By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006
It's a Thursday afternoon in September, and there is a house party to plan. But first there's middle school parents' night to contend with and a teenage daughter's early adventures in driving to worry about. Our host is just back from a two-week hospital stay brought on by a savage throat infection, so even if he'd like to be out hitting golf balls, he's still in his slippers. And bouncing around somewhere is a young one who keeps calling him a name to which he cannot adjust: Gramps.
Jack Nicholson is about to turn 70.
The term "middle-aged" no longer applies. The man -- the man who gave us on-screen acid trips, who made a certain brand of frightening, phantasmagoric tirade his trademark, whose self-styled legend has him bedding enough beauties to satiate the menfolk of most mid-size countries -- has somehow gotten on in years, settled into a kind of humdrum domesticity. He reads. He paints. He reads. He decides he might go "give the help a hard time for an hour or so."
It's a strange thing, probably, for the actor who first seized fame as an embodiment of youthful dissonance and vigor to find himself suddenly five years out from the average-life-expectancy mark. To know that some of his contemporaries are already considering retirement communities and investing in orthopedic footwear. To realize that he is, well, old.
And yet the qualities that defined the actor's greatness, brought him from suburban New Jersey to Mulholland Drive and made him an American icon are undiluted.
These things remain: Eyebrows like protractors. Lips that snarl and twitch and sometimes vanish into a curtain of big, familiar teeth, releasing a smile with the paradoxical power to both gladden and unnerve. A relentless, piercing wit that informs every action and utterance. (The lesson of an early acting coach -- "Do the surprising thing" -- could be the title of his career.) A voice that makes each word sound as though it traveled through a hundred menthol cigarettes and a pebble-mincing food processor before reaching his tongue. A cadence that opts, as often as not, to override any hint of a pause between sentences but can stretch a single syllable into wicked crescendo.
For instance: "The dildo was aaaawwwllll Jack."
The sex toy in question is one he found himself twice inspired to carry onto the set of "The Departed," a thriller in which Nicholson plays an Irish mob boss with -- ta-da! -- a husky appetite for carnal pleasures. The film, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong crime drama "Infernal Affairs," is noteworthy, if only for a cast that includes such names as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Ray Winstone, but mostly because it marks the first professional meeting between two kings of American filmmaking, Nicholson and Martin Scorsese. (See review on Page 36.)
It is also the event that prompted Nicholson -- notoriously press hungry and open in his early years, but dramatically less so in the last decade -- to participate in a 45-minute phone interview from his Los Angeles home on the eve of the movie's release.
"We're both cinephiles so we talked movies together for 30 years. . . . You know, I visited Martin on a dozen sets. I've always been in touch with him," the actor says, by way of explaining why a collaboration between him and Scorsese was so long in coming. "This is the first time we had an occasion, really."
Which may be at least part of the truth, but it's also true that the occasion nearly didn't present itself. Nicholson, who has collected three Oscars, for performances in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), "Terms of Endearment" (1983) and "As Good as It Gets" (1997), turned down the role of Frank Costello when it was first offered, insisting the character was too flat. (Playing hard to get with industry suits is an old trick of Nicholson's, usually to the boon of his bank account, though he has, on occasion, protested to the point of regret. In 1974, Robert Redford was all too happy to nab the title role in "The Great Gatsby" after Nicholson took a pass.)
Goading from DiCaprio, whom he calls a friend, and an agreement with Scorsese that together they would reassemble the mobster into a richer, more layered character persuaded Nicholson to take the part. In the end, Nicholson came to consider Costello "the embodiment of evil," a man who holds nothing sacred as he engages in a cat-and-mouse game with Boston police officials and the mole hidden within his own ranks.
"There's a lot of degrees to this monster," he says. "I just wanted to make sure he was obviously corrupt in every area . . . absolute power, corrupt absolutely." In the early days, before he got his big break with "Easy Rider" in 1969, Nicholson used to write screenplays, mostly as a device to create parts for himself. He's still at it in a way, improvising on set and thrusting his character, at least in this case, into further raunch (see: dildo).
"I got to go as far out as I wanted and gave [Scorsese] several hundred different performances, and he wound up picking out a good one," the actor says in the space of a long, casual exhale. And the clash one might expect during a convergence of entrenched masters didn't happen, at least according to Nicholson. It was, he adds, an enjoyable job, "a very, very creative experience. Very different. . . . Marty's a very enthusiastic and supportive director."
It will be hundreds of movie reviews and a decade or so before we know how important "The Departed" is to the Nicholson canon, but the role of Frank Costello does seem a fitting one, for the man and his hour. The actor says he finally took the part because, after three consecutive comedies -- "About Schmidt" in 2002, followed the next year by "Something's Gotta Give" and "Anger Management" -- he was ready for a dramatic endeavor. But there may have been some other attraction to the role of an aging chieftain in constant, violent battle to maintain his eminence. "I haven't needed the money since I took Archie's milk money in the third grade," Costello seethes to an underling. "Tell you the truth I don't need [sex] anymore either, but I like it."
Sex. It is the signature Nicholson leaves on most of his characters, this one to a menacing degree. Costello is not just a mobster, he's a misogynistic mobster who dons leopard print robes, lewdly harasses nuns and interrogates adolescent girls about their menstrual cycles. If the criminal's graphic sexual maneuvers make some viewers queasy, well, that's the idea. "Audiences are very tolerant of murder, but they're not too tolerant of corrupt sexuality," he says.
Nicholson's own storied sexual exploits have been tolerated, even revered, by fans and obsessed over by journalists. "Too much," he claims. "Too much for reality." But in the same minute, he also claims that if he were ever to write an autobiography, it would start with this line: "From the age of 3 or 4 on, life has pretty much been about sexuality . . . but more about that later." Incidentally, it's a book he says will never be written.
Nicholson describes his relations with the opposite sex as a "very positive, symbiotic, positive connection," one he attributes to an upbringing dominated by strong leading ladies. (The actor, who was raised in Neptune, N.J., famously believed his grandmother to be his mother and his real mother to be his sister until an enterprising reporter told him differently in 1974. Both women were dead by then, and the identity of his father, who was not in the picture, has never been confirmed.)
Though he was wed only once -- a five-year marriage in the 1960s to actress Sandra Knight that ended in part, he once said, because "I couldn't take the arguments, they bored me" -- the list of darlings seen on his arm has never stopped growing. Does he have a girlfriend now?
"No. Well, I mean, what do you mean 'girlfriend'? I have a few, uh, I have many long-standing relationships with women," he purrs. "But you mean 'Do I have what they call in high school a "steady girl"? ' Not really."
A classic answer from America's favorite sexagenarian seducer. In truth, what Nicholson says he treasures most now is clarity. "Where there's clarity, there is no choice; where there's choice, there is misery," he chants. It's a line he has used before. The phrase -- actually a quote from the 1968 Monkees' movie "Head," on which Nicholson served as a writer -- was invoked years later when he told longtime love Anjelica Huston that a young actress-model named Rebecca Broussard was carrying his child.
That child, Lorraine, 16, is the one now worrying Nicholson with her position behind the wheel. ("You know she asked me about it," he grunts. "I said, 'Look, don't even ask me. I would love it if you drove a tank.' ") Lorraine and brother Raymond, 14, split time between Broussard and Nicholson, who says his oft-quoted declaration about being "not good at cohabitation" doesn't apply to his progeny. Oldest daughter Jennifer, the result of his marriage to Knight, is in her forties and the mother of two. Son Caleb was born in 1970 to "Five Easy Pieces" co-star Susan Anspach.
Nicholson gushes with affection for his children. "My kids just stun me, ya know?" he says. "They're gorgeous, they're fabulous. . . . They're young, so they're out there punching and jabbing and moving, and it's fun for me."
In fact, the man who made us believe he might murder his wife with an ax in 1980's "The Shining" is said to cry at airport departures of loved ones. If there's one public misconception about him, he says, it's that he's a brute. "I'm not a chump either, but I'm not like an aggressively tough guy," he says. "You know, I'm funny."
Whether he will always be a working actor is a different matter. Nicholson has taken long periods off before and has thought of giving it up altogether. He has appeared in more than 50 films and is indisputably one of the greatest stars of the big screen. Yet he insists the decision to proceed with this career or call it a day is guided by the belief that "nobody cares whether or not you're always going to be an actor or what you're going to do next. You know, they don't -- it's just a thing to talk about."
During those pensive stints, when the thought of a life outside soundstages and makeup chairs has held particular appeal, it comes back, he says, time and again, to this: "Well, look, right now I still like making beautiful things."
And so, six months before 70, Nicholson feels, he says, "glad to be here."
"I think it's amazing that I'm still a movie actor at this age, but that's just good fortune."
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