by Marc Eliot
The new screenplay was originally titled Love Me or Leave Me, but because that was the name of a 1950s James Cagney–Doris Day pic, the title was changed to Something’s Gotta Give. The gist of the story is that a middle-aged writer (Keaton) becomes involved with a sixty-three-year-old playboy-mogul, Harry Sanborn (Jack), even though he is already involved with her much younger daughter (Amanda Peet). Sanborn learns his life lessons from strong women—Diane Keaton, Frances McDormand, and Amanda Peet. As Meyers recalled, “Jack’s character really unfolds as the movie progresses, so you get to see the Jack that breaks your heart … there was always a fuss being made over Jack. He enjoyed it. His mom was a hairdresser. ‘I grew up in a beauty parlor’ is an expression he used quite often. I think we provided the beauty parlor for him again.”
On the surface, the role appeared to be, at first glance, an extension of his character from As Good as It Gets, but soon enough we find he is far less neurotic, far more narcissistic. In Something, Harry Sanborn (Jack), plagued with heart attack scares and other self-diagnosed early warning signs of doom, “comes to his senses” and winds up with Keaton. Harry is, in a way, more a reflection of the new Jack, no longer in need of chasing young, nubile girls. The film ends on an upbeat note with Jack in Paris singing Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” (over the credits in movie theaters, onscreen in the DVD).
The question was, Would the audience buy this Jack? The answer was yes. The film, shot that summer, opened on December 12, 2003, and proved a smash, on a budget of $66 million (a large piece of it going to the salaries of Keaton and Jack); it grossed more than $266 million in its initial international run.
Perhaps buoyed by the film’s big hit, Jack wanted one last steak after all these salads to properly say farewell to the film business and the audiences that had kept him in it for half a century. In December 2003, just as Something’s Gotta Give was opening, Jack played with the notion of making a film about his own life (perhaps a version of the memoir he had told Time he wanted to write), but ultimately he decided that artistic truth, not chronological fact, was his forte; he would continue to deliver his story through the characters he played in other people’s movies and forget about writing his memoirs.
IT WASN’T UNTIL February 2005 that sixty-seven-year old Jack believed he had finally found the perfect vehicle for what might very well be his fond farewell—the right script, the right director, the right producer, the right studio, and the right co-stars. If his recent crowd pleasers had been lightweights, this was one ton of a movie. Jack may have wanted to make it more than just for the obvious reasons. He had spilled the beans to the public about what was most likely a drop in his testosterone levels. Now he needed to prove to himself that he hadn’t lost his bite. He had to know if his supercharged sex life was also what made his acting so potent.
The opportunity to make this test came with Martin Scorsese’s offer to Jack to star in a cop/mafia remake of a popular 2002 Chinese (Hong Kong) movie about undercover mob infiltration (the Chinese version was about an aging mobster, called Infernal Affairs—Moo Gaan Dou—literally translated as “The Nonstop Way,” the lowest level of hell in Buddhism, directed by Wai-keung Lau and Alan Mak).5
Jack’s co-stars in the American undercover cat-and-mouse version, The Departed, were the post-Titanic, grown-up, and super-hot Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Mark Wahlberg, the latter two bringing a whiff of authentic Boston street life to the Beantown tale.6 It was produced by Brad Pitt, Brad Grey, and Graham King (King also co-executive-produced Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York and was a producer on 2004’s The Aviator, both starring DiCaprio). Jack enthusiastically signed up for the ride.
The Departed had a solid budget of $90 million, with distribution guaranteed by Warner Bros. Jack’s character’s part, originally a small one in the Chinese version, was expanded and made into one of the prime focal points of the film. “We built this character layer by layer, until we had something that fit inside a great genre film, but also pushed the envelope until the movie becomes almost operatic,” Jack said, putting his finger on Scorsese’s love for the dramatic, the ethnic, and the lyrical grandiose, all meshed into a single flow of events put into motion with Scorsese’s speedball rhythm of encouraged on-set improvisation. “There’s a scene in a bar where I’m scaring the shit out of Leo’s character with a gun,” Jack said. “There wasn’t any gun in the script. We had shot the scene the night before but Marty said he had a light schedule the next day and I wanted to try a few more takes. I wanted to come up with something different, so I asked the prop master to hide a gun on the set, and to bring a fire extinguisher as well. The look on his face when I asked for that fire extinguisher was priceless.”
Scorsese remembers the moment this way: “The first thing Jack did was sniff his glass and say, ‘I smell a rat’ … and then he pulled a gun on [Leo]. He didn’t tell me he had a gun. It was great … I still get the chills …” Later, Jack added, “I was going to set the table on fire with bourbon out of my mouth …” That sequence made it into the film.
In another scene, Jack powdered the bottom of one actress with cocaine, strapped on a dildo, and chased after Matt Damon. That sequence did not make it into the film.
In The Departed, Jack plays Frank Costello, a Boston mob boss of an Irish gang that has been infiltrated by two opposing undercover cops. When each discovers there is a second mole, he tries to expose the other so as not to be killed first. Jack was thrilled by the notion of playing a tough guy in Scorsese’s cinematic idiom and molded his character after the notorious Boston organized crime mobster James “Whitey” Bulger Jr., as bad as they get. The story of his earlier, violent years when he ran his mob and the attempt by competing undercover agents to infiltrate his gang was the basis of the American version of the film. Costello is killed in a dark back alley in a final, typically Scorsesian resolution, death coming in a hail of bullets, the dead body left in the mouth of a bulldozer.7
THE DEPARTED PREMIERED on September 26, 2006, to mixed-to-positive reviews, and grossed $290 million in its initial domestic release, reconfirming Jack’s preeminence as America’s favorite movie everything: rebel, Joker, middle-aged pot-bellied lover, OCD curmudgeon, old man alone, and terrifying gangster. His performance in The Departed exploded off the screen.
Despite the reservations of some critics—the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, in her review of the film, complained that “Mr. Nicholson begins to mix too much Jack into his characterization” and that “Mr. Scorsese … spends a lot of time vying for attention with his famous star” (isn’t that why they’re stars?)—it took American film’s auteurist champion, Andrew Sarris, writing in the New York Observer, to recognize the film’s proper sociological and stylistic perspectives: “The Departed strikes unexpectedly deep chords of tragic poignancy with the emotional fallout from an atmosphere of perpetual paranoia so characteristic of our post-9/11 world. No one can completely trust anyone else … an electrifying entertainment … it is truly an occasion for rejoicing.”
The Departed, so dark and powerful it burns itself into one’s sensibilities, ultimately may be the film for which the post-Joker Jack will be most remembered.
Even before The Departed wrapped, a reenergized Jack quickly signed on to star with Morgan Freeman (who suggested him for the film) in Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List, a smell-the-roses, meaning-of-life morality tale about two terminal cancer patients who wish to fulfill a “bucket list” of things before they—kick the bucket. Having just come out of the lowest depths of hell for Scorsese, a trip to heaven sounded more than right to Jack. His shaved head sent rumors flying that he was seriously ill when he showed up without explanation for it as a presenter at the Oscars the following February 25, 2007. The false word ripped through Hollywood that he was dying of cancer. Jack loved it.
The Bucket List opened on January 11, 2008, and, to the surprise of many of the tracking geniuses in the film business who gave it no chance. Despite some scathing reviews, especially that of Ro
ger Ebert, who was suffering at the time from thyroid cancer: “The Bucket List thinks dying of cancer is a laugh riot followed by a dime-store epiphany.” Directed by Rob Reiner, who had worked before with Jack on A Few Good Men to the mutual satisfaction of both, the film feels like an expanded sitcom, with a new destination every week. It proved a smash at the box office. The Bucket List grossed $290 million in its initial domestic and international release, proving that Jack’s star power was intact, as was that of the other senior citizen star of the film, Morgan Freeman.
As soon as the film was released, Jack took himself to Cap-Ferrat, France, where the seventy-two-year-old teenager found a young, pretty girl in a short dress willing to dance the night away with him.
HE WAS IN no hurry to return to the States, until James L. Brooks once again came calling. He had a script for Jack, something called How Do You Know, a romantic comedy with all the right ingredients, including a stellar cast—Jack, Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and a solid supporting cast. The problem was the story and Jack’s part in it. In there somewhere is a triangulated love story among Witherspoon, Rudd, and Wilson, with Jack as Rudd’s father, in what feels like a different picture. The entanglements become increasingly unfunny, and as the film ends it remains unclear who’s with whom and if one, two, or three of them are going to jail. Brooks should have realized after five years of trying to put the film together (or maybe because it took five years he may have lost his perspective) that its pieces didn’t fit. Jack did the movie for Brooks anyway. The net production cost (after tax breaks) for the film was $100 million. When it finally did open on December 17, 2010, expectations were high but the film bombed badly, earning barely half of what it cost.
WHEN HE TURNED seventy-four, Jack began to consolidate his holdings, selling off pieces of land or complete homes meant for his children, his ex-wife, or himself, for which he no longer had any use.
He still smoked three packs a day but got into yoga, as much as he could tolerate, his personal compromise to working out every day. He also concentrated on getting his college-age children into the best schools. He still went to every Lakers home game and became an everyday golfer. He spent an increasing number of nights accepting awards, medals, and commendations, like the one Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave to Jack as he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in December 2008.
And burying his peers. It was the one role that never ran out of sequels. “One of the toughest parts of aging,” Jack said recently, “is losing your friends. At first it starts quietly, then pretty soon it’s every month, and you can’t help but think, ‘when is that bell going to go off for me?’ … At this time of life, you feel just a sword’s point from death. It’s frightening; who wants to face God and the clear white light?”
Carole Eastman had died relatively young in February 2004. Jack had known her since he first arrived in Hollywood and began taking acting classes. He loved her style of creativity as much as her beauty; to Jack her style of creativity was her beauty, and he always felt she understood better than anybody else what he needed on a page to help him bring a character to life.
Five months later, in July 2004, Marlon Brando died. Marlon and Jack had never been close friends, but Marlon was Jack’s first idol—he had worshipped Brando from his days as an usher during his first summer job at the Neptune local movie house. It was there he watched The Wild One over and over again. How could Jack ever have known that one day they would act together and that he would be called the next Marlon Brando? When Brando passed, Jack bought his house and adjoining property to ensure that no one else would move into it and evict the memory or the spirit of his legendary neighbor.
In May 2010, Dennis Hopper died at seventy-four after a life hard-lived and a long bout with prostate cancer. At Hopper’s funeral in Taos, New Mexico, standing alongside Peter Fonda, Jack told the Associated Press, “It was a very singular relationship I had with him. We were soul mates in a way. I really miss him.”
December 12, 2012 brought the passing of Bert Schneider after a long illness; although by now Bert was practically forgotten in Hollywood, at least in part because of his own reclusiveness, Peter Biskind rightly remembered him as someone who “played a key role in the birth of the so-called New Hollywood of the late ’60s and early ’70s.” It was no secret in Hollywood that Schneider and Jack had had a falling-out and had not been close for years, and that Schneider had fallen on hard times, but when Jack heard that Schneider was ill, he made sure that his friend wanted for nothing.
After Schneider’s death, Jack became less visible around town. The faces at the usual haunts had become unfamiliar to him, and Aspen seemed hardly worth the trouble. He no longer wanted to take the long flights to New York, or the longer ones to London and Paris. He became something of a love seat philosopher rather than a philosophical lover. His biggest pleasures these days was smoking a pack a day of cigarettes and his Cohibas.
Also, in 2012, in New York, he went to look at some new art to add to his $100 million collection, and he went to a party hosted by Keith Richards. He stayed at it only long enough to see Richards, and after granted a rare, nonpromotional interview to the press, reminiscing about the old days. As Jack said later, “Keith would stay up seven nights in a row. I stayed up late, but I slept in late, too. I always believed in taking care of myself. There was always a discipline within my partying structure. I’ve never kept a camera waiting and in all my career I only missed one day of work, on The Shining, when I put my back out.… There were these wild guys over there. I wanted to show them what Jack the Waggle could do …
“The last three times I’ve been in New York filming, I didn’t leave my hotel room for one single night.”
He had everything a man could ask for but a peaceful, workable relationship. “The reality was that I was annihilated by the separation from Anjelica [after I told her Broussard was pregnant and she beat me up]. That was probably the toughest period of my life.”
Meanwhile, sixty-one-year-old Anjelica’s career had taken a major upturn when she joined the TV show Smash, which opened her up to a new, younger audience. Ironically, while Jack sat home, she was the one surrounded by beautiful young girls as she continued her own successful career.
When she talks about Jack now, she does so with warmth and affection, and just a touch of recognition about what might have been. “Jack is someone I’ve adored in my life and will continue to love forever. I don’t take him lightly … That’s a real relationship. Real relationships have continuity, and Jack and I have a deep, abiding love and affection for each other. I’m proud that we’ve gotten through some very tough times together.”
JACK MADE AN appearance at the 2013 Academy Awards. He was asked to present the Best Picture of the Year Oscar and to share the duties with a beamed-in Michelle Obama. The crowd greeted both affectionately. After the ceremonies finally ended, the winners had to walk the gauntlet of morning-show booths looking to nab a sound bite for the next morning’s broadcasts. Undoubtedly the hottest winner of the night (in every way) was Jennifer Lawrence. When George Stephanopoulos’s producers saw her, they pulled her over to his ABC network booth. As they talked the mindless gibberish that Oscar winners’ heads are full of—who I should have thanked, who I shouldn’t have thanked, I love my husband even though I didn’t mention his name, do we have to share everything, things like that—someone lurked in the unsure background of the live TV camera. A hand came out and touched Lawrence’s shoulder. Ignoring Stephanopoulos, the voice of the man it belonged to said to her, “You did such a beautiful job! I don’t mean to crash your interview.” It was Jack Nicholson, Wayfarers in place, drink in hand, eyebrows reaching for the sky.
Lawrence laughed and said, “Yeah, you’re being really rude.” She was only half kidding. This was her moment.
Jack started to walk away, then came back. “Enjoy the night. I loved you in the movie. It was great. You look like an old girlfriend of mine.”
Lawrence didn’t
miss a beat. “Oh really? Do I look like a new girlfriend?”
Once again Jack started to leave, but came back. “I thought about it.”
Lawrence buried her head in her hands. To Stephanopoulos she whispered, “Oh, my God! Is he still here?”
Jack: “I’ll be waiting …”
Lawrence: “Oh, my God! I need a rearview mirror!”
Jennifer Lawrence was twenty-two years old. Jack finally gave up. His own description of this stage of his life had come embarrassingly alive.
It was the only thing about that year’s Oscars anyone would remember.
Not long afterward he found his way home. The next day when he woke he called Anjelica, just to see how she was doing. She was the only one who could make everything all right again. At least for now.
* * *
1 Jack later told People that he had first learned he was being honored while in bed, “where I usually am,” and received a call from Quincy Jones to tell him the good news. He told the magazine he was honored that it was Bush who had nominated him, but that he remained “a big Democrat.”
2 Jack was also nominated for and won a 2003 Golden Globe as Best Actor in a Drama. When he received the award he shook his head and said, “I thought we made a comedy,” which got a huge laugh from the audience at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the Globes ceremony was held every year.
3 Jack later told another reporter in London that the secret to his former seven-night-a-week lovemaking sessions was “peanut butter sandwiches in bed.”—Jack Malvern, The Times (London), February 2, 2004.
4 Kodak went bankrupt and the theater’s name was changed in 2012 to the Dolby Theatre.
5 The film, credited with reviving Hong Kong cinema’s international popularity, received only limited distribution in the United States.
