Jack

Edward Douglas

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061745492
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Jack Nicholson is one of the longest-lasting and most recognized sex symbols of our time. This sizzling biography goes deep in-depth, relating exclusive interviews with past flames and flings, to shed light on the unique charisma and magnetism of one of America's most respected and desired movie stars.

Among the startling revelations:

• A longtime girlfriend who describes Jack's reaction when he at last discovered the long-buried, dark secret of his childhood
• Jack's notorious penny-pinching, such as the time he came home from a movie set with a doggie bag of catered Mexican food
• The woman Jack "shared" with Robert Evans and Warren Beatty
• The night Christina Onassis, who'd had a fling with Jack in Los Angeles, got mad at him for seducing a girl in her party at Xenon
• The beauty queen who was still married to drug dealer Tom Sullivan when she was drawn to Jack
• The beautiful, talented costar who showed up at Jack's house at 1 A.M. and what happened when live-in girlfriend Anjelica Huston answered the intercom
• The night Steve Rubell ran around Studio 54 saying, "We got to keep Ryan O'Neal and Jack Nicholson away from each other. There's going to be a big fight."
• Why Rebecca Broussard refused him when Jack asked for her hand in marriage in 1993, even after having two children with him
• Why Katharine Hepburn's goddaughter still loves Jack and has spent years looking for a man who can measure up to him
• Diane Keaton's reaction to Jack passing gas during filming of a love scene for Something's Gotta Give
• Jennifer Howard, who found Jack's lovemaking "very oomph! He knows what he's doing. You can kind of just let go. Let him le-e-e-ad the way!"In Jack, Edward Douglas offers us a provocative, fascinating portrait of the man, the legend, the star: Jack Nicholson.

Chapter One

THE PRINCE OF SUMMER

Just as Nicholson ultimately became remote and unattainable for Cynthia Basinet, so were his parents forever distant from Nicholson. “I became conscious of very early emotions about not being wanted,” he said, “feeling that I was a problem to my family as an infant.” Quite literally, his parents would never permit him to know them—not even their real names or exact relationships.

According to one theory, his father was a man named Don Furcillo-Rose, who impregnated Nicholson’s mother, June Frances Nicholson, then a beautiful, red-haired, seventeen-year-old New Jersey girl and aspiring movie star, who’d been courted by gangsters and prizefighters, and appeared as a showgirl in a Leonard Sillman revue on Broadway. Furcillo-Rose, a song-and-dance man who’d worked the Jersey Shore with various bands, was married to another woman and had already fathered a son. Angry and outraged, June’s mother, Ethel May, banished him from her pregnant daughter’s presence in 1936, months before the birth of Jack Nicholson.¹

According to another theory, Nicholson’s father was a bandleader/pianist/dance-studio owner who’d played the Jersey circuit with Jackie Gleason; his name was Eddie King, and he had featured June Nicholson on his radio show Eddie King and His Radio Kiddies before getting her pregnant. Later, threatened with deportation as an illegal immigrant, King went into hiding in Asbury Park, fearing that admission of having sex with a teenager would get him into even deeper trouble with the law. He was finally cleared and later married an employee at his dance studio.²

Even June herself wasn’t sure who Jack’s father was, and as Jack would later put it, he belonged to his “own downtrodden minority: the bastard.”³ Putting the best possible face on his illegitimacy and its inevitably destabilizing effect on his life,⁴ he convinced himself that he had “the blood of kings flowing through my veins.”

Jack’s thirty-nine-year-old grandmother, Ethel May Nicholson (or “Mud,” as he later nicknamed her), was a slender, pretty brunette. Gifted as a seamstress and painter, she was capable of taking care of herself and others, which was often necessary. Her alcoholic husband, a dapper window dresser named John J. Nicholson, decorated for Steinbach department stores in Asbury Park, but disappeared on binges and could be counted on for nothing. When Ethel May learned that her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock, she made an extraordinary decision. As the only female in the house who was married, Ethel May would assume the baby’s parenting, even claiming to be his mother. Her decision was tacitly accepted by John J., June, and Lorraine. “You can’t imagine the stigma and shame for a mother and child in that situation at that time,” said “Rain”—Nicholson’s nickname for his pretend sister Lorraine—who was fourteen when June became pregnant.⁵

After considering abortion,⁶ June crossed the Hudson River to Manhattan and remained there until the baby’s birth, on April 22, 1937, at Bellevue Hospital. When Jack was two months old, she returned home. Lorraine related, “Right after that, [June] got a job and was gone, which was OK. Mud just grabbed that baby and made him hers. My mother lived and breathed Jack. Everything Jack did was great to us.” Neighbors naturally gossiped, speculating on the identity of the father, many of them later noticing the resemblance between Jack and Eddie King, but eventually they accepted that the boy was Ethel May’s “change-of-life baby.” Jack grew up thinking that June, his true mother, was his sister, and that Lorraine, his aunt, was his other sister. When Jack was in his teens, Lorraine was tempted to tell him the truth—that June, not Ethel May, was his mother—but she held back, and he continued to live in ignorance until he was thirty-seven years old, long after he’d achieved stardom. “They were both so afraid of losing him,” Lorraine recalled. Ethel May and June suspected, not surprisingly, that he’d lash out at them in rage for practicing such gross deception. “He grew up with three mothers,” Lorraine added, “and even though he wasn’t close to June, no one ever deserted Jack.”

Though it was a merciful act in many respects, Jack was surrounded by crafty and deceitful women, a situation that would forever influence his attitude toward women. “Jack has a right to be angry—a legitimate beef,” Lorraine said in 1994. “If he’s got hangups today, they’re legitimate, too.” Not until 1974, when he was contacted by a Time magazine reporter researching a cover story, was the secret so long and scrupulously guarded by Ethel May, June, and Lorraine finally exposed. Upon learning that he was illegitimate, Jack was devastated, his entire sense of identity undermined and savaged, but at last he understood why he’d always felt like a second-class citizen, and why his lack of self-esteem always destroyed his love affairs and attempts at marriage. In 1975 he referred to “a terrible realization I had as an infant that my mother didn’t want me . . . and along with that came desperate feelings of need. Basically . . . I relate to women by trying to please them as if my survival depended on them. In my long-term relationships, I’m always the one that gets left.”⁷

Denied his real mother, he would never stop searching for her, and all his intimate relationships with women would be shaped by what had happened there on the Jersey Shore. “Somehow,” he later ruminated, “in the sexual experience, I was making the woman into a sort of a mom—an authoritarian female figure; that made me feel inadequate to the situation, small and childish. I indulged myself in a lot of masturbatory behavior. I solved none of these problems in therapy. I worked them out for myself, but any of them might reappear.”⁸

As journalist Chrissy Ulley sagely wrote in the London Sunday Times in 1996, “Despite this ‘I love women, I love the company of women’ line that he’s always pushing, you know for sure that the reverse is true—that men who love women like this are in awe of them, they fear them, they don’t understand them, but they understand how to play them, how to hurt them, how to make it work.”

The wild philandering of Jack Nicholson, America’s preening Don Juan, a pioneer and hero of the sex revolution of the sixties and seventies, was a reaction to his own bizarre, traumatic, and troubled childhood. “Under the circumstances, it’s a miracle that I didn’t turn out to be a fag,” he said.⁹ What he didn’t escape, however, were “castration fears”¹⁰ and “homosexual fears.”¹¹

The most urbanized, densely populated state in the United States, New Jersey is a noisy, blue-collar melting pot, but at the same time, beautiful in places like Cape May, rich in history, and one of the key cradles of American independence. In 1776, Gen. George Washington staged a surprise attack against the Hessians at Trenton, followed by the Revolutionary Army’s victories at Princeton—which briefly became the U.S. capital—and Morristown. In 1904, Mark Twain and Henry James met at the home of their publisher, Harper’s Col. George Harvey, at Deal Beach. Jersey was the home of three of America’s best-loved poets, Walt Whitman of Camden, William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, and Allen Ginsberg of Paterson. At Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson was chief administrator before becoming president of the United States and Albert Einstein dreamed up the atomic bomb. The first movie was made there in 1889, Thomas Edison established the first movie studio near his labs in West Orange in 1892, and the first drive-in theater opened in Jersey in 1933. The state also lays claim to the first pro basketball game, played in 1896.

Jersey was the home of Terry Malloy of On the Waterfront, Tony Soprano, Joey “Pants” Pantoliano, the Amboy Dukes, Paul Robeson, President Grover Cleveland, Count Basie, Connie Francis, Whitney Houston, Meryl Streep, and Frank Sinatra, whose mother, Dolly, performed illegal abortions in Hoboken. The fabled Jersey Shore—127 miles from Sandy Hook to Cape May, dotted with holiday towns ranging from skanky to tony—spawned Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Danny DeVito, and the annual Miss America contest at Atlantic City. Just a stone’s throw from the beach and the famous boardwalk, Nicholson grew up in the middle-class section of Neptune City. “I was never an underprivileged kid,” he said, and added, ironically, “I caddied at very nice golf courses.”¹²

But he could also admit, “I lived a tense life . . . I never had great relationships with my family.”¹³ In local bars, the man he called his father, John Joseph Nicholson, whom he’d later discover was his grandfather, would put away thirty-five shots of three-star Hennessy while Jack drank eighteen sarsaparillas. John J. was a “snappy dresser” and a “smiley Irishman,” cheered at firehouse games as “a great baseball player” before he discovered apricot brandy. Many years later, in 1987, Jack’s love for John J. would be immortalized in his sympathetic portrayal of him as the Francis Phelan character in one of his best films, Ironweed. “I never heard him raise his voice,” Jack recalled. “I never saw anybody be angry with him, not even my mother. He was just a quiet, melancholy, tragic figure—a very soft man.” Before long, John J. disappeared, abandoning his family, though, like Francis Phelan in Ironweed, he occasionally and unexpectedly showed up, usually at Christmas, perhaps toting a raw turkey, as in Ironweed.

At 2 Steiner Avenue, in a roomy two-story house near Route 35, the Nicholson family’s circumstances steadily improved as the independent and resourceful Ethel May established her own small business as a hairdresser, running a beauty parlor out of her home. Although her well-to-do Pennsylvania Dutch Protestant father, who was president of the Taylor Metal Company, had disowned her for marrying John J., a Roman Catholic, her family eventually forgave her and lent her the money to purchase a permanent-wave machine and beautician lessons in Newark.

After Jack’s real mother, June, left home to tour as a dancer on the road, she married a handsome test pilot, Murray “Bob” Hawley Jr., during World War II, and remained in Michigan, where she’d been stranded in 1943. “She was a symbol of excitement” to Jack, who remembered her as “thrilling and beautiful.” Lorraine, June’s younger sister, married a railroad brakeman for the line that later became Conrail; George “Shorty” Smith, a former all-state football player, served as Jack’s mentor and surrogate father. Shorty was an irresistible charmer and ladies’ man, and Jack doted on him, later affectionately describing him as a barfly bullshitter. Obviously it was from his family that Jack Nicholson picked up two important lifelong loves: showbusiness and sports—and perhaps something else. Speaking of Shorty, Lorraine said he was an alcoholic, but so beguilingly “sweet” that women would let him get away with anything, including “pinching boobs, that most men would’ve been killed for.”¹⁴

Jack once described himself in childhood as “a Peck’s Bad Boy and a freckle-faced mischief-maker.”¹⁵ Lorraine agreed and went even further, adding that he was spoiled rotten, lying down on the floor and throwing kicking and screaming tantrums by the time he was six. He insisted on Ethel May’s undivided attention, and if she so much as left him to answer the phone, his temperamental demonstrations “rocked the house like an earthquake,” Lorraine remembered. Understandably, years later, when he delivered the murderous “Heeeere’s Johnny!” line in The Shining, very little rehearsal was required.

The troubled child was “overweight since I was four years old,” Nicholson later said.¹⁶ He would emerge from his origins in a houseful of women with a cynical philosophy about relations between the sexes: “[Women] hate us, we hate them; they’re stronger, they’re smarter; and, most important, they don’t play fair.”¹⁷ Where such ideas came from, he perhaps unwittingly indicated in a 2003 press conference for About Schmidt, in which he described a melancholy preschool experience with Ethel May and Lorraine. “I’m one of the kids who actually got coal for Christmas one year,” he said. “I had sawed the leg off the dining room table and then refused to cop. They went all the way down the line with me. I opened the package and there it was—coal.” He cried so hard the women finally relented and gave him his real presents—a sled and a baseball bat. “I had my way in the end,” he said.¹⁸

Early passions included the movies (he was a fan from the time he caught Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way in 1945); sports (football and baseball; John J. took him across the river to see Mel Ott hit a homer); and comic books. “Batman was my favorite,” he said, and added, “The Joker was my favorite character.” After playing the Joker in 1989’s Batman, he remarked, “There are certain parts people say you’re born to play. The Joker would be one of them for me.”

Significantly, the Joker was a dark, malevolent figure, and in Nicholson’s youth, the sense of something sinister was never far from his consciousness, the feeling that something was wrong with him—an ineradicable fatal flaw he could not escape. At six, he visited June and her husband, Murray, in Michigan, where the mother and son’s resemblance did not go unnoticed. Jack decided he wanted to stay, and Murray’s sister Nancy Hawley Wilsea was present the day he wouldn’t let go of June, screaming, “Don’t let her fool you. She’s really my mother. . . . Please, I want to stay.”¹⁹ Nicholson later denied that he’d...