Title: Jack; the lad; Who put the devil in Jack Nicholson? And what makes him think we want to see his autobiopic? On the eve of an overdue comeback, David Thomson reveals the young life that made old Jack the loveable rogue he is today.(Features)

Date: 12/14/2003; Publication: The Independent Sunday (London, England); Author: Thomson, David (English writer)

Byline: David Thomson

In a strange Christmas season for movies, it is possible not only that Jack Nicholson is back, but back with a picture that most people are going to insist on seeing. It's one of those light, romantic comedies that depend on perfect casting. In this case that means a sharp yet fond probing of the very reasons why everyone still loves Jack. The movie is called Something's Gotta Give, and it's important that I spell out its storyline.

Jack plays a guy who is a lot like Jack - 66, and defiant about it, charming, funny, wicked, his devil's eyebrow struggling to reach up for his receding hairline, his body doing its very best to keep up with his helpless taste for young women. Well, Jack is having a nice little love affair with Amanda Peet who is likely all of 30. On one tryst, he goes back to Amanda's mother's house - the mother is Diane Keaton, an exceedingly attractive 57 by now. In the pleasant exertions of his social situation, Jack has a heart incident. He has to rest up - at Keaton's house, with Keanu Reeves (now 38) as his doctor. Is it the heart attack, is it a larger emotional crisis? Whatever, for the first time in his life, Jack falls in love with a woman of a "suitable" age - Keaton. But Keanu falls for her, too.

You don't have to be a connoisseur of Nicholson to smell out an ideal screwball comedy for the age of Viagra. But the film stumbled upon another plus: Keaton and Nicholson have delicious chemistry. She is never lovelier than when laughing, and Jack is a tease who gets his greatest arousal in those situations. More than 20 years ago, when they both appeared in Reds, there were whispers that Jack might have sneaked Diane's heart and the rest of her for a moment or two while her steady, Warren Beatty, was busy with the movie. I doubt that happened, but I'm pretty sure the parties themselves wondered. And now, at long last, they get their chance. USA Today printed a double interview which consisted largely of Jack making outrageous remarks at Diane's expense, with her tottering around the room in laughter, and then jabbing back. I'll guess that there's an audience for this flirty cross-talk, and it begins with the stars themselves having fun.

No, I'm not predicting that Jack and Diane will find each other in marriage, or that Jack - Hollywood's perpetual romantic adventurer - will at last grow up. Jack is on course to be a 90-year-old who is a danger to the nursing profession. His notion that young women are the most fun is unshakeable - and it fits in with his being one of the richest, most amiable and authentically entertaining celebrities in America. It's possible that even though it's a comedy Something's Gotta Give could win him a 13th Oscar nomination. (That would break Katharine Hepburn's record.) It's even on the cards that his favourite team - the Los Angeles Lakers - could win the basketball championship (though that may depend on a Colorado court deciding that star player Kobe Bryant was having consenting sex, and not being a rapist. What other sort of sex is there? you can hear Jack asking, with that wicked grin creeping across his jowls).

I'll admit that we're stepping perilously close to political incorrectness here - forgive me, I'm past 60, too, and I feel I grew older with Jack, even if that meant avoiding maturity. There are good reasons for people being troubled over the Kobe Bryant case - and sighing at the unrestrained childishness of senior stars with nymphs on their arm. What is especially striking this Christmas is the indication that Jack is actually someone who feels those doubts, too. But that requires another kind of story.

Jack Nicholson was born in Neptune, New Jersey, on 22 April 1937, and he was named John Joseph Nicholson. He was the son of another John Joseph (born in 1900) and Ethel May Rhoads (born in 1898). John Joseph Sr and Ethel had two daughters already, June and Lorraine. June had been born in 1918; Lorraine came along in 1922. Then there was a 15-year gap before Junior, or Jack, saw the light - enough to make the parents very happy, wouldn't you think? In which case, it was odd that soon after Jack's birth his father left home and took to drink. So Jack never knew his father well. He had just rare outings with a man who was a drifter and a failure, a charmer, but a drunk. As it was, Jack was raised in a house of fond women - Ethel, and his two sisters.

Jack was pretty smart in school, and he is today a fellow who has educated himself in literature, art (he is a great collector) and politics. But he didn't like to be seen working: he enjoyed acting, clowning and being an entertainer; he was crazy about sports; and he was devoted to girls. By the age of 18, he had moved out to Hollywood - without any thought of college. That was 1955, and naturally enough Jack wanted to be James Dean - him and about two million other kids.

He's the one who made it. After a 12-year period of acting classes and any work he could find, he had a breakthrough in Easy Rider (1969). In the next few years, he did Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail and Chinatown - he was Jack.

It was in the run-up to the opening of Chinatown that Time magazine recognised Nicholson as a popular hero. So they planned to put him on the cover and they sent reporters to look into his life. One of those reporters went to Neptune, New Jersey, and soon got wind of an unexpected story. Ethel - who had died in 1970 - was not exactly Jack's mother. She was his grandmother. The true mother was June, the "older sister" in Jack's imagination. June had died young, in 1963.

Time broke the story, and Nicholson seemed stunned by the news. In which case, of course, it was all the harder in that he no longer had Ethel or June to talk to. It wasn't exactly a scandal - no one could claim that Jack had done anything wrong - but there was an unsolved question, to which no answer has ever been settled. Who was the real father?

June had been very friendly with Don Furcillo-Rose, a handsome man who sang and danced with bands at holiday resorts on the New Jersey shore. There's no question but that June and Don had a romance. Furcillo-Rose even claims a secret marriage meant to legitimise the child he thought was his. But this was tricky because Don was married already.

There was another candidate for Dad. June Nicholson was trying to put together a career in show business, and she was also close to a guy, Eddie King, who had a radio show for new discoveries. And there are photographs of Eddie where it's not too hard to see the outlines of Jack's attitude and seductive grin. Meanwhile, Don Furcillo-Rose - the only survivor from those pre-war Jersey days - insisted that he was the father. Jack took no steps to meet him, or to enter into conclusive blood-tests. He said that he preferred to let the matter rest.

Until now. For today's Jack Nicholson, often highly critical of the flimsy material that is sent to him, has begun talking about making a movie that deals with the clouded circumstances of his own arrival in the world. He wants to direct it himself - and he has directed before: Drive, He Said; Goin' South; and The Two Jakes. This is not a project in which he would expect to act - unless he wanted to handle the role of the man he once regarded as his father. It would be a small story of young people in New Jersey busting to get into entertainment, and a special kind of family intrigue or cover-up.

But pause a moment. Think of it as a movie in which you have a cute, observant kid in a household of women, adored and encouraged by them all, so that he grows up knowing women pretty well. It seems to me that the story plays best if the little boy is never quite sure about his own family tree. Why did Dad go away? Why does Grandma leave so much of the caring to Sis? And why does Sis cuddle him in that wistful way?

Then think of Chinatown, which was written by Robert Towne, and written with Jack specifically in mind, after a friendship of 12 years' standing or more, a friendship that had begun in Jeff Corey's acting class. And then recollect that Chinatown is a story in which Nicholson plays private eye Jake Gittes who puzzles out the intrigue in the wealthy and very powerful Cross family. Noah Cross (John Huston) is one of the founding fathers in Los Angeles. He has a daughter, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), who is married to Hollis Mulwray, the city's chief of power and water, Evelyn and Hollis have a daughter, Katherine. Except that Hollis is not the father. Noah Cross raped his own daughter, and Katherine is the child of that outrage. There's a key scene in a car where Gittes gets Evelyn to tell him the truth: "She's my daughter - she's my sister - she's my daughter and my sister!"

Is that coincidence, or part of a shared intrigue which helped to put Time on the road to New Jersey? In every way except that of human interest it doesn't matter. But that's where you come close to the secret of Jack Nicholson: for we really like and care for this plain but wild man.

I don't see this as the threshold to a maudlin psychoanalytic breakthrough where Jack the philanderer suddenly stops going around with girls who could be his granddaughters. If you want to see Jack Nicholson as a helpless betrayer of women, terribly damaged by the way he was betrayed - so be it. The Nicholson I've met is a lot stronger than that. He has a dark, private, sad side, to be sure, and it's what sparks his urge to make people laugh, to act, to entertain. But he's not sorry for himself, and not the type who is destroyed by any discovery about human behaviour. I think it's in his wise and resilient nature to know that you never can tell about life, so you might as well be as decent and appealing to anyone you meet.

If he makes this movie of his - and I hope he does - I can see a terrific opportunity for some wonderful young actress as June, the sister who is a mother but can't own up to it. And Jack will likely have a fling with her - for old timers' sake.

`Something's Gotta Give' opens in the UK in February next year

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