Jack Nicholson: A Singular Guy

It can hardly be said often enough: In terms of cool and its variants, Nicholson, inside the movies and out, has come to signify almost everything worth signifying. He's the mythic rebel in Easy Rider (1969), his breakthrough performance, at the late-start age of thirty-two, after eleven years of trying; the laconic drifter dropout in Five Easy Pieces (1970); the self-hating misogynist in Carnal Knowledge (1971); the dogged too-nosy seen-it-all detective in Chinatown (1974); the anti-establishment loon in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), all the way up to the over-the-hill womanizer with the flabby rear end in Something's Gotta Give (2003), with enlightening stops along the way to define the true nature of writer's block in The Shining (1980), the murderous nature of lust in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and the effects of aging on a party-hearty ex-astronaut in Terms of Endearment (1983). Plus, born in 1937, abandoned by his father, raised in rinky-dink coastal New Jersey, he didn't know until his late thirties that the woman he thought was his sister was actually his mother and that his putative parents were, in fact, his grandparents -- a set of mind-boggling personal circumstances that also seems to have broadly described many of the social and sexual perplexities of the day. In a sense, he has always operated as an advance man for behavior of the most outrageous, unconventional sort. Could Russell Crowe or Colin Farrell have behaved quite so libidinously in public without Jack, the Great Seducer, having paved the way? Of course, Jack's great pal Warren Beatty was himself no slouch in this regard. But the curious thing is, over time, young and old, all of them got married, or had kids and settled down, or otherwise became respectable, sort of, all but Jack. "More good times is both my ethics and my morals," he likes to say. In other words, today is the same as it ever was, and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

If it happens that you need a condom," I ask him one evening, "do you buy it yourself?"

"I've never bought one," he growls. "But if I needed a porn picture or something like that, my staff normally does that kind of shopping for me."

"Have you ever even used a condom?" "Sure."

"Successfully?"

"It's always a problem. You can't feel your wanker." He sighs, takes a sip of iced coffee and goes on, "Look, I have Reichian therapy in my background. Early on, I had problems with that most common kind of impotence, being quick, suddenness, which is actually a kind of jitter from holding on too hard and not feeling things, which is part of what we're talking about. It's all about actually feeling it, not in some locality but in the larger sense of the experience passing through your being. In my lifetime, from World War II on, the world got freer, just by nature. And then came along, now we have the Death Fuck. And when this idea became popular, the sex-negative, pleasure-denial momentum of the world, I mean, it just got to the point where 'I can't do this anymore.' It was no longer the full catastrophe. So I went to my doctor and got a very specific scientific analysis, which boiled down to, unless you're a shooter or something else, you're as likely to have this problem as to have a safe fall on your head. I mean, look at it logically. If you understand numbers at all, just by geometrical progression, if it were all true, everybody's dead by now."

He continues like this, leaving me frantically trying to parse his words. It's difficult, because if he's not clipping his sentences short, he's divesting his pronouns of most of their antecedents and doing away with transitional connectors altogether. What I think he's saying, though, is that when the AIDS crisis started, he tried wearing condoms, but they prevented him from feeling the "full catastrophe" of the sex act, so he went to a doctor, who told him not to worry about getting AIDS, so he no longer wears condoms. Anyway, at times like this, with him soaring off into the ether, I have noticed that the easiest way to bring him back down to earth is to sink him into the gutter. "What's your favorite position?"

"Huh? Oh. Ha, ha, ha. Heh, heh, heh. Two arms and legs," he says, obliquely.

And at times like these, it's best to raise your voice and start yelling something like, "Oh, come on, Jack! God! It's missionary! It's every guy's favorite position!"

"Yeah. Yes," he says. "But as you get older it's inverted missionary, because of other reasons. Look, I'm less rambunctious these days, not because of a change in character, but your physiognomy changes. I am not as obsessed. I am not as, you know --. I'm still very --. I have the same libido. But whether you want it to or not, that part of your life changes a bit. Throughout most of my life, though, I liked doing what I like to do. And I've been fortunate because that's just the way it worked out for me."