by Marc Eliot
Jack was now a three-time loser at the Oscars. “I like the idea of winning at Cannes … but not getting our own Academy Award hurt real bad. I did it in that movie, that was my best role.” It fell to Anjelica to comfort him as they made the Oscar afterparties. Later, back at the hotel, she did her best to convince him in the most delightful way that this night there were no losers.
BERT SCHNEIDER’S controversial anti-Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds screened at Cannes in the spring of 1974. Rafelson couldn’t care less about Hearts and Minds but was worried about what would happen to his own career without BBS behind him.
Rafelson was right to worry. After BBS was dissolved, he would not direct another feature film for four years. Studios found little to like about him; despite his early hits he was abrasive, arrogant, and, after The King of Marvin Gardens, considered a bad commercial risk.
Jack was aware of the split between Schneider and Rafelson and kept his distance from it. He was interested in making good movies, not political statements, playing characters consumed with the politics of romance rather than the romance of politics. He wanted to make good movies with great directors, and he no longer considered Rafelson in that league.
* * *
1 Schneider, a lifelong druggie—during the middle of an interview for the film with the New York Times she rolled up a joint and smoked it—was plagued with mental problems, and was in and out of asylums her entire life. She made more movies, but none created the kind of stir either Last Tango or The Passenger did. She was knighted by the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2010. She died of cancer in February 2011.
2 There are two published editions of the interviews by Crane and Fryer. The first, Face to Face, is a compendium of interviews collected by them in the early seventies and published in 1975. The second, Jack Nicholson: The Early Years (2012), is essentially the same as the first, with the explanatory paragraph quoted here. See the bibliography for additional publication information.
3 Jack technically won the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle awards the following year, 1975, for both Chinatown and The Last Detail.
4 Academy rules prohibit audience members from leaving their seats during the telecast, except during breaks. If one leaves and does not return in time, a “sitter” will take his or her place until the next break.
CHAPTER
“I don’t know why a guy goes to a hooker … [but] I’m Big Jack. I don’t have to pay for it …”
—JACK NICHOLSON
WITH THE SUCCESS OF THE GODFATHER, BOB EVANS BECAME THE head of production at Paramount, charged with turning the troubled studio around. Part of Evans’s new deal was the right to produce movies under his own name, with points (a percentage of the film’s profits) above his salary. No sooner had the ink dried on his new contract than Evans signed up his first film, a screenplay written by Bob Towne called Chinatown. Towne was a big fan of Raymond Chandler and for a long time had wanted to write a screenplay that reflected Chandler’s seamy-side-of-L.A. mystery style.
He first got the idea for the film from a police friend of his. “The one place I never really worked,” the cop told Towne, “was Chinatown. They really run their own culture.” It was that image of impenetrability, insularity, and inscrutability that he turned into the foundation of his story. Evans was at a loss as to why Towne wanted to write about Chinese people living in L.A. When he explained that the title was a metaphor, Evans agreed to give him $25,000 and 5 percent of the gross to write Chinatown.
Towne was writing at his usual snail’s pace. After six months, by the early winter of 1973, Evans expressed his concern to Towne, who told him not to worry. He reminded Evans he was tailoring the lead role, Gittes, for Jack, whom Evans had originally offered $500,000 up front and a healthy piece of the net to do the film. It was a far cry from the $12,500 Jack had had to beg Evans for when he made Clear Day. Sandy Bresler negotiated the deal to $750,000 up front and the same piece of the net. Jack made no apologies; his cost of living had skyrocketed. He now had a $12,000-a-month nut.
To direct, Evans wanted John Huston, who turned the project down, as did his other choice, Mike Nichols. After reading the first draft, neither thought the material was compelling enough. Evans’s third choice was Roman Polanski.
Polanski had briefly been the prime suspect in the sensational murder of his wife, until he was able to prove he was in London during the time of the Manson massacre. When the trial started a year later, Polanski chose not to watch or take part in any of what he knew would be a media circus. Instead, he left L.A. in favor of world travel (carrying with him everywhere the saddest of talismans, a pair of Sharon’s panties). Now, three years later, he had no desire to return to California, or anywhere in the States, to make a movie. He felt more at ease in Europe, where he was from. Evans caught up with him in Rome and approached him about returning to Hollywood to make Chinatown.
Polanski at first said no, that he did not want return to the scene of the crime, as it were. Besides, he insisted he had all but retired from filmmaking. Since the murders, he had directed a cathartic version of Macbeth, in which Macduff, while away, learns that his family has been murdered. Evans implored him to make the movie. Polanski’s response was that he couldn’t fit it in his schedule because he was going to Poland for Passover. Evans said he should instead come to his house for the biggest Seder he would ever see.
Polanski finally gave in and agreed to return to Los Angeles to make the movie, and Evans, true to his word, put together a massive Passover dinner that included such guests as Anne and Kirk Douglas; Carol and Walter Matthau and their son, Charlie; Warren Beatty; Jack and Anjelica. And Hugh Hefner, who had been one of the producers of Macbeth.
During all of this, Towne still hadn’t finished his screenplay and had run out of money. Afraid to go to Evans, believing he would fire him, Towne went instead to Jack and pleaded poverty, saying he desperately needed cash. Jack gave him $10,000 with the proviso that Towne lock himself in his room until the script was finished.
Polanski, meanwhile, rented a small house, surprisingly, not far from the one on Cielo Drive where the Manson murders had taken place, and asked Towne to move in with him so he could help him with the script. For the next eight weeks, the two worked together day and night, and the further they got into it, the more their personal relationship deteriorated, mostly because of Towne’s dog, who went with him everywhere and was always pissing on the floor, on all the furniture, even on Polanski’s leg, and Towne kept interrupting their work sessions to walk him. Polanski also hated Towne’s stinky, sloppy wet pipe that he smoked constantly and blew spit through that made an awful noise, like a perennially stuffed nose the owner refuses to blow. Towne constantly produced clouds of stale blue smoke that hung over the two as they worked. Polanski prided himself on being an outdoors man—skiing was one of his passions—and claimed the smoke was choking him, not just physically but creatively as well. When the monster that was Chinatown’s 180-page, three-hour script finally went into production, on the first day of shooting Polanski barred Towne, his dog, and his pipe from the set.
The plot of the film is largely a red herring about a detective who stumbles on a scheme to divert much-needed water to Los Angeles, at the expense of Owens Valley, which, deprived of its supply, eventually dries up. All of it had been written about before, and extensively—how the water created the orange groves, how the orange groves attracted the first movie moguls for their cheap and plentiful land. Involved in the mechanics of the deal were the city’s mayor, Frederick Eaton; chief engineer, William Mulholland, who later had a street named after him (which Jack happened to live on); and the city’s chamber of commerce—all of whom stood to benefit from a more water-accessible L.A.
However, the real story in the film belonged to Noah Cross, played by John Huston, who had agreed to be in it but not direct. It is one of family deception, sexual enslavement, incest, and murder, subjects Polanski could relate to far m
ore easily than to the politics of water. And that was what made the film great. On the surface is a politically murky affair, below it an emotional volcano. Polanski turned Detective Gittes, played by Jack (named by Towne as a nod to their good friend Harry Gittes), into a thoughtful observer as he slowly uncovers the evil incarnate that is Noah Cross. There are long scenes in the desert (recalling James Dean’s in the Texas oil fields in Giant) where Jack does nothing more than stare out into the vast space, trying to figure out the pieces of a puzzle that, like Towne’s script, are too waterlogged for him to easily and neatly fit together.
By the time the film began production, Ali MacGraw, Evans’s wife, who had first been cast in the female lead of Evelyn Mulwray, was out of the film because she had left Evans for Steve McQueen.
The part of Evelyn Mulwray was then offered to Jane Fonda, who passed, and eventually went to Faye Dunaway, whom Evans managed to get for $50,000. Dunaway had caused a sensation in her third film as Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, but had since made some questionable career decisions. She did eleven films in five years, none of which were as big as Bonnie and Clyde, and her career was on a downslide. Dunaway was a difficult actress on some star trip all her own, and her peculiar aloofness infuriated Polanski, who was not used to treating actresses as anything but messengers in the service of his precious movies. One time Polanski went to fix something on one of her costumes, and she smacked him in the face, threatening to call the police and accuse him of attempted rape. Dunaway refused to continue unless Polanski was fired.
Evans, who had no use personally for Dunaway, stood behind Polanski and, if it came down to it, would replace Dunaway first. It took the promise from Evans of an enormous Oscar campaign that would surely result in at least a nomination for her, and, if it didn’t, a Rolls-Royce Corniche, to get her to agree to let Polanski stay on the film. Evans made the same offer to Polanski, an Oscar buildup and a Rolls, if he let her stay. Polanski countered with a Bentley, Evans agreed, and the film resumed production.
The neo-noir film plods along as Gittes slowly begins to figure out the depths of the deceptions that have placed him in the middle of some sinister plot, underscored when his nose is nearly cut off (for being too nosy?) by a hit man played by Roman Polanski (the victim now the victimizer). Polanski needed no extra motivation to pluck off Jack’s proboscis. In the midst of trying to film this labyrinthine script, Jack kept leaving rehearsals and missing takes to stay in his trailer, where he had set up a TV to watch the Lakers play. Occasionally, he would leave the set early to meet up with Lou Adler and drive over to the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood to watch the Lakers do their thing.
One time on set, Polanski needed Jack to come back and redo a shot, and Jack told him the Lakers were in the fourth quarter and he, Polanski, would have to wait. More than a little annoyed, Polanski wrapped the scene without the retake. Polanski then “ran into my dressing room, grabbed the television, and smashed it on the floor. I responded by storming out.…” Later they ran into each other at Gower and Sunset and laughed until they had tears in their eyes.
The plot of the film was so ambiguous that the original ending has Noah Cross killed by Mulwray, who, it turns out, is his daughter and his lover, and the mother of his child. It was changed by Polanski. He so hated the self-importance of his fading-star leading lady that instead he had her killed off, hoping the effect would drip over to her career. Unfortunately, that left Cross’s granddaughter in his sole possession, further confusing the audience as the sordid facts of the film continued to unfold. To Jack, it all hit a little too close to home.
THE FIRST PREVIEW of Chinatown took place in San Luis Obispo, not that far from Los Angeles, and it was a disaster. Before the lights came up, half the audience had left. A panicky Polanski met with a calmer Evans, who suggested they put a new musical soundtrack on the film. Evans hired Jerry Goldsmith, who, in eight days, rescored the film, with music that was eerily in tune with the overall tone of the film. A few weeks later the reedited film was screened at the Directors Guild in Hollywood. The reaction was no better. Several luminaries came up to Evans and solemnly told him the film was unreleasable. Not to worry, he told them. Audiences will love Jack, and they will get what we’re trying to do. To connect to his character, during filming Jack had all of Gittes’s shirts monogrammed above the pocket, even though they were never seen in the film.
Chinatown opened in theaters on June 20, 1974, and, as Evans had predicted, proved an immediate hit with audiences and critics. Sensing that the film had Oscar potential, late that fall Paramount sent Jack on an international promotional tour, with Anjelica again accompanying him, this time to Stockholm, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, and Rome. In each city the film had already opened and was a smash hit. His next stop was Switzerland, where he was joined by Polanski, who had just finished the South American leg of the PR tour, for a couple of days of celebrity R and R, skiing. Polanski was not impressed with Jack’s abilities on the slopes. “His style is like a guy who scratches his left ear with his right hand.”
Eventually the tour came back to America. In New York Jack and Anjelica lived it up, squeezing in interviews mostly in the mornings to save the rest of the time for themselves (getting up early was the only problem for Jack). They also met up with Warren Beatty, David Geffen, and Mike Nichols. Wealthy now, Jack loved to play the glad-hander, dressing in gaudy clothes, lots of reds and yellows, and white-top loafers. His arrowhead eyebrows always shot up his scalp when he smiled, the lines of his forehead like the striated sides of an eight-layer cake, his dark hair slicked back and shiny like the side of a ’58 Buick, his teeth shining. Jack reveled in reaching for every tab, proud to the point of near ostentation that he could take care of everybody.
Jack was agreeable to everything the studio asked him to do, except television. He had it written in his contract that he would not have to appear on the tube. All the talk shows wanted him, and they reached a huge audience, but he refused. Talk shows, he insisted, were not for Oscar contenders. “I have done radio interviews and stuff like that … but on a television show you’re sort of captured in there.” Later, he elaborated: “I think secrecy, and this is why I don’t do television interviews, for instance—is a very important tool to the actor, both in the dynamic of playing a part and in the way it’s perceived.”
He preferred to wear the mask of character and believed that breaking the magic of the movie screen by crossing through it to the small screen of television, out of character, was ruinous to an actor.
FROM A BUDGET of $6 million, Chinatown grossed nearly $30 million in its 1974 initial domestic release. The film was hailed as Polanski’s masterpiece. All the major reviews were positive and properly hailed Jack’s performance. Charles Champlin, writing in the Los Angeles Times, declared, “Chinatown reminds you again—and thrillingly—that motion pictures are larger, not smaller, than life, they are not processed in drug stores and they are not television.” Newsweek called it “a brilliant cinematic poem in the style of Poe, circa 1974,” and Saturday Review said it was “superbly acted—especially by Jack Nicholson, who does everything so easily, casually, and appropriately that he hardly seems to be acting at all.” Andrew Sarris best captured the essence of why Chinatown resonated, and still resonates, so powerfully with audiences: “Even Polanski’s intense feeling for tragedy could never have been realized without the vision of tragedy expressed in Nicholson’s star-crossed eyes …”
In the end it wasn’t Polanski’s film but Jack’s, a fact that led everyone to believe he would finally walk away with his first Oscar, one of many Chinatown was expected to win. Evans, keeping his promise to heavily promote the film, had managed to get Time to agree to put Jack on the cover in August 1974 and intended to banner it with “THE STAR WITH THE KILLER SMILE.” Jack was quite excited about it, until a Time reporter, preparing the story, asked him during an otherwise ordinary interview, one that Jack could have done in his sleep, if it was true that Ethel
May was really his grandmother and Don Furcillo-Rose, not John Nicholson, his real father.
Jack was blown nearly off his sofa. Again? The first thing Jack wanted to know was where the reporter had heard that. It was Time’s policy not to reveal sources, and this reporter wouldn’t, but Jack suspected it was the same source that had given the story to those two students. He had thought, or hoped, that it had gone away and he would never again have to deal with it. He had stuck his finger in the dam once and managed to plug it up; now he would have to try it again.
Jack later told Bogdanovich, “I was grateful I didn’t have to deal with it with [any of] them. Show me any woman today who could keep a secret [like Ethel May], a confidence, or an intimacy to that degree. You got my kind of gal … They were all Irish warriors and powerful women … look, it’s why in this instance I can’t be my normally liberal self [and why I’m totally] pro-life. In today’s world I wouldn’t exist [if June had had an abortion] … June was only 16 … Finally finding out did clarify a lot of things. Because in either event my grandmother was a single parent … it verified certain very murmuring intuitions as deep as an 11-to-14-year-old mind can go.”
Jack was horrified that this story would sooner or later be plastered all over the media, to have Ethel May’s and June’s and even John Nicholson’s names dragged through the poisonous mud of gossip, or being called a bastard for the rest of his life. They were all gone and he wanted them to rest in peace. It was nobody’s fucking business but his.
He decided to call Time and take his best shot. Turning on the Nicholson charm, he asked them not to run the material about his family, because he wanted to write about it himself. Incredibly, that was good enough for Time. No one at the magazine, Jack insisted, felt any journalistic urgency to write the true story. In return, he told them, he would give them any further access they might need for their piece on him. The cover story ran that August, with no mention of the skeletons in Jack’s New Jersey family closet.
