Jack Nicholson: Knocking Round the Nest

So he went home alone, to an empty house, and brooded about what he was learning. The gray and gawky young man who loved bombs had constructed, of discarded electronics parts, a cigar box electroshock machine. One morning before dawn he had strolled through is ward, shocking his fellow patients into a sudden, startled wakefulness. It seemed perfectly obvious to Nicholson that a man capable of building such a machine would also be capable of building one of his beloved bombs. This young man was slated for release very soon; some kind of state law. Nicholson, despite himself, didn't think the young man was ready; he imagined him back within a month, likely leaving destruction and possibly death behind.

The truly mad and violent ones they ought to keep locked up forever, Nicholson found himself thinking. He did not much admire himself for these thoughts and the first level of depression settled in like a bitter winter fog. Wasn't he the man who made his fortune playing alienated losers? Shouldn't his most natural sympathy lie with the patients? Nicholson is deeply concerned with justice: He will tell you that Charlie Manson was railroaded and that the total evidence against him was one fingerprint and the testimony of someone involved who got total immunity. He will also tell you that he slept with a hammer under his pillow for weeks after the Tate-LaBianca slayings - that he would be bullshitting himself to pretend he didn't fear that kind of murderous irrationality.

Nicholson worried about what he identified as a personal twinge of self-righteous injustice. If you could deny due process to the gray and gawky man who saw bombs instead of hcickens, or possibly to Charlie Manson, wasn't it possible that you could be the kind of man who would one day find himself in some howling lynch mob?

The first depression had to do with fundamental values and induced a kind of migraine circular reasoning. The second depression was philosophical, emotional. It had to do with the machine and the long electric cord.

I want it understood at the outset that I consider myself a sane man. What happened in Italy over a dozen years ago was a fluke which had more to do with language barrier problems and bad chianti than with serious mental instability. Still, the incident has left me chary of institutions and, on that bleak February morning when I first visited the Cuckoo's Nest set, I noticed a certain coiling of the intestines as we approached the hospital.

There was an early morning fog swirling about the three-story solid brick structure; all the surrounding trees were gnarled and hare. Thunderheads were massing for another storm. The place would have looked just fine with lightning bolts churning madly on all sides and with huge bats spewing out of nonexistent turrets.

Driving the car "as a jovial publicity man who described how coproducers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz held a New Year's Eve party for the inmates when these supposedly hard-eyed movie folks could have been out swiving starlets, or whatever it is they do on their off time. I found myself chain-smoking and recounting the scenario of a science fiction film I had seen years ago:

"It was about these spacemen who came upon a strange planet and in the scene I'm thinking of, they are scouting a cave and come upon a spiral pattern of ropes. A guy goes up to see what the ropes are made of ? goes right up and touches them. Boom. A giant spider drops out of nowhere and eats the guy. Cut to the next scene which is a real classic. The brilliant scientist, captain of the crew, is sitting on a rock with his head in his hands. He blames himself for what happened and he keeps saying, 'I should have known as soon as I saw the web.'"

"So?" A security guard for the film crew motioned the car in and we walked through a gate in the century fence with the concertina wire on top. So nothing, really. The concept is a snaky little joke about paranoia, about how this is all a plot, a bit of devilment if you will, designed to get me safely wedged into the puzzle factory without an unseemly tussle. And my thought was: "I should have known as soon as I saw the hospital."

The publicity man laughed and said that that was what he thought. In fact, he bet that half the cast thought the same thing. Some of them had never acted in a film before. Will Sampson, who plays Chief Broom, was working for Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington, way the hell out, and gone up on the mountain when a couple of guys on horses tracked him down and told him they wanted him to be in a movie. Imagine how he felt, pulling into the hospital for the first time.

The publicist allowed that a running joke had started among cast and crew that they weren't going to be released after the filming had been completed. I lit another cigarette and rehearsed some lines from still another film, this one a hoary gothic in which a young woman is driven to the brink of gibbering insanity by the machinations of rapacious relatives out after her inheritance. In the last scenes, a horse and carriage are taking her to a remote asylum in the company of an evil aunt. When they get there, the no-longer-naive young woman speaks first to the man at the door. 'This is she," she says, pointing to the evil aunt, "but since she becomes violent, we have let her believe that I am the one."