by Marc Eliot
Roger was now beginning to understand how Hollywood really worked. He realized his biggest hurdle was the lag time between putting up the money to make a film and having to wait for it to open to (hopefully) recoup the investment. “I could see the problem … you raised the money, you made the picture, then you had to wait for the picture to earn its money back before you could make another picture.” Just as it appeared his producing career was about to come to a fast and furious end, two other independent producers, Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson, at the time starting a new independent film company together, American International Pictures, originally called American-Releasing Corporation, offered to lease the completed negative for The Fast and the Furious and use it for their startup production. To make the deal, Corman asked for and got guaranteed up-front production money for his next three pictures that AIP could distribute. That solved both AIP’s and Corman’s problems: AIP now had a guaranteed flow of product, and Corman had a way to fund his films.
Roger still felt there was one element to the filmmaking process he didn’t know enough about. “I had learned the use of the camera and other useful technical qualifications of directing a movie but did not know enough about acting. So I enrolled in Jeff Corey’s acting class. Not to become an actor, but to learn about acting …” Corey admitted him as a professional observer. Corman’s focus soon fell on one actor.
Jack remembers, “[Corman] came into the class, serious as a heart attack … He was a one-man band.” As is often the case, the special students take the most abuse from their teachers. With Jack and Corey, it was no different. When Corey admonished Jack one time to “show me some poetry” with his acting, Jack snapped back, “Maybe, Jeff, you just don’t see the poetry I’m showing you.”
It was that confrontation that first brought Jack to Corman’s attention. He loved his attitude. Being an antiauthoritarian himself, he applauded this actor’s willingness and ability to stand up to Corey. Not long after, Corman offered Jack the starring role in his next scheduled film, The Cry Baby Killer. He gave the part to him on his twentieth birthday. Corman had no doubt that he had chosen the right actor. As Corman put it, “I was absolutely certain Jack was going to be a star.” Besides Jack’s demonstrated intensity, Corman also liked his offbeat good looks, different from the homogenized studio-manufactured male heartthrobs of the day, the Robert Wagners and the Rock Hudsons. He knew before a foot of film had been shot that he had found someone special.
The Cry Baby Killer was a misunderstood-youth story that runs at top speed, Rebel without a Cause on amphetamines. “Times were changing,” Corman said. “The major studios really didn’t understand. The audience was looking for a different type of film. One that spoke their language. If we were going to make pictures about young people, we needed a young person to star—and Jack Nicholson was the one.” The Jersey jerk in Jack’s voice sounded genuine to Corman—a youthful toughness cut with a thin slice of panic. The Cry Baby Killer, Corman’s twenty-fifty film, was shot in ten days, on a total budget of $7,000, out of which Jack was paid $1,400, more money than he had ever made from acting in his life.
Despite the fact that AIP couldn’t find an exhibitor for the film for the next eighteen months, Jack was ecstatic about being in a real Hollywood movie playing a James Dean–like character. “I hadn’t really worked before, I figured this is it!” But despite the film’s eye-grabbing tag—“YESTERDAY A TEEN-AGE REBEL TODAY A MAD-DOG KILLER!”—when it finally was released it wound up on the bottom half of double bills, made no money, and quickly faded away.2
Jack didn’t make another movie for nearly two years. With nothing else on his plate, he joined the Air National Guard, knowing that in peacetime there was little likelihood of his ever being called up for combat duty. While he was doing his basic training in Texas, he received mail almost every day from Georgianna, saying how she missed him and couldn’t wait for him to come back to L.A., but he was far more interested in the letters that Mud sent: clips from the local Asbury Park Press. It was the only real coverage The Cry Baby Killer got: “Small-town boy makes good”–type stories all about him.
JACK SPENT EIGHT weeks in basic that felt to him like eight years, and he couldn’t wait to get back to California. This taste of military discipline was enough to last him for a lifetime. When he was released, he still had six years of Air Guard duty waiting for him, and air training a couple of days a month. Because it was in L.A., his unit had its fair share of entertainers. He got close to Bruce Ballard, the lead singer of the Four Preps, who, like Jack, was always up for a good time, and they managed to find ways to entertain themselves during the hours they belonged to the Air Force. They drank, smoked a little pot, and, even though Jack was going with Georgianna, chased after the waitresses who worked in the coffee shops near the Reserves base. They quickly gained a reputation among the others as champion skirt-chasers. Jack and Bruce always wore their uniforms when they went out, believing they were pussy magnets.
MUD, MEANWHILE, decided that if Jack really wasn’t going to come back to New Jersey, she would move to Los Angeles, to be near him and June. She left her businesses to Lorraine and Shorty to look after, hoping they could keep them going. Not long after she arrived in L.A., she moved with June into a small but comfortable duplex on Whitsett Avenue in North Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley, and June went to work at a local J. C. Penney.
Jack, meanwhile, was sharing a new apartment with a couple of friends; otherwise Mud could have stayed with him. While in Texas he had given up his half of the place above the garage to save on rent. When he was invited by two of his coffeehouse pals—Bronx-born Don Devlin, whose father was an actor and producer Jack hoped to follow into the business, and Harry Gittes, who wanted to break into the producing end of movies—to move in with them in a big apartment they had taken at Fountain and Gardner in West Hollywood, Jack immediately went for it. He could have moved in with Georgianna, who more than once suggested it, but the thought of being in another cramped apartment with a woman was not something that struck him as a good idea. He liked Georgianna well enough, but he didn’t want to be with her all the time. That was something people called marriage, and he wasn’t ready for anything like that.
If he was hoping for a little peace and quiet, he didn’t get it in what was later described as “the wildest house in Hollywood.” There was round-the-clock partying, drinks, drugs, sex, lots of tea (of the smoking kind), and beautiful, hot, willing girls who loved to get just as high as the boys and have a good time. The refrigerator never had any food in it, just milk (for Jack’s sometimes sensitive stomach), beer, and pot in the freezer to keep it fresh.
Sally Kellerman, another Corey alum and an as-yet-unknown actress, was one of the girls who liked to hang at the house, and whose big break wouldn’t come until 1970 when she played “Hot Lips” Houlihan in Robert Altman’s film M*A*S*H. She was always showing up at all hours to cry on Jack’s shoulder about some love-gone-wrong. Jack, with his heavy-lidded eyes, happily provided his shoulder for her. According to Harry Dean Stanton, a good-looking then-out-of-work actor and folksinger and one of the house regulars, Jack was always tipsy and ready to offer any comfort he could to whatever woman needed it: “Whenever I think of Jack from that period, I always see him with a cheap red wine on his lips.”
Another out-of-work hangout friend Jack regularly ran into on the coffeehouse and bar circuit was a rail-thin, wild-haired wannabe director by the name of Monte Hellman, who had now somehow managed to raise $25,000 for a half-written script and wanted Jack to help him finish it. He agreed, and the two worked intensely on it for weeks, with Hellman paying Jack for his time. Corman read the screenplay and liked it but thought it would be too expensive to make, and instead offered Hellman a chance to direct Beast from Haunted Cave, an independent, low-budget, twelve-day shoot for Corman’s new ancillary company, Filmgroup, to be produced by Roger’s brother, Gene Corman. Corman created it because he wanted to loosen the ironclad grip of AIP. Beast from Haun
ted Cave was made in 1958, but without AIP Corman couldn’t get distribution for a year.
Hellman had wanted to use Jack in Beast, but Corman had other ideas. He used Michael Forest in the lead. Two years after The Cry Baby Killer, Corman finally had another role he thought was better than Beast for Jack. The Wild Ride (aka Velocity) was a California-based drama directed and line-produced by Harvey Berman, based on the same West Coast drag-racing craze that had been the tragic centerpiece of Rebel without a Cause. It was another Corman neo-teen delinquent film, and the second time he used Jack as his imitation Dean.
Corman: “I had met this other acting teacher who had an acting school in Northern California, and who had been working with his students to make a short film. He approached me about being involved, assuring me it would cost very little because he could supply the crew from his students and most of the cast. I developed the script myself [with Ann Porter, Marion Rothman, and Burt Topper]. I also chose the director of photography [Taylor Sloan] and the leading actors. Even though I hadn’t used him after The Cry Baby Killer I knew Jack could act, and this was the first script that came along since I thought he was right for the lead. Jack had a lot of intensity and I always thought he would make a great youthful psychotic.”
Corman also cast Georgianna in the film, hoping some of her and Jack’s real-life chemistry would transfer to the screen. He paid them each two hundred dollars a week, from a total budget of $12,000, and shot the whole thing on a vacant racetrack in the Sonoma Valley.
The film centers on a psychotic biker gang leader, Johnny Varron, played by Jack, who causes the death of several police officers when he sadistically forces them off the road. At the same time, Varron warns one of his gang members, Dave (Robert Bean) to give up his girlfriend, Nancy (Georgianna), and spend more time with the gang because he is starting to be seen as a chicken. Things quickly resolve in this fifty-nine-minute flick, as Johnny falls for and is eventually redeemed by Nancy. According to Jack, he looked for whatever good qualities he could find in this woeful script to humanize his performance. “I think in all my movies all the characters have something to say, and that’s how you give a larger picture. I believe in the positive philosophy of all my characters …”
When the film was finished, Georgianna said she wanted to meet Jack’s family. He dutifully introduced her to Mud, who, like Georgianna, took the visit to mean they were headed toward marriage and made a real effort to embrace her. Jack also introduced her to June, who took an instant liking to her. They began calling each other every day, chatting, June always asking how Jack was doing.
Sure enough, soon after meeting Mud and June, Georgianna started talking to Jack about maybe making plans for the two of them to tie the knot. That was it for him. He had no time for or interest in domesticity. He considered himself an artist, the romantic loner. His thing was making movies, not babies. He told her so, and Georgianna quietly disappeared from his life.
THE WILD RIDE managed to get booked mostly on the bottom side of drive-in double or triple bills up and down the California coast.3 Hellman agreed to work on The Wild Ride as Corman’s editor and unofficial and uncredited co-producer. It was while on location during production that Hellman and Jack got to know each other better. Their personalities were very different, but they shared a love of independent film, Brando, Dean, and the Beats. Hellman was the quiet one, observant, always looking as if he were lost in thought a million miles away. Jack, on the other hand, was one of the most outgoing actors on set. He was something of a backslapper and loved a good time. Hellman believed Jack was talented, smart, and “very wry and funny but very cynical.” Just as in high school, on set Jack liked to make jokes that made everyone laugh out loud.
As they grew closer, Hellman realized how smart and how frustrated Jack really was. “Jack already had a reputation among his other friends as being the crowd ‘intellectual.’ He was big on quoting from The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s ode to absurdity. He carried a copy of it in his back pocket, and told me working in these films was like trying to push a boulder up the side of a mountain, believing if he kept pushing he would find stardom at the top. Like Camus, he told me, he had come to discover the joy of pushing as its own reward and that was the real reason he appeared in these cornball quickies. I also think he really needed the money.”
Jack’s attraction to Camus was more than Sisyphean. The author was French/Algerian and was profoundly affected by the War for Independence that broke out in Algeria against the French. Camus’s first novel, The Stranger, published in 1942 when he was only twenty-nine years old, made him world famous. He was an intellectual, a modern Absurdist writer whose work anticipated everything from Joseph Heller to Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He was a rock star of a writer, young, good-looking, angry, and brilliant. Jack could relate to all of that. In 1957, Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature, that world’s equivalent of an Academy Award. But what really cemented it for Jack was the beautiful Camus’s shocking death early in 1960, just prior to production on The Wild Ride. Camus was killed in a car crash, a scenario that placed him in the same eternal and eternally romantic pantheon of Jack’s other early-death hero, James Dean.
Not long after The Wild Ride wrapped, Jack was cast in his third film, his first away from Corman, Richard Rush’s Too Soon to Love. Rush had heard about Jack from American International Pictures and offered him a part in the film, based on a first-time script by László Gorog, Rush, and a then-unknown Francis Ford Coppola, and AIP wanted Jack to star. The role of the villain in this cheapie was meant to be Romeo and Juliet meets Rebel without a Cause. To Jack, Corman was John Ford compared to Richard Rush.
He then happily accepted Corman’s next assignment, a small part in something called The Little Shop of Horrors, a monster movie about a man-eating plant, produced and directed by Corman for his Filmgroup. Corman did Shop as an experiment, to see if he could shoot a feature in less time than a half-hour TV show, which normally (then) took three days. To save money, Corman had his cast and crew all climb over the fences at the old Charlie Chaplin Studios on La Brea and used the facilities without permission.4
Corman: “It was actually shot in two days and a night and all the actors, including Jack, only had one day’s rehearsal. It came about because at one of my other film screenings, there was a moment of horror that made the audience gasp. I thought, that’s perfect. And then a funny thing happened. Some of them laughed. I thought, what have I done wrong? Then I realized I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had gotten the scream I wanted, and then the audience released the remaining tension by laughing. That’s when I first saw the connection between horror and comedy. I then made a picture called A Bucket of Blood as a comedy and it was a huge success.”
Even though Jack was cast in the film, he had no idea what it was about or even what part he had until he showed up for the first day of rehearsals. Corman wanted him for Wilbur Force, a nerd who goes to the dentist and winds up wrestling with him and his equipment (borrowed by Corman from his own dentist). Much of the scene was improvised, and it was head and shoulders (and teeth) above the rest of the film, and today it is the only scene most people remember. It eventually inspired a hit musical film and Broadway show.5
Jack’s bit in Shop was so good it helped get him his first part in a studio film: Irving Lerner’s screen adaptation of one of the books in the trilogy of James T. Farrell’s Depression-era opus, Studs Lonigan. Farrell was a writer Jack liked, and this was a film he really wanted to do. Unfortunately for him, the title role he thought he was being offered went to Christopher Knight, yet another James Dean look-alike. Jack got one of the lesser roles, Weary Reilly. An unknown actor who had a flair for impersonation, Frank Gorshin, played Kenny Killarney. This is Jack’s version of how he was cast as Weary: “The reason I got it, I think, is that readings consisted of improvising situations from the book, and I was the only actor in Hollywood with the stamina and energy to [have actually] read the 700-page trilogy … and I was pretty strong in impro
visation, because I’d studied with Jeff Corey.”
Unfortunately, the film failed to capture the novel’s sweep, power, or intensity and struggled to find an audience. Although it was not a success, and James T. Farrell would fade from the requisite reading lists of college English curricula, it was the first time Jack was mentioned in reviews from mainstream critics. At twenty-three years old, he also marked a private milestone, the first year he logged thirty days as a paid actor. He knew this because he marked every day he worked in a little two-inch black address book he kept in his back pocket.
EVEN WHEN HE wasn’t working, which was most of the time, he had plenty going on. He had hooked up with Sandra Knight, a twenty-year-old blond California native he had first noticed when she was a messenger at MGM, and then again in Martin Landau’s acting class he had lately been taking, while she was still going with young actor Robert Blake, which was why Jack hadn’t moved on her then. He didn’t want to tangle with the vicious-looking Blake.
Knight, too, was now occasionally working behind the scenes for Roger, and they ran into each other on one of Corman’s sets. They started chatting, and when Jack heard she and Blake had split up, he immediately asked her on a date. She accepted, he took her out, and they wound up spending the night together. The speed and the intensity of it (and the freedom Knight had with her own body, and his) made him feel certain that he had found the love of his life.
The beautiful, earthy, and sensual Knight was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Venice, California, one of L.A.’s beach areas known for its bohemian lifestyle. Knight bore such a strong physical resemblance to Georgianna that, until they were actually introduced, many of Jack’s friends thought at first she was Georgianna.
Blake, meanwhile, found out Knight was with Jack and let it be known that he intended to kick his ass for “stealing” his girl. Jack’s friends repeatedly warned him to steer clear of Blake, which he did.
