Jack Nicholson: A Singular Guy

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.”

“You mean you got laid a lot just because it worked out that way?”

“Well, no. You know, I mean, I was very driven. I remember being at least mentally sexually excited about things from childhood, even sooner than eight, in the bath-tub. I mean, I had a large appetite.”

“As Kim Basinger once pointed out!” I say. (What she’d said was “[Jack’s] the most highly sexed individual I have ever met.”)

“Well,” says Jack then, taking a long, deep breath, “I’ve never talked about it that much. I talk about the generality of it. But in all honesty, I’m very tender in these areas. Let’s use that word.”

“Altoid?” I ask, offering one.

“Sure,” he says, and places it in his mouth.

And then for a few moments we let the day slip by, his ship of comfort seeming to rock just a little, in a little late breeze.

Lots of things are reverberating into the past around Jack Nicholson these days. For instance, the dildo-in-a-porno-theater scene he thought up for The Departed. The roots of it, you could argue, reach back twenty-five years, to 1981, when he was making The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Jessica Lange – a highly sexed-up piece that nonetheless features no nudity whatsoever. Jack, however, was dead set on making it “one of the naughtiest movies” and decided that the solution lay in showing an erection – “this kind of bulging railer” – through his 1940s pleated pants. To that end, he asked director Bob Rafelson to craft him a conventional prosthetic, but no one took him seriously, so when the day to shoot the scene arrived, he found himself empty-handed and irritated. Said Rafelson, “Well, jeez, if you’re so red-hot about this, go upstairs and see what you can do there.” And so Jack did, “whipping away,” he says, until he realized that some things were beyond even him.

And then there’s Marlon Brando, the only actor to ever outsize him as icon. How odd it is to think that for three decades two such figures shared the same driveway and lived in homes only a few stumble-through-the-woods minutes apart (with their pal Beatty also living nearby, several houses away, the trio forming a kind of unholy trinity that once led local cops to nickname Mulholland Drive “Bad Boy Drive”). Jack idolized Brando. He called him “the man on the hill” and was always delighted, or at least not horrified, when he found Brando’s underpants in his laundry. So when he died, in 2004, Jack bought his place, for $6.5 million. It’s in terrible, falling-apart condition. He plans to get rid of it completely and plant frangipani where it once stood.

“I rarely talked to him on the phone,” he says. “For the most part, he’d come wandering down. We had many, many discussions other than ‘Well, what are we going to do about the gate?’ and ‘Well, I hear my kids came down here.’ But we were good neighbors because we weren’t up each other’s ass all the time. I mean, what can you say? He’s one of the most powerful presences in our lifetime, just sitting there, the big fella. After he died, though, I couldn’t go up there for months or years. I just had this weird juju.” He shivers, dramatically, to show what he means. “Juju kinds of feelings.” Then he pauses and says, “For all thirty years, Marlon’s presence to me was this tree I see out the window in front of my toilet. I miss him.”