyer made him famous (and won him his first of 10 Oscar nominations), and his life would never be the same.
"I woke up one morning - literally one morning - and discovered I was a movie star," he says.
Few stars in all of movie history would have the run of excellence that Nicholson had following up "Easy Rider" in the '70s: "Five Easy Pieces," "The King of Marvin Gardens," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (his best-actor Oscar), "Chinatown," "The Last Detail," "Carnal Knowledge." His brilliantly drawn outsider characters (he calls them "cusp" characters) in these films defined the era.
Film historians of the '90s routinely refer to those years as the "Five Easy Pieces Era," and Nicholson agrees that it was a golden age of American cinema.
"It was the aftermath of the '60s, and studios and audiences - and critics - were more adventurous then, willing to accept risks. You'd have a hard time making any of those films today."
In the '80s, Nicholson adjusted well to the changing times. He retained his position as a major box-office star (and the first to get a $10 million per picture salary), he earned Oscar nominations for "Reds," "Prizzi's Honor" and "Ironweed," and he won a supporting actor award for 1983's "Terms of Endearment." He also made himself a fortune by shrewdly insisting on a piece of the gross and merchandising profits before he would agree to play the Joker in 1989's "Batman."
So far, the '90s have been more of a mixed blessing. There was another Oscar nomination for "A Few Good Men," but he was disappointed at the reception of "Hoffa," which he regards as one of his best performances, and stung by the continuing critical charges that his performances have been increasingly in the way of self-parody.
"The problem with critics is that they can't decide how they feel about me. When `The Shining' came out (in 1980), they hated it; now they say it was one of my best roles."
And there is the endless frustration of moviemaking.
"No matter who you are or what you've done, it just never gets any easier," he says. "The process is a killer - at least if you're trying to make anything worthwhile. Bob Rafelson and I have been trying for months to get going on "Blood and Wine," and we still can't quite make the deal. That's why movies are so bad - it's nine months making the deal and nine weeks making the movie."
Nicholson is so frustrated with all this that he claims he is seriously considering pulling up stakes and moving to France. He goes there frequently, he has taught himself to speak a "passable" French, and France recently reciprocated by naming him a Commander of Arts and Letters.
"I think I could make good movies in France. It's a smaller system, not as much expected of each film, and it just seems more sane."
It is his intense interest in all things French that led to the project that has been perhaps his greatest frustration of all: "The Murder of Napoleon." He bought the rights to the 1982 book, which deduces that Napoleon was poisoned (by arsenic) while in exile on St. Helena - assassinated by his archenemy, Comte D'Artois.
"It's two stories, really," he says. "The story of Napoleon in the final years of his life, and the story of how - centuries later - a group of historians and scientists use high technology to figure out what happened to him. It's an incredible project. But I have never been able to get the backing for it. . . .
"I've read practically every book ever written on Napoleon. I can't tell you how much I would like to make a movie about him - and how maddening it is not to be able to."
By the time the Miramax publicist comes to get me, a full hour has passed. Nicholson - still talking about Napoleon - doesn't want me to go. He keeps at it, even as the publicist starts giving me little embarrassed signals to get up, and then finally enters the room and practically pulls me from my chair and out the door.
As a parting shot, I can't resist telling Nicholson that - in preparation for this interview - I spoke to Richard Rush, who directed him in three of his best early films. Rush told the story of seeing Nicholson the day after "Easy Rider" opened.
Nicholson, dazed by the unexpected success, said to him: "What am I going to do, Dick? Here I was happily on my way to becoming a writer and director, and this thing has just happened - this accident, really. Should I become a big movie star, or walk away now?"
I tell him this story, and he pauses and gives me another big Nicholson smile - but one that is a little emptier than before.
"That's the moment, all right. That's my Rosebud. I could have gone either way at that point. And the day hardly goes by in which I don't think that, hey, maybe I took the wrong path."

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