Every so often I reflect on what the accumulation of time does to some people, and what it’s done in particular to…well, friends and family, of course, but hotshots I’ve run into over the years and especially the occasional supernovas. I began thinking about Jack Nicholson a couple of days ago. William Faulkner‘s concept of eternity will always apply (“the past is never dead…it’s not even past”), but the more it sinks in the more the present seems to concurrently intensify.
Things change, of course. and some weather the storm better than others. Luckier, healthier, better genes.
The general rule is that you can “party” like a madman in your teens and 20s and maybe even into your early 30s, but you have to behave more sensibly and turn that activity down (or better yet embrace sobriety) when you hit 40 or thereabouts. You really do. If you don’t, you’ll probably have to pay the piper when you get old. Some who were famous and flush and relatively young during the great cocaine binge era of the ’70s and early ’80s can tell you about that piper. Not all but some.
Speaking of which you have to admire how Martin Scorsese (who will celebrate his 80th birthday on 11.17) is by all accounts still lucid and wise and charging along like a 47 year old, or a decent facsimile of same.
Feel free to ignore the following if you’ve re-read it too many times…
It was mid January of 1982, and I, representing the N.Y. Post, was interviewing Mr. Nicholson at the Hotel Carlyle. I’d been told that my time slot was, believe it or not, about an hour. The subject was Tony Richardson‘s The Border (Universal, 2.12.83). I arrived at the Nicholson suite on the 23rd floor around 10:30 or 10:45 am. I was greeted by publicist Bobby Zarem in the foyer. Nicholson was seated about 25 or 30 feet away, down the hall and around the corner but within earshot.
“How are ya, Jeff?” Zarem asked with his usual urgent energy. Manhattan had been going through a long frigid spell and it seemed especially icy and and windy that morning. I was wearing a gray leather jacket that wasn’t nearly warm enough, so the first reply that came to mind was “oh, cold as usual.” A split second later I heard Nicholson doing an imitation of me, saying “cold as usual.”
Our discussion was all over the map, and I was trying to keep things cool and steady. But deep down I was saying to myself “wow, this is really happening.” I didn’t know if I was coming or going, but at some point I asked Jack for his reaction to a tartly written review of The Border by Time‘s Richard Corliss. Jack hadn’t read it so I showed it to him. The review began as follows:
“When, early in The Border, Nicholson muses about how, back in California, ‘I liked feeding those ducks,’ one’s first reaction is: ‘Feeding them what? Strychnine?’ Nicholson’s voice, with the silky menace of an FM disc jockey in the eighth circle of hell, has always suggested that nothing in the catalogue of experience is outrageous enough to change his inflection. Even when he goes shambly and manic (Goin’ South, The Shining), Nicholson’s voice and those tilde eyebrows give the impression…” and blah blah.
Nicholson chuckled faintly when he read it, and then went into a minor tirade about how he was “mad” that he’d convinced the public he was a murderer, and about being stuck in that box. This image disappeared the following year, of course, after he played Garret Breedlove, the randy ex-astronaut, in James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment.
Earlier or later I had shared a view (my own) of Nicholson’s performance in The Shining. The idea was that aspects of his Jack Torrance performance seemed, to me and others I knew, to be self-referential or, if you will, a kind of inside joke between Jack and his fan base. Nicholson disputed this. He wasn’t rude but his response was basically who was I, a mere journalist, to assume I had an inside view of things? He was relaxed and droll about it, but his point was that he was “inside” and I wasn’t.
Like a lot of X-factor guys, Nicholson has a habit of jumping the track in terms of conversational threads. We got to talking about cold-weather jackets and he mentioned he was planning to head downtown later to buy himself a nice warm one. “What are you looking for?”, I asked, meaning goose down, motorcycle jacket, Brooks Brothers or whatever. And Nicholson answered, “I don’t know. I haven’t known for quite some time.”
The most poignant moment was when he began sipping a Miller High Life about 15 or 20 minutes into our chat, and my deciding to drink one also as a gesture of solidarity.