‘I don't know, but John Reed always seemed right to me,’ I said. ‘The First World War was about prophets.’
Jim, who was not to know that I was only aware of this because I was a fan of Reds, flashed me a vulpine grin which sent me floating up Parkway that evening eight feet off the ground. I had won a smile from a man who knew how to repair the flaws in dialectical materialism.
Not Reds for Warren Beatty – what kind of book do you think this is? For Jack Nicholson! Warren Beatty … The man with the loveliest, slowest pulse in cinema versus an actor who is forever trying to hoodwink you that his heartbeat is faster than it actually is. The guy who always acts less handsome than he is versus the preener: you're always mentally cleaning up Nicholson's face and mentally trying to ruffle Beatty's. The vulnerable versus the unhurtable. The living versus the dead. Nicholson is the greatest actor since, let's say, the time between the Beatles' ninth LP and the birth of Zinedine Zidane, whose work is founded on a sense of humour. They're not terribly funny, those geniuses whose names end in ‘o’, are they? Here are ten more words to kill any smile – Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman. Serious business, great acting. Nicholson plays a small role in Reds as the playwright Eugene O'Neill being manipulated by Beatty's lover Diane Keaton into thinking he's seducing her. It's all rather sad and Chekhovian. She tells him that Beatty has gone away, leaving her to get on with her own things here in this beach house on Long Island.
‘What are they?’ he asks.
‘What?’ says Keaton.
‘The things that you have. That are yours. What are they?’
– this in his Nicholsonian way, turning over every word, holding it up to the light, inspecting it, and then judiciously pondering whether to place it, with great delicacy, in the world or just to, what the hell, smash it.
‘If you were mine,’ he goes on, ‘it would just be you and me. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.’
By this time you're pretty much rolling around on the floor clutching your ribs and screaming stop! stop! though there is nothing ostensibly there in his delivery except O'Neill's love, his courage in declaring himself, and the glimmer of an accusation against Keaton's way of life with Beatty.
But you're killing yourself, because everything Nicholson says is given its sense by how near or how far it is from the pure delight that makes up his soul. Not sniggering mischief, as people always say of him – delight. It's what makes him so tragicomic. Nothing he says isn't a fuse burning towards some dynamite-pile of hilarity. And he makes brilliant use of its absence, sparingly, and devastatingly, like in the two scenes in Five Easy Pieces (his best film) when he walks out on Karen Black. You think: My God, where's it gone? He reminds you of just how much you've got to lose, of how high the stakes are. Everything he does in his early films is to do with the frustration of this delight. You've got to be a comedian to be a tragicomedian. He'd be brilliant in Chekhov. Brilliant as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, the still-not-disillusioned doctor not a million miles from his not-quite-yet-disillusioned pianist in Five Easy Pieces.
It's so close, this delight. All you have to do is laugh and the world will be full of it. And in his early films Nicholson keeps trying to tickle the world and failing to make it laugh. Meanwhile, we're laughing our heads off. Even to know that delight, in a perfect world, would be the proper response to life is a simplicity beyond most of us. It's not something that any of those other great actors mentioned above seem to have worked out. Do you know how rare this is? This innocence? Why you keep thinking Jack is a boy? It makes him one in a million. It makes him able to tell the story of the loss of innocence which nobody, only great artists, can do. What an absolute privilege to watch the young Jack liven up Easy Rider (he's the only utopian in it!) and talk you through the fall in Five Easy Pieces and tell you what you're leaving behind in The Last Detail. Amazing, amazing. It's the heart of Nicholson – that his essential self remembers innocence, remembers, no matter how scuffed, a prelapsarian world. And that's why the revered and lauded three-time Oscar winner is very, very underrated. Yes, you heard me! Jack Nicholson is underrated.
10 October 1993
The elephants, who have not
been getting on with the new rhino, slept through the exhibition which was being held in the elephant house at the zoo last night (Monday) by an Israeli artist who arrived in the country only yesterday (Monday) before returning to Tel Aviv tomorrow (Wednesday).
‘No wonder you failed your fucking degree,’ Jim said. ‘Nobody cares when the artist is going back or what the rhino thinks. You want to know who was there and how long it's on for. See?’
‘Got it. Except – what's wrong with the rhino exactly?’ I wanted to keep him talking.
‘Even if the rhino's doing the elephant's wife, we don't want to read about it. That's not the fucking story. You've got to find the story.’
But I never could – two-hundred-word pieces unstoppably ballooned, like Rufus Sewell, into vast paunchy monsters, and then were brutally slimmed down again (like Rufus Sewell) by brisk sub-editors. And the Journal, for all its apparent slapdashness, was a very serious little operation, with a sinecure on the Local Newspaper of the Year Award. Eric knew what he was doing, always running the necessary campaigns and magnificently inclusive little obituaries of local burglars and tramps. So I was aware that it was something of a test when he sent me to talk to a woman who was staging a protest in Arlington Road about the poll tax. It was an important story and I had a sense that I might actually be sacked, and never see Jim again, if I couldn't find it.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Jim when I returned five hours later.
‘I think Mrs Norman's a bit paranoid,’ I said. ‘She thinks the FBI are watching her. But – it's actually quite interesting. There were two guys in a dark car watching the house the whole time I was there. Wearing ties. In this weather? It does seem a little strange. And get this – she keeps getting letters from the library asking her to return a book on J. Edgar Hoover. But she never took it out. So I wrote down the licence number in case you want to follow it up.’
I was demoted to theatre reviews.
‘What's the date, the first?’
‘Look at the paper. Oh, no, wait, of course it's the first – it was Halloween last night. What's the matter?’
‘River Phoenix is dead. It looks like an overdose.’
‘Poor kid. Deliberate or accidental? Bet it was coke. Coke and booze. Bet it's a John Bonham. What's the matter with you?’
What's the matter with me? Nothing. There was nothing to show that he was ever going to be great. In fact, you could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn't have been. But he wasn't Andrew McCarthy Jnr, or Ralph Macchio, or C. Thomas Howell either. He wasn't Björn Andrésen, the vision from Death in Venice, who was never going to be an actor. On the other hand,