About Jack

When Humphrey Bogart was dying of cancer, when he was in a wheelchair and being ferried between the floors of his house in a dumbwaiter meant for dishes, he did something that Jack Nicholson admires the hell out of: he invited young actors to his place and told them some of the stuff he knew. Nicholson remembers reading about it in the Hollywood trade papers. Now he sometimes imagines doing it himself. What would he tell the pilgrims? "Well, it would depend on what they wanted to ask," he says. "It might be as simple as, 'Darling, stop using so much mousse on your hair.' Or, 'You have got to play a real son of a bitch now or they'll never let you do it'.'' Men, of course, would ask for advice about women, but Nicholson laughs at the idea. "This is the one thing my close friends never come to me for advice about. They think I'm too goofy about women. In love with love. Too easily injured. Idealistic. They think I'm not really as sharp there as I am in other areas. I do not agree with them, incidentally." In all likelihood, Nicholson would not be able to stop himself from talking about art, either, or about Churchill and Napoleon. And he would certainly make a few Delphic pronouncements that next to nobody would understand, such as: "You can get many kinds of balance toward any seemingly grinding postulate of life." Nicholson's brain is an aviary and, God bless him, there are some really strange birds flying around in there.

At 65, he lives where he has lived since God was a child: on a ridge on Mulholland Drive, high above Los Angeles. Nicholson owns three modest, welcoming houses nestled so closely together that when he gets hungry or wants a more comfortable chair, he says, "Let's move one house over." He has a small pool. A putting green. And Marlon Brando for a next-door neighbor. "I don't see him much lately. I don't know what he's up to. I hear him. He plays classical music late at night, and if I'm out walking around in the moonlight, I hear it up there. He's the perfect neighbor."

On a Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving, the actor sits down in the billiard room in his middle house for what will stretch into a four-hour interview. The phone rings regularly and a series of intercom chimes go off, but he ignores them--later he will explain that they were "escape valves," in case he wanted to cut the conversation off. He happily fields all manner of questions about his life and his dark new comedy "About Schmidt," which will almost certainly snag him his dozenth Oscar nomination. In person, Nicholson is gracious and self-effacing. ("He punctures any bubble you try to put him in," says Alexander Payne, who directed "About Schmidt.") He smokes steadily, but scoops and re-routes the secondhand smoke away from his visitor. He seeks to charm--the impulse seems hard-wired--but he does not do "Jack." "There are a lot of crazy nitwit things that I can't do any longer," he says, an hour into the interview. "I can't work on a movie for 12, 14 hours a day, then go out and burn the streets down to the ground all night and get wild and, you know, tear through other people's lives. I don't have the energy for it." Later, he picks this thread up again: "I'm a different guy here in my 60s. I don't have the same libido. It used to be that I didn't think I could go to sleep if I wasn't involved in some kind of amorous contact or another. Well, I spend a lot of time sleeping alone these days. That's different. And very liberating. It wasn't until the last few years that I became completely comfortable with it. You know, my fear is that I'm beginning to prefer it."

If Nicholson's life seems autumnal, his work remains audacious, though not in quite the way you might expect. In "About Schmidt," he plays Warren Schmidt, a bland, tubby Nebraska actuary who retires one day and who, to forestall the flooding realization that his life has been a joke and a waste, hits the road in an RV and attempts to stop his daughter (Hope Davis) from marrying a water-bed salesman (Dermot Mulroney). Even more than in the grave 2001 thriller "The Pledge," Nicholson jettisons all his trademark bells and whistles, and delivers a magnificently controlled ode to the ordinary that's somehow both merciless and humane (review).

Not that there's anything wrong with his trademark bells and whistles, by the way. He became famous as the pothead lawyer in 1969's "Easy Rider," and one of the astonishing things about his trajectory is how long he's managed to be both a subversive and an institution. Possibly you remember him lacerating a waitress who refused to bring him toast ("Five Easy Pieces"). Getting his nose sliced ("Chinatown"). Descending into mortal combat with Nurse Ratched ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). Making a meal out of Jessica Lange atop a kitchen table ("The Postman Always Rings Twice"). Thundering "Heeere's Johnny!" ("The Shining") and "You can't handle the truth!" ("A Few Good Men"). Cavorting manically in lipstick and whiteface ("Batman"). Sticking his hand down Shirley MacLaine's blouse ("Terms of Endearment"). Dropping a dog down a garbage chute ("As Good As It Gets"). What Nicholson has achieved over the decades is almost too vast and various to get your head around: trying to explain what's cool about his career is like trying to explain what's cool about the ocean.

John Joseph Nicholson grew up carefree on the New Jersey shore ("I would be the leader of high jinks, as a rule"), and was raised by three women. His mother was unwed, so--this gets tricky--his grandmother pretended to be his mother, and his mother and his aunt pretended to be his sisters. Nicholson didn't learn the truth until he was in his 30s. The news didn't faze him particularly, and it didn't change the overarching lesson he'd taken away from childhood: it's good to be around a lot of women. In 1962, while still an aspiring actor and screenwriter, Nicholson married the actress Sandra Knight. Did he believe the union would last? "I got married on Friday because on Wednesday Sandra said she wanted to. And I didn't have any reason not to. I mean, I just said, 'Yeah, that's good. I like that.' While the ceremony was going on, that part of me that, at night, half believes in God was looking upward and saying, 'Now, remember, I'm very young, and this doesn't mean I'm not ever going to touch another woman.' It's a humiliating thing and a horrible thing, allegedly, to admit to, but I remember this very clearly." Years later, Kim Basinger would refer to Nicholson as "the most highly sexed individual I have ever met." (And she dated Prince!) Asked what statistics she might have been basing that on, Nicholson purses his lips to suppress a smile: "Well, you know, I have had a very expressive life in that area."