The Star with the Killer Smile

Lining up a free throw against the Lakers, Walt Frazier is weighing the basketball in his hands, letting things simmer just a minute. He is about to let go and he hears a voice, loud and gleeful, come right out of the stands clear across to him: “Hey, man—you’re the fourth-best guard in the league right now, and you ain ‘t movin’ up ’till somebody dies!” Frazier blows the shot right there.

The deep-dish whammy comes from a Lakers fanatic, bravura bench jockey and this year’s monster movie star, Jack Nicholson. He is letting off a little steam by putting on the kind of pressure he gets and cultivates almost every day. Nicholson is a past master at the Hollywood psych, a vocational tool for professional survival he employs with a street fighter’s energy and a gamesman’s cunning. On this occasion, he is just taking it out for a little airing on behalf of Hollywood’s favorite team.

For maximum effectiveness, the psych requires a jugular instinct for a rival’s weakness—his most intimate ambition, an insubstantial boast or a small, fresh scar—and a sure knowledge that except on certain social or sporting occasions, the only boy on the home team is yourself. Jack Nicholson has been rattling and roughing up the competition since he started acting out in Hollywood in the late ’50s—at first with very little luck. Then came a gradual success that right now is soaring.

But besides infighting, Nicholson has through the years mastered the craft of acting with such thoroughness and skill that each role seems founded on some spontaneous intuition. It is his talent and pleasure never to let all the preparation and all the work he does for each role show. Nicholson shares that knack for apparently effortless deception with the very best screen actors. As Humphrey Bogart once said of Spencer Tracy, “He is so good because you don’t see the mechanism working.”

In the kinetic performance in Easy Rider, the shrewd observation of the frantic womanizer in Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and the unflappable incarnation of J.J. Gittes, the private eye on the make in Chinatown, Nicholson has built up one of the most impressive actor’s portfolios in Hollywood. His are the kind of credentials the town likes best. The recent movies Nicholson stars in are generally well received, and he himself invariably is. His presence in a starring role seems to guarantee both prestige and a profit. That makes Nicholson the man most in demand, the dearest form of collateral when it comes to banking a picture.

Mike Nichols, who has just started directing Nicholson again in a comedy called Fortune, says flatly that Nicholson is destined to become “one of the giant film stars of all time.” Tony Richardson, who hopes to snag him for a new film, gushes that “we are entering the era of Jack Nicholson.” It is not necessary to have a vested interest, however, to see that Nicholson right now is on top. A look at Chinatown’s weekly top-ten placing on Variety charts is one kind of proof, Jack’s current $750,000 asking price (plus a good hunk of the picture’s profits) is another.

Though established as a name, Nicholson is in the first flush of excitement at being a household word right now, and he is handling it with the respectable glee and half (but only that) the mocking humor of a sort of cutup prince regent. He is talking to Stanley Kubrick about playing Napoleon, to Bernardo Bertolucci about being the Continental Op in a film of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Milos Forman is waiting for himto finish Fortune, so he can start playing McMurphy in an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At no time since the burnished ’30s has Hollywood been so big-name conscious. “The system is geared toward overworking the stars,” Nicholson points out. “There aren’t that many stars around to haul the freight.”

In Easy Rider (1969) and in the freer, more personal films that flowed from its success, Nicholson became a kind of figurehead for a loose group of actors and film makers who were trying to expand the commercial genre. Nicholson, Actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Writer-Directors Bob Rafelson, Monte Hellman, Carol and Charles Eastman—none of them then well known—all cheered and boosted each other. Their work was almost always full of aggressive invention (Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Hopper’s The Last Movie, Nicholson’s own Drive, He Said), but the new Hollywood passed, the victim of erratic returns at the box office.

Nicholson passed along with it, not out of sight, as happened with many of his fraternity, but on to other things. He worked into the mainstream that he had been trying to divert, and started running with the high rollers. He now counts as two of his buddies Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans and Warren Beatty, his co-star in Fortune. Nicholson, along with his real gifts, has always had a canny ability to move with the heat. He has done it so well that now he is the heat.

He knew he had it knocked after he saw a rough cut of Chinatown. “Mogul,” he said to Evans, who produced the movie, “we got that hot one. Get those checks ready—we’re on our way.” He also made it a point to phone up Actor Bruce Dern, a pal since they both scuffled through a bunch of low budget bike pictures, for a little needling: “Hey, Dernsie, I think you better retire, babe. I got it all covered —know what I mean?” Nicholson has called Dern “my only real competition —you and the guy on the hill” (referring to Marlon Brando, whose home off Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive is directly above Nicholson’s).

All the double-edged kidding and up-front aggressiveness stand in some contrast to the cool, measured and often affectless characters Nicholson has played so well on the screen. He looks, when he is not trying, like an all-night coach passenger who is just beginning to realize he has slept through his stop. But his features have great plasticity. His friend Candice Bergen speaks of his “cobra eyes.” His energy level can vary with the most careful calibration. His two best roles—as Bobby Dupea, the thwarted concert pianist in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and David Staebler, the self-consumed and self-deceived radio monologist hi The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)—are shaded with anxiety, shaped with a muted force.

Bobby Dupea, strangled by a sense of his own failed talent, allowed Nicholson not only to turn on his own bursting temper, but to flash the charm that has its greatest single emblem in his smile, which seems to be cordially unsettling and made mostly of radium. David Staebler, on the other hand, required Nicholson to master a more dour, slippery confessional mode, to hide his character’s feelings from himself under a barrage of autobiographical patchwork. Nicholson was equal to the task. It is his most daring performance, and one of his favorites.

Marvin Gardens, however, was a movie that asked audiences to reach out almost as far as Nicholson, and it flopped. Chinatown, a smooth, period private-eye yarn that works hard to hark back to the ’30s and ’40s, comes much more easily to hand. In it, Nicholson makes a shrewd choice to play persona rather than character—a commodity hi rather short supply in the script. His JJ. Gittes is cool, ironic, sympathetically small-time, a guy who stumbles on something a little bigger than he expected, or can manage. He also gets the chance to smile a lot. “That smile of his is simply a killer,” says Nicholson’s friend Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue, who ought to know a little something about smiles. “Jack must know it’s devastating, because he uses it very rarely.”

Nicholson can employ his rough, warming charm to get himself through a bumpy scene or an insufficient part, but he is usually a careful and thorough craftsman. “He simply doesn’t care about the way he looks,” says Director Roman Polanski. “I put a bandage on his nose during half of Chinatown, and he didn’t object. With Jack, it’s only the result that counts.” Indeed, for Fortune he gets a weekly permanent to keep his hair Art Garfunkel-style kinky.

Nicholson’s patience and zeal are exceptional. When he works over a script, not only are key phrases underlined and notes made, but almost every word is assigned a number, which signifies beats and pauses. “I’m at least 75% of every character I play,” Nicholson says. “For the rest, I try to find a character’s positive philosophy about himself. You have to search out and adopt the character’s own justifications and rationalizations.”

Nicholson also likes to get going on every movie set a kind of group feeling, turning a crew into a junior-varsity team. “I’ve never seen any other actor do it,” says Mike Nichols. “Usually everyone has their own cliques—the camera crew, the electricians, and so on —but when Jack’s around, that feeling disappears.” Occasionally, Nicholson’s competitiveness gets in the way of the general bonhomie. Bob Rafelson recalls that during the shooting of The King of Marvin Gardens, all of Nicholson’s bottled-up energies would come out in a series of demon Ping Pong games with the crew. Says Rafelson: “He demolished everyone who dared to take him on.” Nicholson is smart enough to know when to call off rivalries. He avoided Ping Pong competition with Michelangelo Antonioni, who directed him in the upcoming The Passenger, fearing shaky times if the filmmaker lost.

He is not above asserting himself to a director, however. There is a crucial sequence in Five Easy Pieces in which Bobby Dupea must break down in front of his paralyzed father. Nicholson did not want to do it, and Director Rafelson wrangled all night with him. “Jack said Dupea was crying out of self-pity —something Jack strongly opposed in himself and in others,” Rafelson remembers. “I argued that Dupea was crying out of an agony of displeasure over the life he was leading, and that this displeasure had to be revealed. Finally, I said, ‘Jack, this is all bullshit. You don’t want to do it because you can’t.’ ” The next morning, Rafelson cleared the set and Nicholson did the scene in one take.

The scene does not fully work because Nicholson still has himself in check. There seems to be a point both for actor and character beyond which a sudden self-awareness cannot trespass, a hard and untouchable reserve. Nicholson, however, is proud of the scene, and comments, “I’ve been asked dozens of times whether I was really thinking of my own father and his tragedy during that scene. The answer is, of course I was.” Perhaps what Nicholson reveals as the root of the scene is also, in an in advertent Irony, what was wrong with it.

Jack’s father, John, whose forebears came from County Cork, was a part-time window dresser, a sometime sign painter. He was also an alcoholic who had moved out of the house in Neptune, N.J., shortly after his only son was born in 1937.

He drifted in and out after that, dwelling somewhere just on the edge of Nicholson’s consciousness, like a phantom who could tell a secret, if you could only catch him.

Jack’s mother, Ethel May, raised in New Jersey, opened up a beauty shop in the bedroom of their Neptune home to support Jack and his two much-older sisters. The business thrived, and the family moved to a bigger place. His sister June left home when Nicholson was four to be an Earl Carroll showgirl in Miami. Jack, bright and funny in school, skipped a grade. He made his unofficial show-biz debut at ten on the stage of Roosevelt Grammar School singing Managua Nicaragua.

“It was really a very comfortable middle-class existence,” Nicholson says, adding that though he was stubborn and scrappy, his mother gave him room to romp. “You’re on your own,” she told him. “All I expect is that if you get into trouble, you’ll tell me about it.” Nicholson early inaugurated his lifetime habit of giving people nicknames. His sister Lorraine was “Rain,” her husband George “Shorty.” Nicholson referred to his father, however, as “Jack.” He called his mother “Mud.” He was reticent about his home life. Recalls George Anderson, a high school pal, now a salesman: “I knew his father was an alcoholic, but the only time Jack mentioned it was one day when he said, ‘I saw my father yesterday. The poor old guy, I feel sorry for him because he can’t help it.’ “

In high school, Mud’s boy was younger and brighter than just about anyone else. “His smile was terrific,” recalls Anderson. “He made plenty of friends who spanned several classes. Jack wasn’t one of the heroes, but he made them hisfriends.” He managed the varsity basketball team his freshman year. On oneoccasion he thought that the opposing team was playing dirty. After the game, Nicholson went back into the gym and trashed the electrical equipment on the rival’s Scoreboard. He confessed his crime, got suspended from school, and took a part-time job to pay for the damage. That was Nicholson’s first moment of notoriety.

He scored high on his college entrance exams (“Top 2%, nationally,” he still remembers). He thought briefly of going to the University of Delaware, but despite his academic potential, he says, “I just hated school.” His sister June had wound up in Los Angeles, and Jack decided to spend a little time out there with her. After just a few weeks, he decided to stay.

He landed a $30-a-week job as a mail clerk at MGM, and kept his ambition in fighting trim by calling all the executives by their first names. “Hiya, Joe,” he grinned at Producer Joe Pasternak, who stopped for a moment, then threw out the classic line: “Hey, kid —how’d ya like to be in pictures?” Pasternak gave Nicholson a script, and told him where to show up for the screen test. Nicholson looked the script over but did not realize that he was supposed to memorize his lines. The test was a disaster, and Nicholson was back on the mail run. “Hiya, Joe,” he greeted Pasternak in the hall a few days after. The producer stopped for a moment, mulling something over. Then he spoke: “Hey—how’d ya like to be in pictures?”

This little object lesson in stomped hopes and lapsed memories must have appealed to Nicholson’s sense of irony, and worked as well on his aggressive sense of pride. He enrolled in a beginner’s acting course run by Actor Jeff Corey. Other pupils included James Coburn, Sally Kellerman, Producer Roger Corman, Writers Carol Eastman and Robert Towne. Nicholson and Towne (who was later to write the screenplays of The Last Detail and Chinatown) hit it off immediately and shared a small apartment on the hungry fringes of Hollywood. Both of them had crushes on every actress in the class, Towne remembers. “But we never had a chance —they weren’t interested in nobodies.”

At least one was—Sally Kellerman, 30 pounds overweight then and always unhappy in love. “I would sit on Jack’s lap and pour out my heart to him,” she says. For sustenance they would go to the supermarket for some “sweeties and souries”—ice cream and potato chips—and gorge between traumas. “Jack was the funniest man in the world,” Kellerman recalls, “and always available when I needed him—a true friend.”

When not working in class, bolstering Kellerman, living the bachelor life with Towne, scuffling for the odd acting job in low-budget melodramas like The Little Shop of Horrors or TV shows like Divorce Court (“I was the most unabashed corespondent in town”), Nicholson found time to court Actress Sandra Knight. The couple got married in 1962. “We were very much in love, and I took the vows totally at ease,” Nicholson says, confessing at the same time to a “secret inner pressure about monogamy.” A year later, his only child Jennifer was born.

Sandra Knight surrendered her career to marriage, but Nicholson persisted in his. When a doubtful Corey admonished him to “show me some poetry,” Jack’s reply snapped back in a second: “Maybe, Jeff, you just don’t see the poetry I’m showing you.”

He began to pick up more or less steady, but decidedly unglamorous work in such Roger Corman quickies as The Terror, starring Boris Karloff, and The Raven, in which Jack played Peter Lorre’s son. The only real satisfaction Nicholson was to get from any of these films, besides a salary, was the chance to insert a little underhanded humor. He once had the smallest running part in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—a chauffeur. Nicholson ad-libbed a single line of dialogue to steal a scene. While a hoodlum rubs some foreign substance on the ammunition, Nicholson explains, “It’s garlic. The bullets don’t kill ya, ya die of blood poisoning.”

Frustrated with his progress as an actor, Nicholson would periodically try other aspects of the business. He wrote a few scripts and co-produced two low-budget westerns, The Shooting, which he starred in, and Ride the Whirlwind, which he starred in and wrote as well. He also turned out to be a demon for efficiency and staying within budgets. When the movies were finished, he personally carried them to the Cannes Film Festival, searching for a distributor and trying to scratch up some contacts.

By this time Nicholson had discovered that the “secret inner pressure about monogamy” was too great for him to bear, and he ambled off into a series of casual affairs. He and Sandra separated while he was writing the script for an LSD epic called The Trip—under medical supervision, Sandra once had a bad acid experience and was spooked by the subject—and when Nicholson finished the assignment, they decided to split up for good.

Soon after, Bob Rafelson was involved with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in preparing a motorcycle movie. Rafelson thought there was a good part for Nicholson, but Hopper wanted Rip Torn. Nicholson was dispatched to the set as a sort of production watchdog. He quickly became the right man at the right time. Torn dropped out of the movie, Nicholson moved in. Easy Rider wound up making $35 million. It also got Nicholson an Oscar nomination. All the scuffling was finally starting to pay off.

Nicholson is honest enough to concede that there have been certain disadvantages. “There are two ways up the ladder—hand over hand or scratching and clawing. It’s sure been tough on my nails.” It has also been taxing on his social energies. After Easy Rider, Pal Harry Gittes (after whom Chinatown’s shamus was named) remembers Nicholson buttonholing people if he got a look of even tentative recognition, “introducing himself and making himself unforgettable, one person at a time.” Last year at Cannes he was observed doing similar gladhanding because he wanted to win the best-actor award for The Last Detail. He did.

All the good work and the unembarrassed politicking have paid off handsomely. Now, from a vantage point at the top of that ladder, Nicholson can settle in. Los Angeles is home base, where he lives with Anjelica Huston, daughter of Director John Huston (a co-star in Chinatown). From there, he and Anjelica, whom he calls Tootman, make frequent lavish forays to New York and Paris, where there are good shops, restaurants and many friends, and to Switzerland, where he likes to ski.

Like many suddenly rich people, Jack’s attitude toward money swivels wildly. Anjelica just got a Mercedes for her 23rd birthday. According to Mike Nichols, Nicholson always has “several thousand bucks out” to help friends over some rough spots. But Roman Polanski says that at other times Nicholson is “stingier than W.C. Fields.” Once at Maxim’s, Nicholson fought for and won the $600 check. When he found that one of his dinner companions could have taken care of the bill as a business expense, he was miserable.

Ever careful of possessions, he once called Anjelica in London from Rome to ask: “I can’t find my comb. Did you pack it?” She found it and, much relieved, he responded long-distance, “O.K., take care of it for me.” He is sometimes subject to gusty emotions. Friends say he has cried when seeing them off at airports. He calls back home to Rain every Christmas to get the traditional family recipes.

Nicholson has never taken any pains to conceal two of his greatest pleasures—women and dope—from public view, perhaps partly because he knows they will add a little darkening to his deliberately scuffed, slightly sinister popular image. He has been a cannabis aficionado for the past 15 years, sampled LSD, and taken some snorts of cocaine. None of that is very unusual, especially in high-living Hollywood circles. Jack evidently can handle it; several friends speak of his basically controlled, “non-addictive personality.” His long-standing romantic relationships (with Model Mimi Machu, with Singer Michelle Phillips) ended stormily, with Nicholson torn for weeks between fury and depression. But the serious love affairs were also punctuated by bursts of inconstancy, and he likes to boast about them. “Jesus,” he said to one friend about a high-paid fashion model who was flying in for an assignation, “she’s coming 10,000 miles for a weekend.”

“I like skunks,” Nicholson admits. He is referring to women who are alluring but unreachable—”ball busters,” as his character in Carnal Knowledge called them. Although Nicholson disclaims specific identification with the hung-up hero of that film, an occasional recreation of his and Warren Beatty’s is riding around town, skunk spotting on the street. “I know some of my friends think I’m self-destructive or masochistic,” he says. “I know damn well what lies in store, but I choose to go after it anyway. I’m courageous.” Says Brother-in-Law Shorty: “I think Jack hates women.”

There are at least two women, however, whom Nicholson counts among his closest friends, and who come as near to having his number as anyone can. One is the reclusive Carol Eastman, who witnessed a Nicholson temper outburst vented against a snooty waitress in a restaurant. “You say one word,” Nicholson warned the waitress, “and I’ll kick in your pastry cart.” Eastman remembered the scene and adapted it years later in her Five Easy Pieces screenplay, in which Nicholson throws a famous fit over an order of wheat toast.

The other woman is Helena Kallianiotes, who played a schizy hitchhiker in Five Easy Pieces. She was making a living as a belly dancer and recovering from two bad marriages when Nicholson took her home with him one night, said, “Pick yourself a bedroom,” and welcomed her simply as a friend. Now she lives next door, and has run Jack’s household through the romances with Mimi, Michelle and Anjelica. “Jack once said to me, ‘Helena, look, I have very aristocratic feet.’ So I say of him he has the feet of an aristocrat and the body of a peasant. He has traveled with kings and knaves, and sees no difference between them.”

With Anjelica, who is serene and apparently not a skunk, Nicholson seems content. Their life, however, is hardly quiet. There are three phone lines in the house, and they are usually ringing. If Nicholson is not around to take the call, he is firm about returning each one personally. The front door is left open, and friends wander in. Nicholson will often come back from work with a few pals in tow, a group that might include Mike Nichols (whom Nicholson calls “Big Nick”), Candice Bergen (“Bug”), Art Garfunkel (“Art the Garf) or Warren Beatty (“Master B”). The house itself is raffish and eclectic, featuring a collection of pig effigies: stuffed toy pigs, carved wooden pigs, a pig matchholder and a needle point showing two pigs coupling. “When pigs became the symbol of evil,” Nicholson explains, “I adopted them.”

In Nicholson’s upstairs office are stacked airmail editions of his favorite paper, the international Herald Tribune —he plans to read every issue this year in a single sitting someday. Sundays are the province of his daughter Jennifer, 10, who visits, although her father says that he is “very tentative about infringing on Jenny’s life. I want to be invited to enter her world, to be admitted gracefully.”

Though he likes to have people around, Nicholson can still be remote. Anjelica admits that “Jack doesn’t tip his hand very much.” Instead of trying to explain him, she suggests mistily, one must “sense his essences.” Indeed, anyone looking for something any more substantial than that from Nicholson may have applied to the wrong department.

A couple of the old gang wonder. Robert Towne says, “We haven’t had a heart-to-heart talk in a long time.” Sally Kellerman recalls that she and Nicholson used to share a funny code word which they used as a whispered greeting, “as our private signal that we still love each other. But I haven’t said ‘Boobs’ to Jack in a couple of years.”

What revelation there is likely to be from Nicholson will come from the screen. When Nicholson first began to make real progress in acting class, Jeff Corey noted that he excelled at an exercise called “abandonment,” where all the stops are pulled out and only raw emotional truth—or the impression of it —remains. This is a difficult exercise for actors because they tend to take it too literally and lose control. There must be some calculation always working, some closed-off part that remains unmoved. For the same reason Nicholson’s scenes of anger (particularly in Five Easy Pieces) have such great power. He never does let everything go. There is always something that cannot be reached.

The acting style he has extrapolated for himself out of his own memory and his great talent is a reserved, tentative thing that depends on his stores of introspection and secret turmoil. Newer actors, younger ones, are already doing something a little different. Robert De Niro (in Mean Streets), Richard Dreyfuss (in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) are working in a broader, larger style—no more daring than Nicholson’s but more aggressive and open.

Nicholson knows the jungle rules of Hollywood and acknowledges them when he says, “Once they want you, you can be certain the day will come when they won’t any more.” Now he can savor the effervescence of his new celebrity and know too that for him that day will probably not come. He is well enough established so that the work will be there for him, maybe not always quite so prime, but always available.

So it is simple enough to slip away; there is not so much worry in coming back again. At night, after work, when there is no company, Nicholson will light a joint, put on some rock music, loud, so it seals off every other sound. Then he will start dancing, in front of a long glass door looking down over a canyon below, pleased, easy, alone.