Playboy Interview: Nick Nolte

It's early morning and Nick Nolte is scrounging for food in the kitchen of his Malibu house. A caged raven, (which fell from a tree, was rescued by Nolte and refused to leave once recovered) is squawking, the five dogs are barking and the cat is hiding under the couch. The 58-year-old actor grabs some yogurt and walks out to the garden, where he picks fresh wild berries, sprinkles them into his dish and enjoys a healthful meal. He has cleansed his body after years of abusing alcohol, psychedelics, mind-altering plants and steroids, and he has taken a keen interest in alternative medicine. "The medical sciences are on the cusp of a big change," he says. "I run around the country hooking up with different doctors and scientists to see what they're doing, to learn why saliva tests are better than blood tests for hormones, to learn more about DNA and how it can signal predispositions for Alzheimer's and heart disease, to understand how protein keeps cellular reconstruction going on. I'm fascinated by all this stuff."

Is this the same Nick Nolte we have come to know over the years, the controversial bad boy of movies, the Robert Mitchum of his generation? While it's true that the actor has always been somewhat of an outsider and iconoclast, most of us are used to the angry, self-destructive Nolte, the one hated by many of his leading ladies. Debra Winger said she never knew if Nolte's personality was courageous or just stupid when they worked together in Cannery Row, Katharine Hepburn warned him about alcohol abuse during Grace Quigley and Julia Roberts called him disgusting after they made I Love Trouble.

Nolte claims that those "disgusting days" are behind him and says he has cured something beside his health: He has resuscitated his faltering career. After a handful of box office misses and some barely noticed though favorably reviewed smaller films, Nolte has recently reasserted himself in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, in Paul Schrader's Affliction and in the upcoming Breakfast of Champions, an Alan Rudolph film based on the book by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That doesn't mean Nolte is any less of a cantankerous free spirit, which is hardly surprising, considering his background. Nolte was raised in Nebraska and starred in baseball, basketball and football throughout high school and at various colleges until his antics got him into trouble with his coaches and with the law. During the Sixties, Nolte found a way to make extra cash by selling phony draft cards to college students. He says he did it strictly to help underage kids get served in bars, but the FBI saw it differently. Agents arrested him for dealing in counterfeit government documents and Nolte was given 45 years in jail and a $75,000 fine. Although the prison term was suspended, he was now a felon, which got him out of the draft and has prevented him from ever voting.

Drinking was something he learned to do at an early age and which he continued to do until he entered Alcoholics Anonymous ten years ago. During his first year out of high school he went to a junior college in eastern Arizona but spent most of his time living in a whorehouse in Nogales, Mexico. For about five years he lived in a commune-like situation with friends from Minnesota, including a woman who later claimed she had lived as Nolte's common-law wife. He denied it, and the woman sued him for palimony around the time The Deep came out. The case was settled out of court.

Nolte discovered acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. While working in repertory, he also developed a passion for photography and for drugs and a skill for welding when he worked for three summers as an ironworker in Los Angeles. Before becoming a star, he did some modeling, even appearing in ads for Clairol. As his acting career took off he drew the attention of directors such as Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet (who said Nolte was headed toward becoming the major American actor). He was also called "the master of the inchoate, the deeply mixed-up" by critic Pauline Kael. Nolte fed that image by avoiding confessional interviews, preferring to say conflicting things at different times ("because there is no way to go through life without people making arbitrary decisions about who the fuck you are") and letting journalists sort out fact from fiction. Some of his tales of excess were true; others weren't.

His long list of memorable roles includes: a Vietnam drug runner in Who'll Stop the Rain, Beat icon Neal Cassady in Heart Beat, a marine biologist in Cannery Row, a photojournalist in Under Fire, a wild cop in 48 Hours, a lawyer stalked by a deranged Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, a paunchy athlete in North Dallas Forty, the shaggy-bearded bum in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a repressed man in need of psychoanalysis in The Prince of Tides, a concerned father in Lorenzo's Oil, a college basketball coach in Blue Chips, a frustrated actor in I'll Do Anything, Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson in Paris, a possessed artist in New York Stories, a racist, psychotic rogue cop in Q and A and an American Nazi sympathizer and propagandist in Mother Night.

He has been married (and divorced) three times and has one son. Nolte's lord-of-the-manor lifestyle was until recently one of the movie industry's secrets: He lives on six acres of land (once three separate properties) with a total of six comfortably furnished houses, a tennis court, sprawling gardens, a greenhouse and an unconnected satellite dish big enough to contact extraterrestrials. When he's not living in a trailer on a movie set, or in Florida visiting his 13-year-old son, Brawley, Nolte can be found in the house he uses as an office, researching the characters he's preparing to play.

To see if he was ready to separate fact from fiction, we sent Contributing EditorLawrence Grobel(who last interviewed David Duchovny) to spend some time with this elusive actor. Grobel reports:

"Nolte is a hard man to pin down. I had been after him for years, and each time he said he was ready to talk, he backed away. Appointments were broken at the last minute, a situation that lasted for months. Finally, he relented. During our first meeting we spent eight hours going from one house to another, from one section of the garden to the next, eating fresh berries and talking about the almost unbelievable life Nick Nolte has led. Somehow he has managed to survive to tell his story."

[Q] Playboy: Terrence Malick disappeared for 20 years until he decided to direct The Thin Red Line. Were you surprised that he chose a World War II story as his return to the screen?

[A] Nolte: No, not after I read James Jones' book and then talked to Terry. It's about being in the middle of a horror and it's antiwar. It's a piece of work that defies all the rules both visually and in terms of storytelling.

[Q] Playboy: Knowing Malick's tendency to procrastinate, were you surprised that the movie actually was released?

[A] Nolte: I was [laughs]. I asked Grant Hill, one of the producers, "What makes you think Terry will bring this film in on time? What's his incentive? He doesn't make films to make money, that's obvious. He's made only two films--one every 17 years--so this might be his last. Why should he stop shooting?" Grant got all upset and said, "No, no, you can't tell me that. Terry will bring it in." I said, "I see no reason why he should."

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any idea why he decided to return to directing?

[A] Nolte: Yeah--he loves it. It's just a long maturing process for Terry [laughs].

[Q] Playboy: Did you get a different feeling being around him compared with other directors?

[A] Nolte: Yes, definitely. It's the same feeling you have with Martin Scorsese. You know that they're really about something. They have a commitment to tell a story that is deeply felt or thought out. In your own egotism you say, "I've got to catch up to the director." But you don't catch up to Marty or Terry. You always have a bit of awe when you function with them.

[Q] Playboy: Does that awe stay throughout filming?

[A] Nolte: It does. There's a deep respect and a touch of fear when you're working with someone who has a vision that you can't quite see. Terry has this tremendous vulnerability that makes him more human and a better director. He's maybe more human than anybody I have run across. His feelings are deep. There is a fragileness about Terry, but it doesn't last.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever ask Malick why he had been such a recluse?

[A] Nolte: I don't have a curiosity about Terry in that way. I relate to him from an artist's standpoint. He's a spiritual man. We would talk about things philosophically, and it was always fascinating because it would go not where you expected it to go, and it was always in-depth. You can feel pain in Terry. For The Thin Red Line we discussed how to explore whatever depth we were trying to get to. He doesn't use his education as a barrier to communication. One of the things in James Jones' book is the transcendence of the commonality of our consciousness that happens in war, into some larger experience, which Jones calls love. That appealed to Terry.

[Q] Playboy: Malick is known for making films that are very striking visually. How does he achieve that look?

[A] Nolte: We were filming a shot in Australia with a young actor, and we reversed it and were shooting over my shoulder onto him. We were in these foothills which had magnificent rolling green grass higher than your waist. I noticed that when the wind would blow, the grass would change color. Terry had arranged soldiers in that grass so they were only revealed when the grass moved a certain way. It was stunning! I turned to Jack Fisk, the set designer, who's worked on all of Malick's films, and I said, "Jesus, that grass is fantastic." And he said, "That's where we focused our art direction. We flew down at the end of winter and we seeded all of these hills with that special grass."

[Q] Playboy: With Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Malick's Thin Red Line, there seems to be a renewed interest in World War II.

[A] Nolte: I'm not quite sure why. It might be that there really hasn't been a serious war in a long time, and it can be visited in a different way. The Malick piece has a certain passion; it's really an antiwar film. James Jones said he learned some things from the experience of war, but that didn't justify the experience. He learned love in a more complete way than in any other place in life. When you're standing next to a guy and in his hands is your life and in your hands is his, and you know you're both going to die, a lot of crap goes out the window, and something truly phenomenal can happen.

[Q] Playboy: How do you compare Malick with Paul Schrader, the director of Affliction?

[A] Nolte: Paul in his exploration is just as complete as Terry, though they're different filmmakers. They are both passionately committed to stories of private hell.

[Q] Playboy: And how would you describe Affliction?

[A] Nolte: Remember Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver? We never really knew who that guy was. Affliction explains it. Paul Schrader wouldn't agree with that. But my character is an afflicted human being, and the film is about his unraveling. It's really quite good.

[Q] Playboy: You received positive critical notice--a Golden Globe nomination and a New York Film Critics Best Actor award--for your role. Where do you rank your performance?

[A] Nolte: It's right up there. It's an either/or situation: Either you're in the role or you have trouble with it. This one was seamless. I was totally involved in it.

[Q] Playboy: How about your latest movie, Breakfast of Champions?

[A] Nolte: This is an interesting story. Alan Rudolph gave me Breakfast of Champions about a year ago. I loved the book, but I thought it was going to take a year to raise the money, that we'd have to fight and scrape. I didn't want to go through that. Then Alan got a call from Bruce Willis, who was looking for something good. Alan sent him Breakfast of Champions and Bruce flipped. He said he'd get the money, $10 million, to do the film. Then Alan got Albert Finney, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly--this wonderful cast. Then Liz Smith said in an article that Kurt Vonnegut had said that Nick Nolte should play all the leads in movies based on his books. Bruce read that and got upset. Alan said, "Nick planted that." Alan then called me and said, "You're going to hear from Bruce Willis, because I just told him you planted that item with Liz Smith." I said, "Fuck, I don't want Bruce's wrath on me." Then he told me who had been cast and I said, "Jesus Christ, I'm a little jealous." He said, "Fuck you, you passed. Don't give me this shit now." I asked, "What else is left?" And he said, "One of the best roles of the film, Harry Le Sabre." "The transvestite?" "Yeah." "OK, I'll play that." So that's how I got in.

[Q] Playboy: Did Vonnegut really say you should be in all his films? You had already starred in Mother Night, based on one of his books.

[A] Nolte: No. Kurt didn't know where that comment came from either. Kurt is in Breakfast of Champions, and he's really good. It's a real pleasure to get to know a novelist whose work I admire. It's been an integral part of my growth and development.

[Q] Playboy: Were movies important to you as a kid?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, that's one thing we did in the small towns in Iowa--we went to movies. I grew up with radio, no television. So we spent a lot of time in movie theaters.

[Q] Playboy: Your sister said that in your mid-20s you moved in with your mother in Phoenix, locked yourself in a room for a year and taught yourself to read. Is it true you couldn't read until then?

[A] Nolte: It's true that I hadn't done much reading. And then I had a breakdown. That happens to me every seven or ten years: I just fall apart, wondering why I'm doing this, this and that. I have these mental breakdowns and I just crumble. It's scary. That is why I used to wear medical clothes all the time--I wore scrubs to say I'm ready for the institution at any time.

[Q] Playboy: Can you describe what these breakdowns are like?

[A] Nolte: It's a reordering of the personality. About every seven years a real inspiring truth will descend upon me and restructure my life.

[Q] Playboy: Is it a truth that tells you the past was a lie?

[A] Nolte: I used to think that, then I would grab hold of the new truth so hard that it would last for the next seven years. I've since gotten a little stability because I don't hang on to things so hard. I'm much kinder with the past.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the past. Besides seeing movies, what did you do as a kid?

[A] Nolte: Growing up in small-town Iowa, you had a real big avenue for imagination. You could ride your bike into the woods, fish underneath a bridge, spend all day by the river or creeks. Sometimes I'd catch snakes and carry them home in the handlebars of my bicycle. I'd keep them in cages or pickle them. If it was a rare snake I'd kill it and shoot it with a hypodermic needle full of formaldehyde and coil it in ajar. I had a rural upbringing. A big shock was when the family moved to Omaha, Nebraska when I was in eighth grade and my sister was going into high school. After that experience she went East and never came back. She stayed in New York.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get along with your sister?

[A] Nolte: Yeah. She would always have her girlfriends over and they would sleep nude in the summers. I always found an excuse to get into that room when they were sleeping.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that the Fifties created a mentality of no one wanting to rock the boat, which led to rage.

[A] Nolte: As a Fifties child I grew up pretty angry. The schools were very regimented, the attitudes conservative. I call it the Age of the Girdle: Women allowed themselves to be trussed. It was a real on-the-edge period. I was frightened all through that time: frightened by the atomic bomb bullshit, frightened by the men. My father was a huge man, 6'6", and his physical size frightened me.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't your father have some colorful brothers?

[A] Nolte: Yeah. One, Uncle Cole, raised jack mules. He had five wives. His last wife was Goldie, who got so jealous when Cole would sexually arouse the horses to screw the donkeys that she would drink iodine. Eventually she ran off with the local barber.

[Q] Playboy: What did your mother do?

[A] Nolte: She was a merchandise buyer for a department store--sportswear. She worked all through Iowa, Nebraska, Arizona, California. She had to buck the Fifties mentality that women stayed at home. So while my father was trying to play traditional head of the family, my mother was breaking every rule possible. I remember her battles with the merchandising managers, who were men. She would build up great departments, very tasteful, then they would come in and take control of them.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't your parents wind up divorced?

[A] Nolte: Eventually, when my sister and I were in our 20s. It wasn't a shock because we always knew it would happen. These were people who were preoccupied with their own interests. But nobody was happy about it. It was just part of the great American dispersal of family that happened and is still happening today. Women work, and the whole idea of the family structure is different.

[Q] Playboy: What did you discover about yourself in high school?

[A] Nolte: That I had to get the hell out of there. I didn't get along well with authority figures and teachers, and my school was very strict and distrustful of individuality. Everything during that time was superficial: the music, the presentation of family in all the TV shows. The Sixties were some form of a revolution, a realignment of the nation within the youth, beginning with a resistance to the Vietnam war that defied authority. Then began the social experimentation. I don't think we give the Sixties enough credit today.

[Q] Playboy: You went to high school in Omaha. Weren't you once kicked off the football team for being obnoxious?

[A] Nolte: Not for being obnoxious. It was basically because a coach didn't like my individuality. That's not the only time I was kicked out of something.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us.

[A] Nolte: There used to be this football camp in Minnesota, with kids from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, South and North Dakota, and a shitload of kids from Oklahoma. There was a tremendous rivalry between the other outsiders and the Oklahoma kids. The Oklahoma guys were obnoxious because they were so gung-ho to work as a team. So us guys from the other states would gang together too. At the beginning of the summer session we would shit into paper sacks and tie them underneath their beds. They wouldn't find them until halfway through the summer. Their whole chalet would smell something terrible. Then the shit would hit the fan when they tried to discover who did it. One year they decided it was me, so one of the coaches came to me and said, "You're going home and I'm going to make sure your coach knows you did this." I was forever being sent home [laughs].

[Q] Playboy: How many different colleges did you attend?

[A] Nolte: Quite a few. There was Arizona State, Eastern Arizona Junior College, Pasadena City College and Phoenix College--the fable is that I went from school to school to play football.

[Q] Playboy: Did you?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, I played at all those schools.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have memorable moments in sports?

[A] Nolte: Oh yeah. Scored the last shot in several basketball games, got carried off. Scored winning touchdowns. Picked up a fumble, scored a touchdown. When I was playing shortstop in Little League there was one year when everything was in sync between my body, my glove and the ball coming off the bat. I could not miss a ball and I knew it. I made phenomenal fielding plays. Nothing matches that, and it went on for a whole season.

[Q] Playboy: How about your first encounter with the law? Weren't you jailed for reckless driving?

[A] Nolte: I went to a junior college in a little town called Thatcher in Arizona. Right off the bat the coach came to me and said there was a problem with my reckless driving, that there was a citizen's arrest for me. But he told me not to worry about it because he had it all worked out with the justice of the peace. So we went to see the justice of the peace, and I was told, "You're going to spend the rest of the semester in jail after school. You'll be picked up right after football practice and taken to the Safford jail"--which was in the next town over--"spend the night there and go back to school each morning." That was their solution! I got over to Safford and found myself among real people, including the cops at the jail. So I would just go riding with them at night and meet all the people in Safford, go to the bars. I did that the whole semester. And as soon as that time was up I moved right out of Thatcher and over to Safford, behind a jockey's house. The jockey had a son, and I got to know them. The jockey ran these little horse races in Arizona. I'd bet on them big time--$25, $50. That was my routine in 1959, my first year away from home. Not quite Jack Kerouac, but it was close.

[Q] Playboy: How did you wind up living in a whorehouse in Nogales, Mexico?

[A] Nolte: That was right out of high school, when I first went down to Thatcher. While I was there I would go to Mexico on the weekends. I got $4000 from my grandmother for college and spent it all in the whorehouse. That's the education I had. It was a great liberation.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have a strong attachment to anybody in the whorehouse?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, there was one gal. I really liked to get up in the morning, give 50 cents to the mariachis, have some eggs, drink beer and then sit around all afternoon.

[Q] Playboy: How long did you stay there?

[A] Nolte: I lasted one semester. Got sent home on a train. I had a pillowcase full of beer. Went back home to Nebraska.

[Q] Playboy: No diseases? No crabs?

[A] Nolte: No. The only time I caught any kind of venereal disease was from a Miss New York. It's true. We did it on a trampoline and she was laughing the whole time, saying, "Oh Jesus, we shouldn't be doing this." I caught gonorrhea from Miss New York. Never got it from a Mexican whore.

[Q] Playboy: Not to cast any doubt, Nick, but you've been known to tell stories about yourself that don't always check out.

[A] Nolte: I have always been a bit of a Roger-dodger. Rather than going silent with a journalist, limiting the verbiage, I like to put out mixed things and let the journalist pick them. My experience has always been that journalism is a highly subjective form. You're always at war with the media, privately, because they wield so much power--power to undo something that maybe you've worked hard to create. They're trying to see you apart from your work, as a person, and that's the last thing you want them to see.

[Q] Playboy: So you lie?

[A] Nolte: I happen to think that the lie is the truth. I haven't been able to find anybody who tells the truth. There is mythologizing in everybody's life.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of the lies that you have concocted over the years?

[A] Nolte: I don't think anybody believes me. Ever since I had to lose my anonymity and become public, there were two things I could do: either totally hide from the experience, or find some way to comfortably exist with it. You can't get anybody to view you the way you want to be viewed. I decided not to struggle with that impossibility. So I basically invented things.

[Q] Playboy: We'll keep that in mind. Between sports, college-hopping, whoring and run-ins with the law, how did you discover acting?

[A] Nolte: In the early Sixties I went to school at Pasadena City College and was introduced to acting through someone at the Pasadena Playhouse. Then, during one of my breakdowns, I got to see my internal processes creating my own character. And that's how acting got to be a hook. I said, "Oh my God. This goes here, that goes there," and then I got right into Stanislavsky.

[Q] Playboy: Without knowing Stanislavsky?

[A] Nolte: Without knowing Stanislavsky. I opened the pages of his first book and thought, Yes, yes, yes. And I started to shed my societal illusions. I went into this profession so that I could bring my darkness to it. I couldn't do that in a WASP society. I could do it in Mexico, but I would have had to have been an outlaw. My introduction to the stage came when I was mentally sick. I was psychologically damaged and the only place that felt safe to me was the stage. No matter how terrified I was of it, I knew the minute I hit it that I would be in a world I could begin to comprehend and feel secure in.

[Q] Playboy: Quite unlike the world outside, where Vietnam loomed over everyone of draft age.

[A] Nolte: Vietnam was the turning point in my generation's lives. I was in Minneapolis, around Lake Minnetonka, during that time, and I'd sit around with the guys and listen to records, get stoned and argue about moral responsibility and whether to go off to Canada, go to jail or accept being drafted. Our concentration was Vietnam. I felt there was nothing moral going on, so why play uppity about it? Just get to your physical and tell them you're gay or puke or take a bunch of speed for two days. I knew this guy who had another guy break his arm before his physical. Twice he did it.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't this when you got into trouble selling phony draft cards?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, but that was an apolitical act, before the politicalization of Nick Nolte. The draft cards were good IDs because they had no photographs, they weren't laminated, you just had to sign them. We'd use them to drink in bars. If a guy had to go off and die, he could certainly get a goddamn drink. I would get the cards in a clandestine manner--I'd meet a guy in downtown Omaha, and he'd have a hundred in a pack and I'd give him $5 apiece and resell them for $10 or $15. I'd take orders at fraternities. I went around the Midwest doing pretty good with this, not realizing the political ramifications. As the Vietnam war escalated, some guys started using the cards to delay getting drafted. The draft board would call you in and you'd show them the phony card and say, "Geez, this doesn't match up with the birth date you've got," and they'd say, "Well, go home, we'll figure it out." You could buy some time that way. Then the FBI came in with a series of questions I really hadn't thought about.

[Q] Playboy: What did they ask you?

[A] Nolte: They wanted to know where the counterfeit government documents were coming from. I said, "What do you mean? Draft cards?" They said yeah, and asked who was making them. I told them I had gotten them from some guy, didn't know his name. They said I was full of shit. They let me go, then came back and arrested me on seven counts of counterfeiting government documents. I got 45 years in jail and a $75,000 fine. Then they suspended the jail term, put me on probation.

[Q] Playboy: Which means you can't vote, right?

[A] Nolte: Can't vote, can't own property. I was a felon. But I got my deferment out of it. I was immediately classified 4-F.

[Q] Playboy: So instead of wearing a soldier's uniform you wound up in LA as an ironworker?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, I put in a lot of the storm drains in Los Angeles.

[Q] Playboy: Then you became a photographer. How serious were you about that?

[A] Nolte: Very. Besides working in the theater, I shot photographs for five years. It was tremendous training for film acting, in the sense that you know lenses, framing and light.

[Q] Playboy: In 1973 you appeared in William Inge's The Last Pad. Did Inge's suicide on opening night affect you?

[A] Nolte: Yeah. Everybody was shocked. Bill was real despondent at the end of his career. He was chronically depressed. He felt terribly beat-up by the theater world in New York.

[Q] Playboy: How do you cope?

[A] Nolte: Well, I started drinking at the age of 16. I come from a family of drinkers. They would party through the weekend. So 15 of us kids would all be together and we would watch the adults and that was the lifestyle. I was fine with it until it just stopped working about nine years ago.

[Q] Playboy: Did you stop because your drinking frightened your son?

[A] Nolte: No, you don't stop because of other people. Nothing outside affects an alcoholic. I just reached a point where the pain was unbearable. My body couldn't take it, my mind couldn't take it. The problem was me, not just alcohol. I was using that substance to deal with anything that was difficult. I used alcohol as pain medication, as suffering medication, as love medication, as lonely tonic, as isolation tonic. I used it for everything.

[Q] Playboy: Did you and your buddies really get on planes after the bars closed just to keep drinking in another time zone?

[A] Nolte: Not only to drink but to keep flying. I had my first credit cards and we would go from airport to airport all over the country. You'd pick up a waitress somewhere and she'd travel with you for four or five days, then you'd end up somewhere like Oklahoma and wonder, How do we get home? By then we'd have gone from California up to Seattle over to Minneapolis and into Dallas and then Oklahoma.

[Q] Playboy: When you made Grace Quigley with Katharine Hepburn, she called you irresponsible when you showed up late on the set.

[A] Nolte: Oh, she tore into me. I had been out all night riding around with New York FBI guys, going to little gambling joints, scaring people. And I was 20 minutes late for an early screen test. I hadn't been to sleep, and Hepburn just got in my shit. "You can't come in here and be...." And I'm back at her: "Well, for Christ's sake, I'm here now." We were testing out in the ocean to see how we were going to sink at the end of the film. And she would look at me and say, "I hope you drown." Shit like that. But after the day was over she came up to me and said, "Now listen, Nick. You know Spencer drank and we had a dickens of a time with Spencer. But he never drank when we were working." I said, "Yeah, I know. I just got caught." She said, "Well, OK, you need to get some sleep. I have a doctor and I can get you some Thorazine." She's so fucking classy, this gal. I said no. She knew what Thorazine does. She knew it would make me catatonic for a fucking year if I took it! You can't move on that drug. So I'm thinking, What the fuck is this broad up to? Thorazine? That is for psychotic people who are breaking so bad that they have to be strapped down. So when she walked away I thought, Wow, OK, tomorrow, no more booze.

[Q] Playboy: What about drugs? When did you first try cocaine?

[A] Nolte: I don't know. It was never my drug of choice, but it became a nemesis that I really had to battle. We were the psychedelic generation, we were into mescaline, marijuana. Coke was good for the psychological state I was in. I was already moving in a real fast world--a little bit scary, a lot of emphasis on things that aren't really important--so the coke fit right in. Cocaine mimics a certain kind of creative fire that ultimately will burn you out.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you stand today with drugs?

[A] Nolte: I did all my experimenting in the Sixties and Seventies. I haven't smoked a joint in 15 or 20 years. The few times that I changed my mindset by changing the chemistry of my mind, I found it a narrowing of awareness rather than an expansion. The reason I started taking drugs was to expand my consciousness. As long as it provided me that feeling, it worked well. I had a good relationship with plants and different pharmaceuticals. But through the years it became a self-centered activity, and I started using harder drugs to close off the pain and suffering of life--in other words, to escape life. Then I got addicted and in trouble.

[Q] Playboy: If you no longer drink or take drugs, what vices do you have left?

[A] Nolte: Ah, that's the mystery! And only an addict would say something like that. When the addict gives up everything, the whole world opens up, because he has closed himself down so much.

[Q] Playboy: You got your start in Rich Man, Poor Man on television. But after that you turned down a lot of TV offers. Why did you do that?

[A] Nolte: I wasn't really interested in television. I was going to do film if I could get a film.

[Q] Playboy: What films were you trying to get?

[A] Nolte: There was Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Billy Friedkin's Sorcerer, George Roy Hill's Slap Shot. I was up for all of them, but nothing happened. So I sat for a year and the only thing they kept coming at me with was The Deep. I kept saying, "No fucking way." But finally, after about a year and a half, I took it.

[Q] Playboy: And you were never happy about that?

[A] Nolte: Boy, I was an unruly son of a bitch on that. I was miserable. Bob Shaw used to grab me and say, "It's only a treasure picture, Nick." Bob and I hung out a lot. He was very despondent about his acting. He thought of himself as a novelist and was kind of pissed off and angry that he had spent a lot of his career doing things like The Buccaneers when Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney were doing Lawrence of Arabia and Tom Jones. But we matched up perfectly. God, we had a good time.

[Q] Playboy: Around that time you turned down Superman. Was it because you saw it as The Deep in the air?

[A] Nolte: It didn't make any sense to do Superman. It was a silly thing. I thought the cutest way of rejecting it was to say I had to play him as a schizophrenic, because he thinks he's two different people--and he does.

[Q] Playboy: After Who'll Stop the Rain you were offered $1 million for Fort Apache, the Bronx. That was a lot of money then. Why didn't you take it?

[A] Nolte: Because it was a 300-page script and a fucking mess. It was way out of my territory to play a Fort Apache cop. It didn't make any sense. Paul Newman played the role I was supposed to play. I remember the producer getting all pissed off and screaming at me, "How dare you turn down a million dollars!"

[Q] Playboy: How dare you?

[A] Nolte: It didn't make any difference to me. When I was young I didn't want anybody to perceive that I was having any difficulty dealing with a fucking monster. I'd just say, "I'm fine, I'm doing OK." They're coming at you with millions of dollars and then somebody else is saying, "You have to really work with Scorsese." It's difficult to sort through. The only time money came into play was after Cape Fear and The Prince of Tides. Oddly enough I was fine with whatever money I made until then, and then I got sucker punched. They upped my salaries to huge amounts and that's all I could focus on for a couple of pictures. And then you get miserable and sick of doing things you don't want to do. That's why I like to talk to young actors. I always tell them, "This fucking shit's a bitch." Because they're thrown out into this world where it's a battle for them to maintain connections with what they love to do and against the people who treat it as totally economic.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds like you have a proper handle on the advantages of fame and stardom.

[A] Nolte: Fame is a demon. It's "I want." You want to be something. Another whole being gets created in fame. It takes on a life of its own and you can't do anything about it, not a fucking thing--except to quit and get out. It destroys any perspective you have in life, any connection. It inflates your self-worth. And being a star, where the studios provide you with the planes, the nannies and the assistants, is destructive to the process and takes a tremendous toll on the spontaneity of the actors themselves. I don't mean spontaneity on the set, I mean spontaneity as a real human being. When that's no longer there, your whole structure crumbles. The other thing is, once you set up that star structure most of your energy goes into maintaining it, not into being free to make a choice to go do a film that's got only a $5 million budget. Eddie Murphy came to me and said, "You know, Nick, I would like to do some of those small, really gritty pictures." I said, "Well, Eddie, the budget doesn't even come close to your salary." He said, "Oh, I can't cut my salary." And if you talk to Nicholson or anybody else they'll say, "Don't ever cut your fucking salary, man."

[Q] Playboy: Don't you prefer to hang with older actors, such as Rod Steiger and James Coburn?

[A] Nolte: Almost all the older actors I meet I want to hang out with. I see Rod a lot. Coburn was a lot of fun. Alan Arkin's a good friend. On Cape Fear Mitchum was fascinating. He told me a great story about Ava Gardner. George Cukor was directing them, and while he was setting up a shot Ava was sitting with Mitchum. She kept saying, "Bob, when are you going to fuck me?" "Oh Jesus, Ava... I don't know." And Cukor overheard this and came running out and said, "The man protests too much." Mitchum told me that part of the story one day and left it like that, so the next day I asked him, "Well, did you ever fuck Ava?" He said, "Oh no, too addictive." That is one of the greatest compliments you can give an actress. Too addictive. She must have been that kind of beauty.

[Q] Playboy: Are you seeing anyone now?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, I have people in my life. I've been going with Vicki Lewis--who's on News Radio--for six years.

[Q] Playboy: And how do you feel about the relationship?

[A] Nolte: It grows, it changes, it's good. She lives with me.

[Q] Playboy: Are you more comfortable alone or with someone?

[A] Nolte: Equally. I can't do without my aloneness and I can't do without someone, either. I need relationships to mirror what I am. And I need aloneness to be what I am. It's all about seeing who you are.

[Q] Playboy: You've said you've never been able to get a handle on the male-female thing. Why do you suppose it's been such a slippery concept to grasp?

[A] Nolte: Because of the false way we view relationships between men and women. We're taught that marriage is the sanctity of the relationship, but historically marriage is not a real old concept. Men and women really haven't spent that much time together, and we expect them to fucking get along? It's absurd! So I question the structure of marriage. There seems to be an inherent conflict between a man and a woman shortly after the marriage begins. I don't see any reason not to question the relationship between men and women.

[Q] Playboy: One of your most successful films was 48 Hours. How did that come about?

[A] Nolte: Oh Jesus, it was the last thing I wanted to do. The original script had two white guys. Nobody took anybody out of prison. I went to San Francisco and got with some detectives up there, and one guy told me the whole story about getting someone out of prison. Then Walter Hill told me about this actor he met in New York named Eddie Murphy. I hadn't heard of him; I didn't watch Saturday Night Live.

[Q] Playboy: Was the sequel, Another 48 Hours, which earned $81 million, the highest-grossing picture that you've appeared in?

[A] Nolte: That or Prince of Tides. Another 48 Hours is one of those sell-out, good-for-the-money things. Miserable experience, for Eddie and Walter Hill too. There was no way of doing anything good, even if we'd started with the best of intentions, which we didn't. Eddie by that time had evolved into a mega-mega-mega star and was encumbered by entourages and didn't come to work until noon as standard procedure.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever behaved in such a prima donna way?

[A] Nolte: No, never have. One, because I've never reached that kind of glorification; two, that isn't my intent. My intent isn't to do stories that I think the audience will go to. I do stories that appeal to me.

[Q] Playboy: Such as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, in which you played the homeless bum, Jerry. Is it true you prepared by sleeping on heating grates and not bathing?

[A] Nolte: Shit, that was the most fun part of it. That's why I wanted to do it! We'd drive down to the mission in LA and we'd see guys being deloused and put through Christian indoctrination. I stayed a night down there. I let my beard grow for two months, lived in the street, didn't wash, drank wine with some of those guys, went through some really hopeless moments.

[Q] Playboy: You also had an unconventional diet. You dined on dog food for a while. Have any favorites?

[A] Nolte: Gourmet Pup out of Beverly Hills, $7 a can. Ingredients purer than some canned stews. I ate that. The dog in the film was a vegetarian.

[Q] Playboy: Jessica Lange said that during Cape Fear you drew a lot from your personal history and what you were going through at the time. Can acting help heal personal wounds?

[A] Nolte: I was going through a divorce during filming, so in order to deal with it I played it out in the open and then took it right into my character. I put out a big garbage can so the crew and everybody else could donate money. I called it Camper Divorce. All I fucking got from the crew was a Canadian dollar, some quarters and an old broken watch.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about acting with and being directed by Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides. Was it scary? Was it enlightening?

[A] Nolte: Barbra's great will and determination and fight to get down in the trenches--that comes from her feminine side having to fight in the male world. The passion of that battle is part of her brilliance. She was totally thorough, totally prepared and researched. She knew exactly how she wanted to tell the story and was tremendously connected to the material. What appealed to her was the story of a man and the women involved in his life and how they played out in this relationship around a theme of love. I liked her discipline. She was never satisfied, would always search more. We'd rehearse and have versions of scenes. People would go, "Oh my God, she's got four versions of this scene!" It was kind of an agonizing process. I would get a little frustrated, but it was always, ultimately, the right way to go.

[Q] Playboy: For The Prince of Tides, you were nominated for an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organization you're not a member of. Why aren't you?

[A] Nolte: I don't like the concept, the competition, the picking of actors for best performance of the year. You can't make that kind of a judgment. It smacks of unfairness. It's popularized and highly commercial. I have nothing against a group of actors getting together to honor each other's good work for the year, but I'm really opposed to allowing the whole world in on the process. I don't think you can pick the best picture of the year, or the best actor.

[Q] Playboy: Would you have turned down the Oscar had you won it?

[A] Nolte: No, I don't have that kind of political willpower. I don't have anything to prove in an action against the Academy. I just don't agree with it. Listen, it's a terrible time for this town. It's a terrible time for the business. On the commercial side it's a great thing to expose millions of people to the film industry. But everybody turns into a maniac. Everybody drops his persona and becomes terribly greedy. They all are anyway, but it really comes out at that time.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever had a plan for what you want for yourself?

[A] Nolte: On some levels, yeah, because there are so many people operating inside me. There's the surface Nick who wants the attention and money and wants to get laid; there's another Nick who knows all that is crap, that there's no certainty in any of it--that the moment after sex you're again back to the anxious being. After the moment of making the money you have to continue (concluded on page 168)Nick Nolte(continued from page 66) to make more to feel any kind of security, and there's never enough to take away the essential insecurity of life. Same thing with recognition. Then there's the Nick who wants to let go of all that.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever felt a kind of nameless dread?

[A] Nolte: Yeah, it's a vague feeling, coming from an archaic criminal background, some kind of crime or bestial kind of darkness that I don't want to face. It's in my nightmares, in my daydreams, in my thoughts if I'm quick enough to catch it. You want to walk around the world feeling good, you don't want to feel pain or fear--and all the work that goes into that side leaves this big monster that haunts you. That's what I get.

[Q] Playboy: What's the dark side of the American dream?

[A] Nolte: Success and achievement. That is what will bring America down.

[Q] Playboy: Ever achieve any success on the golf course?

[A] Nolte: I haven't played golf in five years. Last time I played I had a 54" driver with a psychedelic green shaft, and somebody took it. It was fun to hit with. The idea was to see how far away I could get from the ball and still make contact.

[Q] Playboy: What's the farthest you've ever hit a golf ball?

[A] Nolte: 350 yards.

[Q] Playboy: When we began you warned us that you often make up stories. How much of our conversation have you invented?

[A] Nolte: A large part of it! I've been far too serious, and any time I'm too serious it's got to be full of shit. Now I don't know when specifically, so I can't say I've looked you in the eye and lied to you. I haven't done that. I just know that some of the things I've said are part fact, part imagination, part hope, part desire, part life. What I've told you is an interpretation that, psychologically, I'm probably feeling comfortable with right now. Reality is an evolving thing. There's a great desire in man to achieve some kind of certainty, and that's where all the illusion comes from. There's a great desire in me to feel permanence and certainty, and that's where I get in trouble, that's where I get serious. It's disconcerting. I've had some journalists get real pissed off about it. But the fact is, nobody tells the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Not even before God?

[A] Nolte: I have difficulty with God and with beliefs. You have to ask the question, If God created man in his own image, what kind of an image is God?

[Q] Playboy: If there is a God, what do you hope he overlooks about you?

[A] Nolte: I hope God would overlook that he made me in his image, because he sure fucked up.

When you're standing next to a guy and you know you're both going to die, a lot of crap goes out the window.

I happen to think that the lie is the truth. I haven't been able to find anybody who tells the truth. There is mythologizing in everybody's life.

The next day I asked him, "Well, did you ever fuck Ava?" He said, "Oh no, too addictive." She must have been that kind of beauty.