“This is the way people work, I suppose, out of Europe?” he asked.
“Yes, yes.”
No, actually. It was the way Polanski worked, the way his whole crew would work, doing in prep what would be impossible in life, exercising absolute jurisdiction over chance.
And yet, days and actors later, there remained one small part the director wouldn’t—or, so he claimed, couldn’t—cast.
* * *
The pain down Evans’s back, his leg, was impossible to locate in time. Had it always been there, waiting? It had certainly increased since The Godfather, in the days and nights since he lifted Paramount from the grave. Now it never left him, and there was nothing he could do about it save bed rest and choice feel-good injections from Dr. Lee Siegel, until 1971, medical director at 20th Century Fox who brought his syringes to Woodland, or occasionally to Canon Drive, though Evans, as Chinatown neared production in the fall of 1973, was not coming into the office much anymore. It was the pain, he said, that kept him home, on gurneys carried in and out of cutting rooms. It was the pain, he assured Bluhdorn, after Frank Yablans reported Evans’s absence to the boss (“Doesn’t Evans had a legitimate doctor somewhere in his Rolodex?” Yablans asked). It was the pain that kept him up late, up early. That kept him from fucking.
“Take a sniff,” one woman said to him in bed, unscrewing the top of a gold cylinder she wore around her neck.
“Is it what I think it is?”
“It’ll help.”
With Ali and their son, Joshua, no longer around, there was no one he needed to hide it from.
And why hide it when no one else was? Hollywood hadn’t hidden the marijuana, why hide the coke? Rather, why not show it off just a little—because coke was expensive, a status symbol, a sign of box office ability? And when it gave energy, the energy to create, to fuck, why not, as Evans’s bedfellow had, recommend it to one’s friends, or as Nicholson had, give it away in little vials for Christmas? Why not, when nothing else worked, and it drained the past away?
“It’s a miracle,” Evans told Bart. “You can’t believe how much better my back is.”
“Bob, you don’t take cocaine for your back. You take it for energy.”
“You take cocaine?”
“I love cocaine. What I can’t believe is that you love it.”
Evans, Bart knew, ordinarily had no interest in drugs. Even pot confounded him. When Hal Ashby, an inveterate marijuana smoker, slowed production of Harold and Maude to a stoner’s pace, Evans threw up his hands and dispatched Bart to jump-start the director. “Evans was too interested in work and getting laid to be distracted by drugs,” Bart said. “And I loved him for that. I used coke from time to time, but for Bob it was innocent.”
On October 7, 1973, Jack Nicholson wrapped The Passenger, a strenuous production under Michelangelo Antonioni—to Nicholson’s mind, a most uncollaborative director—and flew home from Spain physically and emotionally depleted and glad to be back.
Nicholson loved Los Angeles. He even loved the earthquakes. “People comically impugn the L.A. sensibility,” he said. “They think it’s kookie. But it’s based on breadth. We have an open view of things that comes out of the topography.” Since he first arrived, in 1954, he took to the big-sky freedoms of the natural landscapes—“Where else could you have all these mountains and desert and still be in the dead center of one of the greatest metropolitan cities in the United States?”—the great western spread of desert, ocean, and ideas that made Los Angeles, for him, “the only truly modern city,” an expanding urban possibility unlike the comparatively confined New York. Nicholson was instantly at home in Los Angeles, its pace of life swayed to the type of languid hangouts he commandeered as a young man, at Pupi’s, and later as a movie star, in his yawning living room atop the Santa Monica Mountains. “It would be a shame if these mountains get developed any more than they are now,” he told one journalist from his living room window. “We’d be dead. Once the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains is gone, there really is no Los Angeles any longer. This is what makes the difference between here and 55th and Fifth—this desert/mountain/land-by-the-ocean look. It’s what gives it what it has. That’s what Chinatown [is] basically about.”
He was in Western Costume with Anthea Sylbert a day after getting back, for wardrobe fittings, one of his favorite parts of making movies. Jack savored clothing. His vintage Hawaiian shirts, the spectator shoes with eyelet-worked brown leather, gleefully mismatched in the heedless California style, were charged with memories. Top to bottom, he dressed himself in loyalties: This piece a gift from his lady, Anjelica; that one from his great pal, Harry Dean Stanton; a stalwart bomber jacket, picked up on location, thrown over a Lakers T-shirt; “a black porkpie hat that I’d gotten from the freeway in a motor accident that involved a priest”; those spectator shoes, the trademark image of one of his father figures from back in New Jersey: Shorty, as Jack called him, married to Jack’s much older sister, Lorraine. “A very dapper dresser,” Nicholson said, “he participated in all the Asbury Park Easter parades on the boardwalk.”
His namesake, the man who may have been his father, Jack rarely saw.
When he did see Shorty, it was in bars. Once Jack watched him swallow thirty-five shots of Hennessy. “But I never heard him raise his voice: I never saw anybody be angry with him, not even my mother. He was just a quiet, melancholy, tragic figure—a very soft man.” Jack’s mother, Ethel May Nicholson, ran a full-service beauty parlor out of the back bedroom of their house—and worked all the time.
“You’re on your own,” she told her son. “All I expect is that if you get into trouble, you’ll tell me about it.”
It was perhaps too much freedom for one so young. “I always knew there wasn’t going to be anybody to help me and emotionally support me,” he said “that whatever I did I’d have to do on my own.” He built a second family of friends he culled from sports, acting, and girl chasing—team efforts all. In sandy feet, he romped around the Jersey Shore with the guys, talking the big talk of little men, pranking, clowning, dreaming those long summer days of the sweet rumor of Manhattan, the big breast of the East. Then a little basketball, maybe shoot some pool to the music of a beatnik soliloquy from Jack, who just discovered the undying combination of black Ray-Bans and Camus. They were big mellow days and, with a girl, bigger nights: “Did you? With her?” The big smile. But as good as the kiss was, it was just as good telling the guys about it the next day, the next year. Over the years Jack kept them close with a lasting, even romantic, code of courtly devotion. “I come from a small-town environment,” he explained, “and I remember my childhood impressions that, if you were a conniver or a fink or whatever, everybody knew about it and you were a louse for the rest of your life.” He stayed Jersey, but he read about the world.
Nobody ever needs you—he read and revered the existentialists. “You’ve got to remember that,” he said. “You’re alone, that’s it. Friends are a boon, love is a boon, contacts with other human beings and events, these are all boons. You’ve got to do your part as well as you can.” As soon as he got to Hollywood, Jack more than did his part, traveling in packs of like-minded artists and cinephiles he harvested from Jeff Corey’s class. “The only way I’ve been able to eat all these years,” Jack said, “is through the help of friends. I figure I owe them something.” He graduated onto Roger Corman’s sets, his pal Monte Hellman’s sets, and then, eventually, into his pal Dennis’s Hopper’s Easy Rider, where overnight he became a hit, but he might easily have ended up as a writer or a director instead. For his pal Bob Rafelson and the gang at BBS—a leading young production company named for Bob, Bert (Schneider), and Steve (Blauner), producers of Easy Rider—he’d written Head, starred in Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, appeared in A Safe Place, and directed Drive, He Said. He was an artist. The benefits of movie stardom were lovely but limited; the ensemble’s regenerative feed was Jack’s first priority. “As an actor,” he said, “I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don’t want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.” Got a good idea? Jack was game. Even if it was what he called a short part, Jack would take it. Film was, after all, a group undertaking. And he never forgot where his group came from.