Bucket List: Nicholson, at 70, isn’t ready to slow down yet

Jack Nicholson has a little of the devil in him.

Maybe a lot. 

He delights in being Hollywood’s perennial bad boy, the “Easy Rider” escapee from conformity for more than  four decades.

Mischievous – complete with that devilish grin.

Never mind that he’s 70.

“When I look at the mirror in the morning, I can’t see myself anyway,” he quipped. “When I turned 70, it was the first time in years that I felt younger than my age. I have no idea what it feels like to be 70.”

Looking straight into Jack Nicholson’s eyes is a rare opportunity. Usually, whenever in public, he wears dark sunglasses. Today, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, he’s wearing small, black-framed glasses with clear lenses, and he’s in a talkative mood.

This is not the sleepy, sly, deadpan tease he’s been in some earlier interviews. This is not the actor who, upon occasion, we have thought most intriguingly reminded us of the contemplative Bogart. He may be kidding us a bit because he keeps calling his interviewer “Sir,” a gesture that makes us feel particularly unworthy. (And, after all, in spite of his partying ability, he is older). 

He’s bald and has  a paunch that he doesn’t hide, all topped off by that famous, devilish Jack Nicholson grin that he’ll flash at the slightest encouragement.

He laughed at the alarm he set off at last year’s Oscars when he showed up with a completely bald pate. His head had been shaved for the surgery scene in his latest movie, “The Bucket List,” but he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone.

“Hair never concerned me, one way or the other,” he said. 

He is one of the wealthiest actors in the world, complete with an art collection worth millions – heavy on the Picassos.

And yet, he said: “You bet I collect Social Security! Every cent.”

Currently, he’s playing a wealthy, wise-cracking cancer patient who makes friends with an auto mechanic who is his roommate in the hospital. They take off, together, to whoop it up around the world, defying the doctors who say they have from six months to a year to live. They are determined to carry out their bucket list – a list of things they want to do before they die (sky dive, auto race, see the Taj Mahal).

His “Bucket List” co-star is Oscar winner Morgan Freeman . The director is Rob Reiner, who directed Nicholson in “A Few Good Men,” which gave us the line: “You can’t handle the truth!”

“The Last Detail” in Norfolk

We first met Nicholson  34 years ago at the bus station in downtown Norfolk. Back then, he was thinner, sporting a moustache and a Navy crew cut. The year was 1973, and he was filming a scene for “The Last Detail” at the concession stand in what was then a combination of the Greyhound and Trailways terminal.

He was playing a tough, career Navy man who was assigned to escort a pitiable prisoner, played by Randy Quaid, from Norfolk to a Navy jail in New England. They shot scenes on Hampton Boulevard as the sailors went from the naval station  to the bus station.

When a Virginian-Pilot photographer asked Nicholson to step outside because the light wasn’t right in the bus terminal, he resisted. “We’re making a movie here. Haven’t you ever heard of flash bulbs?”

Today, Nicholson is more friendly  but still with the flashing eyes that let you know he’s ready to get away with something, if at all possible.

“I was pretty full of grits back then. Intense actor and all that, I guess. But we made pictures that were meant to last. It’s sad what’s happened to movies today.”

His classics include the likes of “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Chinatown,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Terms of Endearment,” “The Shining” (with the line: “Heere’s Johnny!”), “Prizzi’s Honor,” “Batman,” “As Good as  It Gets” and the most recent Oscar-winning movie “The Departed.”

Jack and Oscar

He has received 12 Academy Award nominations, more than any other male actor, winning three (for “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Terms of Endearment” and “As Good as  It  Gets”). Important, to him, is the fact that he has proved longevity by winning an Oscar in each of the past three decades.

Still, “I was robbed plenty of times at the Oscars. Why don’t they give me one of those nostalgia Oscars they give to old folks?

“I love the Oscar show. To me, it’s a no-lose situation. Everyone wins. I support them. In the old days, I used to love to go, and you’d see Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and I got to know Bob Hope. We don’t have that kind of glamour anymore. Now, they campaign for the Oscars for five months ahead of time. It kind of dilutes it.”

He wasn’t upset that he wasn’t nominated for “The Departed.” “I’m not sure I was the best thing in that. For years, I was considered a rebel or an outsider or some kind of unwashed being, and I always knew I wasn’t going to win. I was nominated a half dozen times before I won. (Actually, five.) Then, suddenly I was OK. Like joining the country club."

Career and family

Off screen, he’s had five children, ranging in age  from 47 to 15, with four women.

“They’re great, and they’ve done it on their own. I don’t think I motivate them. As a parent, I kind of believe in freedom, for them, and me. It’s a risk.”

His long time relationship with Anjelica Huston ended in 1990 when he fathered a child with starlet Rebecca Broussard. He was married to Sandra Knight and linked with the much younger Lara Flynn Boyle. 

Nicholson grew up in small-town New Jersey. When he went to visit a relative in Los Angeles, he never went back. His first job with a movie studio was as a mail boy in MGM’s cartoon department.

Getting work in B movies, he wrote films for Roger Corman and appeared only occasionally as an actor for years. His early TV credits included two episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.” His first movie was “The Cry Baby Killer” in 1958, followed by things like “The Raven” (with Vincent Price in 1963), a bit as the dentist in “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960) and, in 1967, “Hells Angels on Wheels.”

As the movies began to catch up to the emerging counter culture, he wrote the drug-tripping “The Trip” in 1967 and, for the group The Monkees,” “Head” (1968).

He considered himself mainly a writer who appeared  only occasionally as an actor until, at age 32, he got his big break.

“Overnight, baby. Right?” He  flashes that grin to remind us that the dues have been paid.

It was a small part as a Southern, square  lawyer who makes a bid for freedom by running off with bikers Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider” (1969). His charisma and on-the-edge charm made him a star and, yes, it did seem overnight to those who had never caught his underground, B-movie  career.

It was not until he was 37, and his growing fame led reporters to look into his life, that he learned  June Nicholson, the woman he had always thought was his sister, was actually his mother. He had been raised by his grandparents, whom he thought were his parents. He never knew his father.

He never saw himself as a counter-culture icon, although his films have often pictured him as an outsider.

“I never thought of film as something to study, just something to do,” he said. “In an earlier generation, we saw new Ingmar Bergman movies and Federico Fellini movies every week. Masterpieces like that were imported from foreign countries. You don’t get them now. My kids haven’t seen some of my movies."

Making “The Bucket List”

Freeman, when asked, said, “The best thing about working with Jack is that he doesn’t get up early. On his pictures, you don’t start until 10 a.m. ”

“And that’s too early,” Nicholson countered.

As for his own “bucket list,” Nicholson has far from fulfilled it.

“I haven’t traveled much because I’m busy making movies all the time. That was one of the attractions of taking this picture. I noticed that the script called for a safari in Africa, riding a bike on the Great Wall of China and a trek to the Taj Mahal. I was ready for all those visits, but the entire thing was filmed in Hollywood. They used computers to simulate all those scenes. They built the Great Wall in the studio. A bummer.”

His numero uno bucket list priority, though, is to see the great pyramids of Egypt.

“Over two years ago, I signed up, at a pretty high price, for a concert Luciano Pavarotti was proposing to do at the pyramids, but his death ended that, and I’ve never been to Egypt.”

Life has disappointments, even for Jack Nicholson.

But that trip is on his bucket list.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com