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  ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

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  Copyright © 2013 by Rebel Road, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eliot, Marc.

  Nicholson : a biography / Marc Eliot. — First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Nicholson, Jack. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.N5E45 2013

  791.43028’092—dc23

  [B] 2013018044

  ISBN 978-0-307-88837-2

  eISBN 978-0-307-88839-6

  Title page photo courtesy of mptvimages.com

  Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon

  Jacket photography: Archive Photos/Getty Images

  v3.1

  In Memory of Andrew Sarris, we miss the passing of our great teacher, friend, critic, and historian, and for the late Karen Black, whose input was enormous and whose cooperation was unending. And always for baby cocoa bear.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  Hard Ride to Easy Rider

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART TWO

  Flying over Chinatown Straight On to the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART THREE

  The Good Life

  Chapter 11

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 12

  PART FOUR

  Return of the Joker

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART FIVE

  A Few Good Roles

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART SIX

  Sunset on the Boulevard

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  FILMOGRAPHY

  AWARDS

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  “There is James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda. After that, who is there but Jack Nicholson?”

  —MIKE NICHOLS

  “Marlon Brando influenced me strongly. Today it’s hard for people who weren’t there to realize the impact that Brando had on an audience.… He’s always been the patron saint of actors.”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  “He’s our Bogart. He represents this whole period of history in a way Bogart represented the ’40s and ’50s on film.”

  —HENRY JAGLOM

  “When I started off, there were 25 people walking around L.A. in red jackets who looked exactly like James Dean, because he was very extreme and quite easy to imitate—which missed the point entirely.”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  “He has a great deal of respect for women, and I would think was one of the pro–women’s lib type people.”

  —BRUCE DERN

  “What would it be like to fuck Britney Spears? I can answer that question: Monumental. Life altering!”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  INTRODUCTION

  “One never really recovers from his own birth.”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  JOHN JOSEPH “JACK” NICHOLSON JR. WAS BORN APRIL 22, 1937, AT home in New Jersey, according to his official record of birth, which lists his parents as John and Ethel May Nicholson. Growing up, Jack called Ethel May “Mud,” short for “Mudder,” Jackspeak for “Mother.”1

  Ethel May was the stalwart family breadwinner. For many years she worked as a hairdresser out of a second-floor room of the small family house in Neptune City, until eventually she made enough money to expand her business, move the brood to a better neighborhood, and open a string of modestly profitable beauty parlors.

  John J. Nicholson was nothing like Ethel May; he had no money and little ambition. He found jobs intermittently doing handiwork. While Jack was still a baby, John’s drinking became too difficult for Ethel May to put up with and she kicked him out of the house. After that, he lived hand to mouth, often sleeping on park benches and occasionally under the boardwalk. He showed up at Ethel May’s mostly on holidays, when she let him in to have dinner with the family. Although Jack rarely saw him, this was the man he believed was his real father.

  Various other men drifted in and out of the family house during this time, including Don Furcillo-Rose, a dark-haired, dapper, sharp-dressed fellow with a great smile. He had been Jack’s older sister June’s boyfriend just before her abrupt departure from the family home to fulfill her dream of being in show business. The charming and good-looking Furcillo-Rose, ten years June’s senior, was a sometime musician who played with various pickup bands along the Jersey Shore, where they likely first met.2

  Apparently, Ethel May did not like Furcillo-Rose sniffing around June, and whenever she caught them together she warned him to stay away from her underage daughter or she would have him thrown in jail. After June left home, Furcillo-Rose still occasionally came around, but he was never warmly welcomed by Ethel May, or Lorraine and Shorty, her other daughter and her husband, but Mud knew Furcillo-Rose and June had grown very close, so she occasionally let him sleep over in June’s empty room. He was, in his way, after all, part of the family.

  Little Jack also never liked Furcillo-Rose, the way he reeked of whiskey and cigarettes, the way he was always whispering to Ethel May so no one else could hear him. Furcillo-Rose never said much to him. Jack did adore Lorraine and George W. “Shorty” Smith. “I had Shorty, as good a father [type] as anybody’s ever going to get or need.”

  Lorraine was the opposite of June in every way. She was not outgoing and not a dreamer; she preferred being a stay-at-home wife. She had married Shorty as soon as it was legal for her to do so. They had gone together since she was seven and he was eleven. In his spare time, which was plentiful, since regular work was hard for him to find, he taught Jack everything a real father would normally teach a boy: how to lift the toilet seat when he peed, how to catch a grounder on the nearby sandlots. Keep your knees closed when the ball is hit. Let it come to you and wrap it in your glove with your other hand. In his earlier days Shorty had taken dancing lessons with June, at her insistence, so she could have a partner who wouldn’t be groping her all the time, and it had left him unusually limber. In high school he p
layed a little football, although he was too small to make first string. He earned his pay as a brakeman for Conrail, but was laid off too many times to be able to call it a career. At the height of World War II he decided to join the merchant marines for the three squares, a place to sleep, and a regular paycheck that he always sent back to Lorraine.

  Jack had no memory of June, but he always remembered all the stories told about her around the dinner table at the family house. “My sister June was another story,” he told Rolling Stone. “She left home at sixteen,” the same year Jack was born. “She was a show dancer for Earl Carroll and knew Lucky Luciano. She married one of the test pilots on the American team that broke the sound barrier.… Then June went to California, got some interesting jobs, met some interesting people. And died. Very young. Cancer.”

  Jack told this to the magazine as if it were an outline for a screenplay, a fantasy with a storyline that ended in tragedy, June the beautiful but doomed princess. Jack was also still a teenager when he, too, decided to leave home and head west, in search of his own dreams of show business glory. He said he wanted to be an actor. Like June, he had a fanciful imagination hinged to a lack of real opportunity.

  When he first arrived in L.A. he briefly stayed with her, until he got a regular job and moved out. After taking some acting classes, he found some work in independent films. His early “rebel” roles led him to bigger parts with better scripts, and although it took many hard years to happen, he eventually became a star. He was lauded by fans and critics alike for his attractive onscreen persona and how he always seemed to be playing himself, no matter what the role. People went to his movies to see him as much as to see the film. Audiences loved Jack—or the movie persona they believed was Jack.

  Acting came naturally to him and with good reason. His Americana childhood was a diorama of deception. Nothing in the Neptune City house was exactly the way as it had seemed. Everyone in his childhood had played a role, and they did it well. Jack didn’t learn how to act from Marlon Brando or even Stanislavsky. He learned from June, Lorraine, John, Shorty, Don, and most of all, Ethel May.

  ALL THE GREAT movie stars, and Jack is unquestionably one of the greatest, are really two people: the private person offscreen and the famous actor on it who plays the characters that audiences love him for. This duality makes it difficult for audiences, and sometimes film critics and historians, to differentiate between the characters actors play and the character of the actor who plays him. The trick for screen actors is to convince us they are who they aren’t and they aren’t who they are; the contradiction for those performers looking to reveal the “truth” to their audiences is by playing people they are not. Acting is the art of the artificial.

  The continuum of Jack’s character, smiling, cool, hip, intense, and articulate, showed up in virtually every one of his movies, until one day in 1974 he learned his family’s terrible secret, the reality behind all that “acting,” something so deep, so dark, and so deceptive, it changed everything about his life, and therefore everything about his acting. The final film he made before he found out this secret was The Last Detail, in which the character he plays, Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky, believes he is invulnerable. He is tough, funny, cocky, and inherently instinctive. He is innocent when the film begins and he remains so, even as he comes to recognize the contradiction of his responsibilities. In the first film he made after that, Chinatown, the character he plays, J. J. Gittes, is a detective, a symbol of authority. Gittes, too, is tough, funny, cocky but vulnerable and inherently cerebral. To audiences, this was the better, meaning more ingratiating, performance. Audiences adore attractive vulnerability in their heroes.

  But to Jack, the differences were more than surface sensitivities. His acting style hadn’t grown; Jack the personality had changed because Jack the man had changed.

  In between, he made The Passenger for Antonio Antonioni, before Chinatown but released after. It is a film whose main character has no clear identity and spends the entire film in search of himself. This journey serves as the transition between the characters “Bad Ass” Buddusky and J. J. Gittes. The liberation of the aptly named David Locke is the link between the two. Set in the background of the Chad civil war, a perfect metaphorical backdrop for this film, Locke comes across a dead body at his hotel and assumes the person’s identity, literally and figuratively becoming him. In Chinatown, Gittes starts off as an innocent, but when the film ends he is, in Blakean terms, experienced. In real life, Jack had taken a bite of the forbidden fruit when he learned the family secret and paid the price.3 For the rest of his life, no character he ever played would again be so easy, simple, or innocent. This is what people really mean when they talk about the difference between Jack’s early performances in his “personal” films and his later ones in more commercial, mainstream movies.

  After 1974, with one or two exceptions, he never again played a purely romantic lead. And in real life, while women continued to be a source of both pleasure and pain for him, true love was something he could never fully accept, believe, or trust from them. His seventeen-year relationship with Anjelica Huston, the woman able to get closest to him, was a series of hellos and good-byes, angers, frustrations, and, on both their parts, infidelities strewn throughout their time together. It is significant that in the end they both wound up alone.

  What follows, then, is the story of Jack Nicholson the movie star and Jack Nicholson the man. Jack the personality made sixty-two films, during which Jack the man kept playing the one role he had tried to reconcile with and perfect his whole life. Who he really was.

  Himself.

  * * *

  1 Early on, Jack liked to make up his own language by shortening words to make them sound funny and keep, or sometimes heighten, their meaning. Later, when he moved to L.A. and hung out with the postbeat/Kerouac crowd, he began to incorporate more “beat speak” into his already colorful “Jackspeak.” “Beat speak” is essentially musical in origin, coming out of the sound of jazz and early a cappella rock and roll.

  2 Don Furcillo’s stage name was Don Rose. He is often referred to in books and articles as Don Furcillo-Rose.

  3 The remarkable similarities between what Jack discovered in real life and the plot of Chinatown, written by his friend at the time Robert Towne, was something Jack called a coincidence, as the film was written before he found out. However, a close check of the chronology of events shows that Jack did know it before Chinatown was written and very likely helped Towne shape his screenplay into something more autobiographical (for Jack) than originally intended.

  Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson in Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider. Courtesy of Getty Images

  CHAPTER

  “I have the blood of kings in my veins …”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  JACK NICHOLSON GREW UP IN NEPTUNE CITY, A SMALL BOROUGH in Monmouth County, New Jersey; it is situated approximately fifty miles south of Manhattan near the Jersey Shore and Asbury Park, the colorful mecca of carnival dreams and penny arcades that so captured the imagination of the local children of South Jersey’s working class. Asbury Park needs no further mythic atmospherics than have already been provided by its fertile crop of countless local dreamers-made-good, most notable among them—besides Jack—Bruce Springsteen, Danny DeVito, and, a step or two back in time, the most commercially successful film comedy duo of its day, the burlesque-trained team of classic skinny straight man and lovable tubby stupido, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.1

  Because Ethel May’s house was constantly filled with women coming and going to have their hair done, and the children they brought along to save babysitting money, amid all the hustle and bustle and female gossip, young Jack had trouble finding his own little corner in this noisy, chemical-smelling house. As Jack later said, being surrounded by all that estrogen, “It’s a miracle I didn’t turn out to be a fag.” Sometimes if he could, he would sneak off and lose himself in the sands of the shore, walking aimlessly through its many cheap and taw
dry sideshows.

  Two other things he could do by himself were read comic books and collect baseball cards. Jack was a boy who lived inside his superhero dreams. Escapism helped alleviate the loneliness borne of being surrounded by so many people at the house and yet being alone so much of the time. As a result, he had frequent temper tantrums that were partly a cry for some attention of his own. According to his sister Lorraine, when Jack couldn’t get his way about something, his tantrums “rocked the house like an earthquake.” One Christmas, he took a crosscut saw and sliced off a leg of the kitchen table. In return, Ethel May gave him a lump of coal for his present. Jack screamed and hollered until she gave him his real present, and then he calmed down. Another time, when she was on the phone, he lay down on the floor and began kicking and screaming until she hung up. “Later on,” Jack recalled, “I became conscious of very early emotions about not being wanted—feeling that I was a problem to my family as an infant. You see, my mother and father separated just prior to my birth … it must have been very hard on my mother …” It would take decades for Jack to understand why he had those feelings.

  Like most boys his age, Jack idolized Joe DiMaggio and had all his cards. One time Jack was sent to the grocery store for bread and milk and instead spent the money on the newest issues of Sub-Mariner, Human Torch, Captain Marvel, and Batman comics. He loved Batman the most because of his extended human skills rather than superhuman skills or supernatural powers. And the character of the Joker. When he came home, Ethel May spanked him and took all the comic books away.

  And the seeds of sex were clearly planted in Jack from a very early age. “I was very driven. I remember being at least mentally sexually excited about things from childhood, even sooner than eight, in the bathtub. I mean, I had a large appetite.”

  AND THERE WAS also the movies. Young Jack spent nearly every Saturday afternoon at the local movie house, the Palace, devouring the cartoons and the episodic serials with endings that seemed impossible for the hero to survive—cliff-hangers constructed to guarantee the return of every kid in the audience the following Saturday for another marathon of celluloid, soda, popcorn, and miracles.