Jack’s back, and the shades are off.
Pot belly preceding him, he looks only slightly rumpled as he enters the room and slyly comments, “How do you do, gent?” The full-toothed, almost demonic smile is a friendly grin now, but it’s clear the legend is not a myth. For the occasion, he is not wearing sunglasses.
He is a man who finds the world vaguely ridiculous. He’s Puck, a mischief-maker with a reputation for telling it like it is. The perennial odd man out, he was the most famous movie rebel of his generation — and generations since have continued to embrace him. He thumbed his nose at the establishment by sticking around long enough to be accepted on all levels.
And, at 63, Jack Nicholson is returning to movies for the first time in three years — since winning the third of his Oscars for the romantic comedy “As Good As It Gets.”
“I only work when I find something worthwhile to do,” he says succinctly.
What he’s found is “The Pledge,” a dark drama about obsession directed by his friend Sean Penn and with a cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Harry Dean Stanton, Helen Mirren, Sam Shepard, Mickey Rourke, Robin Wright Penn and Benicio Del Toro. He plays Jerry Black, a Nevada police detective who is nearing retirement but promises the mother of an 8-year-old murder victim that he will find the killer.
It’s a different Jack Nicholson — minus the trademark grin and sarcastic asides. Black, an everyday guy on the brink of desperation, could well become a legendary Nicholson character to rank with J.J. Gittes in “Chinatown” and McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Yeah. Yeah. This guy has got problems,” Nicholson said. “That’s what makes him interesting to play, you know?”
It’s 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and Nicholson is hacking and wheezing from a cold. “I got it from the kids. It’s going around.
“I don’t go out much anymore, but when I want to, I do,” he says, arching his devilish eyebrows. “You’ve got to really put some effort into having a good time if you’re going to have a good time. But who likes to create a scene? It seems I create a scene when I go out. I don’t care for that as much as I once did. Oh, I still know how to create a scene. I just don’t choose to.”
Nicholson still looks as if he’s just pulled off some prank.
After all, this is the man who has always freely acknowledged his fondness for womanizing, cocaine, marijuana and bucking the studio system — and gotten away with it all. His durability is undeniable: He’s the only actor to win Oscars over the span of three decades — in the 1970s for “Cuckoo’s Nest,” in the 1980s for “Terms of Endearment” and in the 1990s for “As Good as it Gets.” Still, the academy tried to ignore him back when he was considered too rebellious — despite nominations for “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Last Detail” and “Chinatown.”
The gray hairline is receding but the hooded, sleepy eyes are the same and that killer smile can flash at any moment.
“Making movies isn’t as much fun as it used to be,” Nicholson says. “It takes too long now to clinch a deal. There are too many bankers and investors involved. I liked it when a deal was a deal and a person’s word was all you needed.
“Sean is a good friend — not just a casual friend but a good friend. … When he brought this novel to me, `The Pledge,’ I didn’t see a movie in it. Later, when he sent it back to me as a script, I saw it. I said, `OK. Let’s do it.'”
Penn immediately saw something different from the usual whodunit in the 1957 novel by Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (author of the classic play “The Visit”). “It’s about the investigator, not the murder,” he says. “Jack was my partner. He worked with me in every phase, right through the editing.”
Nicholson, however, insists that he kept his distance.
“I don’t insinuate myself into a director’s way. I’m always ready, if I’m asked. But I have to be asked. Sean uses what he wants. It’s his film. For example, I wanted a shot of a couple of cops weeping at the scene of the murder. It isn’t in the movie.”
The worst thing about making “The Pledge,” he says, was the location: The sub-zero backwoods of Canada were too far from his beloved Los Angeles Lakers. “We put in a TV dish so that I could pick up the games,” he says.
“Jack is such a normal Joe,” says co-star Robin Wright Penn, wife of Sean Penn. “He said to me one time, `I don’t like confrontation!’ And he meant it. He doesn’t like to stir things up. He’s a very gentle person with everyone.”
Nicholson’s personal life has not been without conflict, and revelations. In 1974, he learned that the woman who raised him, who he thought was his mother, was actually his grandmother. The woman who he thought was his older sister was his birth mother. His father, an alcoholic, deserted the family.
At 17, during a trip to Los Angeles to visit a sister, he got a job in the mailroom of MGM’s cartoon department.
“I saw all the famous movie stars pass through,” Nicholson says. “Actually, the first star I ever saw was character actor Percy Sloan. I was down at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, looking at the footprints, and I recognized him as someone who had been in movies. I thought, I’m really in Hollywood now.”
His movie debut was “Cry Baby Killer,” followed by a decade of cheap films produced by Roger Corman, including some that Nicholson co-wrote. He was in “The Raven,” “The Trip” and “The Little Shop of Horrors.” But just when it looked as if he was stuck in B-movie nowhere, Rip Torn dropped out of “Easy Rider,” the trend-setting 1969 cycle flick that took Hollywood on the road forever.
Taking the role of a square Southern lawyer who becomes hip, Nicholson got an Oscar nomination — and superstardom. “I never worried about money,” he says. “I assumed I’d make a living in movies, but becoming a superstar was not in the plan. In the 1970s I was in the unusual position that I could do anything I wanted.”
For “The Last Detail,” he played a gritty sailor who transfers Randy Quaid to prison — and teaches him to party.
Nicholson has partied a bit himself. His most recent affair was with Lara Flynn Boyle of TV’s “The Practice” — 32 years his junior. When she moved out in September, she told the press that “sleeping with Jack is like sleeping with Einstein. He’s the most well-read man in the world.”
Michelle Phillips was among his girlfriends. His 17-year romance with Anjelica Huston, who won an Oscar when she co-starred with him in “Prizzi’s Honor,” came to an end when she learned he had fathered a child with a waitress named Rebecca Brossard. He has two children, Lorraine and Raymond, with Brossard. That affair lasted until the late-1990s, when she and the children moved into a separate house on his estate. During the 1960s, he was married to actress Sandra Knight.
There have been lawsuits too. Susan Anspach, his co-star in “Five Easy Pieces,” sued him for breach of contract after she allegedly gave birth to his son. Automobile accidents in 1994 and 1999 resulted in legal actions against him. In 1994, he was charged with assault after using a golf club to smash the windshield of a car whose driver he believed had cut him off. There were charges that he beat up two hookers who came to his house in 1996.
The rebel has lived up to his rep, but for the interview he’s pleasant. “The trouble with movies today that they don’t have language. People don’t talk. Because of the foreign market, they want action and comedy films, films that don’t have much dialog.”
Asked why he is so seldom corralled for an interview, he says, “I don’t want to de-mystify myself. People would get bored if they knew how quiet I really am. Let them believe all they’ve read. Every time I’m caught out in public, I figure it’s part of the job.”
As for Jerry Black, his character in “The Pledge,” Nicholson feels he’s closer to himself than others he’s played.
“What I chose to do is less a characterization and more of myself. Jerry hides everything from other people in his life.”
