They Used To Hang People For Having This Much Fun

Late one afternoon, on the hairiest run the Herd had yet negotiated, Bradley caught an edge, took a header and went bouncing ass over teakettle halfway down the mountain. His parka was ripped, he had a hard time breathing, and he lay there in pain for several minutes. When he finally did get up, he thought it wise to have me check him over for broken bones.

A spill like that can shatter your confidence, and Jack, mindful of this, set a slower pace and led us down the easier slopes. When we got to the lift, Bradley said he wanted to go back to the slope on which he'd crashed and burned. "Gotta get right back on the horse that threw you," he said. Now this is exactly what you might expect from a man like Bradley. In one of the most famous filmed reports to come out of the Vietnam War, Bradley was wounded, on camera. What is less well known is that, immediately upon being released from the hospital, Bradley made his way back to the front lines.

"We don't have to take the same run," Jack said, reasonably enough.

"Got to," Bradley replied.

A look of complete understanding passed between the two men. Nicholson broke into his homicidal grin. Bradley had the killer instinct.

Sex and Violence, Guts and Glory

Riding up the lift, Nicholson told me he was taking the year off. "The last three years, out of, what, 156 working weeks, I worked 162. I was editing one project and acting in another. Anyway, I was talking to Richard Burton, and I asked how much time he'd taken off in his career. He asked, 'Off off?' An actor knows what it means to take off. I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Maybe six 'weeks.' In thirty years he's taken six weeks to himself. So I decided to take off, to watch the seasons change. You become an actor because it isn't a nine-to-five job. You expect an unscheduled existence. Then you become bankable, and you have all these projects spread out in front of you, and you know exactly what you'll be doing four years from now. Even the president of the United States doesn't know what he'll be doing four years from now. I want to get out of that cycle for a while. Let the reservoir fill up."

One of the projects that came out of 162 straight weeks of work is a film version of James M. Cain's 1934 novel of violence and sexual obsession, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain was a best-selling author in his day, though he is not highly regarded today. It turned out that Nicholson and I both shared an admiration for Cain's writing. "What's interesting about Cain," Jack said, "is that he came out of the same hard-boiled school as Chandler and Hammett. But they wrote about detectives, good guys, and Cain wrote about criminals.

"You know, Cain started as a journalist, and there is a lot of detail in his writing. He's very cinematic. We essentially did the book. We added very little. [Screenwriter] David Mamet came in right on the money, first draft. The Lana Turner-John Garfield version [1946] was a classic, but at the time, they couldn't really do the book. Not all the scenes. I mean, you know what it is: it's a folie a deux of lust and murder with a strong sadomasochistic element.

"What I like about Cain is that his women are very strong. Villainesses. You think of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis in those roles, That's why Jessie [Jessica Lange] is going to blow everyone out of the water.

"The characters are very sexual, and this is a sexual story. The movie isn't about relationships, it's about sex, and the core of it is the suddenness of the sex, of the desire between these two characters."

"A lot of naked people?" I asked.

"Hardly any." We talked for a while about sexuality in film. "The sex in the movie arises out of the acting, sexual acting," Jack said. "A writer friend of mine saw a screening and he said, 'Shit, I haven't had a hard-on in a movie since I was eighteen.'"

"Makes me sorta want to see it," I said. Nicholson said he would arrange a screening in Los Angeles. He had chartered a jet to fly back there for a few days because the Lakers had eight home games coming up, and one of the joys of his life is watching his team stomp all over everyone else.

I struggled to keep up with the Thundering Herd on the run, and on the next lift ride, Jack brought up a subject that seemed to be haunting him.

"People seem to think The Shining stiffed, but I think it's Warners' tenth-biggest grosser in history. Critically, it's been ignored."

I told Jack about a speeding ticket I'd gotten in Wyoming, and how the highway patrolman had talked to me for half an hour when he heard I was on my way to interview Nicholson. The fellow had loved The Shining and felt obligated to tell me the entire story. There's nothing more boring than listening to someone recount the plot of a movie, especially when a forty-dollar ticket depends on the quality of your attention, but as I listened, the patrolman worked his way up to the climactic scene in which Jack, as the deranged husband with ax in hand, chases his wife through an abandoned, snowbound hotel in the Rockies. Jack is pounding his way through the door in a homicidal frenzy while his wife cowers in the next room. "He hacks this hole big enough for his face," the patrolman said, "and he does this expression" - out there on the windswept high plains of Wyoming, the patrolman pressed his face close to mine and let his features fall in the rubbery, slack contortions of madness - "and he says, 'Heeeeeeres Johnny.''' The patrolman laughed out loud and repeated the line again, like the punch line of a good joke.

"Yeah," Jack said, "people loved that line. I remember Stanley [Kubrick] wanted a funny line there. It was the most horrific scene in the movie, and he wanted to break it up. So I came up with that line. It holds a lot of the essence of what we were trying to do.

"I mean, we had the Stephen King novel, and we wanted to get to the heart of that. But I remember, I kept thinking of those old EC comics. Do you remember those?"