The Outsider

He thought of himself as a dark specter beyond the bathers. Most of the lifeguards at this particular New Jersey beach had opted for the image of Bronze Protector, but Jack Nicholson was different. He was a boat guard, and he enjoyed rowing out beyond the breakers. His job was to see that no swimmer strayed too far or got in too deep. It was the mid-Fifties, and Jack was the sort of older teenager who identified with Holden Caulfield, that sad, neurotic hero of J.D. Salinger's novel whose only dream was to stand in a field of rye where children were playing and to catch them before they fell off the cliff.

Jack stood as he rowed, and he was good with the boat. He wore a black lifeguard jacket, a World War II fatigue hat and mirror shades. His nose and lips were white with sunscreening zinc. He worked hard at the symbology of separateness.

The day that Jack Nicholson made the local papers for the first time was a bad one at the beach. There was a hurricane far out in the Atlantic, and it was kicking up heavy waves. The surf was too high for boats, and the guards were keeping swimmers in close. There was a jetty to the south and a separate beach below. That beach had its own crew of lifeguards, and it was there that eleven bathers were somehow carried out to sea by a vicious rip current.

Jack sprinted down to the beach, ready to help. There was no way to row the boats out through all that windwhipped surf. The strongest swimmer among the guards had strapped himself into a harness attached to a long rope. He would plunge out through the surf, grab as many of the endangered swimmers as possible, and the other guards would pull him back in. But there were too many drowning people out there, and one guard couldn't hope to save them all. A lot of them were going to die.

Nicholson ran back to his own beach, where the surf was not quite as high. Although the other guards doubted it could be done, Jack thought he might be able to muscle a boat out. He pulled through five-foot-high waves, waves so steep that sometimes it seemed as if the boat were moving in a vertical plane. Exhausted, he pulled out beyond the breakers, into the chop and swell, and made his way around the jetty, finally picking up the last five swimmers.

Everyone on both beaches was watching, and a news photographer got a nice shot of the boat topping the crest of a huge wave, bow pointing into the sky. That photo made the paper.

"You can't really see my face," Nicholson told me, "but the caption said I had risked hurricane surf to rescue five. Something like that. What they didn't mention is that as soon as I beached the boat, I puked my guts out in front of about 40,000 people."