Jack Nicholson: A Singular Guy

"Oh, you know how it is," he rasps. "At the last minute, those old boys' bladders --"

Then he lights up a cigarette and leans back, never bothering to finish the sentence he's started, which is often the way it is with him, completion indicated only by the skyward hoisting of his thick pyramidal eyebrows. At other times, though, he gathers in a full breath of air, starts talking, usually in fat, orotund paragraphs, and never stops. For instance: On the topic of his latest movie, The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese and co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, in which he gives another Oscar-worthy performance, as Boston-Irish mob boss Frank Costello, probably the worst, most criminal criminal ever -- in one gruesome scene, he steps out from behind closed doors covered in blood, well up past his elbows -- and over which he, the loosest and most experimental of actors, was expected to lock horns with Scorsese, the tightest and most controlled of directors.

"My reaction to 9/11 was 'This is just a catastrophe, so I'm just going to do comedy for a while,' " Jack says, sallying forth through a plume of cigarette smoke."I'd done three in a row [About Schmidt, Anger Management and Something's Gotta Give] and thought, 'Jeez, I really would like to play a bad guy.' And the guy I play here, he's bad. Nothing is sacred, not the church, not children, nothing. I knew Leo from a while back and, in fact, he's the one who brought me in. Matt I knew too. I have very good feelings about both of them. At first I tiptoed in, but Marty was very inspiring in terms of how free he was with me. I thought it'd be more frightening if my character had a sexual component, but all we put in the notes was 'Costello has wild sex.' So I called Marty up and said, 'Look, I just thought of what would be an interesting scene of Costello having wild sex.' And in this scene with two girls, one of the girls is wearing a strap-on, and he just hurls this handful of cocaine and says, 'Don't move until you're numb.' And then later on, in a porno theater, as a sick joke, the guy turns to Matt Damon's character with that same strap-on dildo sticking out of his pants. This was my idea and improvisational, and Marty went for it. But that's what these parts are for me: spicing the movie."

While he's talking, I'm looking around. It's serene in here, simple, no sleazy leather couches, nothing like that, a guitar in a corner, with an intimate swimming pool glimmering in the twilight out back, and pretty soon I can hear Nicholson gliding by all the hottest recent topics -- Tom Cruise's firing by Paramount, Mel Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic rant, Lindsay Lohan's bad behavior on set -- breezily suggesting that he doesn't take much interest, really, in any of it. And all the time I'm thinking, where could one possibly take Jack Nicholson, where could one possibly go, where he hasn't been before, lots of times, comfortably?

Of his early actor pals -- warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Peter Fonda, Art Garfunkel, Bruce Dern -- Jack is the only one who remains crucial to the current moviemaking scene. He's still friends with most of them and they do talk, but more infrequently these days. And of those contemporaries who might be considered acting equals, like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, he just seems to loom larger. He's both a movie star and a cultural icon and in so being has single-handedly managed to render meaningless such distinctions as Old Hollywood vs. New Hollywood. DiCaprio and Damon are great big movie stars in their own right, but as The Departed makes clear, Nicholson is bigger than either, and better. Pretty much, he's all things at all times, a sui generis lunatic force of nature who in his personal life is forgiven for all of his apparent sins -- his obsessive womanizing, his brutalizing of a car with a golf club, his evasions behind sunglasses -- even as they mount to the heavens above, because what else can you do with a guy like that?