Jack Nicholson: The Early Years

Jack Nicholson: Second Interview

159 JaCk nICholson seCond IntervIew On the spur of the moment we arranged to do a second interview with Nicholson. He was leaving the next day for a month’s vacation in Colorado. Sunning herself on the front porch as we drove up was Helena Kallianiotes (the talkative hitchhiker from Five Easy Pieces). She escorted us into the living room, where we set up our equipment while waiting for Jack to come downstairs. As always, Jack was comfortably dressed. He was wearing a terry-cloth wraparound and an open shirt, but this time he was sporting a full beard. Whereas the first interview was more film oriented, we tried, this time to cover a broader range of topics, and hopefully to get a glimpse into Jack Nicholson’s private self, an endeavor not without its own dangers. Question: Did you always have aspirations to get into the filmmaking business? Nicholson: No, not really. I always thought it was a nice occupation, but I didn’t really identify myself with it until I was out here working in a movie studio. It’s appealing; it was appealing to me then, and it’s appealing to me now. Question: Are there any kinds of roles that you haven’t played that you would like to play? Nicholson: Yeah, lots. I could never play all the roles that I would like to play. I’m lucky, in that I can play just about anything. There are certain limitations that I’m still working on. Obviously, I’m not ideally set up to do costume drama at this point, because of certain regional characteristics that I have. I’ve been asked to do things in every area; people believe that I can do things in all kinds of areas, and even if I can’t I’ll JACK NICHOLSON: THE EARLY YEARS 160 get the opportunity to try them. That’s the situation I would like to try and maintain as an actor. Question: What kind of an educational background did you have? Nicholson: Just high school. Question: Was it worthwhile? Nicholson: I went to a fairly good high school—it was definitely worthwhile to me. The main problem with American education is a lack of correlation. The system is so designed to fragment that they don’t put what you learn in history together with what you learn in French or some other area. There’s no real attempt to give anybody a comprehensive view of their education. That’s the main problem that I see with it. I’m not an expert on education, I mean, I skipped grades when I was in high school, and then I was too young, by my standards too young, to go to college; I wanted to wait a year. Well, by the time I had waited a year I didn’t want to go at all. A guy from my high school called me up the other day, and asked me if I wanted to come down and address the national convention of high-school principals. They wanted me to give them my view on education . Well, the main reason why I didn’t do it was because the lecture was scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning in Anaheim. Also, when someone says, “What do you think of education?” I say that I really liked school, but I liked it simply for the social event. I had a couple of good teachers, and in areas like mathematics you had the feeling that you were really learning something, but in all the other areas I always had the odd feeling that I had just learned that last year, and sometimes just the opposite way to the way it was now being taught. English was like that. You were given all the rules as to how this was diagrammed, and this is the subject, and so on, and the next year someone else had a whole new theory. Question: How much of an influence did your parents have on you? Nicholson: Well, I never really had a father around the house, because my mother and father were separated before I was born. My mother and my sisters and my brother-in-law were in the house, so I guess he was kind of like my father figure. It’s hard to say. I always had a very adult dialogue with all of my family, because I think I established an early communication on a person...