Nicholson is aware of the fortuitous timing that brought the roles he created into sync with the generational realities

(ARHIVE)
In order to generate these particular noises, Nicholson has assumed a posture that suggests his post-shock-treatment mode in ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” His arms hang limply at his sides, his shoulders droop into a posture that verges on the simian. His jaw is slack, his face drained of expression. To his left, out beyond the glass wall of his living room, the canyons of Hollywood are beginning to redden with the sunset. To his right, on the opposite wall, is one of his Picassos – an interesting early Cubist work that looks to be a painting of a painting of a woman. And from Nicholson’s middle comes pouring out, in deep, resonant, utterly uninflected, cello tones:

THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE . . . . BLIIIIIIIINNNNNNDDDDD . . . . MIIIIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCE . . . .

He is not, of course, attempting to impress his visitor with heretofore hidden talents as a crooner. What is Jack Nicholson up to? He says he’s demonstrating a Method acting exercise he learned from his second acting teacher, Martin Landau.

”I sang ‘Three Blind Mice’ for two years in his class,” Nicholson says, grinning with a mixture of pride and rue. ”It’s an exercise Lee Strasberg invented, the song exercise, and the purpose of it is what’s known as ‘diagnosis of the instrument.’ The job is to stand relaxed in this position, look directly at the class, and sing a song, preferably a nursery rhyme, in such a way that you make each syllable have a beginning and an end. You just do the syllable, not the tempo of the song or the meaning. And you elongate. The idea is to get the physical body, the emotional body and the mental body into neutral. Then you should be able to hear through the voice what’s actually happening inside. I’m sure you heard some changes in my voice -it’s a way of locating the tensions, the tiny tensions, the problems with your instrument that get in the way of getting into a role.” He reaches back and grabs his buttocks with both hands. ”One of the main ones everyone’s got is . . .” he grins, ”heinie tension. It’s an indescribable kind of thing, this exercise, but I guarantee I can tell you what kind of actor you are from hearing you do ‘Three Blind Mice.’ ”

In fact, it is possible to say something about what kind of actor Jack Nicholson is from hearing him perform ”Three Blind Mice.” He’s one of those fanatic believers in the method and mystique of the craft of acting, an actor who, even during the dozen lean years in Hollywood when he was doing only B pictures, D pictures, biker epics and schlock, would nonetheless devotedly go from acting teacher to acting teacher seeking truth the way others of his generation would go from guru to guru or shrink to shrink.

THE TENDENCY OF THOSE who watch Nicholson on screen and read about his colorful private life is to see him as an ”instinctual” actor, as opposed to, say, Dustin Hoffman, Nicholson’s chief rival for recognition as premier film actor of his era, who is known for his methodical, cerebral approach to a role. While Hoffman has become known as some kind of demon for actorish preparation, Nicholson is merely seen as some kind of demon.

He jokes about it. ”I’ve been studying to play the Devil,” he says of his next project, the role of John Updike’s Mephistophelean rogue, Darryl Van Horne, in ”The Witches of Eastwick.” ”Of course, a lot of people think I’ve been preparing for it all my life,” he adds with a suitably demonic grin.

Still, the view of Nicholson as an instinctual, easy rider of an actor relying on some high-octane-powered ”natural gift” misses an essential element of his creative identity: the side of him that would sedulously sing ”Three Blind Mice” for two years, that is constantly ”diagnosing his instrument.” This is a man who still analyzes his roles in terms of Strasbergian ”polarities,” who, during those lean years, would sit around in Los Angeles coffee houses for hours discussing Stanislavskian metaphysics with similarly inclined cinema theorists, who would use their meager earnings from biker epics like ”Hell’s Angels on Wheels” to support themselves while making austere Beckett-like nouvelle vague ”westerns.”

If Nicholson’s film persona tends toward world-weary disillusion and cool cynicism, Nicholson himself is still the kind of excitable acting-theory enthusiast who is capable of great earnestness on the subject; capable, for instance, of suddenly pushing back his dining-room chair and leaping up from the table to paraphrase Camus on the actor’s life:

”The actor is Camus’s ideal existential hero, because if life is absurd, and the idea is to live a more vital life, therefore the man who lives more lives is in a better position than the guy who lives just one.”

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He’s also capable of confiding to an interviewer that he believes ”the actor is the litterateur of his era,” meaning that the actor is capable of ”writing,” even shaping the inner history of his age through his choice of roles and how he plays them.

And a case could be made that Nicholson has inscribed an idiosyncratic character on the face of our age, one that has reflected and shaped the contemporary personality in the way that only a very few film actors have done. ”There is James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda,” says director Mike Nichols, who worked with Nicholson on ”Carnal Knowledge” as well as ”Heartburn,” which opens July 25. ”After that, who is there but Jack Nicholson?”

In the same way that men of earlier generations imitated Cagney and Bogart, incorporated their mannerisms and attitudes into a version of the American male personality, few men between the ages of 25 and 50 in America today have not delivered a line with some imitation or caricature of Nicholson’s trademark, mocking, deadpan drawl. You can also see his influence in William Hurt’s disenchanted character in ”The Big Chill” and, more remotely, in David Letterman’s acid, deadpan demeanor.

In part, it’s been a matter of timing, a confluence of the content of Nicholson’s roles with the concerns of the baby-boom generation, growing out of adolescence into adulthood. While Marlon Brando’s and James Dean’s naive rebelliousness could be models for teens in the silent generation of the 50’s, Nicholson’s characters embody the modulations those adolescent attitudes must undergo to survive the disillusion of adulthood.

Nicholson is aware of the fortuitous timing that brought the roles he created into sync with the generational realities.

”Right about the time of ‘Easy Rider,’ ” he says, ”I had gotten myself locked right into the sociological curl – like a surf rider – and I found I could stay right in there, ride this, and cut back against it.”

Staying ahead of the sociological curl means the search for projects in which he can play what he likes to call ”cusp characters.”

”I like to play people that haven’t existed yet, a future something, a cusp character. I have that creative yearning. Much in the way Chagall flies figures into the air – once it becomes part of the conventional wisdom, it doesn’t seem particularly adventurous or weird or wild. . . .”

And it can be argued that the particular cusp Nicholson’s characters are most frequently found on is that painful one between illusion and disillusion. His most memorable characters are fallen angels of one sort or another, whether in the guise of a grounded astronaut (”Terms of Endearment”), disenchanted Don Juans (”Carnal Knowledge” and ”Heartburn”), self-destructive artists (”Five Easy Pieces” and ”Reds”), defeated rebels (”Cuckoo’s Nest” and ”Easy Rider”), disaffected writers (”The Shining” and ”The Passenger”), or various embittered romantics. Of the latter, his role as J.J. Gittes, the disillusioned private investigator in ”Chinatown,” may have the most lasting resonance. The shattering discovery Gittes makes at the end of the movie – that beneath the deepest levels of political corruption is something even darker and more frightening, the ineradicable corruption of the human heart – gave that 1974 film the added dimension of being a kind of farewell to arms for 60’s idealism.

STANLEY KUBRICK, the director, has said of Nicholson that he brings to a role the one unactable quality – great intelligence. And it was fascinating in the course of visiting Nicholson and discussing his work to see that intelligence at work preparing for one of his greatest challenges, playing the ultimate fallen angel, the Devil himself.

”Take a look at this,” he demands, shoving a huge, musty tome into my hands. He takes it back and opens it up.

”It’s Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ and these are the original Gustave Dore illustrations. Look at that,” he says pointing to an etching of a bat-winged demon tormenting a soul in some lower circle of hell.

He’s been immersing himself in the subject: ”Aquinas and all those people discuss this, but they never arrive at a definition of evil, which I found interesting. The only thing they could come up with was that you couldn’t define the principle because it was always a paradox of opposites.”

He has fairly high ambitions for his performance. ”When I played ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ I knew that women weren’t going to like me for a while. That was a given. I’m going to play the Devil, and I don’t want to play him safely. I want people to think Jack Nicholson is the Devil. I want themto be worried.”

A bit later he takes up the ”Witches” screenplay and opens to a passage of dialogue to explain how he breaks down a script. The page of dialogue he opens to is a seduction scene between his character, Darryl Van Horne, and one of the witches, to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Nicholson has affixed numbers from 1 to 4 along the margins of this particular page, and he explains that each number represents a single ”beat,” or moment of response, in a scene. The first thing he does with a script is divide it up into ”beats and measures” – a measure being a sequence of beats – to get at the fundamental rhythm of the part before playing it in rehearsals.

Beyond breaking down the script, what Nicholson is also doing at this point is looking for some ”secret” to the role, some inner emotional dynamic, a prop, a piece of business, that captures for him the essence of his character’s nature.

”I have secrets in all these parts,” he says. In fact, he’s particularly pleased with himself today because he thinks he has made a breakthrough to the secret in ”Witches.”

”I’ve come up with a dynamic I think is devilishly clever,” he says, a dynamic that has to do with his relation to his three co-stars, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon. ”I’m going to impregnate this artificial world we’re creating with that dynamic.”

Asked to get more specific, he starts to, then has a change of heart and demands that this secret not be divulged. ”I’ll feel revealed. . . . That’s a very primary thing I was taught – you never give these secrets out, certainly not before you’ve done the thing, because you’ll feel exposed, the mystery. . . .”

Well then, he is asked, what about revealing some ”secrets” of previous roles? Surprisingly, he agrees.

”All right. The secret to ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ – and it’s not in the book – my secret design for it was that this guy’s a scamp who knows he’s irresistible to women and in reality he expects Nurse Ratched to be seduced by him. This is his tragic flaw. This is why he ultimately fails. I discussed this with Louise,” he says, referring to his co-star, Louise Fletcher. ”I discussed this only with her. That’s what I felt was actually happening with that character – it was one long, unsuccessful seduction which the guy was so pathologically sure of.”

It’s a particularly interesting ”secret” because what seems distinctive about Nicholson’s Oscar-winning performance in ”Cuckoo’s Nest,” what distinguishes his Randle Patrick McMurphy from Ken Kesey’s hero, is the suggestion of a dark side, a pathological impulse behind the drive for pure liberation, a self-absorbed quality that ignores the destruction that ”liberation” can bring upon more fragile souls.

”One of the secrets of ‘Chinatown,’ ” says Nicholson, continuing, ”is that there was a kind of triangular offstage situation. I had just started going with John Huston’s daughter, which the world might not have been aware of, but it could actually feed the moment-to-moment reality of my scene with him.”

”Are you sleeping with her?” intones Nicholson, in an unmistakable imitation of John Huston’s line from that scene. Nicholson shifts again: ”Throw me another picture.” ”What about your Eugene O’Neill in ‘Reds’?”

”One of the keys that unlocked O’Neill for me was the fact that he couldn’t write with anything but a pencil. He couldn’t adapt to the typewriter. He couldn’t dictate.” And so, Nicholson says, when O’Neill came down with a degenerative disease, ”he literally couldn’t hold the pencil. I mean, there’s something very sensual about lead coming off the pencil. It’s one of the purest feelings.”

Impure feelings entered into his O’Neill characterization also. ”I’ll tell you another secret from ‘Reds.’ That poem I gave to Miss Keaton. I wrote a real poem that was extremely revealing.” The scene is a climactic one between Nicholson and Diane Keaton, who plays Louise Bryant. He gives her a poem in an envelope only to hear that she’s abandoning him for John Reed, played by Warren Beatty. Nicholson’s poem was ”in that envelope when I gave it to her on camera. It’s the kind of thing no one else sees, but you know it’s there. And believe me, I did not misplace that prop.

”Here’s another example. No one knows it, it didn’t matter to the character, but I wore the exact same glasses that my father wore for that part in ‘Easy Rider.’ It’s not necessarily meant for a result but for what it does for you.”

What it does for you: only a slight knowledge of Nicholson’s family background is required to guess at what seeing the world through his father’s glasses might do for him emotionally. The person he knew as his father was a bright, gentle man who pickled his early promise in alcohol, not unlike the good-natured but weak Southern lawyer, George Hanson, who comes to such a brutally disillusioning end in ”Easy Rider.” ”What about ‘Prizzi’s Honor’?” Nicholson is asked. ”Well, ‘Prizzi’ – what I recall to be the secret there is actually something more that you hope to get across by inference. It’s a kind of observation that I’ve made about the difference between a street mentality and a jail mentality. People talk about – ‘Oh, he’s a street person, he can get along. . . .’ But the difference between the street mentality and the jail mentality is that street mentality gets eaten alive in jail. And jail mentality – that covers like a blanket the mind of a killer. That slightly deeper level of reality. You know there’s no angels in there to save you. And if you’re in that head and someone else is not – well they’re like under a magnifying glass,” he says, holding out an imaginary specimen and regarding it with the dead, cold stare of his Charley Partanna character in ”Prizzi.”

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