Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  Jack was made aware of Haskell’s Times article that singled him out as one of Hollywood’s new dirty old men when Fred Schruers, interviewing him for Rolling Stone, asked him to comment on it. Jack’s answer left smoke trailing off the pages of the magazine: “Well, Molly could answer her own questions if she did even close to what I’m sure is the responsible research she does in other areas. These people continually try to socialize and intellectualize these issues. Nature doesn’t care about that …”

  Haskell had made a good point, but Jack, even in anger, made a better one. With few exceptions, his films were not meant to be sociological statements or documentaries. He was, simply, a very popular movie star. Audiences loved him. And who complained when he played opposite Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment? MacLaine was three years older than him. Jack was not a flag waver for any causes but good acting. Haskell’s sociological weapons were, in fact, just the opposite of what her husband, the legendary Andrew Sarris, had warned against—when studying films one should be careful not to miss the forest for the trees. Sarris was eleven years older than Haskell.

  AS GOOD AS IT GETS received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Jack, his eleventh, matching Laurence Olivier’s long-standing record. (Jack didn’t bother to wake up for the live dawn broadcast of the announcement of the nominees from the Academy, or for Jim Brooks when he called to break the good news.)

  Around this time Jack had begun seeing the divorced Rebecca Broussard again. One friend of Jack’s said about his old/new relationship with Broussard, “They’re the closest they’ve ever been … they are finally talking about getting married …”

  To celebrate his Oscar nomination, the completion of five films in two and a half years, and Broussard’s thirty-fifth birthday that January, and he had missed, he threw a big party up in Aspen, during which he announced to everyone present how happy he was.

  Broussard was less so. No ring came that night from Jack and no proposal of marriage.

  From there he took her to Rome for the European opening to do some promotion of As Good as It Gets. Everywhere the two went he was asked by reporters about the possibility of wedding bells in his future. Jack just smiled and said things like “I’m on a constant honeymoon with Rebecca Broussard, the mother of my children.” Whenever he said things like that, Broussard bristled but said nothing.

  THE OSCAR AWARDS were handed out on March 23, 1998, at the Shrine Auditorium, hosted by Billy Crystal. It had been one of Hollywood’s better years, both critically and commercially. Titanic’s spectacular coming attractions had brought audiences to see the film in droves, while As Good as It Gets showed off both Jack and Brooks in top form, with Helen Hunt, Hollywood’s new favorite leading lady, giving a perfectly nuanced performance as Jack’s “sort of” girlfriend, and it propelled the good-looking Greg Kinnear, a former cable TV show host with a few small movie roles under his belt, into the big screen forefront with his anti-cliché portrayal of a young gay artist. Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty was the sleeper in the pack, a “small” picture that gave new meaning to that word. Good Will Hunting introduced the writing duo of Matt Damon, who also appeared in it, and Ben Affleck and allowed Robin Williams to turn in a performance that, for once, wasn’t too manic. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential was a high-quality neo-noir film about corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department (set safely in the 1950s).

  The Best Actor category that Oscar season was especially competitive. A few days earlier, Jack had told Variety that he wished the contest could wind up in a five-way tie, but no one ever believes the across-the-board false modesty that precedes the night of the Oscars. His competition this time was Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting); Robert Duvall in The Apostle, a small film about a flawed evangelist that he had also directed, written, and produced; old friend Peter Fonda in Victor Nuñez’s Ulee’s Gold; and Dustin Hoffman in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog.

  When Frances McDormand, the previous winner for Best Actress (for Fargo), opened the envelope to announce who had won Best Performance by an Actor, Jack, sitting next to Rebecca, grinned and later said of the moment, “I dropped about three quarts of water the minute they said my name!”

  He trotted to the stage smiling and looking just the slightest bit overwhelmed. It was his third Oscar, one less than the all-time champ, Katharine Hepburn, and tied him with Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, and, as of 2013, with Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis.

  The next day he sounded as if he was celebrating his longevity when he told Variety, “I have a career that covers three decades … I won one in the ’70s. I won one in the ’80s, and now I won one in the ’90s!”

  IN JULY, JACK was invited personally by one of his admirers, Fidel Castro, to attend the Cuban Film Festival. Jack was excited about being able to travel to Cuba and again took Broussard with him for the week-long stay. He met personally with Castro for three hours, after which he publicly declared that “Castro is a genius!” The Cuban leader, in return, gave Jack a large box of Cuban cigars, which, unfortunately, he couldn’t take with him out of the country. Not long after his return to the States, Jack, one of the least vocal political figures in Hollywood, urged President Clinton to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba.

  He and Broussard continued their honeymoon-without-a-wedding, traveling on to Ireland so Jack could get in some golf. Then it was on to Wimbledon, and then to France to watch the last game of the World Cup, where he met up with Dennis Hopper, who had painted his face the colors of the French flag. Then to Spain, for the opening there of As Good as It Gets and to visit Michael “Mikey” Douglas at his home there. He had always wanted to make another picture with Douglas producing, but it had never happened. As Douglas’s acting career grew ever more successful, his desire to produce receded, especially after he won Best Performance by an Actor for Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street. Douglas had found out the hard way that acting was so much easier than producing. Jack had known it all the time, which was why he rarely got involved in that end of making movies.

  IN NOVEMBER, it was announced that Jack would be receiving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s 1999 Cecil B. DeMille award at January’s Golden Globes presentations “for his outstanding contribution to the world of entertainment.” It was Jack’s fiftieth industry-wide award for acting. According to the organization’s president, Helmut Voss, “We picked him because of his amazing body of work and his worldwide appeal …” The association, which always operated in secret, had let it slip that giving Jack the award was a good way to guarantee his presence and, in turn, higher ratings for the TV show that was broadcast around the world.

  A week later, Jack put the five-bedroom Beverly Hills house he had bought for Broussard in 1989 up for sale. To many, this signaled the last step before the two would get married. They were wrong. Jack was veering away from the one-time marriage-seeking missile that was Broussard, who put up no argument about the house. She had cooled down, having had enough of Jack’s stalling and was more than ready to move on. Broussard, whose marriage had lasted less than two years, was certain now she and Jack would never marry, and soon began dating a young actor named Al Corley, best known for his role in the original Dynasty TV series. Their relationship didn’t last, and Broussard eventually married Alex Kelly in 2001.

  Jack wished them all well.

  TWO YEARS HAD slipped by since he had wrapped production on As Good as It Gets, and the only meaningful thing (to him) that he had done, besides attending every Lakers home game and presenting at the Oscars in March 1999, his tenth appearance, to hand out the Best Performance by an Actress Oscar to Gwyneth Paltrow, was to get hot and heavy with a flaming redheaded actress by the name of Lara Flynn Boyle.

  Boyle was thirty-three years Jack’s junior, and hot, both professionally and personally. She had made a name for herself on David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks and followed that with a starring role in ABC’s legal drama The Practice. She also had a reputation for walking on the wild side that matched Ja
ck’s in its hedonistic fervor. Flynn had just broken up with actor/comedian David Spade and met Jack in, of all places, the men’s room at a Hollywood party, where he’d gone off to sneak a smoke. She’d followed him in, lit up as well, and began to chat. It didn’t take the time to smoke a filter tip for the lithe twenty-eight-year-old to arouse the interest of the roundish, balding sixty-one-year-old. They started dating, and soon they were inseparable. According to Jack’s daughter Jennifer, his first child with Broussard, Boyle was just another in a long line of beautiful women her father dated, older at first, then the same age, then younger.

  Boyle was Jack’s kind of girl—she could drink and party with the best of them, and she had a female edge the type of which Jack always liked to cut himself on. She had “dare me” written all over, and Jack wanted to dare the everything out of her. So much so that within a month Boyle, who liked to refer to her new man as “Jack Pot Belly,” had accomplished the seemingly impossible by moving into his man cave.

  That summer, while living with Boyle, Jack invited Broussard to go to Wimbledon with him, and she accepted his offer.

  In August, his daughter Jennifer gave birth to her second child. For the occasion, Jack bought her a $2.75 million house in Brentwood and sent over several pieces from his art collection to help dress it up. By this time she had given up a stalled film career for one in interior decorating that catered to the stars.

  IN THE FALL of 1999, Jack turned down a new series of film offers. Harry Gittes had a screenplay set up at Universal, American Caesar, a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Jack didn’t want to do it. Nor was he interested in a sequel to Goin’ South that was in development. Jack wanted no part of that. Good friend Fred Roos wanted him for something called Him and Her. Jack said no. He even turned down the never-say-no-to Clint Eastwood when he asked Jack to be in his senior-citizens astronaut comedy Space Cowboys. Jack liked Clint well enough but was just not interested in making a comedy about men getting older.

  However, when Sean Penn put together enough funding for a third film, The Pledge, Jack said yes. He loved working with Sean, but this time there would be no financial breaks. Jack demanded and got his full $10 million fee up front and his normal piece of the back end. Penn couldn’t say no; he needed Jack’s name on the dotted line to seal the financial $30 million distribution deal he had managed to put together with Warner Bros. No doubt Jack’s name was more important to Warners than Penn’s. Production began early in 2000 and, except for one or two scenes filmed in Reno, Nevada, it was shot entirely in British Columbia to take advantage of Canada’s generous tax breaks.

  The Pledge is a curious little film. Set in the 1950s, it nonetheless focused on an unsolved murder that resembled the sensational 1996 Jon-Benét-Ramsay case. In the film, the culprit is a mysterious dark character called “the Wizard,” played by the up-and-coming Benicio Del Toro. Jack played Jerry Black, a retired cop who dedicates the rest of his life to finding the child’s killer (in a way, this film’s plot was not that far afield from The Crossing Guard). The mother was played by Patricia Clarkson. Also in the film were Aaron Eckhart, Robin Wright Penn (she and Sean had since married), Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sam Shepard.

  With a good script by Jerzt and Mary Olson-Komolowski that suffered only from an overly ambiguous ending, the film opened in January 2001 and did moderately well, grossing $29 million. It represented an enormous leap for Penn, but it was still not enough. When the film had gone $15 million over budget and the studio refused to make it up, Penn had had to put in his own money to finish it.

  WHEN JACK RETURNED to the States, he and Boyle entered a new phase of their highly public affair, one familiar to Jack, the break-up/make-up seesaw. Friends of the couple agreed among themselves (according to one of them who wishes to remain anonymous) that Boyle had the upper hand with Jack and “liked to crack the sexual whip.”

  Jack, meanwhile, signed on to Harry Gittes’s new project, a dramedy called About Schmidt loosely based on a 1995 novel by Louis Begley. Perhaps feeling he owed Gittes, Jack agreed to a pay cut (moving some of his up-front money to the back end) to get the $32-million-budget film made. Gittes, having given up on his American Caesar script, had About Schmidt tailored to Jack. The film concerned the plight of an older man who retires and plans how he is going to spend his time when his wife suddenly dies. He then sets out on a “life-learning” journey alone in the Winnebago he had just bought. The script is an affecting one about the problems of aging that Jack highly preferred to the Space Cowboys view of older men reverting to the behavior of little boys. The cast also included Kathy Bates as the mother of Schmidt’s daughter’s fiancé, and Jeannie, his daughter (played by Hope Davis, “Hopie” in Jackspeak). When he shows up alone for Jeannie’s wedding, Roberta (Bates) makes a pass at him. After the wedding, Jack leaves the festivities by himself. Stripped of his career, his wife, and now his daughter, Schmidt must face the rest of his life lonely and alone. It was a gentle tour de force for which Jack gained weight and adapted a comb-over hairstyle—“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror the whole three months I was doing this picture, the most miserable role I ever had in my life,” he told one reporter. To another, he said, “I looked at him as the man I might have become if I wasn’t lucky enough to wind up in show business.”

  With a script by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, the film was produced by New Line Cinema, which guaranteed distribution and was willing to green-light the relative newcomer Payne to direct as well as co-write the film. Payne had had a moderate hit with Election at Paramount and taken home a slew of non-Oscar awards for it.

  Filming went well, and after production ended, Jack took off with Boyle for the south of France, even as the buzz that ripped through Hollywood was that she had also started seeing Bruce Willis.

  On December 2, 2001, sixty-four-year-old Jack, who had been named by President George W. Bush as a Kennedy Center honoree, along with Julie Andrews, Van Cliburn, Quincy Jones, and Luciano Pavarotti, had flown with Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, to attend the next-day’s ceremonies. Jack went without an escort. Jack and Boyle had split up when they returned from France. No one was surprised.1

  During the ceremonies at the Kennedy Center, the president proclaimed that Jack Nicholson “was one of the true greats of this or any other generation of actors. America cannot resist the mystery, the hint of menace, and of course, that killer smile.”

  ABOUT SCHMIDT WAS considered so good that it was held back by New Line until December 13, 2002, to cash in on the holiday moviegoing season and capture the attention of the Academy. Both the film and Jack received rave reviews, and it did extremely well at the box office. Off its $30 million budget, it grossed more than $105 million internationally. In February 2003, Jack and Kathy Bates were both nominated for Oscars, Jack for Best Performance by an Actor, Bates for Best Supporting Actress.2 For Jack, it was his twelfth nomination.

  Also, Jack appeared to be ready to talk publicly about why for the first time in a very long time he was without a steady female companion and how happy it made him feel to stop relentlessly pursuing young women. To Newsweek he said, “There are a lot of crazy nitwit things I can’t do anymore … I don’t have the same libido. It used to be that I didn’t think I could go to sleep if I wasn’t involved in some kind of amorous contact or another. Well, I spend a lot of time sleeping alone these days. That’s different and it’s very liberating … my fear is that I’m beginning to prefer it …”

  Later, Jack continued his public self-contemplation/confession in People: “A younger woman is not necessarily for me. I’m pretty old, so almost everyone is younger. I won’t pretend that I haven’t been a rogue most of my life, because I have and would still be if I had the energy. I sat in a restaurant recently, and I could’ve knocked off 2,000 of them—every age, and their mothers too. Right now, though, I just can’t do the dance. And if I bother, they’ve got to be a good dancer.”3

  IN MARCH 2003, the Academ
y Awards were held in a spiffy, brand-new venue, the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. As part of the movie industry’s attempt to rescue the boulevard from the brink of drug and porn oblivion, the strip from the Roosevelt Hotel to Highland had been fast-tracked for the comeback trail. Since its post–World War II decline, millions of tourist dollars had been lost because of the degradation of what was once the most famous film site in the world. The first phase of Hollywood Boulevard’s renovation was completed with the emergence of the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood and Highland, built to be the permanent home of the Oscars and the occasional red-carpet event.4

  All the heat that night wasn’t only Oscar’s new digs but also the kiss that Adrien Brody, dark-horse winner of Best Performance by an Actor for The Pianist, planted on presenter Halle Berry. The Pianist was a French, German, Polish, and U.K. production directed by Jack’s old friend Roman Polanski, who won for Best Director, which thrilled Jack. Polanski was unable to accept, still living in self-imposed exile overseas. The win was intended to send a strong message that it forgave Polanski and wanted him back in Hollywood where they believed he belonged.

  Jack, his co-star Bates, and the movie were shut out. Despite his strong performance in About Schmidt, it was not his year for Oscar.

  Nor was it for Jack’s next outing, Peter Segal’s Anger Management (2003), a star vehicle for Adam Sandler. The film was completed before About Schmidt was released, and it too did well at the box office, with an opening Easter week take of $44.5 million. Jack’s role as an anger-management therapist is little more than a foil to Sandler and is one of his least interesting or memorable roles.

  SIXTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD JACK NEXT signed on with Columbia to co-star with Diane Keaton in his fifty-ninth movie, Something’s Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers, whose previous film, What Women Want, starred Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt in an ill-fated stab by Gibson at comedy.