Jack Nicholson Is Taking the Year Off

This story was originally published in the April 16, 1981, issue of Rolling Stone.

The Outsider

He thought of himself as a dark specter beyond the bathers. Most of the lifeguards at this particular New Jersey beach had opted for the image of Bronze Protector, but Jack Nicholson was different. He was a boat guard, and he enjoyed rowing out beyond the breakers. His job was to see that no swimmer strayed too far or got in too deep. It was the mid-Fifties, and Jack was the sort of older teenager who identified with Holden Caulfield, that sad, neurotic hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel whose only dream was to stand in a field of rye where children were playing and to catch them before they fell off the cliff.

Jack stood as he rowed, and he was good with the boat. He wore a black lifeguard jacket, a World War II fatigue hat and mirror shades. His nose and lips were white with sunscreening zinc. He worked hard at the symbology of separateness.

The day that Jack Nicholson made the local papers for the first time was a bad one at the beach. There was a hurricane far out in the Atlantic, and it was kicking up heavy waves. The surf was too high for boats, and the guards were keeping swimmers in close. There was a jetty to the south and a separate beach below. That beach had its own crew of lifeguards, and it was there that eleven bathers were somehow carried out to sea by a vicious rip current.

Jack sprinted down to the beach, ready to help. There was no way to row the boats out through all that wind-whipped surf. The strongest swimmer among the guards had strapped himself into a harness attached to a long rope. He would plunge out through the surf, grab as many of the endangered swimmers as possible, and the other guards would pull him back in. But there were too many drowning people out there, and one guard couldn’t hope to save them all. A lot of them were going to die.

Nicholson ran back to his own beach, where the surf was not quite as high. Although the other guards doubted it could be done, Jack thought he might be able to muscle a boat out. He pulled through five-foot-high waves, waves so steep that sometimes it seemed as if the boat were moving in a vertical plane. Exhausted, he pulled out beyond the breakers, into the chop and swell, and made his way around the jetty, finally picking up the last five swimmers.

Editor’s picks

Everyone on both beaches was watching, and a news photographer got a nice shot of the boat topping the crest of a huge wave, bow pointing into the sky. That photo made the paper.

“You can’t really see my face,” Nicholson told me, “but the caption said I had risked hurricane surf to rescue five. Something like that. What they didn’t mention is that as soon as I beached the boat, I puked my guts out in front of about 40,000 people.”

Nicholson told me this story on a ski lift one day. I myself had been a lifeguard, and we were swapping tales of heroic rescues, as former lifeguards tend to do. What struck me most in the telling of this story was the way Nicholson described himself as a loner, an outsider. Lifeguards, I know from experience, tend to be gregarious. The strong young people I worked with years ago were not being entirely facetious when they referred to themselves as “sun gods.” Your average sun god does not like boat duty. He prefers to strut about the beach so that mere mortals may worship.

After a week of hanging around with him, skiing and talking about painters and authors, talking about basketball and film, it occurred to me that, despite his success, despite an Oscar, despite all the producers and directors and other actors who would love to work with him, Jack Nicholson still views himself as an outsider.

Related

The Killer Instinct

THE WORST CELEBRITY INTERVIEWS are conducted over lunch in some chic restaurant with the waiter interrupting a prize anecdote to ask who had the fettuccine while the public-relations person across the table is saying, “What Bobby really meant to say here was …” Some are held in a mobile home on a movie set. Others happen in desperate motel rooms around the world. Still others are held in the star’s home after the cleaning lady has left. This interview was conducted on skis, over a period of several days. It was set up by mutual friends, and Jack called me at home to confirm the date. This is not the way these things are usually done in Hollywood, but it’s the way Jack Nicholson seems to do them.

“Do you ski?” he asked.

“Not for several years,” I said, “and then not very well.”

“You’ll do okay.”

Photograph by Albert Watson

A few days later, I joined the Crack of Noon Club, an amorphous and informal group that convenes at a certain restaurant near Aspen’s Buttermilk Mountain almost every day the snow is good. The restaurant serves good coffee, fresh-squeezed orange juice and the kind of enormous breakfast you want before hitting the slopes at the crack of noon. Membership in the club varies according to who feels like skiing on any particular day. Jack and his longtime companion, Anjelica Huston, are usually present. Sometimes Jimmy and Jane Buffett join them, or producer Lou Adler, or director Bob Rafelson might be there. I met a few instructors, a local racer, one of Jack’s buddies who shares his love of basketball and skiing, and Ed Bradley of CBS News, who was taking a short ski vacation.

“Jack,” Bradley told me over his third order of sausage, “is of the fugit school. Here’s the top of the mountain. There’s the bottom. Fugit, let’s go.”

“Is he good?”

“Pretty good. I’d say his style depends largely on courage.”

Promptly at half past the crack of noon, we hit the lifts. When the last of the group arrived at the top of the hill, the Crack of Noon Club suddenly became the Thundering Herd. They all simply took off down the slope like crazed Comanches, whooping for joy and leaving me gasping behind as I executed a large number of cowardly traverses.

Over the next few days, I managed to regain my snow legs to the point that I never completely lost sight of the Thundering Herd. Nicholson congratulated me on my perseverance, if not my technique. Small shows of courage went a long way with the Herd.

Jack himself was not the best technical skier in the group, but I seldom saw him anywhere but in the lead. Occasionally a hotshot would shoot by us, but in general, the rule was “No one passes the Thundering Herd.” Nicholson obviously preferred the sides of the runs, where the bumps were fewer and smaller. Moguls annoyed him. He was after speed, and he seldom turned: “Slows you down,” he explained.

He would often wait for me at the lift line, and we’d put in twenty minutes of interview time on the chair.

“You have a, uh, unique style,” I said.

“Yeah. I’d describe it as massive poetry in motion,” Jack said seriously, “though others say it looks like a dogfight rolling down the hill.”

“Anjelica is a good athlete. Good technique.”

Nicholson graced me with one of his perfect homicidal grins. “Yeah. But she lacks … the killer instinct.” Some time later, I relayed the comment to Anjelica, and she replied with a vigorous masturbatory gesture.

Two things became very apparent, very quickly. One, Jack loved to ski the narrow, raggedy line that divides control from total disaster. Two, he enjoyed skiing with others. He took time out to help Bradley and me, the two weakest skiers in the group. Bradley hadn’t skied in years, but he was improving hourly, and Jack, through word and deed, would caution him against the danger and delay of excessive caution.

Late one afternoon, on the hairiest run the Herd had yet negotiated, Bradley caught an edge, took a header and went bouncing ass over teakettle halfway down the mountain. His parka was ripped, he had a hard time breathing, and he lay there in pain for several minutes. When he finally did get up, he thought it wise to have me check him over for broken bones.

A spill like that can shatter your confidence, and Jack, mindful of this, set a slower pace and led us down the easier slopes. When we got to the lift, Bradley said he wanted to go back to the slope on which he’d crashed and burned. “Gotta get right back on the horse that threw you,” he said. Now this is exactly what you might expect from a man like Bradley. In one of the most famous filmed reports to come out of the Vietnam War, Bradley was wounded, on camera. What is less well known is that, immediately upon being released from the hospital, Bradley made his way back to the front lines.

“We don’t have to take the same run,” Jack said, reasonably enough.

“Got to,” Bradley replied.

A look of complete understanding passed between the two men. Nicholson broke into his homicidal grin. Bradley had the killer instinct.

Sex and Violence, Guts and Glory

RIDING UP THE LIFT, Nicholson told me he was taking the year off. “The last three years, out of, what, 156 working weeks, I worked 162. I was editing one project and acting in another. Anyway, I was talking to Richard Burton, and I asked how much time he’d taken off in his career. He asked, ‘Off off?’ An actor knows what it means to take off. I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Maybe six weeks.’ In thirty years he’s taken six weeks to himself. So I decided to take off, to watch the seasons change. You become an actor because it isn’t a nine-to-five job. You expect an unscheduled existence. Then you become bankable, and you have all these projects spread out in front of you, and you know exactly what you’ll be doing four years from now. Even the president of the United States doesn’t know what he’ll be doing four years from now. I want to get out of that cycle for a while. Let the reservoir fill up.”

One of the projects that came out of 162 straight weeks of work is a film version of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel of violence and sexual obsession, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain was a best-selling author in his day, though he is not highly regarded today. It turned out that Nicholson and I both shared an admiration for Cain’s writing. “What’s interesting about Cain,” Jack said, “is that he came out of the same hard-boiled school as Chandler and Hammett. But they wrote about detectives, good guys, and Cain wrote about criminals.

“You know, Cain started as a journalist, and there is a lot of detail in his writing. He’s very cinematic. We essentially did the book. We added very little. [Screenwriter] David Mamet came in right on the money, first draft. The Lana Turner-John Garfield version [1946] was a classic, but at the time, they couldn’t really do the book. Not all the scenes. I mean, you know what it is: it’s a folie à deux lust and murder with a strong sadomasochistic element.

“What I like about Cain is that his women are very strong. Villainesses. You think of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis in those roles. That’s why Jessie [ Jessica Lange] is going to blow everyone out of the water.

“The characters are very sexual, and this is a sexual story. The movie isn’t about relationships, it’s about sex, and the core of it is the suddenness of the sex, of the desire between these two characters.”

“A lot of naked people?” I asked.

“Hardly any.” We talked for a while about sexuality in film. “The sex in the movie arises out of the acting, sexual acting,” Jack said. “A writer friend of mine saw a screening and he said, ‘Shit, I haven’t had a hard-on in a movie since I was eighteen.’”

“Makes me sorta want to see it,” I said. Nicholson said he would arrange a screening in Los Angeles. He had chartered a jet to fly back there for a few days because the Lakers had eight home games coming up, and one of the joys of his life is watching his team stomp all over everyone else.

I struggled to keep up with the Thundering Herd on the run, and on the next lift ride, Jack brought up a subject that seemed to be haunting him.

“People seem to think The Shining stiffed, but I think it’s Warners’ tenth-biggest grosser in history. Critically, it’s been ignored.”

I told Jack about a speeding ticket I’d gotten in Wyoming, and how the highway patrolman had talked to me for half an hour when he heard I was on my way to interview Nicholson. The fellow had loved The Shining and felt obligated to tell me the entire story. There’s nothing more boring than listening to someone recount the plot of a movie, especially when a forty-dollar ticket depends on the quality of your attention, but as I listened, the patrolman worked his way up to the climactic scene in which Jack, as the deranged husband with ax in hand, chases his wife through an abandoned, snowbound hotel in the Rockies. Jack is pounding his way through the door in a homicidal frenzy while his wife cowers in the next room.

“He hacks this hole big enough for his face,” the patrolman said, “and he does this expression” — out there on the windswept high plains of Wyoming, the patrolman pressed his face close to mine and let his features fall in the rubbery, slack contortions of madness — “and he says, Heeeeeere’s Johnny.’” The patrolman laughed out loud and repeated the line again, like the punch line of a good joke.

“Yeah,” Jack said, “people loved that line. I remember Stanley [Kubrick] wanted a funny line there. It was the most horrific scene in the movie, and he wanted to break it up. So I came up with that line. It holds a lot of the essence of what we were trying to do.

“I mean, we had the Stephen King novel, and we wanted to get to the heart of that. But I remember, I kept thinking of those old EC comics. Do you remember those?”

I did, too vividly. They were the ones I had to hide from my parents: gory, blood-spattered epics of severed limbs, spilled intestines, crushed, burned and mangled bodies, the plots of which always hinged on some horrible and macabre joke. We swapped a few of the stories we could recall. It’s a strange fact that people who read those comics almost a quarter of a century ago can invariably dredge up some lurid details out of a dank and haunted little room in the mind. Jack remembered a story about an evil butcher who beat his wife. She hacked him up with the tools of his trade and served his dismembered flesh at a neighborhood barbecue. Everyone kept asking her where her husband was.

“No wonder they banned those things,” I said.

“I wonder if the critics missed that element, or whether — I hadn’t thought of this — whether they felt a horror genre was somehow below Stanley?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted it to be one thing or the other: either humor or horror. Maybe they thought the interrelationship of the two was somehow indecent.”

Nicholson brightened up considerably at this. Better indecent than mediocre.

Sisphyus with Six-Guns

ALL THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, Jack Nicholson had these … deportment difficulties. Think early Fifties, imagine the black hair combed back into a DA, the pegged pants, and you just about have it. “I never got to play basketball,” Jack said. “There was some lack of ability involved, but it was primarily for deportment reasons.” Jack was a freshman, the manager of the varsity basketball team, when he deported himself badly enough to be banned from sports. After an away game, some members of the other school jumped one of the players on Jack’s team and beat him badly. In an act of revenge, Nicholson snuck back into their gym and destroyed a big music console.

There was the neighborhood in Neptune City, New Jersey, where Jack spent his earliest years — it was mostly black, and so were many of his earliest friends. Basketball was the game, and his town “used to produce black basketball champions year after year.” You can still hear some of the hero worship in his voice as he talks about it.

And he spent a lot of time reading, always reading. “Writers provided role models. They got people thinking.” So Jack was reading Catcher in the Rye, that pitiful, protracted whine about the “phonies” of the Fifties and the superficiality of American society

“They say the Fifties weren’t creative, but I don’t believe it,” Jack told me. “The environment was so tough on self-expression that if you came out of school with any creativity at all, you’d be creative for the rest of your life. It was a good era for an artist to grow up in. It toughened you.”

Nicholson scored high on his college boards and was offered a scholarship, but instead of college he took off for California and twelve solid years of acting classes. “I also spent a lot of time hustling pool,” he said. “It was all in the proposition. I could make money being the third-best player in the room. I made some money at the track, too. I bought my first car with it, a ’49 Studebaker.”

During that time, he studied acting with Jeff Corey and Martin Landau and Lee Strasberg. He was reading the existentialists. He was interested in Zen Buddhism. He wrote a screenplay, a western based on Sisyphus. He hung out in poolrooms. He worked as an office boy in the cartoon department of MGM, handling mail for Tom and Jerry.

“I came to L.A. in ’54,” Jack said. “It wasn’t until ’57 that I began to think of myself as an actor.” An actor who considered himself something of a Zen existentialist with perpetual deportment problems. His politics leaned to the left, but he agreed with the Buddhist dictum “skirt the authorities.” He had an affinity for black culture, he identified with the characters at the track and pool hall. He was deadly serious about his art. What you had, in fact, was a classic Beat. It was as if, say, Jack Kerouac had taken up acting instead of writing.

Giant Apes, Moaning Carrots

“I’M A LUCKY ACTOR,” NICHOLSON SAID. “Even though I wasn’t very successful until my thirties, I never had to pump gas. I was always able to work at my trade.”

There was a period early in Jack’s career during which he was always cast as the kill-crazy teenager. “You can spot that era,” Jack points out, “because my eyes always look like two piss holes in the snow. I was letting them make me up, and somehow they blotted out my eyebrows.” Denying Nicholson his eyebrows is like asking Richard Burton to play the lead in the Marcel Marceau story. Nicholson started refusing makeup.

After the era of browless homicidal teenagers, Nicholson found himself working in a strange collection of pictures. There were the big bike epics, including Hell’s Angels on Wheels and The Rebel Rousers. Nicholson says he played bikers as “the modern man on horseback,” a notion that may contain more romance than reality, but one that endears him to bike people to this day.

“At AIP,” Jack said, “I worked with [screenwriters] Carol Eastman and Robert Towne. Monte Hellman got me into writing, and I emerged from that with a wider view. I started trying to produce, and all that was a key turn in terms of aesthetics. I began to see filmmaking as a whole, to see how all the parts fit together. Filmmaking is a collaborative art, and collaboration is what I’ve studied. I learned that a good actor can always be interesting, but fine acting involves the whole piece. And if you write or direct or produce as well as act, you understand that. Orson Welles once told me that the ideal figure for the theater is a writer who acts. Shakespeare, Molière, Charlie Chaplin were all actors who wrote.” Not to mention Orson Welles.

That group — Nicholson, Eastman, Hellman — experimented within the context of the B movie. They saw themselves as underground, experimental filmmakers, like Jonas Mekas or Stan Brakhage. A few strange films like Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting emerged out of those collaborations, films that have since become cult classics.

Nicholson also worked on another kind of film, movies that stretched the limits of credulity and taste, and that were, on occasion, so rotten, so unrelentingly execrable, that they rose to the level of superb entertainment. One of my favorites of that time is called The Little Shop of Horrors, a kind of comedy and guts Roger Corman film in which Jack has a cameo as a simpering masochist who goes to a dentist for the joy of having perfectly healthy teeth yanked out of his mouth. “I did a lot of films for Roger,” Jack said, and I’m grateful for the work. You know, when we cast Jessica for this strong role in Postman, a lot of people couldn’t believe it. All they knew about her was that she played the Fay Wray part in the King Kong remake. But if anyone ought to know what it’s like working with giant apes and moaning carrots, it’s me.”

The picture that established Nicholson as an actor of brilliance — the one that enabled him to wave goodbye to the giant apes and moaning carrots — was Easy Rider, the Peter Fonda-Dennis Hopper movie about a couple of sympathetic dope dealers who are killed by rednecks in the deep South while on their search for America. “If you accept that metaphor of the biker as the modern man on horseback, then Easy Rider was the Stagecoach of the genre,” Jack said. “It bumped the bike picture up one notch in terms of literary intention.” That’s how Jack saw the film, and he almost begged to play the part of the hard-drinking Southern lawyer who befriends the bikers.

“I wasn’t the guy they would have cast,” Jack said. “I had written The Trip and had been involved in a couple of other drug-related films, so they had me along as a consultant. I had been acting for ten or twelve years, and I hadn’t been that successful. I had never really been in a major studio production up until then. There was the thought that I had been around too long to be a star, and I was thinking more in terms of direction at that point. Curly Bob [Rafelson] had confidence in me, though. He said I’d be great in the part.” And that was that. Rafelson’s recommendation changed Jack Nicholson’s life.

Jack followed the resounding success of Easy Rider with a starring role in a film directed by Rafelson and written by Carol Eastman (who penned it under the name Adrien Joyce). Five Easy Pieces proved to any lingering doubters that Nicholson could carry a film in the starring role. After that came Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, Chinatown, The Passenger, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Bonus Deez There, Uh, Sinor el Presidente

WE WERE SITTING IN the chartered jet, talking about some of the characters Jack has created. It seemed to me that he could get rich by playing characters like McMurphy from Cuckoo’s Nest, and nobody would ever get bored. Instead, he has experimented with roles and characters, some of them neither meant to be attractive nor particularly sympathetic.

“It’s as if you’ve decided on doing the Seven Dwarfs of perversity,” I said. “You were Dopey in The Fortune, Sleazy in Goin’ South and Crazy in The Shining.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I wanted a long career. I’ve played against the traditional standard of beauty. I designed my career to be in the European model. Europeans tend to look more at an actor’s body of work, and there will be peaks and valleys in that. Americans view art as an ever upward process. The next thing you do always has to be bigger and better. With a body of work behind you — good work — you can afford to take on a project that entertains you, one that challenges you, but which may not be bigger and better in the American sense.”

Still, there are those fans who would like to see him repeat his roles in Cuckoo’s Nest or Chinatown or The Last Detail. There are others who go even further back in his career. At dinner one night in Aspen, a fellow in a leather jacket talked to Jack about bikes for over an hour until he finally got to his point. “Look, man,” he said, “you’ve got to do another bike film. One more. The ultimate bike film. I mean, you got a lot of us into it. You got me into it. You owe it to us. It’s your responsibility.”

“I get a lot of that,” Jack said on the jet. And somehow that encounter reminded him of a story about Jose Lopez Portillo, the president of Mexico.

“I was doing The Border last summer, a movie about illegal aliens. We were in El Paso during the real border days, and President Portillo was there for the ceremonies. Now, my back had just gone out on me that day. I was in serious pain. Anyway, I was lying down when there’s a knock at the door. It was a representative of the mayor of El Paso, and he gave me a letter: ‘Dear Mr. Nicholson, President Lopez Portillo, as you may know, is in El Paso for border days. Señor Portillo has told me that both he and his sixteen-year-old daughter consider you to be their favorite movie star. Could you perhaps spare fifteen minutes to visit the president of Mexico and his daughter? I needn’t tell you how important these informal meetings can be and how much they contribute to positive relations between our two countries.’ Something like that, and it was signed by the mayor of El Paso.

“I thought, ‘Geez, international politics,’ and I began composing this eloquent speech in my bad Spanish right there, when suddenly two big motorcycles lead a big Cadillac limo up to the door. Two tall Mexican fellows step out They look like Mexican secret service, and they ask me to get in the limo.

“Well, my back was real bad, and I knew I was going to have to lie down in the car, and it seemed to me that maybe I shouldn’t lie down in the president of Mexico’s car, so I asked if I could follow in my own car, with my own driver. I asked them if it would be all right if Warren Oates came along.

“So the big bikes lead off, and we follow the Caddy with the flags and all these sirens, and the Caddy is zipping through traffic and changing lanes, and I’m getting edgy. Something doesn’t seem right. I start to wonder if I’m being kidnapped. At the same time, I’m still trying to remember my Spanish, still trying to put together a dignified speech for the president of Mexico. Understand now, I’m flat on my back and I can’t see a thing.

“Warren says, ‘Uh-oh, Jack, you better sit up and look at this.’ There, on the side of the road, are about 200 big bikes, pulled up in formation, two by two. And as we pass them, all these bikers pull out and follow us down the road. Now I know there’s something weird. But I lie back down and try to work on my speech, all the while wondering if we’re in any danger, or whether we might have gotten into the middle of some big bikers’ party, or whether the bikes are just a coincidence in the kidnapping plot. My driver follows the limo directly into a big football stadium. I see a marching band all lined up and people sitting there in the stadium. All the bikers follow us in, and they line up around the field. I’m wondering, ‘What the hell,’ and I’m now half-convinced that I’m being kidnapped while still mentally rehearsing my wimpy speech about friendship between our two great countries and trying to remember my Spanish so I won’t insult the president.

“I step out of the car, and suddenly all these fireworks go off and they spell JACK IS NUMBER ONE. I think, ‘Holy God, Portillo must be my biggest fan.’ All the people begin to cheer, and the band starts playing The Yellow Rose of Texas, and about forty women in bathing-beauty type swimsuits and high heels come marching in my direction. When they got close enough, I said, ‘Ladies, what is going on here?’ One of them said, ‘Anything you want, Jack’ I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what a night for my back to be out.’

“Then I started looking closer at the bikers, and there’s Dennis Hopper and a couple of guys I worked with in Hell’s Angels on Wheels. All of a sudden there’s a helicopter hovering over, and hanging off it is a magnificent bike someone apparently wants me to ride. And it turned out that the whole thing was set up — the letter from the mayor, the limo. It was all a joke by a guy who had this movie project, the ultimate bike film, I guess, and wanted me to think about being in it.”

Toots and the Wanker

IT WAS THE CRACK OF 10:30, and Jack Nicholson was wandering around his Los Angeles home with his first cup of coffee. He was wearing an expensive black robe and a crimson ascot. This is how one expects to find a famous movie star dressed first thing in the morning. It’s the small additions to the wardrobe that detract slightly from the elegance: it’s the red baseball cap emblazoned with the name MACHIAVELLI, it’s the ratty pair of urine-yellow wool socks, but most of all, it’s the vampire teeth he’s wearing, with the gleaming canines protruding over the lower lip.

Still, we were having a perfectly rational conversation. Jack was paging through a diary he keeps on location. He likes to write little notes to himself, half-aphorisms, and some of them can be a little cryptic:

“Give no brown gifts.”

The one I liked best read: “Never go to a party where someone is dressed darker.”

“You know,” he said, “Orson Welles once told me that the first actor to accept knighthood betrayed the profession. Respectability isn’t good for the craft.”

We had been talking about books: Charles Gaines’ Dangler and Jim Harrison’s Farmer. It was Harrison, a friend of Jack’s, who told me, “Yeah, he reads whole books, all the way through,” as if this were an odd thing for an actor to do.

A big black dog of indeterminate breed loped in and interrupted the literary conversation. “Hey, Fabulous,” Jack said. He began scratching the dog behind the ears, his face inches away from that of Mr. Fabulous. “Aha, Fabuloso, Mr. Fab, yeah, good dog, good boy.” The dog huffed great puffs of happy dog breath in Jack’s face.

After a discussion of the dog’s dubious parentage, Jack decided to show me his art collection. He seemed especially proud of a deco work by Tamara de Lampicka, a nearly forgotten artist of the Twenties and Thirties. The work showed an angular man in a uniform. He was thin, of aristocratic bearing, and there were unhealthy dark pouches under his eyes. The painting might have been titled The Sick Soul of Europe.

“Now,” Jack said, “while she was doing that in Europe, Frank Tenney Johnson was doing this in America.” He pulled a canvas from a stack against the wall. It was a painting of a couple of cowboys saddling up at dawn with a campfire still smoldering out there in the wide-open spaces. “The fact that these two works were painted at approximately the same time just fascinates me,” Jack said. “I don’t know why.”

Jack had sculptures by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and several paintings by contemporary Western artists like James Bama. There was a Cecil Beaton photo of Sugar Ray Robinson hanging near the kitchen and some pop art treatments of Chinese propaganda posters in the pantry. There was no place on the walls to hang more art, and a dozen canvases were stacked in the guest bedroom where I was staying. I counted fifteen works of art in the guest bathroom, including two Japanese prints and an Egyptian sculpture. Jack could talk knowledgeably about everything he owns; knowledgeably and at great — one might even say excruciating — length. It is disconcerting to have a man who is wearing a set of vampire teeth explain great art to you.

Nicholson gave me a book on Tamara de Lampicka to read while he sorted through the mail that had accumulated in his absence. One package contained a series of large-for-for­mat transparencies, photos of artworks for sale from a certain gallery. “Well, no, unh-uh,” he muttered. “I think I can do without paintings of candy canes and jellybeans. Ak! What’s this? Ak! I’m going to take offense. Here’s a painting of a baldheaded guy with big tits. Ak! Ak!”

He’d torn into another package, this one containing a set of publicity stills from The Border (to be released this fall), when Anjelica came downstairs, dressed for town. “I’ll be gone for a couple of hours,” she said. “See you at two?”

“Okay. You want to look at some pictures? Here’s Valerie Perrine. She plays my wife. Oh, Toots, look at this one. We had to do this stunt with a train, and the train guys didn’t know a lot about stunts, and the stunt guys didn’t know a lot about trains, so I had to do a lot of the work setting it up.” He handed her a photo of the train as it passed over him. “And there I am lying under a speeding freight train with no protection.”

Anjelica took the picture. Jack was looking at the next photo. It was a love scene. He was in bed with Valerie Perrine. “And here I am lying on top of a speeding freight train with no …”

“Let me see that,” Anjelica said.

“No.”

Anjelica fell on the sofa where Jack was sitting and grabbed at the hem of his robe. They wrestled.

“Help!” Jack cried. “She’s trying to expose my wanker to ROLLING STONE.”

He struggled free and ran for the other room, ran past the de Lampicka, past the Cecil Beaton and the Magritte, past the three recently purchased Chathams stacked by the door. They stopped there, breathless and giggly. Jack gave her a big kiss on the mouth, vampire teeth and all.

Into the Ether Region

At the Lakers’ home games, Nicholson sits on the floor, just to the left of the visiting team’s bench. He attends the games regularly, the way other men go to church. Like any rabid fan, he may yell at the ref for a bad call, stand and cheer the occasional extraordinary play, but mostly he sits quietly, saying the names of the players like they were a litany of saints.

If Norm Nixon sinks one from the foul line, you can hear Jack whisper, “Norman.” If Nixon charges in for a slam dunk, it comes out, “Stormin’ Norman.” When Jabbar unleashes the sky hook, Nicholson shakes his head at the wonder of it all. “Kareem.“

We were watching the Lakers run all over the Atlanta Hawks. That night, Jamaal Wilkes was hot, playing with such smoothness and precision, such control of his body that one understood immediately why he had earned the nickname “Silk.”

Earlier, I had been to a screening of The Postman Always Rings Twice, and my head was still full of its gritty imagery. Nicholson hadn’t lied: they had done the book almost exactly as written. It was splendidly sordid. Cain’s book, in this film, still has the power to shock. Director Rafelson and cinematographer Sven Nykvist created the texture and feel of a classic film out of the Thirties.

Jessica Lange plays a restless young woman married to an older man. Nicholson is the hired man —eventually her lover — and the chemistry between them is elemental. It’s all sex, raw and more than a little perverse. My favorite scene takes place in the rain. Jessica, her hair disheveled, her eyes wide, stares at Jack. “I don’t care what’s right or wrong anymore,” she says. Nicholson, as the tough drifter, lets it all sink in: the evil of it, the unmistakable invitation to murder, the promise of the sex to follow.

“They hang people for that, Cora,” he says. It’s the kind of exchange film buffs love to play out themselves, like the “I cudda been a contender” dialogue between Brando and Steiger in On the Waterfront.

Generally, I don’t care to see movies in the middle of the day. If they’re any good, they color the rest of the evening so that it is difficult to concentrate on the business at hand. At the Lakers game, when little Charlie Criss stole the ball from one of the Lakers, I found myself muttering, “They hang people for that, Charlie.”

I had talked with Jack after the screening and asked him a question I’d been saving for days. It seemed to me that he was passionate about five things: art, movies, basketball, skiing and books. I wondered if there was some connection, a common denominator among them.

Jack didn’t think so. Or not at first. Basketball and movies were collaborative efforts. No really good actor wants to be the best thing in a bad piece of work; no basketball player wants to score forty points and watch his team lose. These were ensemble arts.

But art and books and skiing, they were different. There, it’s just one man, one woman — Jack searched for the phrase — “stepping out into the ether region.”

He thought about that for a time, then said, “No, there is a common thread. There’s poetry in all those things. When I look at a painting, I get involved. There is a moment of truth somewhere. And basketball: when you miss a play, it’s a matter of microseconds. Little moments of truth. A game of the immediate. Skiing is like that: it’s all little moments of truth and extending the limits of control.

“I was talking to Michaelangelo Antonioni, and he had just done Red Desert, which is about technology encroaching on man. Antonioni was firmly on the side of nature, of a more natural existence. And every day while he was doing that film, he drove to work along the Adriatic. On one side were the mountains, unspoiled, beautiful. The other side was encrusted with factories, all rust and corrosion. Antonioni said that he couldn’t help it, he found himself looking at the factories rather than the mountains. Because that is where man was. Maybe that’s how all those things tie together: they are the efforts of human beings to step out into the ether.”

Trending

The Lakers had the ball, and Wilkes took a pass. He dribbled once, spun toward the basket, faked, got his man to commit, then rose up off the floor as if gravity had no dominion over him. Nijinsky would have envied that move. The ball arched toward the basket and dropped through, clean, for two, and a little moment of truth in the ether region.

“Silk,” Jack Nicholson said, reverently.