by Marc Eliot
Jack, Davy Jones, and an extremely rare photo of Bob Rafelson. This was taken the same night as above. Courtesy of Henry Diltz
A miscast Jack Nicholson in Vincente Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, released in 1970 and made before Easy Rider. Courtesy of Getty Images
The iconic image of Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Courtesy of Getty Images
Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
A scene from Jack’s directorial debut, the unsuccessful 1971 Drive, He Said. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and Michelle Phillips, with the love light in her eyes, at the Governor’s Ball following the April 1971 Academy Awards ceremony, just after Jack lost Best Actor for Five Easy Pieces to George C. Scott for his performance in the title role of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton. Courtesy of WireImage
Lobby card for Mike Nichols’s 1971 Carnal Knowledge, with Art Garfunkel and Jack. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Candice Bergen and Jack in a scene from Carnal Knowledge. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and “Dernsie” in Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens. Courtesy of Getty Images
Jack as “Badass” Buddusky in Hal Ashby’s 1973 The Last Detail. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack signing his name at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, June 1974. Courtesy of Getty Images
Co-star, father figure, and potential father-in-law John Huston with Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown. Courtesy of Getty Images
Chinatown.
Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack by the pool in the only house he ever owned, on Mulholland Drive near the top of the Hollywood Hills. In the background is his daughter, Jennifer (mother Sandra), July 1974. Courtesy of Getty Images
The highlight of Jack’s 1975 run, Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film was the first in forty-one years to win all four major Oscars. The recipients, left to right: producer Michael Douglas, director Miloš Forman, actress Louise Fletcher, Jack, producer Saul Zaentz. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and Stockard Channing in Mike Nichols’s 1975 misfire The Fortune. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and Maria Schneider in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 release, The Passenger, about a neo-Hitchcockian hero in search of his own identity. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack in the John Garfield role and Jessica Lange in the Lana Turner role in Bob Rafelson’s 1981 remake of the 1946 Tay Garnett classic The Postman Always Rings Twice, with a screenplay by David Mamet. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack as Eugene O’Neill in Warren Beatty’s epic 1981 Reds, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack, Shirley MacLaine, and James L. Brooks posing with their Oscars for Brooks’s 1983 Terms of Endearment. Courtesy of WireImage
Jack and Anjelica Huston, his longest and most meaningful romantic relationship, pictured here in 1985. Courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Kathleen Turner and Jack Nicholson as loving killers killing lovers in John Huston’s endlessly entertaining Prizzi’s Honor. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and director Rob Reiner, 1992’s A Few Good Men. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack in character to play the title role of 1992’s Hoffa, directed by his good friend Danny DeVito. Two TV actors and two dark characters in one year. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack and Rebecca Broussard, the mother of two of his children. Although she wanted to, they were never married to each other. Courtesy of Time/Life Pictures/Getty Images
Jack Nicholson with Kellita Smith (left) and Priscilla Barnes in Sean Penn’s 1995 The Crossing Guard. Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives
Jack with Lara Flynn Boyle attending the premiere of Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt. Courtesy of WireImage
Three stars and one director—Jack, Mark Wahlberg, and Martin Scorsese at the Warner Bros. premiere of The Departed, September 26, 2006, at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, New York. Jack appears to still be in character. Courtesy of Getty Images
CHAPTER
“I’m not much for birthdays … In 1972 I eliminated all years from my life. I don’t keep track of anything by years or weeks. I call it my living experiment … I’m unemployed with no irons in the fire … the good ones don’t make a movie a year … they wait …”
—JACK NICHOLSON
JACK WAS NOTHING IF NOT LOYAL. HE NEVER FORGOT HIS FRIENDS, especially those who struggled with him in the early days and those who helped him get to where he was. That was why when Bob Rafelson again asked Jack to play the John Garfield role in a 1980s remake of Tay Garnett’s 1946 film adaptation for MGM of James M. Cain’s tale of sexual betrayal and brutal murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice, he still couldn’t say no.
As it happened, Jack had been looking for a role that would allow him to bring a more complex, adult sexual aspect to the screen than his recent films. Except for Eugene O’Neill in Reds, which wasn’t a leading role, he hadn’t played a sexual character in a feature film since Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge. “I hadn’t done a lot of sexual acting—for lack of a better word—and it’s something I always felt I did well, in classes and workshops … in life, as in films, it’s a relatively unexplored area that’s extremely ritualized with convention.” Frank Chambers was a twisted sexual being, morally decrepit and stuffed with lust. Jack shared certain sexual interests with the character, who had a weakness for young and beautiful women and sex on top of kitchen tables. Jack could connect to Chambers as an actor and as a man.
This was his fourth film with Rafelson, who was desperately in need of a hit. Things had not gone well for him since Schneider had dissolved BBS and become something of a recluse. Rafelson, on the other hand, wanted to keep making movies, but his style of small, personal early 1970s filmmaking had fallen out of fashion in Hollywood. Rafelson made only one film in the seven years after the commercial failure of Marvin Gardens. He was never that well liked even at the height of his success. He was rough-hewn, quick-tempered, and confrontational. Henry Jaglom thinks he remembers seeing Rafelson throw somebody he was arguing with down a flight of stairs during the making of a film.
There were other reasons for his absence from the industry. In 1973, a year after he directed The King of Marvin Gardens, Rafelson’s daughter died in a gas explosion accident at his Aspen home. Shortly thereafter, his wife, Toby, was diagnosed with cancer. She eventually recovered, but her brush with death made her rethink her marriage strewn with the years of infidelity she had endured. She decided to legally separate from Rafelson. Three years passed before he made another movie, Stay Hungry, starring Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Scatman Crothers. During filming, Rafelson had an affair with Field, and when Toby found out, she filed for divorce. The film did only moderately well, and four more years passed before he got another shot to direct. That film was Brubaker, starring Robert Redford. Rafelson was fired after ten days. Word was that Redford didn’t like Rafelson’s manner and had him replaced by the far less demonstrative Stuart Rosenberg, a journeyman director and former film editor who was content to let Redford call the shots.
Rafelson’s next, possibly last chance to direct was this remake of Postman, for Paramount (Lorimar Productions). Jack was one of the few actors in the industry willing to work with Rafelson; most thought he was too tough and his style dated. Jack knew he held the balance of power and Rafelson couldn’t pull his bully tactics with him. If he did, his star would simply walk out and never return. Jack asked for and got $3 million, fully one-third of the film’s relatively modest $9 million budget, all that Paramount was willing to risk on Rafelson. There was loyalty and there was loyalty. If he was going to do a favor for Rafelson, Rafelson was going to have to show his appreciation. He agreed to Jack’s price because he had no choice. and on December 4, 1979, the comple
ted deal was announced in the trades. In typical boastful fashion, Rafelson declared in print that Postman would be “the most erotic movie I’ve ever conceived!”1
Jack’s co-star was Jessica Lange, but she wasn’t the studio’s first choice. They were pushing for Raquel Welch until Jack said no. He didn’t think she projected any heat. He preferred Meryl Streep, and she almost signed on, until she learned she was pregnant and had to bow out. Diane Keaton and Debra Winger, at the peak of their careers, were both turned down by Jack. When he again suggested Lange, this time the studio said yes.
The chance to work with Jack had almost happened once before, when Lange auditioned for Goin’ South, and while Jack didn’t give her the role, believing she was too glamorous, he did want her this time for the role of Cora Smith, played by Lana Turner in the 1946 version of the film.2 Jack wanted her for the “terrific farm girl-goes-to-the-city aura about her; she’s solid and substantial with a kind of rolling femaleness.”
Jack’s salary was announced in the trades; Lange’s too and was considerably less. She was fairly new to movies, a blond beauty who had made only three films, beginning with the unfortunate 1976 remake of King Kong, directed by John Guillermin. Despite winning a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year for a role made famous in the original by Fay Wray, Lange did not see herself as a mindless bimbo and turned down so many of those roles that she didn’t make another film for three years. Lange returned to the big screen in Bob Fosse’s sensational 1979 autobiographical All That Jazz, in which she played Angelique, the gorgeous Angel of Death. The film was an Oscar-winning hit, but the next year she took a step back, appearing in Robert Scheerer’s forgettably lowbrow female caper film How to Beat the High Co$t of Living. When the opportunity to do Postman came along, Lange jumped at it, believing that playing opposite Jack Nicholson could be her breakout film as a leading lady.
Rafelson wanted Jim Harrison to write the screenplay but he had a three-picture contract with Paramount and was unavailable. Jack then suggested the edgy, tough-writing David Mamet, winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle and Obie awards for his play American Buffalo (a future Pulitzer Prize recipient for 1984’s stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross). Mamet took the assignment and finished his script in January 1980.
At Jack’s urging, Rafelson gave the cast an unusually long five-month rehearsal time. Jack was after the same sense of intensity and continuity that shooting in sequence had given Five Easy Pieces. The flow of the script’s locations made that impossible, and Jack suggested to Rafelson that he use long single takes and fewer takes wherever possible. Rafelson acquiesced. He may have been the official director of the film, but Jack was obviously pulling all the strings. Rafelson gave Jack his head to get the film made.
The director hired Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s favorite cinematographer, to help create moody dark-and-light, faded-color neo-noir atmospherics. All the while Jack pushed Mamet to emphasize the film’s sexual theme in his script.
The story takes place some time during the Great Depression and begins when a drifter, Frank Chambers (Jack), stops at a California roadside diner somewhere off the beaten track, operated by a luscious young woman, Cora Smith (Lange), unhappily (and inexplicably) married to a much older, unattractive man, Nick Papadakis (John Colicos). The age difference between Nick and Cora explains why she is sexually unfulfilled, like a widow with a living dead husband, longing to be reheated, and soon is, by the blackest of cards. She hires Frank to help out around the diner.
Cora has designs on improving the place as a way of upgrading her own life, while Frank has designs on her. Nick, a bitter man with no ambition just looking to get by, wants to keep it the way it is. In a highly erotic scene, while Nick is upstairs half drunk, Frank seduces Cora (or Cora seduces him). They make passionate love, fully clothed but highly suggestive, over a kitchen table.
They are soon plotting to kill Nick. They pull it off and are quickly arrested and put on trial. The clumsy DA loses the case to a clever lawyer, and the two go free. Not long after, celebrating their victory, they get in a car accident. Cora is killed, leaving Frank free but alone.
Mamet’s script is seamy and lowlife, but it left out a vital part of the original novel and the 1946 film version, and by doing so took the power out of the story. In those versions, after the fatal car crash, Frank is arrested for the murder of Cora, although this time, ironically, he is innocent. Nonetheless, he is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Frank’s last lines as he is going to his death are “You forget that the postman always rings twice. Yeah. He rang twice for Cora and now he’s ringing twice for me,” the memorable metaphorical title phrase.3 The novel (as the Garnett version does, but not Rafelson’s) begins on death row, with Frank recalling the events that led him there. One thinks immediately of the other great seduction/husband killer/weak male/strong woman movie of the 1940s, Billy Wilder’s brilliant adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1944 novella, the remarkably similar and far superior, both on the page and screen, Double Indemnity.4
Mamet and Rafelson may have felt Garnett’s final sequence too preachy and unambivalent (one could see Cora’s death as punishment enough). Rafelson’s version only has the sound of sirens in the background as Frank realizes Cora is dead, and it is a stretch to believe audiences could, or would, fill in that many blanks. In Rafelson’s version, Nick’s hysterical, weakly out-of-character self-pity, weeping at the side of Cora’s corpse, reflects on the loss of her hot body, not the mourning for her lost soul.
The emphasis with Rafelson was on sex, but Mamet’s script, as directed by Rafelson, didn’t have any of the sadomasochistic elements of the original 1934 novel. Because the sex is explicit but unconvincing in the Rafelson film, all of that is lost. One great touch in Jack’s film: they celebrate Nick’s murder with a candlelit dinner. Their cold-bloodedness is striking enough; the dinner is startlingly romantic and represents the restaurant Cora hopes she will realize from the murder.
Jack not only was well aware of what the film required emotionally but welcomed an attempt to reclaim some of his own fading onscreen sex appeal. “I did Postman because I hadn’t come down the middle with the fastball about sex in a movie. The whole reason for [making it] is sex, and that’s why I wanted to do it … the obligatory scene in Postman happens when the two kill her husband and she gets so hot she has to fuck right then and there … I like the idea that there is not a speck of nudity in Postman…”
Perhaps to keep his very real attraction for Lange in check, or maybe just to help Anjelica’s career, and his relationship with her, improve, Jack insisted that Rafelson cast her in the role of Madge, a whip-cracking lion-taming German temptress, of all things, a small but highly suggestive role, intimating that Jack’s character (if not Jack himself) was into showing off a little of his freak side, the only time in the film he does.
Anjelica jumped at the chance to be in the film, even if the role had nothng to do with the plot, and its sheer bizzareness broke the mood of the film. Five years had passed since her last onscreen appearance.
Soon after filming ended, Jack described their on-and-off relationship this way: “I’ve always viewed [us] as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir … I respect her more than I do other women and there’s something about the way she is that I just adore …[but] if you told me twenty years ago that some woman could go off and fuck one of my best friends [Ryan O’Neal] and I’d end up reading about it in newspapers, and that four years later I wouldn’t even give a shit, I’d say, ‘You’re talking to the wrong guy here. That’s not the way I am. I might want to be that guy, but I’m not.’ Now, I am.”
During a break in filming, Jack flew alone to New York for the highly anticipated May 23, 1980, Memorial Day weekend opening of The Shining. He was seen around town with Diane Keaton and took her to an advance screening of the film while Beatty was off in Spain, still shooting a few remaining scenes for Reds. On the way to the screening, Jack and Diane got stuck in an elevator with TV talk show h
ost Dick Cavett. After they were finally freed, they all went to the screening, and afterward Jack and Diane did the town, hitting, among other places, the then-popular disco Xenon, where it was certain they would be seen by the paparazzi. Jack gleefully smiled for every photographer, always with his arm around Keaton, knowing that Beatty would surely see these photos.
The next day, Jack underwent yet another round of hair transplants. Not only was his hair still receding, but his weight problem had gotten out of hand. He was not into exercise and all those enchiladas had added up. He had starved himself to look believable as a lover in Postman, but nonetheless, at forty-three, he had a belly the size of a basketball that, despite all his efforts, was getting bigger. And he needed his first pair of reading glasses.
WARNER BROS., The Shining’s distributor, had hoped the film, the first major release of the summer season, would bring the studio a big take at the box office. The night of the gala holiday weekend opening, Jack skipped out of the premiere once the film started to attend a party thrown by Mick Jagger. Shortly after arriving, Jack laid eyes on Playmate model Bebe Buell, one of the hottest and most notorious rock groupies of the day. Her major talent for driving famous men crazy worked perfectly on Jack. Elvis Costello was among the many performers who had once fallen for Buell, and after she left him he wrote some of his best, most bitter songs about her.5 Jack wanted her badly that night, and could have had her, except he also found himself attracted to sultry actress Rachel Ward. They retired to one of the bedrooms in Jagger’s hotel suite and didn’t come out until the next morning.
