Playboy Interview: Jack Nicholson

Nothing brings a warmer glow to Hollywood's gloomy faces than a revival of the overnight success story--the performer who was unknown one day and a star the next--that was so common during the film capital's halcyon days. In the case of Jack Nicholson, the overnight success story took 14 years to write. After a long apprenticeship--mostly as a heavy--in a plethora of low-budgeted B movies, Nicholson finally scored with his funky, funny portrayal of George Hanson, the football-helmeted, alcoholic A.C.L.U. lawyer in "Easy Rider," which brought him instant recognition and an Academy Award nomination. The critical praise he's received for subsequent performances as the restless, predatory, self-destructive antiheroes of "Five Easy Pieces" and "Carnal Knowledge" has firmly established this balding, sleepy-eyed native of Neptune, New Jersey, as an improbable but curiously contemporary star.

The product of an unhappy marriage between a beautician and a window decorator that ended shortly after his birth, Nicholson gained his first dramatic experience in a Neptune grammar school variety show when he lip-synced to a Frank Sinatra record. Star-struck from a steady diet of drive-in movies, he headed West in 1954 soon after graduation from high school and supported himself by working in a Los Angeles toy store and hustling in pool halls. At 18, he landed an office boy's job in the animation department at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, where he helped augment his meager income by running a betting pool.

To get his first professional acting job, Nicholson resorted to a ploy worthy of Dale Carnegie--addressing all the executives he encountered at MGM by their first names. One of them finally set up a screen test and arranged for him to study at a local theater. Early parts in such TV shows as "Matinee Theater" and "Divorce Court" enabled Nicholson to move out of the apartment he was sharing with a friend and--in 1962--into another one with Sandra Knight, an aspiring actress. Their marriage, which produced a daughter, Jennifer, ended in 1969.

For most of the Sixties, working outside the major studios, Nicholson played leads in a string of leather-jacketed biker movies, horror epics, Westerns and psycho films with such provocative titles as "The Terror," "Back Door to Hell," "Too Young to Love," "Little Shop of Horrors," "The Cry Baby Killer" and "Hell's Angels on Wheels." He also wrote several of these exploitation films, including "The Trip," a doper starring Peter Fonda, and "Head," the sole motion-picture venture of the Monkees rock group. Then, in 1969, when another actor dropped out of what promised to be just another bike movie--but turned out to be the Seventies' counterculture's gripping answer to Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"--Nicholson was tapped as a last-minute replacement for a featured role in "Easy Rider."

From that point on, his career was off and revving. After surviving a major blowout with only minor cuts and bruises--an embarrassing outing in the bigbudgeted Barbra Streisand musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever"--he went on to win his Oscar nomination as a failed piano prodigy turned drifter in "Five Easy Pieces." His directorial debut in "Drive, He Said," the story (which he coscripted) of a campus activist slowly going insane, drew mixed reactions; but with the Mike Nichols--directed "Carnal Knowledge," a searing study of the obsessive sexual adventures of two friends, chronicled from college days through middle age, he reached what many consider to be the zenith of his craft.

According to friends who know him well, Nicholson is as complex a man offcamera as Jonathan in "Carnal Knowledge," or any of the other characters he has delineated on the screen. To explore these complexities, Playboy Contributing Editor Richard Warren Lewis visited the actor in his home at the top of Mulholland Drive, overlooking Los Angeles. Lewis reports:

"When I arrived at the trim, two-story stucco house, Nicholson was preparing to leave for ten weeks on location in Atlantic City, where his latest picture, 'The King of Marvin Gardens,' was being filmed. With great deliberation, he placed a number of LPs in corrugated shipping boxes: George Harrison's 'All Things Must Pass,' Strauss waltzes recorded by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. 'Rimsky-Korsakov's Greatest Hits' and a representative selection of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and Lee Michaels. Nicholson wore brown-and-white saddle shoes, pleated slacks and a Shetland pullover--an outfit he could have worn in the early sequences of 'Carnal Knowledge.'

"Among the first things one notices about him, besides a vaguely rural voice that sounds as if he'd spent a childhood of Saturday matinees watching Henry Fonda movies, is the expanse of white enamel gleaming from his foot-wide grin: perfectly straight teeth untouched by caps or orthodontia. His creased forehead and receding hairline make him look considerably older than someone on the precipice of his 35th birthday.

"While Nicholson excused himself to field the first of many phone calls that would punctuate our conversation, a glance at his cluttered library shelves revealed an eclectic selection of books: 'The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp,' 'Edgar Cayce on Reincarnation,' Jules Feiffer's 'Harry, the Rat with Women,' 'The Primal Scream,' 'The Groupsex Tapes' and several works of Hermann Hesse. Standing amid these volumes were two large candles, one spelling out the word Peace and the other sculpted in the form of a prodigious, erect penis.

"Returning, Nicholson led the way into a beamed-ceiling living room and eased his slender, 5'10" frame into a suede couch opposite a fireplace crackling with pine logs. Feet propped on a coffee table, he lit a fat Monte Cristo Havana and idly stroked the cat nestling next to him. Nicholson's eyes, somehow, were as inscrutable as the cat's. Visible over his shoulder was a baby grand piano and beyond that an expansive swimming pool rimmed by redwood decking, and beyond that an incomparable mountain view--creature comforts that had become available to Nicholson only in the three years since he became an honest-to-God celebrity. They suggested an appropriate point of departure for our conversation."

[Q] Playboy: Have there been any significant changes in your life style in the three years since you hit it big with Easy Rider?

[A] Nicholson: Well, I'm not looking for work anymore. Work is looking for me. That changes every minute of your day--your entire outlook on life. Before Easy Rider, I had been almost totally unknown, despite the fact that I had written six movies, coproduced three, edited or assistant-edited five and acted in 20. For one thing, since my overnight stardom, if you can call it that, I can't go around picking up stray pussy anymore. You don't have the anonymity of a pure social exchange in a bar. If you just come up and say, "Hi, how're you doing?" everyone notices; it all becomes very public. And there was a time, soon after Easy Rider, when I was rude to friends--didn't return phone calls as promptly as I should. I never used to be late at all; suddenly, I was late everywhere. After three years, I'm just now starting to be on time a little bit. But the most encouraging thing is, really, how little has changed inside me. My own judgment of myself, candidly, is that I'm very happy with the way that I've responded. It's been good for me, and it's getting better all the time.

[Q] Playboy: Has your standard of living changed appreciably?

[A] Nicholson: As far as the tangibles are concerned, until recently I still drove the same 1967 VW I had for five years. I gave it up when I started to feel it might be an affectation of some kind. My new car is a Mercedes-Benz 600, for driving my friends around at night. My house is 20 percent bigger than the one I was living in before, and I'm in the process of buying it instead of renting it. It's not a really expensive house by contemporary standards. The one really decadent habit I've picked up is spending a great deal of money in restaurants. With anywhere from four to six people, every lunch is $15; most dinners are $25. I probably average $30 a day on food. I'm grateful to be able to pick up the majority of the checks, 'cause I'm working and a lot of my friends aren't. When they're working and I'm not, they pick up the checks. Probably one of my biggest self-indulgences is a Monte Cristo number two, the Cuban cigar that I buy for $25 a box in Europe or Canada, where they can still be legally obtained. There's nothing like this cigar. I've been through the sophistry of investigating all the other ones, but basically, when you get right down to it, Monte Cristo's it--boom, over and out. One of the great injustices of Western diplomacy is our nonrelationship with Castro. Never mind China; give me Cuba back so I can get my cigars. I got into smoking them in Canada when we were shooting Carnal Knowledge. We had all taken a vow to stay off grass while we were making this movie, so the Monte Cristos became a perfect substitute.

[Q] Playboy: Why was the vow made in the first place?

[A] Nicholson: Mike Nichols felt, properly, that grass slows your tempo down a little bit. Without it, he felt that there would be more vitality, more ability to get with the juvenile factor--especially in the earlier college sequences. For the most part, everyone stuck to it, despite some unusual temptations. In Canada, they smoke it in public bars. They have an enormous heroin problem in Vancouver. A tremendous amount of Canada's heroin traffic is through that city, so they allow grass in certain sections. There's no bust, no nothin'. The clubs I visited were just great and groovy because of this, even though I wasn't smoking. Everyone was happy and pleasant.

[Q] Playboy: You once told a reporter you had smoked grass every day for 15 years. Is that true?

[A] Nicholson: To a certain degree. Fifteen years ago is about when I started smoking. I'm a social smoker. But I can go for months at a time without even thinking about it.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the anti-marijuana laws?

[A] Nicholson: It's insane to have laws that are making criminals out of a huge percentage of our population, particularly when it's something that involves morality. I'm old-fashioned in that I don't want to see the entire world addicted to drugs--like the synthetic existence described in Brave New World --but I think it's an enormous leap from a little grass to that grim picture. Yet we have organizations like the Federal Bureau of Narcotics putting out the most misleading kind of propaganda. I've got one of their pamphlets in my bookcase; it propounds such garbage as: "Beware, young and old people in all walks of life. This [joint] may be handed you by the friendly stranger. It contains the killer drug, marijuana, a powerful narcotic in which lurks murder, insanity, death." I don't think there's anything to prove that marijuana leads to the use of harder drugs. It hasn't been true in my case, although probably I never would have encountered any other drug if I hadn't gotten involved in smoking marijuana. But I'm not addicted to any of it. I know when to say, "No more of this."

[Q] Playboy: Isn't cocaine the currently fashionable drug in Hollywood?

[A] Nicholson: I see it around.

[Q] Playboy: Have you tried it?

[A] Nicholson: Yeah, it's basically an upper, but it doesn't seem to do too much to me. I don't think it'll be fashionable for long, because it's expensive and we're in a depression; whether the world chooses to call it a depression or not, there's no money around. Cocaine is "in" now because chicks dig it sexually. It's the white powder that they talk about in Porgy and Bess: "Don't let him handle me and drive me wild." The property of the drug is that, while it numbs some areas, it inflames the mucous membranes such as those in a lady's genital region. That's the real attraction of it. In his book, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Errol Flynn talks about putting a little cocaine on the tip of your dick as an aphrodisiac. But his conclusion is that there really isn't any such thing as an aphrodisiac. I sort of agree with him, though if you do put a numbing tip of cocaine on the end of your cock because you're quick on the trigger and need to cut down on the sensation, I guess it could be considered a sexual aid. And it's an upper, so you've got added energy.

[Q] Playboy: Five or six years ago, the popular sexual upper was amyl nitrite. Have you had any experiences with that drug?

[A] Nicholson: I've never taken any poppers; I'm afraid of them. Whenever I say that to friends of mine, they look at me like I must be insane, so I guess it's big in the sexual area. It's a flusher. It ups the respiratory system to a tremendous degree, from what I understand, and makes the heart pound. I just don't like fast rushes. I've had more than a dozen opportunities to get ahold of amyl nitrite and I notice I haven't done it, so something's resisting it. Many people don't know what the hell they're doing when they take something into their system, if you want to know the truth. I really know very little about drugs except how they individually affect me. I'm attuned to that because of my training as an actor: to know how I feel and why I feel and where the feelings are emanating from. In that regard, I've had a lot of experiences with acid.

[Q] Playboy: When did you first try it?

[A] Nicholson: I was one of the first people in the country to take acid; it was in laboratory experiments on the West Coast about nine or ten years ago. At that time, I was a totally adventurous actor looking for experience to put in his mental filing cabinet for later contributions to art. I was very curious about LSD. Some of the people I knew were in therapy with it. I went to downtown L.A. and took it one afternoon. I spent five hours with a therapist and about five more at home in the later stages of it. I hallucinated a lot, primarily because of the way the therapist structured it. He put a blindfold on me, which makes you much more introspective, gives you more dreamlike imagery. Imagine what acid is like when you know nothing about it. You think it's going to be like getting stoned on grass, which I had done. But all of your conceptual reality gets jerked away and there are things in your mind that have in no way been suggested to you: such as you're going to see God; or watch sap streaming through the leaves of trees; or you're going to feel the dissolving of certain bodily parts; you're going to re-experience your own birth, which I did on my first acid trip; you're going to be frightened that your prick might be cut off, because you have castration fears; you're going to come mush-ass to face with your own homosexual fears. I just wasn't ready for half this stuff.

[Q] Playboy: Can you describe what the castration fears felt like?

[A] Nicholson: At first, I just didn't feel too hot. I said to the therapist, "I feel a kind of fluttering in my genital area." It was sort of like a queasy stomach. At that level, it's alarming, but it's not terrorizing. Then I began to get more uncomfortable and cold in that area. At one point. I came back to consciousness screaming at the top of my lungs till I had no more breath to exhale. I thought I'd have to try to remedy this genital discomfort myself by cutting my cock off. I got into interpreting that psychologically with the therapist, what it meant, and he said it related to homosexual fears. It was really a kind of paranoia. The drug just aggravated it. Taught me a lot about myself. It was a good psychological experience.

[Q] Playboy: What insight did you gain from experiencing your own birth?

[A] Nicholson: I came away with the feeling that one never totally recovers from his own birth. It was extremely graphic, a feeling of actually being inside a womb in some kind of sack that was the same as me. I didn't feel the separation, because everything was the same temperature. At a certain point, something began to happen: I didn't know what it was. but still there was only me. I was the universe, you see. I didn't even know that I had fingers and a nose. Then suddenly I began feeling myself. I started moving and felt the interior of the vagina going by my face. And then came the absolutely traumatic moment when the cold air of reality hit the top of my head. It totally defined me. It was the first feeling that I was separate from anything, that I was a specific individual. Then suddenly I was in this room and it was light and I didn't even know what light was. I'm telling it now as you tell a story, but it wasn't a story when I was experiencing it, because I didn't know what a story was, what a word was, what I was. It almost defies description.

[A] Later on, I became conscious of very early emotions about not being wanted--feeling that I was a problem to my family as an infant. You see, my mother and father separated just prior to my birth. Knowing what I know now, it must have been very hard on my mother. She certainly didn't need the problems of caring for an infant coupled with the deterioration of the marriage. Some of that must have been communicated. Realizing that made me understand in psychological terms a certain kind of relationship that I have with the female sex--one of dependence upon them, wanting to please them because my survival depended on it.

[Q] Playboy: Have you dropped much acid since that first time?

[A] Nicholson: Some, but not as much as most of the people I know. I still take it occasionally, but I have a certain awe of it.

[Q] Playboy: What makes you persist?

[A] Nicholson: Once you've related to acid, there are certain things you perceive that would be impossible otherwise--things that help you understand yourself. Also, maybe there's the element of challenge. You get into it because you don't want to feel something is too frightening to deal with. If properly used, acid can also mean a lot of kicks. During the shooting of Easy Rider in Taos, New Mexico, for example, Hopper and I dropped a little of the drug and a couple of guys drove us up to D.H. Lawrence's tomb. It's on the side of a mountain and there's this great huge granite tomb where his wife is buried. Lawrence is indoors in a kind of crypt. When we got up there, we were just starting to come on. The sun was going down, so that it was only slightly above eye level. Dennis and I get very sentimental about each other at these moments; we love to cry about old times and talk about how it's gonna be. So we were up there rapping about D. H. Lawrence and how beautiful it was. We decided we were going to sit on the tomb with D. H. and that was it. From then on, this was where we were going to make our stand in life, and if they wanted to go on with the movie, they'd have to come here and get us; 'cause this was where we were and this was where we'd be. We looked at trees and talked about art and the nature of genius and asked ourselves why people couldn't be more open. And after a while, the guys in the van came back to get us.

[A] Later on, Dennis went off with a lady and I went back to the motel we were staying in. Keep in mind that we were in the middle of Western country, reeking with Indian lore. So back at the motel, I spent a certain amount of time acting out guarding our rooms, watching where the Indian attack would come from. Then I listened to the electric buzz on the television for about ten minutes and that began to make me feel as if I were a bunch of wiring. I had this enormous energy, a need to do something, so I went outside and started walking. You're always very sensitive to light under acid; so when light began appearing around the mountain corners, I knew that dawn was coming. It was getting cold, like it does just before the sun comes up. I thought I'd better get somewhere where I could see the dawn, so I climbed up to the top of a 40-foot tree. I was very happy up there. By now I had passed the peak of it. I was watching this meadow--looking at the light coming on. The meadow seemed to have all these rocks, especially a big white rock that was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. At a certain point, the white rock stood right up and suddenly turned into this fabulous white horse. He went up on his hind legs once, came down stiff-legged and his tail went around in a circle, exactly like a propeller, as if he were going to take off. I'd never seen this in a horse before. Now I thought, "Well, maybe I'm not peaked out on this acid, 'cause this is far out." He just went tearing around this meadow and throwing his neck up and bouncing and kicking. It was so beautiful to see. Then all the other darker rocks became horses and he went racing around to each of them. The moment filled me with fantastic emotion. Later, I climbed down the tree, walked out into the meadow and actually followed a cattle herd. I was about ready to go home when I looked down at my feet and found an inflatable plastic pork chop--apparently a squeaker toy for a dog. It was so incongruous. You can imagine what that did to me. I carried that pork chop in my suit pocket through most of the shooting of Easy Rider.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any idea how big a picture it was going to be?

[A] Nicholson: Well, before I even saw the film, I knew that any motorcycle picture with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in it was going to make a certain number of millions of dollars, because I was acquainted with the grossing potential of all of those films. Peter at that time had become the John Wayne of the bike movies; Dennis had also been in several. You could figure a picture with Fonda and Hopper would gross, fairly conservatively, $3,000,000 to $4,000,000 in the bike market alone, because Wild Angels had done $6,000,000. I had also been in a couple of them--Psych-Out and Hell's Angels on Wheels--which had very good grosses. I felt, too, that the script for Easy Rider was a modulation up in terms of quality within the genre. Because of the quality of the film, what it did, what it said, you could see it was going to reach beyond the bike market.

[Q] Playboy: How successful has it been?

[A] Nicholson: I don't know for sure. The last projections that I heard were around $20,000,000.

[Q] Playboy: Did you participate in the profits?

[A] Nicholson: Yes, I did. I had no deal to do so before the production, but afterward, they gave me a small piece of the action, a percentage. This is very unorthodox; you never get this in a conventional corporate structure. They also let me cut my own section of the film, which is even more unusual. That had a lot to do with the longtime relationship between Dennis and myself.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true, as one interviewer reported, that you smoked 155 joints during Easy Rider's campfire sequence?

[A] Nicholson: That's a little exaggerated. But each time I did a take or an angle, it involved smoking almost an entire joint. We were smoking regular dope, pretty good Mexican grass from the state of Michoacán. Now, the main portion of this sequence is the transition from not being stoned to being stoned. So that after the first take or two, the acting job becomes reversed. Instead of being straight and having to act stoned at the end, I'm now stoned at the beginning and have to act straight and then gradually let myself return to where I was--which was very stoned. It was an unusual reverse acting problem. And Dennis was hysterical offcamera most of the time this was happening. In fact, some of the things that you see in the film--like my looking away and trying to keep myself from breaking up--were caused by my looking at Dennis offcamera over in the bushes, totally freaked out of his bird, laughing his head off while I'm in there trying to do my Lyndon Johnson and keep everything together.

[Q] Playboy: We've heard you were equally into the part for the scene in Five Easy Pieces in which you're confronted with a sullen waitress.

[A] Nicholson: Yeah, the one where the waitress says, "No substitutions," and I end up having to ask for a chicken-salad sandwich on wheat toast--hold the butter, lettuce, mayonnaise and chicken salad--just to get an order of wheat toast. Finally, boom, I sweep the table clear of glasses, silverware and dishes. Actually, something like that scene had occurred in my own life. Years ago, when I was maybe 20, I cleared a table that way at Pupi's, a coffee shop on the Sunset Strip. Carole Eastman, the screenwriter of Five Easy Pieces and an old friend of mine, knew about that incident. And Bob Rafelson, the director, and I had gone through something like the bit with a "no substitutions" waitress, although that time I hadn't dumped the dishes. So, knowing me, Carole and Bob just put the two incidents together and into the script.

[A] Bob and Carole are among a number of actors, writers and directors I've hung around with for years whom I consider my surrogate family. I have very familial feelings about them and Charles Eastman, the writer; Robert Towne, the actor; Monte Hellman, who most recently directed Two-Lane Blacktop, and Roger Corman, who produced most of my previous films. It's like we all grew up together. We have a rare symbiotic relationship, in the best sense. We seem to turn one another on artistically. I've always had a very real feeling that they were more talented than I was in most areas; they are all people whom I admire, as well as friends of mine. A lot of what growing I've done is the result of experience that they've shared with me. I know they'd say the same.

[Q] Playboy: How did your group come together?

[A] Nicholson: It began by just being in Hollywood and starting out at the same time, attending acting classes and working together in films. I met my former wife, Sandra, in an acting class taught by Martin Landau. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, none of us had much money. We used to hang out in now-defunct coffeehouses like The Unicorn, Mac's, Luan's, The Renaissance and Chez Paulette's. And we'd meet at Barney's Beanery or we'd play darts at a bar called the Rain Check, both of which are still in existence. I was never a drinker, but I was one of the earliest people in the Rain Check and I took them some of their heaviest drinkers. I think Sally Kellerman and I, between us, probably made the place.

[A] People in the group were writing plays and reading them in coffeehouses. A bunch of us literally built a small theater, The Players' Ring, where we produced our own legitimate productions. We didn't have a penny. We used to go out and steal lumber from lumberyards at night. We stole the toilets out of gas stations. Lighting, boards, everything, we ripped off one way or another. We spent a lot of time acting. That was really ripe learning. It was a time of freshness and a discovery of what acting was all about, of meeting new people and being inspired by other people's work, or watching an actor or an actress who could hardly talk come into a class and then six months later suddenly do a brilliant scene. That was part of the early days.

[Q] Playboy: Was the theater and coffeehouse scene pretty much your whole life then?

[A] Nicholson: No; I was also part of a generation that was raised on cool jazz and Jack Kerouac, and we walked around in corduroys and turtlenecks talking about Camus and Sartre and existentialism and what going on the road would be like. We stayed up all night and slept till three in the afternoon. We were among the few people around seeing European pictures. We went to Dylan's and Ravi Shankar's early concerts. We smoked a lot of dope, usually in the toilet or out in the back yard or driveway, 'cause it wasn't cool to do it in public. Zen was coming in, so we knew about Alan Watts. Most of us had been fortunate chronologically; we hadn't had to go to war. And we were probably among the first group of people who weren't buying the American dream. We spent a lot of time in the street scene on the Sunset Strip. This is long before drug trafficking wrecked the Strip. There were no rock-'n'-roll clubs, no naked shows, no fuck movies; it was really cool.

And there were a lot of parties. Many more parties than I go to now. They were simply bring-your-own-bottle parties or wine parties. Harry Dean Stanton, who was one of my close side-kicks in those days, says that whenever he thinks of me in that period, he always sees me with a cheap red wine on my red lips. We'd get 19 half gallons of Gallo Red Mountain and get everybody drunk. I guess you could call them orgies by the strictest definition. I gave parties that hundreds of people attended; there were a lot of rooms in my house and people would take their own little private trips. I don't know what they were doing. I know what I was doing, though, and I guess that could be called an orgy. But it wasn't something where everybody's there and naked and fucking one another all over the place. I've never been in that scene. I've tried ineffectively to promote it a time or two, because of thrill-seeking impulses, but they never really came together. I've never been in an orgy of more than three people. But the parties were great. Actually, Dennis and I originally became actors because we like parties and people and girls and art and acceptance and all the things that are really very momentary and immediate.

[Q] Playboy: Can you recall any particularly memorable festivities that the two of you attended together?

[A] Nicholson: We used to go a lot to the salons held by Samson DeVreer, a male witch. He's one of the great Hollywood L.A. puries, no question about that.

[Q] Playboy: Puries?

[A] Nicholson: By puries I mean people who are very expressive of the L.A. culture--the overstuffed California hamburger, the 48,000 ice-cream flavors, the Hollywood electric whiz-bang kids. Anyway, DeVreer had sort of a running open house for crazos over there, all the local eccentrics like Vampira and occasionally James Dean. People would be reading tarot cards at those gatherings--long before it became fashionable. Just big walking-around parties. Every once in a while, Samson would turn off all the lights and read from his memoirs. I didn't know many people who had been André Gide's lover, so it was very exotic to me.

[Q] Playboy: How were you supporting yourself during this period?

[A] Nicholson: Unemployment checks helped. And I was doing pretty well betting the horses. On a day when I'd have four winners, I'd come away from the track with maybe $300 or $400. The moment I quit was the day I tapped out in the fourth race and couldn't find my car in the parking lot at Hollywood Park. I thought, "Well, this is grand. I'm pissed off 'cause I'm losing and I can't even find my car. What kind of state of mind is that to be in?" So I just dropped out of it.

[A] I guess I earned most of my living from TV. There was lots of television work around in those days. I used to do court shows and improvised stuff like that. I was a great corespondent in Divorce Court. I got my first film, The Cry Baby Killer--with Roger Corman as executive producer--right after I started acting. I played a high school boy who kidnaps a woman and a child--sort of a Desperate Hours situation. I got killed at the end. Didn't work on anything much for almost a year after that. Gradually, though, most of us from the group began getting work. One of the most memorable for me was Corman's Little shop of Horrors--which took little more than two days to shoot. The story line concerns a scientist who crosses a Venus'-flytrap with some gargantuan plant. He starts off feeding it flies and it graduates to mice and finally to people. You know the rest.

[Q] Playboy: How many films did you do for Corman?

[A] Nicholson: I did the leads in 11 horror movies and kill-crazy teenage-delinquent pictures for Roger. The longest shooting schedule he ever had was two weeks, and at that time actors' scale was about $350 a week. That's all he ever paid anybody. Several years ago, when he was shooting The St. Valentine's Day Massacre at 20th Century--Fox--at a much larger budget than usual--I said, "Roger, I'll be perfectly honest with you, I don't want to do the lead. Do me a favor: Give me the smallest part with the longest run you can in the picture." Which he did. As the driver for the murderers, I worked for three weeks and earned more money in a Corman movie than ever before. I had only one line. It got the only laugh in the picture, I might add. Someone says, "What the hell are you doing?" to another character, one of the killers, who's rubbing something on his bullets. And I say, using a gravelly voice, "It's garlic. The bullets don't kill ya, ya the of the blood poisoning." That voice coming out of me always got a laugh, for some reason. But Roger's record is amazing. At the time I stopped working with him, he'd made 70 pictures, and only two of them lost money. No major studio has ever had this kind of a record.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel now about your work in those early low-budget films?

[A] Nicholson: I'm probably more pleased about it than I should be. The beauty about most of those early films is that I was--for the most part--working with the same group of actors and writers who hung around the parties and coffee shops. In fact, in the first and only film I directed--Drive, He Said--I used a number of my old cronies. And I was more than pleased that I was in a position to do so.

[Q] Playboy: Why was Drive, He Said originally rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America?

[A] Nicholson: Because it had frontal nudity and it had someone who was fucking have an orgasm. The orgasm is audible, not visible. The person says, "I'm coming." I'm convinced the rating system is 100 percent corrupt. The censors say they're protecting the family unit in America when, in fact, the reality of the censorship is if you suck a tit, you're an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you're a GP.

[Q] Playboy: What prompted the M.P.A.A. to change Drive's rating to R?

[A] Nicholson: Columbia fought it because it had never released an X movie. They showed it to a group of psychiatrists and they got hundreds of affidavits saying that this was a film that should be seen by audiences under 18 years of age because it was a realistic representation, an unfrightened look at a kind of social behavior. Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger and a lot of heavyweight clergy wrote affidavits expressing their support of the picture. Ramsey Clark is a member of the law firm that handled our appeal of the X rating, and he did the final argument. I've got a lot of very interesting critiques of why the picture is morally fit. Some of them went so far as to say that it was imperative that people under 18 see the picture and that they should have to be accompanied by a parent to ensure that parents also saw it. That was most gratifying.

[Q] Playboy: Was any footage eliminated in order to qualify for the R rating?

[A] Nicholson: There have never been any cuts. So far, I haven't allowed any censorship. If I let anyone censor the work so that I can make more money, then I'm going back on what I felt when I made the film at first. I can't resist the entire Columbia Pictures corporate structure, should they decide that they want to cut it, because I don't have full control in that area. But thus far, Columbia has supported me. The authorities in Canada wanted 45 cuts, so it's not being distributed there. As of this moment, it's not being distributed in England, either, because I refused to censor the fucking sequence in the car. They don't mind the fucking, they mind the coming. That's what's fascinating to me. In other words, you can have the sequence, you can have everybody moaning and saying. "It feels good" and "Screw me," but you can't have someone saying, "I'm coming."

[Q] Playboy: A few critics suggest that this scene brands you as one of the last of the old school raised on the idea that sex is dirty--something to be done in the back seat of a car in a drive-in. Are they right?

[A] Nicholson: No, I don't think there's anything dirty about sex. I don't dislike sex in the back seat of an automobile and I don't know why anyone would think it's dirty. It's certainly not dirty to me.

[Q] Playboy: But the way you've shot the scene--with the girl bent over the front seat, the guy behind her, grinding away--has been called rather unattractive. Some of those same critics said it might be fun to do it that way, but it wasn't fun to look at.

[A] Nicholson: That was the most forthright, frank way of presenting it. I've fucked in the front seat of a two-seater sports car, and that's how I happen to know it's practically the only place in the car, the only position in which it can be accomplished. As for its being attractive or unattractive--I don't know what's attractive or unattractive about viewing the sexual experience. In fact, I nailed a critic on the radio who used the same approach. I asked him, "What's really unattractive about it?" He felt that the guy was kind of ginky-looking. And I had to ask, "Well, is it only beautiful people who are allowed to enjoy sex?" Many people, in fact, have gone out of their way to tell me that the scene totally turned them on. I think it's the most erotic scene that's been shown in a legitimate film to date, and yet all that's visible is the two people's faces. I understood that it was an erotic scene when I did it. The whole point of the film is that this is a young man involved in an erotic relationship with an older woman from whom he is emotionally unable to detach himself, even after she's tired of him. So that when I did the scene, I wanted it, in the clearest, most succinct way, to show that these people were involved in a sexual relationship. I think I did it. I would hate to have someone say that I did anything "tastefully," but I think that's the way it came out. I'm bored to death by the overuse of that word tasteful.

[Q] Playboy: Was the transition from actor to director difficult for you?

[A] Nicholson: For someone who'd never directed a picture before, I'd had a lot of industry experience, but I was amazed at how little I knew about actual directing when I came to do it. Mistakes went into the film in areas out of my control, but basically it's the movie I wanted to make; it's very deeply thought out. Drive, He Said, doesn't take the point of view of the revolutionary, of the celebrity, of the equivocated professor, of the gung-ho basketball coach who's attempting to be a spiritual leader, of the militant black, nor of a woman's life. It takes all of these points of view. Only at the end of the film do you get a master look at it. When you pull back one notch with the camera, you see that this guy who's acted out all the drama of the revolutionary of the Sixties doesn't even draw a crowd on campus--even though he's being carted off in a cage. His friend comes and tries to jump onto the truck and stop it. but everyone else is just kind of on the way to class, and that's it.

[Q] Playboy: What were you trying to convey? The shift in campus mood?

[A] Nicholson: Not the shift in campus mood but the universal fact that people do not respond to extremist behavior. They'll observe it, but they won't get involved with it. In fact, it's suspect. That's why the Gabriel character in Drive, He Said is driven crazy. Everything he says is essentially true. He feels that the country is not sexually healthy. Some critics think that I oversimplified by reducing everything to sex, but if you look at the real facts of your life, you'll find if you're not releasing your sexual energy, you're in trouble. If you take a trip and you're away three days and you don't relate to a chick, pretty soon that's all you're thinking about, even if you're out selling Bromo-Seltzer. Within three days in a new town, you're thinking. "Why can't I find a beaver in a bar?" Or, if you're a woman, "Why can't I find a guy? Why are all the guys I meet so uninteresting?" It's not that sex is the primary element of the universe, it's just that when it's unfulfilled, it will affect you. I wish that we could all express our sexuality so openly that every party and every conversation wouldn't have those undertones. They wouldn't if there was a truly healthy flow through the society.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by healthy flow?

[A] Nicholson: The absence of sexual hangups. It's a pure Wilhelm Reich theme and illustrative of Reichian politics. I personally have related to Reichian therapy and it's been very positive to me.

[Q] Playboy: How did you become involved in Reichian therapy?

[A] Nicholson: I never got into any therapy until late for that sort of thing. It was prompted by the collapse of a longstanding relationship with a female. It ended before I was ready to be out of it. She felt that I wasn't worth her time. She'd had it. It was very sudden, very abrupt. I was unprepared. I couldn't cope with all the emotion that was released as the result of being cashiered.

[Q] Playboy: Are you still in therapy?

[A] Nicholson: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any indication when treatment will be concluded?

[A] Nicholson: Probably never. Once you're in it, you don't get out. You just gradually improve your health and your system.

[Q] Playboy: What is there about Reichian therapy that makes it meaningful for you?

[A] Nicholson: The design of the therapy makes sense to me. It's structured to soften and relieve holding areas of what Reich described as body armor--which comes from pleasure denial or pleasure fear. When you dam up energy and feelings, sexual and otherwise, you begin to devour yourself. Our society is unhealthy, according to Reich, because we tend to fragment and separate sexuality. We talk about it in terms of scoring. We have ass men and tit men and leg men and cunt men and lip men. These are all partialisms.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't these partialisms and the male's preoccupation with scoring exactly what Carnal Knowledge is about?

[A] Nicholson: Reich and Feiffer have a lot in common. There's one difference between Jules's outlook and mine, though. In his Playboy Interview, he talked about the speech that was left out of the film where my character says. "Guys don't really like girls." That's something I disagree with, because it's true of only some guys. I have at least an equal number of male and female friends. I have many nonsexual relationships with women; I'm not trying to get into the pants of every woman I'm interested in. For example, there's an attractive gal living in my house now--a movie star--with whom I don't have a sexual relationship. Sally Kellerman used to sit on my lap and tell me about her boyfriends and her problems. Jonathan, in Carnal Knowledge, is exactly the opposite. I don't think he knows any way to communicate with women beyond screwing them.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you ever go through the same stage yourself?

[A] Nicholson: Of course. I've been through a lot of infantilism sexually. When I began sexual activity in earnest, my point of view was simply to try to seduce everyone I could. At that time, I had trouble with ejaculatio praecox. A lot of men have had this problem. I had it almost exclusively until I was 26 or so. You find yourself making it with a chick--and, like, you poke her eight times and right away you're coming. It's a chore trying to go through to the second orgasm and not lose your erection. In desperation, you find yourself getting the chicks off without balling them, through manipulation of some kind; or you find yourself getting with another chick to share the load with you; any way to keep yourself from saying. "I've got a major problem here, man. I'm not fucking for shit." I would never tell you this story now if I was still in that situation. I didn't know the story when I was there. I'd say to myself, "Well, I haven't balled anybody in three days and I'm all filled up." And then I'd have a premature ejaculation, which is really a form of impotence. The root of it all was in some kind of pleasure denial; it was pretty unsatisfactory for the woman involved. Somehow, in the sexual experience, I was making the woman into a sort of mom--an authoritarian female figure. That made me feel inadequate to the situation, small and childish. I indulged myself in a lot of masturbatory behavior. I solved none of these problems in therapy; I worked them out for myself. But any of them might reappear.

[Q] Playboy: Somehow this, too, recalls Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge.

[A] Nicholson: I moved Jonathan a great deal toward me. Mike Nichols and I agreed that this guy must not become a lascivious character, because that's not really what's being said. Jonathan is the most sensitive character in the picture. He's the one who doesn't recover from the original sexual triangle. He's never able to really trust girls after that. He winds up in a very ritualistic but honest sexual relationship with a professional, which is the best thing--not the worst--he can do for himself. He's a person with sexual problems who's never been fortunate enough to make a genuine contact, probably largely through his own doing. He's in a position where he truly doesn't want to go on rifling women's cunts. By paying for it, he gets it off with no muss, no fuss. Nobody's pissed off. Nobody's concerned that he's fucking them over. The hooker doesn't care if he stays the night at her place or she stays the night at his. He hasn't solved his problem positively, but he's given himself the best negative answer that he can come up with.

[Q] Playboy: Rosalyn Drexler, in The New York Times, wrote: "Carnal Knowledge may be a study of latent homosexuality masquerading as two college roommates growing up from the mid-Forties to the present time." Is that a valid interpretation?

[A] Nicholson: When the term latent homosexuality is used by a lay person, it's as valid, medically speaking, as was the use of leeches or any other remedy of the Dark Ages. I suppose any time you're doing a piece of work with two male leads, there will be some connotation of latent homosexuality. But you could probably project that implication onto Romulus and Remus or Abbott and Costello. I don't think that was really an intended statement of the work.

[Q] Playboy: How do you respond to another critic who has suggested that "the pathological case histories [of the two leads] the authors give us as representative ... would be more accurately described as 'aberrational extremes' "?

[A] Nicholson: There do exist people who are not part of today's pervasive sexual environment. But I think Nichols and Feiffer assumed that they were writing about very social people, working New Yorkers, upper-middle-class professional men who are meeting women, having cocktails, having affairs and constantly judging and rejudging their own sexuality, trying to find some substance in it, trying to make conquests within it. There are millions of men like this in New York and in cities all over the world. Probably these characters wouldn't be sophisticated enough for the European culture, where individuals aren't kept so ignorant about sexuality. But excluding the nonsexual person, I think we must assume that the characters played by Artie Garfunkel and myself are probably far more representative than most people care to admit. Obviously, they don't represent people who live in a rural area; it's strictly an urban story. A man couldn't be as openly promiscuous as Jonathan in a small-town environment. He would be branded a social outcast, considered predatory.

[Q] Playboy: One of your lines in Carnal Knowledge goes: "Love is so elusive that it may not exist at all." Do you think that's true?

[A] Nicholson: No. I don't know if I could give a succinct definition of love, but I feel that it's there in my own life and in my relationships with people. Even if they outlawed love tomorrow and found some way of eliminating it from everything but the mind, it would have existed in my life.

[Q] Playboy: Presumably you were in love during some portion of your six-year marriage. What prompted the divorce?

[A] Nicholson: My marriage broke up during the period when I was acting in a film during the day and writing a film at night. I simply didn't have time to ask for peace and quiet or to say, "Well, now, wait a second, maybe you're being unreasonable." I didn't have the 30 minutes I felt the conversation needed. If the other person can't see that I haven't got the time right now, I can't explain it to her. I've blown a lot of significant relationships in my life because I was working and didn't have time to deal with a major crisis. Another source of trouble is that your increasing celebrity becomes a threat to your partner, and you can't turn the celebrity off to save the relationship. Nor should you. I'm not terribly thirsty for the limelight, but obviously you don't get into the movie business if you want to be a recluse.

[Q] Playboy: Having had one failed marriage, would you be wary of getting married again?

[A] Nicholson: If there is any realistic deterrent to marriage, it's the fact that you can't afford divorce. If I should have a second unsuccessful attempt at a marriage, I'd be financially ruined because of the inequity of the divorce laws, which sack the male in the courts beyond all possible belief. I'm hoping that the feminist movement in this country can get rolling toward achieving economic equality on this score. Actually, I don't have any problem with this, because I have a good relationship with my ex-wife. Our marriage was lived out rather than failed. We just grew apart. We were so obviously going in different directions that we were becoming a burden not only to each other but to our child. We haven't excised each other from our lives. We're in communication. So I don't have an ironclad policy against remarriage. But I'm not seeking it as a path to fulfillment, either.

[Q] Playboy: Recently, a bill was introduced in the Maryland state legislature advocating three-year marriage contracts. Do you think that proposal has any merit?

[A] Nicholson: Yeah, it certainly does. There may be a certain amount of fatalism written into the relationship: but if the participants are aware of what this escape valve can or might do for their mental well-being, it can only have a positive effect. Fortunately, I'm currently involved with somebody--Michelle Phillips--who has the same feeling about marriage as I do. I don't think either one of us particularly wants to get married. Nor are we living together.

[Q] Playboy: That arrangement is rather oldfashioned, isn't it?

[A] Nicholson: I don't know if it's oldfashioned or not. Someone said to me recently, "I can never tell if you're behind or ahead of the fashion." It may be new-fashioned. Michelle and I are talking about ultimately living in separate residences next to each other. When I met her originally, it was under very tempestuous circumstances. She had been married to my good friend Dennis Hopper, but the marriage only lasted eight days. I started taking her out because she was depressed. I called Dennis on the phone beforehand, of course, and made sure how he felt; I cooled it out with him. I don't think there's any resentment at all. He's into some other relationship himself. As my feeling for Michelle deepened, I told her up front, "Look, I don't want to constantly define the progress of this relationship. Let's keep it instantaneous." And it's working beautifully. I'm trying to continue to open up and grow as a man and be fulfilled in my relationship with a woman. I've spent a certain amount of time completely unattached and I find that being with someone makes me enjoy my achievements more. I like sharing things and learning how to share. I find when I'm alone I become very crusty and thwarted in a lot of ways. Where my head is at now, expanding sexuality is not most satisfied through promiscuity but through continuously communicating with someone specifically.

[Q] Playboy: Does that imply that you've eliminated all outside sexual experiences?

[A] Nicholson: I haven't had to eliminate anything. You know, I'm not a dead man. Like everyone else, I'm attracted daily to something or someone. But the fact that I'm fulfilled in other areas makes me feel less compelled to find ego gratification through seduction or conquest. Therefore, if I see a twist I like walking down the street, I'm not automatically going to go over and say, who's that, what's her phone number, call her up on the phone, how do you do, I'm doing OK, how are you, can I come over. And by the time I'm over there, I'm already coming in my pants. I don't have that experience anymore. I've had it.

[Q] Playboy: What would your reaction be if Michelle--or a future spouse, for that matter--made it with someone else?

[A] Nicholson: I'm not all that willing to share, but my suspicion is that I wouldn't let something that incidental--if that's what it was--destroy something that's much more substantial to me. I don't know if I can live up to it. As I say, I'm not after all the women anymore. That's a definite change. I've had days in my life, or three or four days at a time, or weeks, when I've been with more than four women. I found that to be an internal lie. You're just not really getting it on past a certain point. It's unrealistic--like going for some endurance record. Everybody knows that's a pure ego trip. A couple of years ago, I told a reporter that for years I'd balled all the chicks I wanted to. Well, man, every chick I ever related to really resented that statement. The Jonathan role in Carnal Knowledge also turned off a lot of chicks. In a casual conversation with me, you could have a certain difficulty in separating my sexual stance from Jonathan's. You can imagine what that does to a chick who sees the film, then meets me. For her, I become that character, the negativity she saw in the film. And she doesn't want to be in a pussy parade. I mean, no chick wants to be a part of some band of cunts. And I certainly don't blame 'em for that.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that make you feel some kind of need to explain what you're really like?

[A] Nicholson: Not really. I've done enough of that. In fact, one problem I'm having lately is that I'm constantly pressured to explain myself to the public. That's why I never do television talk shows; I don't want to lose a certain amount of mystery. The more people know about you, the harder it is for them to believe that you're someone other than yourself. The job of an actor is to create an illusion of being many different people. Why should I go on television and be a part of someone's late-night cookies and milk, telling them what I've done that day, and an amusing story about so-and-so, and what it was like to blah-blah?

[Q] Playboy: Then why are you spilling your guts in this interview?

[A] Nicholson: At this moment, I'm wishing I wasn't. Maybe because I know when the interview is read, it will add as much confusion as to who I am as it will reveal truth.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you reveal as much of yourself in your performances as you do in an interview such as this one? Friends have suggested that in the scene in Five Easy Pieces where you break down and cry in front of your father, with whom you have not communicated for years, you were summoning up memories of your own father. Were you?

[A] Nicholson: Of course; who wouldn't in a scene like that? I had never really had a relationship of any significant longevity with my father. He was very rarely around. He was involved in a personal tragedy of alcoholism, which no one hid from me. I just sort of accepted it as what he was like. He was an incredible drinker. I used to go to bars with him as a child and I would drink 18 sarsaparillas while he'd have 35 shots of Three Star Hennessey. 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. He died the year after I came to California.

[Q] Playboy: Did the absence of a father in the household leave any traumatic imprint on you?

[A] Nicholson: I don't think so, no. If it did at all, it would be that I didn't have anybody to model myself on after my own child was born.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you attend your father's funeral?

[A] Nicholson: I was living in Los Angeles at the time and the financial aspects of the trip made it prohibitive--or at least gave me a reason for it to be prohibitive--and I didn't particularly want to fly East just to go to the funeral. I never attended any funeral until a couple of years ago, when my mother died and I went back to New Jersey.

[Q] Playboy: Had you deliberately avoided funerals?

[A] Nicholson: Yes. Well, none had ever come along that I felt I needed to attend out of respect for the deceased; and I certainly was never attracted to funerals as occasions. When my mother died, the funeral was a good experience for me. I was fully in touch with what was happening. I felt the grief, the loss. After I asked at a certain point for everyone to leave, when she was in the funeral home for what they call the viewing, I stayed for an hour or so sitting next to the casket. I really tried to let it all come through me and see what my feelings were, and I was very enlightened by the experience. I felt that during her lifetime, I had communicated my love very directly to my mother. We had many arguments, like everyone does with any parent, but I felt definitely that I had been understood. There were no hidden grievances between us. I had always fulfilled whatever her expectations of me were, as she had mine of her. I didn't feel any sense of "Oh, I wish I had done this or that" at the moment of bereavement. I felt as good as you could feel about the death of anyone.

[Q] Playboy: Are you able to think ahead to your own death?

[A] Nicholson: My mind has difficulty sinking into that. I always imagine myself locked in a casket underground, scraping at the inside of it, or I sense an incredible feeling of searing agony from being burned. I've never liked the idea of being dead, of short-circuiting out. So I'm trying to keep in shape; my doctor told me last year that I was in dismal condition and should start getting some exercise. Now, every morning, I jog around the reservoir on a small mountain near my house. That way, I feel more secure. But even so, my thinking about death has changed somewhat recently. A dozen times I've been sitting at peace and thinking if I were to the at this point, I would feel good about my life.

[Q] Playboy: Then you have no particular regrets?

[A] Nicholson: It's funny you should ask that, because with my 35th birthday coming up on April 22nd, I've been thinking a great deal about what I've done with my life--the various successes and failures I've had in everyday living as well as in my career. One of my biggest regrets is that I'm not academically trained; it's hard for me to talk in intellectual terms because I'm not a high-powered intellectual. I also regret that I don't have more contact with my daughter. She's eight now. I hope to be having more success in that area. Turning 35 is a major milestone. It's probably the last time you can consider abandoning what you've started and getting into something totally new. I've thought recently about getting out of films and going into some other business, like maybe ranching--an alternative I've considered in the past. One of my problems is that I'm a romantic. I constantly allow myself to believe that things could be better. But one has to examine what one does with that romanticism. Do you try to enhance it? Or do you drop it and become more pragmatic? It's not that I feel I've done less than I'm capable of. I don't want to brand myself a failure. But in the future, I hope I have a little more peace of mind than I've had during my first 35 years.

[Q] Playboy: Would winning an Oscar give you that peace of mind?

[A] Nicholson: I don't know. I'd love to win the Oscar, even though art prizes as such are never that satisfying. And movies are certainly a light art form, so you can't get too serious about them. If I ever do win an Oscar, I don't think it'll be for a long time--certainly not this year. Now that I've had three good performances that people at large have liked, it becomes harder to excite them, because of the standard of excellence you've set for yourself. And familiarity breeds contempt.

[Q] Playboy: Since you've given the prospect of your 35th birthday so much thought, how would you like to spend it?

[A] Nicholson: If I'm in my regular groove, I'll be with a bunch of my friends uncorking a bottle of champagne and smoking a terrific joint. That would help a lot. And, of course, Michelle will be there. No music. Just nice and quiet. Very clean air. But I really don't want to project my 35th birthday, man. Better it should be a surprise--just like whatever I've accomplished in my first 35 years has been a surprise. That'll take the sting out of it and set things up nicely for the next 35. Come to think of it, maybe 35 isn't so old after all.