by Marc Eliot
She was soon openly going with him to Aspen, and auditioning for Jack for the role of J. J. Gittes’s secretary in the perennially stalled The Two Jakes. No gratitude is sweeter or more intense than from a pretty young girl promised a role in a big Hollywood movie.
Jack felt rejuvenated by Broussard, and Anjelica felt fed up. She decided she was finally through with Jack, once and for all, and as if to prove it, perhaps to herself as much as to Jack, put her Beverly Glen house for sale and moved to Benedict Canyon, far enough away from Mulholland so as to not have to worry about Jack ever wanting to come over to borrow a cup of sugar. And she signed on to act in the upcoming TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. Jack, meanwhile, leased a big house for Broussard, a sugar bowl away from Mulholland.
PETER GUBER HAD been after Jack since the start of The Witches of Eastwick to play the Joker in the upcoming big-screen version of Batman, and Jack had continually said no. Guber persisted, saying it would be the biggest picture of his career. Then he signed Tim Burton to direct. Burton, who began, like Jack did, in animation (on far different levels), worked his way through the ranks, and in 1987 he earned the right to direct Beetlejuice. Even before it was released, Burton signed with Warner Bros. to do one of the studio’s biggest new productions, its highly anticipated Batman.
Guber: “It was always about capturing Jack’s natural personality and using it in different ways. Kind of like getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to do a romantic comedy. Now, this was going to be the next big superhero picture, done a little differently from Superman, mainly because of the addition of Tim Burton, who was going to transform this into something that had never been seen before. Everybody scoffed, saying we wouldn’t get anybody over seven to come and see it. But I knew the key to turning this into a franchise was to get an iconic adult actor to play the most important role, the villain.
“But Nicholson was playing hard-to-get. I knew that and figured the best thing to do was to take Tim Burton to Aspen, where Nicholson was, let them meet and help convince Jack to take the part. Tim said fine, we flew up there, to Jack’s ranch, they met and Jack said, ‘Let’s go riding.’ All the color drained from Tim’s face. He turned to me and said, ‘I don’t ride.’ ‘You do now,’ I said and threw him on a horse. Along the way Tim convinced Jack that they could make real magic in the film, that it would open up a whole new, younger audience to him, and that’s when Jack said okay, let’s do it. For five million up front and a hefty percentage of the gross.”3 Jack smelled a big film here and had packed his back end of the deal. Batman may have gotten all the press, but Jack was intent on getting all the money.
Jack’s nose was right. As Guber had promised, it made him a household name all over again, as Batman became the biggest box office film of the year, with the fiftieth best opening (adjusted) gross of any American film ever made.4
Never the fool when it came to money, Jack thought Burton was on to something when he talked about opening a new audience. I talked to Tim about keeping the movie bright.5
“We had him for a three-week shoot [in England at the end of October],” Guber remembered, “which, predictably, stretched into six, and Jack was furious. ‘I’m missing all my goddamn Lakers games,’ he kept grousing to everybody. All we did was laugh. Jack was completely professional and finished the film without another word about basketball and wound up making a fortune doing it.” To prepare for the role, Jack immersed himself in Nietzsche.
In addition to using his paycheck from Batman to add several paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Magritte, de Lempicka, and Bouguereau to his wall-leaning collection of art, there were other reasons Jack had agreed to do the role. Besides leching after co-star Kim Basinger (who later described Jack as “crazy, nasty, and the most highly sexed human I’ve ever known”), he told Bogdanovich, “I considered it an artistic commitment … I had worked in what actors call ‘en masque’—you’re wearing a mask, acting in a mask feels very liberating. You’re not quite as exposed. One of the few books Jeff Corey recommended to us was Masks or Faces.” His best line in the film, the one that made audiences hysterical, was delivered in full Joker mask and garb: “Can somebody tell me what kind of world we live in when a man dressed up as a bat gets all of my press!”
Jack loved his green hair wig, red mouth, and electrified purple clown outfit so much that he paid the production $70,000 to take them home. He thought they might come in handy, someday. After all, green was a good color for Jack.
* * *
1 The film happened; the soundtrack didn’t. Jack and Bono were both represented by the same PR agency, Mahoney/Wasserman, which was how Jack was connected to and became friendly with Bono.
2 Mayo-Chandler gleefully chronicled her brief but intense romance with Jack in a Playboy spread that left little to the imagination, in print or in photos. Jack stopped seeing her after that. Mayo-Chandler died in July 2006 of breast cancer.
3 Estimates put Jack’s final earnings from the film in the $90 million range. Rumors persist that Jack sold his back-end points for a flat $50 million. This has been denied by Sandy Bresler.
4 Batman led the pack with a whopping $251 million gross, followed by Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, $198 million; Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon 2, $147 million; Amy Heckerling’s Look Who’s Talking, $140 million; Joe Johnston’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, $131 million; Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future Part II, $118 million; Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters II, $112 million; Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, $107 million; Ron Howard’s Parenthood, $100 million; and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, $96 million. Batman would be, according to Variety, the highest domestic-grossing film of Jack’s career, post-1989, followed by A Few Good Men ($41.3 million), Hoffa ($24.8 million), The Two Jakes ($10 million), and Man Trouble ($4 million).
5 Early on, while still a boy living in New Jersey, Jack had once met TV’s future iconic Joker, Cesar Romero, from the campy Batman TV series. Nicholson had met Romero when he, Jack, was a lifeguard in New Jersey and Romero was in the Coast Guard; Jack recalled Romero as “one of the greatest looking men in the business.” Romero told Jack the day they met, “Hollywood is the lousiest town in the world when you’re not working.” Jack said he never forgot that—Information and quotes from Variety, August 29, 1988.
Jack Nicholson plays Col. Nathan R. Jessup, USMC, and Col. Jessup plays God, in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Courtesy of Getty Images
CHAPTER
“The actor is Camus’s ideal existential hero because life is absurd … the man who lives more lives is in a better position than the guy who lives just one.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
A YEAR AFTER JOHN HUSTON’S 1987 DEATH, HAL ASHBY PASSED. HE was only fifty-nine years old. If Huston’s body was preserved by alcohol, Ashby’s was rotted by coke. Both had memorials held at the Director’s Guild Theater on Sunset. Huston’s was standing room only; Ashby’s was half full. That same year, Andy Warhol died at age fifty-eight in a New York hospital recovering from minor surgery.
These three deaths deeply depressed Jack. They were important people in his life, and their loss left him in no mood to go back to work. He flatly turned down Peter Guber’s offer of $7.5 million, plus a generous piece of the back end, to do a Batman sequel that would have given the Joker a much larger part. He was both amused and relieved when the trades announced that his friend Danny DeVito was going to play the Penguin in the eventual sequel, Batman Returns, scheduled for release in 1992. Let Robin have a turn at some big-bucks comic book glory.1
Jonathan Demme, meanwhile, tried to persuade Jack to take the role of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which would pair him once more with Michelle Pfeiffer, one of his co-stars from The Witches of Eastwick. He was tempted, but said no. Those two roles eventually went to Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, and the film became the first picture to win all five major Oscars since One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest twenty-six years earlier. Hopkins won Best Actor,
Foster won Best Actress, the film’s producers won Best Picture, Demme won Best Director, and Ted Tally won for Best (Adapted) Screenplay.
Next came director John Badham, who wanted Jack to play a New York City detective in something called The Hard Way (1991). He said no, and the part went instead to James Woods. Tony Scott followed with an offer to Jack to star in The Last Boy Scout (1991), but again Jack said no, and that part went to Bruce Willis.
The one role he did say yes to was one he had waited what seemed like forever to get to play: J. J. Gittes. The Chinatown sequel had once again been resurrected, again without Polanski, who was still in self-imposed exile; but there was one director he believed could do the job better than anyone else.
Jack Nicholson.
He had not directed anything since Goin’ South, which proved as much of a bomb as his only other directorial effort, Drive, He Said. Although he had vowed never to direct again, the desire to prove he could do it was strong enough to make him change his mind.
Bob Evans, who had somehow found a way to bring the project back to life, this time offered Jack $11 million to star in and direct the sequel, which Evans envisioned as the second part of a Godfather-like trilogy. His new production partner was Harold Schneider, who had worked with Jack for Goin’ South. At Jack’s directive Evans and Schneider hired Jack’s daughter, Jennifer, now twenty-five, to be their assistant. She was interested in getting into movies. Evans once again hired Towne to rewrite his own script, despite Jack’s making it clear he would have nothing to do with Towne directly. Right from the beginning there was trouble. Jack kept rejecting each revision and made Towne do several until he was finally satisfied.
Filming on The Two Jakes began August 18, 1989, in Los Angeles. The story jumps ahead ten years and one World War later from the original. In 1948, private detective Gittes is hired by a client, Julius “Jake” Berman, a real estate developer (Harvey Keitel), to find out if his wife, Kitty (Meg Tilly), is committing adultery. Before Gittes can prove anything is going on, Berman kills the man he thinks has been bedding his wife, who turns out to be Jake’s business partner. Jake is pulled into both the new murder and memories of the murder of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway allowed only her voice to be used for the remake). Missing yet vivid in their absence were John Huston, who had added just the right amount of mystery and trepidation to the original, and, of course, Polanski, who, at one point, suggested the film be shot in Paris so he could direct it, an idea that Jack liked, but for financial reasons, was rejected.
Production wasn’t going well, and the mood of the cast and crew grew decidedly darker the day Anjelica showed up, unannounced, at the same Valencia, California, studio twenty-five miles north of Paramount where her father had shot his last film, 1987’s The Dead. She had recently returned from New York, where she had just finished Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story. The night before, Jack had told Anjelica that Broussard, who was in the movie, playing Jake’s secretary, was pregnant with his child, and Anjelica blew a gasket. The next morning she headed straight for the set where The Two Jakes was being filmed, brushed aside crew members who tried to stop her, stepped into the action shot, and physically mauled Jack with both fists and feet, letting out her fury for every wrong that Jack had done to her. Jack put his head down and his hands up to protect himself while letting Anjelica get it out of her system.
On April 16, 1990, Broussard delivered Lorraine Nicholson, seven pounds, fourteen ounces, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (the baby girl was named after his sister/aunt). Fifty-two-year-old Jack happily agreed to support both mother and child, his third. The night before Broussard gave birth, Jack left her alone to attend a Lakers game with Don Devlin, and on the way home he stopped at Bob Evans’s house to watch the screening of a film. When he got back to Mulholland it was around two in the morning, just in time to rush Broussard, who had gone into labor, to the hospital. Four hours later, she gave birth.
Jack was there to catch baby Lorraine when she came into the world. “We had everybody helping us and a beautiful room and the clouds—she came at dawn. Only four hours of labor.” He looked at the doctors, smiled, and said, “She’s rich, too.”
Jack then bought Broussard a $2 million home in Beverly Hills and set up an ample trust fund for Lorraine, claiming he still preferred to live alone. He needed his privacy, he told Broussard, who was a bit surprised by Jack’s decision. “I’m very moody,” he told a magazine interviewer, “and I shouldn’t be around anyone when I think the world is too awful to tolerate. I need to have a place where no one gets into. Rebecca understands that, and it’s fantastic for our relationship,” he insisted. “It’s my office—not my harem.”
EVERYBODY INVOLVED WITH The Two Jakes knew the film was not very good. On set it had been dubbed by one crew member as “Jack’s sex pen.” It was not going to be a hit, probably not even make back its negative cost. Once again, Jack was overwhelmed and, as he had in Goin’ South, discovered that doing double duty as director and actor was something he couldn’t handle; one canceled out the concentration on the other. “You got any idea what it’s like to direct a movie and star in it too? I’ll tell ya. You’re up at six and on the set at eight. You shoot all morning—settin’ up shots, directin’ the actors, playin’ your own part all at the same time. Then you miss lunch ’cause you’re thrashin’ out production problems. In the afternoon you shoot till dark. The actors go home—you don’t. You got two hours of conferences before you look at what you shot the day before. Suddenly it’s midnight and you haven’t had supper … so you go eat, and if you manage to get home by two a.m. you’re lucky. You’re dead beat, but you can’t go to bed yet. You’re also an actor. You got to study your lines for the next day. So you put out the lights at three, and three hours later the alarm goes off. That’s the normal routine. However, Bob Towne and I had to rewrite the script while we were shooting; and the only time I could write was in the wee hours. So for about three months, I got one, two hours of sleep a night … The Two Jakes is the hardest work I’ve ever done.” Because Towne and Jack were still not talking to each other, Jack had to take Towne’s notes and work from them by himself.
Vilmos Zsigmond, the film’s director of photography, added another side of what was so difficult about making the movie: “Filming Jack wasn’t easy. I had to cover up all that weight and use tricks to hide the red in his eyes.”
Evans, who had not produced a decent film in years—his last major effort, 1984’s The Cotton Club, a pathetic attempt to make an African American version of The Godfather that made no money and was mired in a scandal that included a real-life murder and more—was now broke and had to sell his French Regency house at the foot of tony Coldwater Canyon, which he had owned for twenty-three years, complete with pool, tennis court, and separate projection house. Jack couldn’t stand the thought of that; Evans had cast him while still an unknown actor in On a Clear Day, and Jack never forgot it. As ever with Jack, loyalty took precedence over everything. Now Evans, who had reached the heights of filmmaking and had taken advantage of all the perks, including women and drugs, was paying the piper. Reluctantly and tearfully he sold his house to wealthy international entrepreneur Tony Murray for just under $5 million, although the house was easily worth ten. He desperately needed cash.
After Jack and Beatty did what amounted to an unofficial drug intervention with Evans, Jack flew to Monte Carlo and, invoking a technical clause in the escrow account, returned the $5 million (plus buyback penalties) from his own pocket to Murray and gave the house back to Evans.
AND NOW HE had to deal with Anjelica, or try to; she had made it plain through the media, after their on-set brouhaha, that after seventeen stormy years with him, with the arrival of Broussard’s baby, she was finally and forever finished with Jack. To one reporter, she said, “It never feels good to have been left and to have been left for a younger woman … I was very devastated by our having to separate, but there was no choice. There was no way I could go on being with
Jack, who was fathering a child by another woman. I’m not that kind of woman.”
Jack’s reaction was to blame the press for invading his privacy. “Do you know what it was like to pick up Vanity Fair and see the headline on the Anjelica story [in which Anjelica was interviewed—“Anjelica Huston Hots Up—Life after Jack”]? It hurt. It wasn’t realistic. She knew there was another woman and a baby, and then it was just all out there in the public eye and the privacy and the intimacy were gone …” That was all he had. He knew he had hurt Anjelica and feared now she was never coming back. He was right to be afraid.
On May 23, 1991, two years after her slap-him-upside-the-head breakup with Jack, Anjelica married well-regarded sculptor Robert Graham. The couple lived in Venice, California, and stayed married until his death at age ninety on December 27, 2008. They had no children.
Don Devlin observed this about Jack’s sexual soap operas, including his relationship with Anjelica: “[His sexual] relationships were very strong and filled with huge emotional ups and downs. Every one of them fell into an identical pattern. Jack is such an overwhelming character that girls were always madly in love with him. Then he starts to behave fairly, then he starts to lose the girl, then he goes chasing after her again, then the relationship changes—the girl usually gets the upper hand. Then he becomes a little boy … Jack started his sexual career later than most of his friends … he was a very good boy, and behaved himself extremely well in his early years. Once he got into his seductive mode, he really went after it with a vengeance.” Devlin hit upon something very insightful. Neither Anjelica nor Jack was inherently wrong, or right. Theirs wasn’t a moral failure. The inability to either leave each other for good or make a real mutual commitment was the disease that killed their relationship.
