by Marc Eliot
Even though there were some hard financial times, “I never felt poor,” Jack recalled. “In Neptune there was a slightly rougher, lower-middle-class region and a more upper-middle-class one. Ethel May Nicholson was smart enough to move [us] to the better area …” With her business thriving, in 1950, when Jack was thirteen, she moved the entire brood a crucial two miles south to Spring Lake, a better neighborhood on the other side of the tracks, sometimes called the Irish Riviera of the Jersey Shore. She set up home and shop at 505 Mercer Avenue just in time for Jack to enter Manasquan High School, one of the stronger academic public schools in southern New Jersey.
It was a big deal to everyone except Jack when Ethel May bought one of the first TVs on the block, a black-and-white box with legs. Jack preferred the Saturday morning big-screen movies over the blurry, talky content of the small flickering screen. He wasn’t impressed with the likes of The Adventures of Superman or The Lone Ranger. To him, they were better in comic books, or in his animated imagination, than on TV. Even when some of the other kids from the neighborhood crowded in to watch the new picture-and-sound marvel in the living room, Jack could not have cared less.
He hadn’t yet had his adolescent spurt (such as it would be); he was still shorter than most of the other boys and carried a thick layer of baby belly fat. He would eventually lose most of it but would never grow as muscular as he wanted to be, or tall enough to play basketball, his favorite sport. With the extra pounds and the diminutive height he earned the taunting nickname “Chubs” from the other students. And he suffered from an unusually extreme case of acne. His skin was covered with blemishes that would permanently scar and pit his face, shoulders, chest, and back, causing him throughout most of his film career to never allow himself to be filmed without wearing a shirt unless the lighting was favorable and his body and face makeup was expertly applied.
At Manasquan he proved a good student—smart, cerebral, and analytical—but what meant most to him was what he lacked: the size and physical strength to play ball. He also tried out for football but proved too small and too soft for that game as well and had to settle instead for the job of the baseball team’s equipment manager, reduced to carrying bats, balls, and gloves for the team’s players. “He wanted to be an athlete, and was probably frustrated about not having been a little bigger, a little taller, maybe even a little older at the time. He was always the youngest in the group …,” recalled one classmate. Instead, he wrote about the teams’ games. What did come easily to him, he discovered, was writing. He liked descriptive prose, capturing the action as if he were playing right alongside the team. Writing a great sentence was almost as good as making a slam-dunk. Almost.
By 1953, his junior year, sixteen-year-old Jack, with his dark Irish good looks—despite his acne—his new, leaner, and more muscular body, and his sharp, witty tongue, went from being the runt to one of the most popular boys in his class. For the first time the girls at school began noticing him—“Chubs” became “Nick” (short for Nicholson)—and his broad smile, which seemed always now to be plastered across his face as if cut open by a can opener. And while his teachers were always suspicious of what they perceived as some mischievous prank behind it, along with his general air of newfound arrogance, the worst thing they could find to accuse him of was smoking. He had developed a two-pack-a-day habit he would never be able to break. They warned him that smoking would stunt his growth. He laughed but would never grow taller than 5′9½″—smaller than Steve McQueen, smaller than Paul Newman, smaller than Robert Redford, the same size as Robert De Niro, taller than Al Pacino and Bob Dylan.
After failing to make any of the teams, he eventually turned to acting in school plays, something that didn’t require the size and strength of athletics. He tried out for one in the spring of his junior year and discovered he not only liked performing but was pretty good at it. His first show, Out of the Frying Pan by Francis Swann, was a broad comedy about young kids trying to make it as actors on Broadway. It had had a successful Great White Way run in 1941, after which Swann’s youthful characters became a staple of high school productions for much of the 1940s and 1950s, before giving way to more contemporary fare. Jack had a small role in Frying Pan, but it was satisfying enough to persuade him to sign up in his senior year as a regular for the school’s drama club.
After hours, between rehearsal schedules, to earn cigarette money Jack worked as an usher at a local movie theater, the Rivoli in Belmar. There the brightness of the day and the attention he got in school by acting turned into the darkness of the movie theater, where he was able to pay attention to real actors over and over again, studying their every move, trying to figure out how they did what they did, and how he could do it too. He also worked as a part-time lifeguard in the warmer weather, at nearby Bradley Beach (always wearing a swim shirt to keep his acne-filled chest skin covered), a job that gave him the pleasurable task of watching pretty young girls sunbathe in bathing suits.
In his senior-year production, Jack landed the role of one of the crazies in John Patrick’s The Curious Savage, originally written as a screenplay for the silent screen legend Lillian Gish about an old woman committed to an insane asylum where she is surrounded by lunatics, one of whom, Hannibal, was played by Jack. He was so good in it that at graduation he was voted “Best Actor” by his classmates.
Despite his increased, thespian-generated popularity with girls and his lifeguard gig, he still couldn’t actually get one to go with him. Always quick with a joke or a smirky comment, he became something of the class clown throughout high school, and his quick wit eased a lot of his frustration. If he couldn’t attract girls with his physical prowess, he could get them at least to come closer by making them laugh, and as a result he was surrounded his senior year by what were for him all the prettiest look-but-don’t-touch cuties. Sandra Hawes, the senior class’s “Best Actress,” the princess to Jack’s prince, remembers, “He would hang around with the most popular girls in high school … because he was fun to be with … even though he never really had any love life … he was probably the only one who didn’t have to have a girlfriend … he was a kidder, a joker, always cutting up.” His verbal athletics earned him the new nickname “The Weaver” for his ability to move in and out of stories and always manage to find a way to tie them all together at the end. Even then he had the habit of licking his lips between groups of words.
His good-guy popularity also got him elected vice president of the senior graduating class, despite the fact that by now his everyday costume of choice was more fit for a budding rebel—a pair of dirty jeans and a motorcycle jacket became his uniform after he saw Lászlo Benedek’s The Wild One when it opened in December 1953, starring Marlon Brando as a motorcycle-riding bad boy who possesses a killer smile he fully flashes only once, at the so-called happy ending of the film. The school’s authorities frowned on Jack’s outfit, but they chose to look the other way. He was about to finish school that June; it made no sense stirring any pots at the last minute.
HE GRADUATED FROM Manasquan in June 1954. By then he had saved enough money from working at the movie theater and as a lifeguard to buy himself a used 1947 Studebaker (Jack liked to brag that he was such a good handicapper that his regular visits to the Monmouth racetrack all through high school had won him the money to buy it). It was only when he applied for his driver’s license that he discovered for the first time there was no record anywhere of his birth, which he had always assumed had happened at home, like his sisters. As far as the state was concerned, Jack Nicholson did not exist. To solve the problem, Ethel May filed a Delayed Report of Birth with the New Jersey State Health Department. In it she listed Jack’s birth date as April 22, 1937, at 1410 Sixth Avenue in Neptune City, New Jersey. According to it, Jack was indeed born at home. She listed herself, Ethel Rhoads, as the mother and John Joseph Nicholson as her husband and Jack’s father.
It gave Jack the official documentation he needed to get his license, but, as he was later to discover,
like so much of the rest of the family’s history he believed and believed in, none of it was true.
* * *
1 Lou Costello was born farther north, in Paterson, New Jersey.
CHAPTER
“I got into acting by being a fan …”
—JACK NICHOLSON
“[WHEN I WAS OLD ENOUGH] I HEADED WEST TO SEE SOME MOVIE stars and got work around the studios … when I say ‘fan’ I don’t mean I was an autograph hound or anything like that … Everybody in my age bracket [were] Marlon Brando fans.”
Jack’s decision to spend some time in Los Angeles came because of an invitation from the unlikeliest of sources, his sister June. She was living now in Inglewood, a low-rent section of L.A. County on the outskirts of Hollywood. Her journey west had not been a smooth one. Over Furcillo-Rose’s objections, two months after Jack was born, she determined to leave New Jersey to pursue a career of her own in show business. She joined one of the remaining vaudeville circuits that traveled from Philadelphia, down to Miami and back north and west to Chicago. In 1944, at the age of twenty-five she gave up on making it as a dancer and wound up working in a defense plant in Ohio. There she met and married Murray “Bob” Hawley, a divorced test pilot (who may or may not have broken the sound barrier) but who definitely came from money. Over the next few years they had two children, a son and a daughter, and relocated to Southampton, New York, the playland of the Northeast rich. All was well until one day, without warning, Hawley left June and the children and took up with another woman. Dejected, June returned briefly to New Jersey before setting out to Los Angeles with her two children in tow, hoping to start another new life.
When Jack graduated from high school in the spring of 1954, as a present June sent him an invitation to spend the summer with her in Hollywood and a plane ticket to get there. Jack jumped at the chance not only to be with his sister but to walk the same streets and breathe the same air as his screen idol Marlon Brando.
Curiously, and despite his popularity, he told none of his neighborhood friends from school about his journey west. It was as if, after all, they meant nothing to him, that they had made his life more difficult than it had to be, especially the girls. He was still a virgin when he left for California. Jack promised Ethel May he would return in two months and enroll at the University of Delaware, where his high gradepoint average had earned him an offer of an engineering scholarship.
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for June to regret having invited Jack, and for him to regret accepting. Her apartment was already small with her and the two children, and smaller with Jack in it, especially since he hung around all day, sullen, slouchy, sleeping late, and eating whatever was in the small refrigerator. The only time she had a break from him was when he walked over to the nearby Hollywood Park to indulge in his favorite pastime, playing the ponies. On days he didn’t have enough money for the track, he ventured out by bus to Hollywood to explore its fabled streets. He couldn’t get over all the little aqua-and-green houses.
The dream-factory town was built by the first-generation movie moguls who took over the orange groves that covered acres of cheap land and turned them into studios and built these little houses for the employees, from the makeup staff to the actors and actresses. Small businesses sprang up to service the two necessities of most studio actors and technicians—coffeehouses where they could smoke and drink cupfuls of hot, steaming caffeine on their way to work, and bars where they could retreat in the evenings and juice it up until closing time. At eleven every night the town shut tight. Filmmaking began at dawn.
By 1935 the party had moved west to a strip of undistracted, unregulated land between Hollywood and Beverly Hills on Sunset Boulevard known as the Sunset Strip. It had no police department and no local government, and sex and alcohol were plentiful. Many of the cafés and clubs on the Strip were owned by the actors themselves, and for those who couldn’t couple up for free, there were brothels all over the place, their main attraction the unusually beautiful girls who worked there, many of them bit players at the studios during the day, “starlets,” as they preferred to be called, waiting for their big break and in the meantime needing a way to pay their bills.
The major Hollywood studios had a decades-long lock on what could be made and what could be seen; they produced the films, distributed them, and owned the theaters that showed them. That iron grip began to loosen in 1948, when the Supreme Court declared Hollywood an oligopoly, and because of it the look of films soon began to change. The arrival of independent films signaled the beginning of the end of the censorial Production Code, and Hollywood, but not necessarily the majors, began to make more interesting movies, exploring subjects beyond the boy-meets-girl fare that had dominated the studios’ Golden Age. At the center of these new films were new stars, and no one was more explosive than Marlon Brando.
In July 1954, shortly after Jack arrived in Hollywood, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, starring Brando, opened in theaters and replaced Johnny Strabler with Terry Malloy as the newest rebel of American movies, a virile but vulnerable tough guy in search of his own tortured soul.
Brando changed forever the image of what an American male movie star was, by lowering the age and raising the temperature of the definition of onscreen masculinity. As Terry Malloy in Waterfront, Brando’s performance turned on Jack and a whole generation of young starstruck boys just like him who wanted to be the next Marlon Brando.
DESPITE THE FACT that he felt crowded in June’s tiny apartment and didn’t especially like her constant fixing of his hair, and asking him if he’d had enough to eat even when he emptied the fridge, and if he had changed his underwear, more like a mother than a sister, he didn’t mind it all that much. “There were certain things about my relationship with her,” Jack recalled years later. “Body English. And I remember thinking, when my sister doted on me, what was she worried about?”
Despite Mud’s insistence that fall that he return east to start college, Jack knew there was no turning back. When the summer ended he decided to trade in his chance to get a higher education in favor of learning a few life lessons. He found himself a small inexpensive apartment in Culver City, a few miles south of Hollywood, where he would sleep until late afternoon if he felt like it, without June’s constant nagging, then get up and go to the part-time job he’d found to pay for it, restocking inventory in a toy store on Hollywood Boulevard.
After work he might grab a bite at Romero’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire, a hangout for a lot of the new self-styled rebel wannabe actors. Jack’s outgoing personality allowed him to easily ingratiate himself into their circle, where he loved to sit around and talk with them about movies in his flat monotone New Jersey voice. They all enjoyed hearing him analyze that scene in Waterfront where Brando as Terry picks up the glove that Eva Marie Saint as Edie accidentally drops while they’re walking and talking. Terry picks it up and tries to put it on his own hand, in effect to get under her skin. What made the scene even more special for Jack was that it was improvised. Saint really had accidentally dropped the glove during filming and Brando just went with it. Method-acting, of which this was a perfect example of “being in the moment,” was nirvana to him and the rest of these caffeine critics.
And if Jack got lucky, he might even try to pick up one of the little beauties in tight sweaters and black jeans sitting at a nearby table, their chins in their palms, listening to his every word in rapt attention. He may have thought about it, but he never had the courage to try.
Or he might head over to one of the other Googie-style coffeehouses and bars where other nests of wannabes frequented, or the Unicorn, the Renaissance, Chez Paulette’s, Barney’s Beanery, the Rain Check—a good place to play a game of unhurried darts—Mac’s, Luans. He loved hanging with the “puries,” as he called them in Jackspeak, the L.A. young actors whose own hip culture was emerging around them. “I was part of a generation that was raised on cool jazz and Jack Kerouac, and we walked around in corduroys and turtlenecks talking about Camus and S
artre and existentialism … we stayed up all night and slept till three in the afternoon … We were among the few people around seeing European pictures … L.A. ‘puries’ were people very expressive of the L.A. culture—the overstuffed hamburger, the 18,000 ice-cream flavors, the Hollywood electric whiz-bang kids …”
Or, if he was really broke, he might walk east on Sunset, past La Brea, to one of the many storefront pool halls tucked between the tattoo parlor and the whorehouses, and hustle up enough money to make that month’s rent.
But by 1955, after Jack had spent a year scrounging and being alone among the coffeehouse cliques, L.A. was beginning to lose some of its allure. Hanging out with the boys was fun, but it wasn’t enough for him. He had not been able to get close to anyone, boy or girl. He didn’t want to spend the next twenty years drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and getting off on the sound of his own voice. He wanted to be where the real action was, to somehow break into the business, no matter how menial a position he might be able to get. Anything had to be better than sleeping all day and bullshitting all night. He would rather return east and go to college, like Ethel May was still pushing him to do. “I had no [real or meaningful] friends. I was living on my own … I had this job I kind of liked as a messenger. I was living in this apartment in Culver City. I’d already seen the two movies in town and I had no car … I felt as grim as Vincent van Gogh …”
Everything changed one day when a tip from a fellow he’d met at one of the pool halls he frequented led him to MGM’s mandatory Labor Relations Deck in Culver City, where, his friend told him, he could apply for a job, and probably get it if he didn’t care what it was. He didn’t, as long as he could smell the same air the studio’s movie stars did. As he later recalled, “I had [already] bought a [plane] ticket on my birthday to go back … I thought, ‘Well, nothing’s happening much [in L.A.]. I better go back [east] and get serious. And while I was down buying the ticket I got the job at MGM.” At the last minute, as he was already packing, he got a call that he was hired full-time as an office worker for MGM’s animation department.
