by Marc Eliot
Another finger in the dike.
EARLY IN 1975, the Oscar nominations were announced, and Chinatown picked up eleven, including one for Jack for Best Performance by an Actor. The other favorite film, which would be Chinatown’s chief competition, was The Godfather: Part II, also nominated for eleven awards.
Jack was favored to win. He had already picked up the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle award as Best Actor, the same from the National Society of Film Critics (for Chinatown and The Last Detail), a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe.
THE AWARDS WERE held on the rainy night of April 8, 1975, once again at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this time hosted by several members of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Shirley MacLaine, and, out of a sense of loyalty to Oscar past, Bob Hope. Jack showed up in a tux, sunglasses, and a beret to hide his fast-thinning pate, with a resplendent Anjelica Huston proudly on his arm.
Jack’s chances were improved by what was an especially weak pack of nominees, the softest grouping since he had first been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Easy Rider. Art Carney, a well-liked TV actor best known for playing Ed Norton on Jackie Gleason’s working-class sitcom The Honeymooners, for which he had won five Emmys, but whose résumé for feature films was slim, was nominated for Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto.1 Albert Finney, the British actor, won a nomination for his appearance in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express. Dustin Hoffman, disastrously miscast as the iconoclastic comedian Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse’s Lenny, received one, as did Al Pacino for Francis Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II, a film that everyone agreed belonged to Robert De Niro, who was nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his superb performance. The smart money (six-to-five in Vegas) all went to Jack, who deserved to win not just for Chinatown but for his entire body of work, which had helped pull Hollywood kicking and screaming into the seventies.
Jaws dropped everywhere in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when the Best Actor Oscar went to … Art Carney, for a minor performance in a decidedly minor film, his road picture for geriatrics. It was felt that the Oscar was a nod for a lifetime of work, mostly in vaudeville and on TV, and that this was surely the only time he would ever be nominated for an Oscar. The others would have many more chances.
Despite Evans’s furious campaign, Chinatown lost Best Picture to Godfather: Part II; Ellen Burstyn, an actress everybody liked, won for Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, over Faye Dunaway, whom nobody liked. Of the major players connected to Chinatown, Bob Towne, of all people, was the only winner, for Best Original Screenplay. Polanski lost Best Director to Coppola for Godfather: Part II.
The Oscar for Best Documentary feature of the year, presented by Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas, went to Bert Schneider, for his controversial Vietnam film, and his swan song, Hearts and Minds, an award that infuriated many in the audience. Schneider fanned their flames when he read a congratulatory telegram from the Vietcong delegation at the Paris peace talks that began, “Greetings of friendship to all American people …” When he finished, to mixed applause, and left the stage, Frank Sinatra came on, glaring, looking like he was ready to kill anybody as long as his name was Bert Schneider, denounced the award and was, to his amazement, booed. Backstage everyone started arguing. MacLaine shook a finger in Sammy Davis Jr.’s face; John Wayne, outraged, made fists intended for but not thrown at the first face he ran into that he didn’t like. The noise in the wings was so loud it could be heard throughout the auditorium.
In the midst of all the commotion, Schneider managed to slip away. He knew that Hollywood had seen the last of him, and he had seen the last of it. Holding his Oscar in his fist, he climbed into the back of his waiting limo and instructed the driver to take him home.
Jack watched the whole thing with bemusement. He wasn’t a fan of Hearts and Minds, but he was happy it won. He only wished he’d had a chance to tell Bert how proud he was, but he couldn’t get to him before he left. Jack never made any public comment about the film or the award.
WHEN HE FINALLY arrived back at the house with Anjelica early the following morning, after putting on his game face and making all the requisite rounds, he found an envelope sticking in his fence. It was a bill. The IRS wanted $123,000 in back taxes they claimed Jack owed.
A month later The Passenger opened in theaters in America and disappeared in a week. The film grossed a paltry $620,000 in its initial release and received mixed-to-negative reviews about the lack of a cohesive plot. Andrew Sarris dubbed its director “Antonio-ennui.”2 After the film completed its initial theatrical run, because of issues dealing with the ownership of the negative, it was rarely seen in revival.3
* * *
1 Carney won one Emmy for The Honeymooners and four for playing Norton on The Jackie Gleason Show.
2 The film’s reputation has grown with the passage of time. In 2005, on the occasion of the film’s rerelease, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called The Passenger “arguably Mr. Antonioni’s greatest film.”—New York Times, August 28, 2005.
3 Jack settled with the studio for cash and all future distribution rights to The Passenger, a film he insisted was a work of art, and he wanted to add it to his permanent collection. The studio had no problem giving him The Passenger, as it believed it had run its course.
CHAPTER
“To succeed—in order to become a Brando or a Bob Dylan, you can’t just punch a time card, take a nap, and pick up your reviews and your money … your work is all consuming … whether you want to or not you do take your job home with you.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
IN 1962, KEN KESEY PUBLISHED HIS GROUNDBREAKING NOVEL ONE Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which came out of his own experiences as a struggling writer. To pay the bills, he had worked the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California. At the same time, he got heavily into peyote and LSD, became friendly with several patients, and witnessed some things that affected him deeply and he wouldn’t forget. Eventually, his time at the institution became the basis for his semiautobiographical novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in an Oregon state mental hospital in Salem, Oregon, which depicts the lives of several inmates and their supervisors, including one inmate, Randle Patrick McMurphy, whose rebellion against supervisor Nurse Ratched symbolizes the struggle of the rebel to be free in an ordered or controlled civilization. The novel and the subsequent play and feature film all ask the same question—are the inmates insane living in a sane world, or are they really sane in an insane world?
Faded granite-jawed golden boy Kirk Douglas hit his peak in 1960 playing the title role in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, another story of a rebel fighting against an unjust social order, after which Douglas’s career began to slow down. He would never again achieve that level of popularity. Dissatisfied with the films he was now being offered, Kirk began to look for original properties as far away from sandals-swords-robes spectaculars as possible, and when he read a prepublication proof copy of Cuckoo’s Nest, he believed that the story and especially the character of McMurphy were exactly what he needed to kick-start his career. He paid Kesey $47,000 for the rights and then, after failing to find backers for a movie version, decided to turn the story into a play and bring it to Broadway, proving the old adage that movie stars play the Great White Way on the way up and on the way down.1
Douglas had been a working Broadway actor before he was discovered by film producer Hal Wallis and brought to Hollywood, and now he wanted to return to Broadway with Cuckoo’s Nest. If it was a success, he knew film producers would once again be lining up around the block for it and for him. Douglas partnered with well-known stage producer Dale Wasserman to produce it on Broadway. Cuckoo’s Nest opened on November 13, 1963, to brisk business. Nine days later, JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Despite Kirk’s best (and most stubborn efforts), nobody wanted to go to the theater to see a play about crazies and the show closed in January 1964.
For the better part of
the next ten years, Kirk searched in vain for someone to pick up the play’s movie option. At times he came close. In 1969, independent producer Joseph E. Levine’s independent production company Avco Embassy, which had grossed over $100 million from Mike Nichols’s offbeat 1967 The Graduate, briefly considered producing Cuckoo’s Nest but ultimately passed.
A year later, Richard Rush, who had done three early films with Jack, thought it might be a good project to direct and Jack to star in. Kirk, who still controlled the rights, said no to Rush, believing he wasn’t big enough, and the project lay dormant for two more years, until Kirk decided to conduct a fire sale and offer the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest for $150,000 to anyone who wanted it. He got no takers. Kirk had not even a shadow of his former box office clout, and Ken Kesey was never a factor in Hollywood. Moreover, the original novel gave off an unpleasant whiff of 1950s sexism, especially when it came to its portrayal of Nurse Ratched.
Then, after a protracted legal battle over the film rights with Wasserman, a fed-up Kirk gave the whole package to his son, Michael Douglas. At the time, Michael was an up-and-coming actor appearing in a TV cop-chase show who desperately wanted to get into producing. As Michael remembers, “I said to my father, ‘Why don’t you let me take it over, and I promise that I’ll at least make your original investment back for you.’ ”
With no other options, in 1972 Kirk agreed to have Michael run with it. As Michael put it, “My saga began—and it was a long one.”
MICHAEL QUICKLY LEARNED the same thing his father had: that there was no interest in Cuckoo’s Nest. He would have to start from scratch to get it produced. He went through all of Kirk’s old files and found the name of Saul Zaentz, who, at one time, had wanted to partner with Kirk on the project. Zaentz was several years older than Michael, closer to Kirk’s age, and had first made his name in the music business. When Michael caught up with Zaentz, both were living in San Francisco; Michael was shooting episodes of The Streets of San Francisco, and Zaentz was running his Fantasy Records. Zaentz had added rock and roll to his newly acquired label and signed several acts, including Creedence Clearwater Revival, fronted by John Fogerty. They became a hit machine and Fantasy’s biggest moneymaker. Zaentz continued to diversify his business interests and wanted to get into film. After seeing a local San Francisco theatrical production of Cuckoo’s Nest, he had tracked down the rights and got in touch with Kirk. The two didn’t hit it off, and Zaentz went off to produce another movie that made no money.
Kirk had disliked Zaentz—his puffy, hippie veneer, his know-it-all attitude. But everything Kirk hated about Zaentz, Michael, a former hippie himself, loved. And Michael, busy with his TV series, was more than happy to let Zaentz be the up-front man. He offered Fantasy Films, Zaentz’s film production company, a full partnership with Bigstick Productions, Michael’s film production company, if Fantasy put up the film’s entire $2 million budget.
Zaentz sat down and wrote a check.
ZAENTZ WANTED TO commission Kesey himself to write the screenplay, but Michael was hesitant about bringing the novelist into the deal. Michael had been around his father in Hollywood long enough to know that book writers didn’t usually make good screenwriters, and besides, he knew, Kesey was known to be a bit of a head case.
Zaentz nevertheless set up a meeting with Kesey and offered him a generous deal, and he took it. Four months later he produced a script that both Michael and Zaentz agreed was useless. After a series of legal entanglements, they were able to buy out Kesey and hired the then relatively unknown and little experienced Bo Goldman to do a complete rewrite. While that was happening, Michael and Zaentz went in search of a director.
One of the first they considered was Hal Ashby. As it turned out, Ashby himself had long wanted to acquire the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest but had neither the money nor the wherewithal to make the deal. Now that the film was moving forward, he wanted to direct it and bring Jack in to star.2 By now, Chinatown had opened to great success, and he was eager to find a new project, and Cuckoo’s Nest seemed perfect. It would take him out of himself and allow him to concentrate on the acting out of a complex character’s personality; a character that would be remarkably close to who he really was.
Douglas and Zaentz, however, had other ideas. Their first choice to play McMurphy was Marlon Brando, who immediately said no, then Gene Hackman, who also turned them down. So did Burt Reynolds and James Caan.
Jack remained interested in playing McMurphy; he liked the script and also wanted to work with Ashby again, and the deal was made. Jack agreed to a million dollars up front and a piece of the gross.3 Zaentz wanted Jack but not Ashby (Zaentz didn’t like him), and still without a director, the film’s projected start was delayed for another six months.
ON A RAINY June 17, 1974, at one o’clock in the afternoon, accompanied by his agent, Sandy Bresler; his daughter Jennifer, whom he had flown in for the occasion (one of the few times he got to see her without having to fly to Hawaii); Robert Towne; Lou Adler; Kathryn Holt (an artist friend of his); and Anjelica Huston, Jack was given the honor of becoming the 159th star to put his handprints in the courtyard of Mann’s (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The once-prestigious honor was now little more than a publicity stunt to promote new movies, in this instance Chinatown. At the height of Hollywood Boulevard’s popularity, in the 1930s, through the 1960s, 158 previous recipients had gone through the ritual. In the 1970s, Jack was the second of only seven honorees, one of them a droid (C-3PO)4 (Darth Vader and R2-D2 also received the honor on C-3PO’s big day).
Jack dutifully placed his hands and feet into the cool wet cement and used a pencil to sign his autograph in big block letters. Afterward, while Jack was having something to eat with Jennifer, Bresler, who had known all along but didn’t want to put more of a damper on the day than the steady rain falling already had, quietly informed Jack of the delay in the start of production of Cuckoo’s Nest.
THAT JULY, STILL under contract to Zaentz and Douglas, with a temporary option-out clause, Jack, eager to work, exercised it; after considering several offers, he signed on to do Mike Nichols’s The Fortune, written by Jack’s old friend Carole Eastman (as Adrien Joyce) and co-starring pal Warren Beatty.
Having the chance to work with Nichols again and being in a movie written by Eastman with his buddy Beatty were the reasons Jack agreed to do it over the many other offers, despite having not read the completed script. (Mike Nichols had signed on after reading only the half that Eastman had completed. She had given it to him on a flight to Warsaw, and by the time the plane landed he had made up his mind to do it.)5 Nichols’s career had floundered a bit after making The Day of the Dolphin, his disappointing first film following Carnal Knowledge. Jack’s ex-roommate Don Devlin, who had since become close with Eastman, co-produced.
The Fortune, ostensibly a “caper” film minimally based on a real-life scam from the 1930s, in which a neo–Laurel and Hardy—Jack and Beatty—try to pull off a money-grabbing scam to separate a wealthy sanitary napkin heiress (ha ha) from her “fortune.” As would soon become obvious to one and all, slapstick, or any style of comedy, for that matter, was not one of Beatty’s fortes. The Fortune’s female lead was Stockard Channing, who could play broad comedy but whose talents were wasted here, and whose name had been way down Warren’s wish list of co-stars, high among them Anjelica Huston, who wisely turned the picture down to keep her relationship with Jack on solid ground. Anjelica later said, “I don’t think Jack really wanted to be with an actress, because he had been with them before and it hadn’t been successful …”
Nichols had originally sought Bette Midler to play the female lead. Midler was far better known than Channing but committed a fatal error when she met Nichols and, in her familiar out-of-the-side-of-her-mouth manner, aggressively quizzed him on what other movies he had made. Midler was out, Channing was in.
Jack often took Jennifer with him on set. She was staying with Jack while she was on summer vacation. One day during a
break he had a conversation with Jennifer and asked his ten-year-old daughter, who would sometimes hum softly to herself, if she liked to sing. She nodded. Well, then, had she had ever heard of the song “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”? She replied, “What’s a five-and-ten-cent store?”
WHEN THE FORTUNE came out, one or two critics cited Jack’s performance as better than the others’, but that was like saying cyanide was better than arsenic. The film’s tried and true conceit—put together stars and let their charisma do the acting—this time did not work. What came across to audiences was a tiresome, ill-paced noncomedy that unintentionally reeked of homoerotic bonding, as do most male-male films where the female lead is only minimally involved and is not a sexually desirable character. If anything, the film proved the difference between Beatty as an actor with star power and Jack as a star who could act. As Henry Jaglom pointed out, “Jack was more than of his time. He was not just another hippie, temporary break-out indie star (like Bruce Dern). Jack could legitimately act, and write, and produce and direct. He was not conventionally handsome, especially after he lost most of his youthful appeal—he was fast approaching forty—but he was a superb character actor. Beatty was a traditional movie star, more like a gorgeous woman, whose run at the top was going to be limited to how long his looks lasted.”
MICHAEL DOUGLAS AND Saul Zaentz were still searching for a director. Michael once more returned to his father’s files, where this time he came up with the name of Miloš Forman, the Czech director whose career had begun while his native country was still in the Soviet sphere. Kirk had been visiting Russia and Prague as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department in the sixties and for the first time met Forman. Kirk had loved his 1965 Loves of a Blonde, which would eventually be nominated for a 1967 Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (it lost both to Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman). Kirk promised to send Forman a copy of Kesey’s book and asked if he would consider making a film out of it. When Kirk returned to the States and did not hear back from Forman, the famous Douglas temper showed its fangs, and Kirk swore he would have nothing more to do with the director.
