Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  The role of the sexually ambivalent Smith student Susan went to Candice Bergen. After Jane Fonda turned down the role of Bobbie it went to the fabulously sexy Ann-Margret in what was undoubtedly the best performance of her career. Stage and screen actress Rita Moreno played the dutiful embodiment of middle-aged Jonathan’s fantasy fuck, a small but powerful role and performance.

  The film opens with a voice-over question from Jonathan to Sandy that sets the philosophical and emotional exploration of the film: Is it better to love or to be loved? The answer, by way of Jules Feiffer’s brilliantly cynical screenplay (the script was originally written for the stage, intended for Broadway, but Feiffer could not get it produced) and Nichols’s single-take direction, is that it is impossible to be either. As the audience soon discovers, Jonathan is desperate to be loved, enough to put getting laid (his version of love) above loyalty, while Sandy longs to love in that way college boys dream of while they write lousy poetry in their notebooks.

  Soon enough, Sandy falls for the angelic-looking but standoffish Susan, a student at Smith who, after a long and frustrating struggle with Sandy, still won’t sleep with him but gives him a compromise hand job, just enough to keep him interested. That night, back in the dorm, Sandy brags to Jonathan about what Susan did to him. Nichols’s next razor-sharp, perfectly timed jump cut has a drooling Jonathan on a hallway pay phone calling Susan and arranging to go out with her. They meet and begin a blazing sexual romance without Sandy knowing, until Susan, realizing Jonathan is only in it for what he can get off her, drops him and (eventually) marries Sandy. There is a whiff of Freudian homoeroticism here, the sharing of one woman by two friends being an indirect way of having sex with each other, underscored by the two boys sharing single beds in their dorm, each talking about his female conquests that turns the other one on. The first act ends with Sandy unaware that Jonathan has slept with Susan.

  In the film’s second act, the boys are now in early middle age. Jonathan is single, a successful money manager, while Sandy, a doctor (a specialist!), is unhappily married to Susan. Apparently, the sex has long gone out of their marriage and he is horny but trapped, by both social convention and his own inability to overstep the careful bounds that Susan has laid out. To others, the marriage is perfect. To Sandy it is perfectly boring. Jonathan then gets involved with a red-haired bimbo with big tits (Jonathan’s main requirement of his women), Bobbie (Ann-Margret), good-looking but helplessly dependent, who pushes him to “shack up,” and when he reluctantly lets her move into his Upper West Side apartment, she then presses him to get married, with disastrous results. In one of their more tempestuous arguments, she complains of having nothing to do, that she wants a baby, and Jack has an explosive fit (his best onscreen one yet), climaxing with the most unforgettable line of the scene, the movie, and possibly the seventies: “I’m taken! By me!”

  The fight is shown in a single take, the first and only one Nichols shot. Jack goes balletic as he moves about the apartment flailing, yelling, and screaming, while Bobbie sits on the bed, pilled up, boozy, watching in horror. Audiences were at once shocked and mesmerized.

  Afterward, as Sandy keeps complaining to his friend about how the sex has gone out of their lives, Jonathan proposes a solution. Jonathan has a hot friend, Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal), good-looking in that Upper East Side style and looking for action. He fixes Sandy up, and soon they’re mating like rabbits. This kicks off Jonathan’s old competitive/jealous/greedy streak, fueled by his grass-is-greener complex, and while having Sandy and Cindy over for a double date, he takes Sandy aside and suggests they swap partners for the night. He convinces Sandy and sends him into Bobbie’s room. Jonathan then makes his pass at Cindy, who turns him down, at least for now, but leaves the door and everything else open.

  When Jonathan realizes he isn’t going to get laid with Cindy that night, he goes back to his room, hoping it’s not too late to stop Sandy, who is now on the phone, calling for an ambulance. Bobbie has OD’d and Sandy is trying to save her life. Eventually, she recovers, Jonathan marries her, and she soon leaves him and hits him up for all the alimony she can squeeze out of him.

  The film moves into its third act, with the men bemoaning their fates as they walk along Park Avenue. Sandy’s marriage is still there and not there, and Jonathan has given up all hope of ever becoming “Playboy magazine’s ideal man.” What fascinates him now is a beautiful ice-skater in Central Park he likes to watch from a distance; she is his ultimate ice-queen fantasy of female sexual perfection.

  In the film’s truly shocking climax, Jonathan visits a beautiful woman, Louise (Rita Moreno), with whom, it appears, he has at last found the perfect mate, a hooker who follows a sexual script, and who sends Jonathan into another fit when she flubs a line. They start the scene over and he lies back on her sofa, allowing her to talk him into a difficult-to-achieve erection. As Louise works on him, Jonathan’s mind drifts into a fantasy about the ice-skater as the film ends.

  Jack and the other cast members made a vow to stay off pot for the duration of the production, to make sure they were pinpoint sharp, to match Nichols’s precise direction. Jack smoked his Montecristos instead.

  CARNAL KNOWLEDGE opened on June 30, 1971. The film received mixed reviews; its overall emotional darkness and sexual cynicism didn’t compute with most of the daily write-a-review critics. It wasn’t a big studio production; it had relatively no action, no plot, and plenty of near-explicit sex and big-star nudity, which were still relatively new to the movie mainstream.10

  One Hollywood producer had this to say about it: “The film was written by one Jewish guy and directed by another, and Arthur Garfunkel was the onscreen Jew. The producer, Joseph E. Levine, was also Jewish, and not especially well-liked in Hollywood. He was the Jewish Roger Corman, the difference being that everyone loved Roger and his pictures, even his exploitation flicks were harmless cartoons. Both The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge dealt with topics like incest and marital infidelity that turned off a lot of people in Hollywood, and because of it—maybe it hit too close—Carnal Knowledge had absolutely no support at the Academy, which itself, of course, is largely Jewish and saw the film as a testament to self-hate; the ultimate Jewish guy [Garfunkel] who wants to assimilate with the ultimate shiksa [Candice Bergen, or “Bug” in Jackspeak]. Thank God for Jack Nicholson.”

  Carnal Knowledge came in at number thirty in a magazine compilation of the year’s best movies; William Friedkin’s policier The French Connection came in at number one. Carnal Knowledge was the sixth-highest-grossing film of the year, and took in $18 million domestically, $29 million worldwide.11

  Jack had given his best performance yet and it helped Nichols take his place as a legitimate American auteur. Jack later admitted, revealingly, to Playboy that, with Nichols’s encouragement, he’d allowed Jonathan to get closer to his own reality than any other character he had played to date.

  And, as that producer had predicted, it was all but ignored at Oscar time. Jack did not receive a Best Actor nomination, and Nichols was passed over as Best Director. Only Ann-Margret was nominated, for Best Supporting Actress.12 Despite the Academy’s snub, Carnal Knowledge is the film that confirmed that thirty-four-year-old Jack Nicholson was the best American film actor of his generation.

  After its release, Jack took a deep breath and, through his new agent, Sandy Bresler, turned down a number of lucrative offers, including the role of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 The Godfather, which went instead to Al Pacino and made him a star. He also turned down The Sting. “The same year I turned down Godfather and The Sting,” he later told Peter Bogdanovich. “A lot of that was because of what else I felt I had to be doing. I was perfect for The Godfather—I don’t think I would have turned it down today [2006]. But at that time it was like Tony Franciosa and Ben Gazzara were the only Italians acting. I felt like, the Italian actors should have it—it was very idealistic of me.” As for The Sting, he said, “I liked the project, I liked the period and I knew i
t would be commercial. But I wanted to put my energies into a movie that really needed them.” Jack also turned down the younger priest in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and the assassin in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal.

  There was one role he really regretted saying no to. “I could kill myself [for turning down] The Great Gatsby … Since I was 18 years old people said I should do Gatsby.” The part went instead to Robert Redford, in Jack Clayton’s flat 1974 version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel.

  But to close friends he admitted that the real reason for turning everything down was that he was exhausted. He had made twenty-six movies in thirteen years and needed a breather, to regain his strength and to see what, if anything, was still out there for him.

  As it turned out, it was only the end of the beginning.

  * * *

  1 Anthony Quayle for Charles Jarrott’s Anne of the Thousand Days, Elliott Gould for Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Rupert Crosse for Mark Rydell’s The Reivers, and Young. Easy Rider won nothing.

  2 Another of Jack’s nearby neighbors was Charlton Heston. This strip of Mulholland would become known in Hollywood as “Bad Boy Alley” because of Nicholson, Brando, Rafelson, and Warren Beatty, who also lived on Mulholland. Charlton Heston was not considered one of the bad boys. Almost immediately, Brando threw up a chain-link fence between his property and Jack’s.

  3 The tickets are still in effect today.

  4 In the film, Bobby plays two Chopin pieces, one Mozart, and one Bach.

  5 Or not. Susan Anspach later told a reporter that during the shoot Jack was heavily into cocaine, and that he used it to do the scene. He did thirty-nine takes to get it right. “Jack took one toot every six takes. He frequently left the set to snort.”—Robert Sellers, Hollywood Hellraisers, p. 122.

  6 Caleb was born September 30, 1970. James Dean died on that day in 1955.

  7 It initially received an X rating by the MPAA. Columbia had never previously released an X-rated film and challenged the MPAA’s decision. Ramsey Clark was a member of the law firm that handled Columbia’s successful appeal. Nothing was changed, nothing was taken out, and the film’s rating was changed to R. Jack called it a victory for anticensorship. He also refused to cut the nudity or the orgasm scene for Canada or England, and as a result the film was not released in theaters in either country.

  8 Some reports have Jack buying the house.

  9 Bogdanovich had made Targets for Corman; it was the product of a contract Corman held on Boris Karloff that had a few days left on it. Bogdanovich’s job was to come up with a story built around Karloff. The film was released in 1968, but Corman held it back for several months because of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; it later became a cult film. Corman had wanted a Hitchcock-type movie, the only real directive he gave the young director. Bogdanovich also made another quickie exploitation film for Corman in 1968 called Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.

  10 Not that the film didn’t have legal problems that may have hurt it at the box office. A theater in Albany, Georgia, showed the film on January 13, 1972, relatively late in its run, and the local police served a search warrant on the theater and seized the print. In March 1972, the theater manager was convicted of the crime of “distributing obscene material.” His conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court of Georgia. On June 24, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the State of Georgia had gone too far in classifying material as obscene in view of its prior decision in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) (the Miller standard), and overturned the conviction.

  11 The top ten highest-grossing films of 1971 were Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, Guy Hamilton’s Diamonds Are Forever, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, and Robert Stevenson’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

  12 Cloris Leachman won Best Supporting Actress for The Last Picture Show.

  Lobby poster for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives

  CHAPTER

  “I’m a fairly common man, a New Jersey personality. I don’t exude aristocracy or intellectualism. But I try to give the common man some extraordinary facet.”

  —JACK NICHOLSON

  BERT SCHNEIDER HAD SEPARATED FROM HIS WIFE IN FEBRUARY 1971. Fed up with his insatiable lust and unstoppable pursuit of women, his drugging, and the increasingly shady (to her) circle of radicals and who-knows-who he surrounded himself with, she couldn’t take it anymore and asked him to leave. Schneider moved into a small bachelor pad he kept for himself in Benedict Canyon. His neighbor there was the lovely Candice Bergen, also a friend of Henry Jaglom’s; he was the first to bring her to one of Schneider’s regular seminude Benedict Canyon back-to-bachelorhood reveries, complete with the requisite number of champagne-swigging revolutionaries, drugs of all types, and nitrous oxide, the latest craze among the celluloid/rad set.

  At that same party, he reintroduced Jack to Warren Beatty. The two had first met in Canada and they immediately hit it off. After running with him for a couple of weeks, Jack soon dubbed Beatty “Master B” or “the Pro” for his ability to bed women. Beatty, meanwhile, nicknamed Jack “the Weaver” for his ability to tell a good story. With Beatty’s magnetic looks and Jack’s articulate charm, they made a formidable duo cutting through the starlet populace of Hollywood like two love musketeers. Who was the better swordsman? According to Bob Evans, no slouch himself in the skirt-chasing department, there was no question it was Jack. “He [was] a very big player. Not even Warren Beatty has been so successful with women.” Another time Evans added, “I’ve been at parties where Jack’s been there. Warren’s been there, Clint Eastwood’s been there, Bob Redford. All the girls go to Jack.”

  JACK WANTED TO do a project for Michelangelo Antonioni that had gotten bogged down by delays and previous commitments of the Italian director. While waiting, he spent the summer adding a $40,000 addition to his house, for Michelle and her daughter, Chynna (by John Phillips). To make room, Helena Kallianiotes was moved into a small shack on Jack’s property.

  UNLIKE SCHNEIDER, WHO had grown tired of making movies, Rafelson wanted to continue BBS and direct movies through its title umbrella. He had a script he liked, The King of Marvin Gardens, but despite his having hit it big with Five Easy Pieces there was no rush by any of the studios to work with him. Even his best films were not hugely successful at the box office, and he had developed a reputation as difficult to work with. Even Jack was hesitant to do another film with him, but when Rafelson asked, out of loyalty Jack said yes. Loyalty was Jack’s great personal strength and professional Achilles’ heel. Over the objection of Sandy Bresler, Jack accepted the deal and agreed to take SAG minimum. Bresler still insisted his client get a piece of the back end, and Rafelson agreed.

  Although Jack didn’t know it, he hadn’t been Rafelson’s first choice. Bob had wanted Al Pacino, but he kept wavering. Before Pacino could make up his mind, Jack had accepted the part of David in The King of Marvin Gardens.

  In addition, Bruce Dern’s career was still going nowhere, and, as Jack knew, the role of Jason Staebler, David’s more flamboyant brother, was a potential star-maker for him. Jack wanted Rafelson to give Dern the role. Rafelson said okay if Dern promised to try to control his distracting hand gestures that showed up in every character he played. Dern packed his wife and two dogs in his car and drove cross-country to southern New Jersey for the duration of the location shoot.

  The King of Marvin Gardens was made in typical BBS fashion—on the cheap, mostly on location, this time in Atlantic City, which was in post–Miss America decline and years away from its legalized-gambling resurrection. Jack was happy to be there, near enough to Neptune City for him to drop in occasionally on Lorraine and see how she and Shorty were doing. He normally tried to come home once a year
, and after Easy Rider he could do it on someone else’s nickel, to promote a movie. This was the first time, however, he brought a woman with him to New Jersey. At his invitation, Michelle came along for the duration of the shoot.

  To prepare for his role, Jack packed the essentials, and a crate of his favorite albums—George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Strauss waltzes recorded by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Greatest Hits, some Dylan, a couple of Cat Stevens albums, and a Lee Michaels.

  Gardens, in many ways, complements Five Easy Pieces—except nothing in Gardens works cinematically, and without Eastman’s touch the script cannot compete. It is a family drama and takes place in an isolated house where the family comes together to try to work out their differences.

  David (Jack) is the host of a radio talk show, nerdy and toothsome (and balding), whose brother, Jason (Dern), has a get-rich scheme that will necessarily involve them with some shady characters and ultimately results in Jason’s death. The film opens on a Kovács-lit close-up of Jack, who could be testifying at a trial or confessing to a priest for all anyone knows, before the camera pulls back and reveals that he is talking into a microphone. He is a small-time radio DJ.

  According to Jack, this is the breakdown of his character: “The character was sort of what I call a one-roomer. He’s Kafkaesque. He lives alone. He is a radio monologist. He’s an intellectual and he’s been institutionalized. He’s involved strongly in the absurdities of life. He’s not really in with society, he’s like a bystander. He’s very laid-back. Most of his thinking and verbosity relate to his work and not to his life. He’s a watching character in life.”

  Much of the film was shot in an old hotel, which was cheaper than building sets, but because of it, camera movement was necessarily minimal, and it stopped whatever visual flow the film might have had.