![]() One of the people, a man you could deal with. Still, he even dresses the part, the melancholic/laid-back aspects of both: the unshaped drape of a brown suit, cut late '40s style red and green checked shirt brown lace-up toe cap shoes with maroon socks all of it gathered around the tiny, perfect Garden State touch: a gold tie clasp worn with no tie. They do have that affinity with Los Angelenos, who are the only people who talk about smog all the time." and Jersey affinity, because they're both places that give themselves bad P.R. People don't realize this, what I started to say is, because, it's another thing about L.A. I mean they had four fine arts nominees for the Kennedy award (Kennedy Center Honors) and two of 'em from Jersey and the other one wasn't an American, so out of three Americans, two of 'em were from Jersey, Count Basie and Jerome Robbins. who's the dance choreographer, you know, no, Jerome Robbins. "I was telling my friend Lou Adler about doing a Jersey music documentary - Sinatra, Basie, people don't realize how many people are from Jersey. And never went back.īut his heart is in New Jersey. Left New Jersey after scoring in the top 2 percent on his college boards, and went to Los Angeles where one of his older sisters was a dancer with a chorus-line troupe called the Earl Carroll Showgirls. Trashed a rival team's electrical scoreboard equipment after a game because he thought they were playing dirty, then got a part-time job to pay for it. He was a cut-up in school, by all accounts. His mother supported him and his two older sisters by putting a beauty parlor in a bedroom. Nicholson grew up the son of an alcoholic window dresser who left just after he was born. He slouches on the couch in a posture reminiscent of failing private detectives and, just possibly, people from New Jersey - Neptune, to be precise, down by Asbury Park, psychic hardscrabble, the country Bruce Springsteen celebrates: "It's a town full of losers, we're pulling out of here to win." And I spent the summer in the south of France, and came back and went to Colorado and skiing at the end of the year, that's about it."Īnd still he sounds tired. "I started off the year last year skiing and my daughter graduated from high school in Hawaii, I went over there and then I got back and went to Wimbledon, I'd been there a couple of years before but I was working every day so I didn't get to see it. His new movie, "The Border," is just out, and "Reds" came along last fall, and "The Postman Always Rings Twice" opened last spring, and now he's taking it easy, doesn't even have any idea what he'll do when he does it. "I haven't worked all year," he is saying. After 44 years of spontaneous combustion, the face doesn't look a day under 44. It turns out there's a face to be studied behind the glare: a couple of big horizon lines over his brows, the hair thinning. Then he puts on the sunglasses, aviator tear-drop lenses, black as telephones and so small they look sinister. The face, the voice: Nicholson makes a good, jarring entrance, here in the cool precision of a 33rd-floor hotel suite with a picture window overlooking Central Park, the Hudson and his home state of New Jersey. Or, to Marlon Brando in "The Missouri Breaks": "Know what woke ya up, Robert Lee? You've just had yer throat cut. He seems to be saying the word "right" a lot, or "yeah," or "y'know," but it's mostly the sound of the voice that counts - the fatigued Jersey drawl, beyond cynicism, the schwa-toned vowels in the tradition of his great lines: "Are ya making this up as ya go along?" as he says to Diane Keaton in "Reds," a performance that has won him an Oscar nomination this year. This is the face that lit up "Five Easy Pieces," "The Last Detail," "Chinatown," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Shining," "Reds," 36 movies since 1958, 17 of them since he stopped turning out biker and horror flicks and got famous in 1969 with "Easy Rider." Big heat.Ī voice comes out of the fire. It's the you-know-that-I-know-we're-both-crazy smile, blazing under the glow of eyes that are yellow. That's what it's like, he walks into the room and it's instant ignition, the eye brows dropping like burnt logs in the middle, flaring up at the ends, and then the inferno of The Smile, which erupts in three stages: the corners catching, the upper lip curling back, and then the white heat of one of the classic Nicholson faces.
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