Edward Douglas - Jack: The Great Seducer

Jack

T HE L IFE AND
M ANY L OVES OF
J ACK N ICHOLSON

F OR W ILLIAM M. M ENDENHALL , M.D.
D OCTOR B ILL

To catch the life that throbbed behind the work, this is our task.
L EON E DEL , H ENRY J AMES

Contents

O ne of the most surprising things Cynthia Basinet saw during her millennial love affair with Jack Nicholson, the leading American actor of his time, with seventy-eight movies in forty-five years, was the sight of the legendary superstar, who was worth $250 million, bringing home a doggie bag from a caterers spread. He was a nest of contradictions carried to unimaginable extremes, just as his dancing eyebrows and flashing smile, the most familiar trademarks on the worlds screen since Brandos biceps, concealed an unfixably morbid inner life. But whatever his issues, they havent interfered with his reign as one of the worlds favorite personalities, from the time he flashed his irresistible charm in Easy Rider in 1969 to his Oscar-winning curmudgeon in As Good as It Gets in 1998, his masterful turn as a hollow man in 2003s About Schmidt, and his aging playboy in 2004s Somethings Gotta Give, a film that bears remarkable parallels with the actors personal dilemma.

He hadnt fallen in love since Anjelica [Huston], he said to me, recalled Basinet. The saddest thing about Jack is, I know that man loves me more than anything in the world, but he does not know how to love, or he loves in a mean way. I had to teach him to love. You have to walk him along. As Alexander Payne, Nicholsons About Schmidt director, observed, great actors have a very special relationship with the cameraits almost as though theyre able to tell the camera things they cant tell any single real person.

Asked how she first met Nicholson, Basinet said, You come to this town as a model, who else are you going to meet? I mean, if you like to have a good time, youre used to a certain energy, and youre hitting the nightclubs. Actually, the first time she saw him wasnt in Los Angeles but in France, where, already a red-haired, raving beauty, she was working as a model. One night, she went to a Paris nightclub with some friends, including a man shed been dating. Nicholson, who was often attracted to models, sat at a nearby table with director Roman Polanski, a close friend, and some others. Cynthia was feeling ill at ease that evening. All these friends of mine were together because of me, but we werent really relating, she later recounted. I felt really lonely. Then she spotted Nicholson, who didnt seem to be paying any attention to his companions, either. He smiled at me as if he realized I was as lonely and stranded as he. Somehow she related to him more than to her friends; it was as if both she and the famous stranger wanted something more out of lifeand that life itself was never quite enough, that reality had fallen short of their dreams. It was just a brief encounter, when our eyes met, she recalled, but it set something in motion. What I had been envisioning in an ideal man was actually embodied in one: Jack.

Shed first been struck with the actor when, at twenty-two, shed seen Terms of Endearment, around the time she was breaking up with her husband, but her awareness of the star went all the way back to her childhood in the San Fernando Valley, where shed been born to a mother who was an artist and a father who was a working man. When the family moved to Northern California, she grew up wanting to be a singer, but most of her free time was devoted to looking after a retarded brother. She was eight or ten years old when her father saw Nicholson in Easy Rider and was so impressed he started riding his motorcycle again. I felt as though my dad was grooming me to be a particular mans wife, and I grew up feeling a certain person would embody my dreams. She started to think about what would be her ideal man, and to romance about him, and from about fifteen on, she began to have dreams about the house they would live in; it wasnt a mansion, wasnt even particularly fancy, and there was something very lived-in about it, almost rundown.

At nineteen, she married a frigging spoiled bratan ex-baseball player who worked for a computer-parts distribution company in Northern California. They had a son, Jonathan, but the marriage soon fell apart. She went to Los Angeles, where, instead of realizing her ambition to sing, she found it easier, with her natural beauty, to fall into modelingand to postpone her music career for whatever man was in her life. Modeling led to the jet set and an engagement to a man who had an elaborate estate abroad. Shortly after this relationship ended, she encountered Nicholson at the Paris nightclub.

Back in Los Angeles in the 1990s, she saw the superstar again. I often ran across him in Hollywood, and hed come up to me in clubs and say something kind of inane. My girlfriends were saying, Guess who called me last night? Jack Nicholson. He was hitting on everybody. For a while, they were no more than passing ships in the night. Still, she couldnt get him out of her mind, sensing a strange affinity that somehow already existed. When she started taking acting classes, the other students called her a female version of Jack Nicholson. Then she heard that he was also going to be a guest at a Beverly Hills party she was attending, and decided, If he shows up, Im going to make a concerted effort to talk to him, civilly, just to see what hes about.

The party was a very small one indeed. There were only a couple of other guests, and one of them, like Cynthia, was a redhead. Nicholson walked in looking really cool in a Hawaiian shirt and clear horn-rimmed glasses. It was just like my dad had shown up, she recalled. Jack had some Jim Beam and he went to put ice in it and then saw me and suddenly dropped the ice on the bar. He swooped down on it so fast, like no one would see it, and placed it in his glass, all the while trying to remain really suave. I thought he was so cute doing that. He came over and sat down next to me and started ranting on about what had just happened when he was in his car in traffic, and what had been playing on the radio. An odd sensation came over her as she realized some kind of ESP was going on between them. He was expressing things I was already thinking in my head, she remembered. I also started to see how much he was like my dada union man, union boss, head of a plumbing company. Hanging out with Jack was like sitting in the garage with my dad and his friends.

Later, they gravitated to a couch and relaxed together, talking easily. Cynthia, without explanation or warning, lay her head on his stomach. Uh-oh, Jack said, I better, like, run to the bathroom. As he started to get up, she grabbed his arm, as if implying, Youre not going anywhere. I yanked him back down, she recalled. In my mind, Id already had signs that it was going to happen this way, and the symbol Id been given in a dream had to do with stomachs. Six months prior to meeting Jack, I had this dream. I have a lot of prophetic ones that guide me in my life. In this dream I was getting married, but all I could see of the groom was his stomach, and it was Harvey Keitels stomach. Keitel had been Nicholsons costar in The Two Jakes earlier in the nineties.

The day following the dream, she was invited to a barbecue, and when she arrived, she saw Harvey Keitel sitting in a Buddhist position, almost naked. I could see his gut, she said, and I thought, Damn, thats not the one. Though he wasnt my type, I sat back and enjoyed the party, letting the other girls enjoy Harvey. So, cut to this night with Jack, we go to sit down on the couch and for some weird reason, I feel like Im home and I put my head on his stomach.