Crane (18 page)

The next day we found ourselves in a small, cozy adobe bungalow, complete with hammocks slung from patio trees, on pueblo land. We were also face-to-face with
Easy Rider
’s Billy. Hopper was soft spoken, calm, and thoughtful, just the opposite of his maniacal image. He even took us on a tour of his home, which he was renting from the Taos Indians. As Hopper led us upstairs into the loftlike bedroom, he quickly ran ahead to fling the covers over the rumpled sheets of his bed. We happened to be doing the interview shortly after Hopper married his third wife, a beautiful but clueless actress, Daria Halprin. That summer Hopper was renting out to college art students a much grander house that he owned, which once had been owned by socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan and been graced by the likes of Georgia O’Keefe, D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, and Carl Jung.

Another time we had to go zooming up Highway 395 from L.A. to Lake Tahoe because after several weeks of phone calls we were told that we could finally talk to Ann-Margret, who was performing at Harrah’s. Unfortunately, that was all the information we had when we arrived at the Sierra resort. Luckily and completely coincidentally, we bumped into Roger Smith and Allan Carr (Ann-Margret’s husband and manager respectively) shopping in a sporting goods store near the motel where we had checked in that afternoon. Over a rack of Lacoste tennis shirts we introduced ourselves and arranged to do our interview that night in Ann-Margret’s dressing room before her show. After which we were invited to sit front and center for the dynamic song and dance extravaganza.

On top of that we met Mitzi McCall and her husband, Charlie Brill, who were Ann-Margret’s opening comedy act. As we made our introductions Mitzi announced, “Oh, I did a movie with Jack Nicholson, too.” Our eyes lit up. It turned out she was in Jack’s very first film,
The Cry Baby Killer,
so late that night, after the second show, we sat down and Mitzi gave us a short, funny impression about working with the twenty-one-year-old Nicholson.

Only two days after our interview with Ann-Margret she fell from moving scaffolding used in the entrance for her act and was rushed to the ICU unit at UCLA with serious head and face injuries. We sent flowers and talked about sending a card reading, “No, it’s ‘Break a
leg,
’” but decided in a fit of good taste that that was not appropriate.

During the production of
Chinatown
in 1973 I had found out through my dad’s former secretary at KNX, Carole Steller, who worked at Paramount, what Jack’s shooting schedule on the Roman Polanski movie was going to be, and I decided to head down to the L.A. City Hall shoot unannounced. I stood in the back of a large room at city hall watching the scene in which a farmer lets his sheep loose into the chamber while Jack’s character, J. J. Gittes, watches from the gallery. Polanski yelled, “Cut!” and Jack got up. He was about to light a cigarette when he noticed me standing there and invited me into his dressing room while the crew set up the next shot. It was just Jack and me, sitting in his trailer. He was telling me about having just finished
The Passenger
for Antonioni with costar Maria Schneider.

“I loved her in
Last Tango in Paris,
” I enthused.

“Yeah, I fucked her,” he drawled, his trademark eyebrows raised over devilishly twinkling eyes.

I didn’t know if Jack was kidding, letting me in on a secret, padding his reputation as a lady-killer, or just testing me for a reaction. I tried to be cool.

All this crazy running around for the book was done completely “on spec,” which meant we had no idea whether or not we would ever make a dime from it—we did it purely “on speculation” of selling the finished product. Those are not the ideal conditions under which to write a book, but we would have done it even if we knew it was all going to go for naught. Chris and I were still attending school full-time and running an ever-growing business empire, but at long last we had a presentable manuscript. Yeah, so now what?

Diane’s dad, the television writer, put us in touch with his agent in Los Angeles, who directed us to a literary agent in New York, Henry Morrison. Henry sold the book after only a small raftful of rejections to M. Evans/Lippincott, and Chris and I split the royal sum of $4,500 for our more than three years of work. We were making more than that in a couple of months selling license plate frames, but
Jack Nicholson: Face to Face
arrived in bookstores in May 1975, and we were pretty damned excited about it. I asked my dad if it would be possible to hold a book launch party at his Tilden Avenue house. Now, the closest my dad ever came to celebrating one of his own projects was hosting a
Hogan’s Heroes
Christmas party once at the Vanalden House.

“Why would you do that?” he asked. “I never do that.”

That was the end of the book launch.

It was the first book ever written about Jack, and to this day the only one of more than a dozen to benefit from his amiable participation, his unique voice resonating from the pages. I am particularly proud of that. It was issued simultaneously in both a large hardcover and a softcover format. I never understood the thinking behind that decision. But it was printed exactly the way Chris and I turned it in. There wasn’t one change. The photographs and posters are in the positions and order in which we’d laid them out. The words we wrote and the subjects’ voices in the interviews are intact. The book features two interviews with Jack, one at the beginning and one at the end, after we’d seen him through the prism of his colleagues.

When we got our advance copies we called Jack to tell him and ask if we could bring him a hardcover copy. We hadn’t spoken in over two years, and his first reaction was, “Robert, what is this book?” I jogged his memory about who we were and what we were doing, and he sighed, “Okay, come on up.” He was in for a big surprise.

Chris and I drove up to his house with no near-fatal incidents and handed him a book and a T-shirt printed with his face, the photo on the cover of the book, on it. Jack looked genuinely pleased and only slightly bewildered about how, as Bruce Dern kiddingly referred to us, “the two lames from the Texaco station” had managed to produce this beautiful film archive about him. Thirty-five years later Chris and I are still amazed at what we managed to accomplish. To this day we can’t have a phone conversation in which one or the other of us doesn’t do a bad impersonation of Jack.

The book was published to mild acclaim, including a nice review from Charles Champlin, the film critic of the
Los Angeles Times.
He was someone I greatly admired—not only was his analysis of film intelligent and rational, but he was also a true fan. He was Siskel and Ebert before there was Siskel and Ebert.

The following year Chris was putting together an audiotape as a surprise for the landmark celebration of my first quarter century, my twenty-fifth birthday. He decided to compile salutations from many of my past girlfriends, other friends, USC professors, and naturally, some of the celebrities we had met along the way—Bruce Dern, Sally Struthers, and of course, Jack Nicholson. Chris called Jack to get a comment, a “Happy birthday” to yours truly. Didn’t seem like a big deal to Chris, considering we had lived, breathed, and slept the guy for over three years, but when Chris finally got him on the phone Jack reamed him out, telling him how much his time was worth and how everyone always just wanted “two minutes.” Chris, unable to comprehend that Jack was saying no, persisted until Jack relented, saying in a snarl he would later use to perfection as Colonel Jessup in
A Few Good Men,
“Okay, turn on the fucking tape, and let’s get it on.” Jack then delivered an Oscar-worthy performance of a birthday greeting to me. It was astounding. If you heard the tape you’d swear Jack and I are compadres, los dos amigos. We’re not, of course. But the tape, which lives on in a box in my closet, says otherwise.

Chris and I did attempt one last connection, showing up unannounced on the set of the Elia Kazan film
The Last Tycoon,
which was shot on location in Hancock Park. The film starred Robert DeNiro, but Jack had a cameo as a union rep meeting DeNiro’s Irving Thalberg. When Jack spotted us we said hi and asked if he had any plans for lunch.

“Yeah. No lunch,” was the terse reply, and Nicholson retreated as swiftly as possible back to the set.

Chris and I stood awkwardly among the busy crew members preparing the next scene. That signaled the end of our days hanging out with the big boys. On our way out we saw Nicholson having lunch at a table set up under some trees. The “lames from the Texaco station” slunk off into the afternoon, never to see Jack again. Well, not exactly.

19

Patti was not about to interfere with my dad’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for women. In one instance that I was privy to, Patti even acted as pimp for her priapic husband. The setting was a Sunset Boulevard strip club called the Classic Cat, where my dad often sat in and played drums with the jazz combo that accompanied the real entertainment. For him it didn’t get much better than beating the skins while simultaneously ogling some. At least not until his forty-seventh birthday.

The headliner at the club was a monumentally well-endowed ecdysiast named Angel Carter. My dad and Patti both had become friendly with her simply by virtue of being at the club so often. So, as any loving wife would do for her husband’s birthday, Patti arranged for my dad to have a private little birthday bash with Angel in her dressing room. While my dad beat some skin backstage, Patti sat at her table in the club nursing her red wine. She set it up and stepped aside. My foolish dad jumped in with reckless fervor. Would this later come back and bite him? Like a pit bull.

A few years later when my dad and Patti began divorce proceedings, Patti would cite the birthday bang she herself had organized as an example of my dad being a bad husband and a worse father, not to mention a man obsessed. I’m not saying some of that wasn’t the truth, but Patti was the agent, the facilitator of the behavior, at least in that particular case. You can’t keep pouring drinks for an alcoholic and then complain when he falls off the stool.

I had been on her good side for a number of years because I was of the male persuasion, a good listener, and interested in her because she had come from a world so different from that of my mom’s—modeling, selling cars, and acting. Patti claimed to have slept with Frank Sinatra, Bill Cosby (who, she said, had a preference for zaftig blondes), and
Mannix
star Mike Connors who, while not a great actor, was purported to wield a different kind of huge talent in Hollywood. Patti was worldly and frank
with me in revealing her Hollywood escapades as a young starlet. She was a brassy Broadway character, a combination of Gypsy Rose Lee and Auntie Mame. I had never known a woman so intimate and self-assured in her conversation. So the first few years of her marriage to my dad were revelatory for me. She was the older sister I’d never had who had seen and done it all.

Unfortunately, her love of control and her total denigration of the women in my dad’s family tilted the seesaw of their marriage into a negative, poisonous angle from which it couldn’t be righted. I drew away from her ultimately because any relationship with Patti was a minefield: one day you’re minding your own business, and then suddenly your legs are blown off by some form of verbal IED. I was one of the last survivors with my legs still securely attached.

My youngest sister, Karen, was not so fortunate. One afternoon when my dad and I were out together and Patti was inside their house, my then fourteen-year-old sister was charged with minding Scotty on the backyard swing. Scotty flung himself off the seat midswing, and though he seemed okay at first, by the next day it was apparent he had broken his arm.

Patti blamed Karen and demanded that my dad get her back to the house to face Patti’s unilateral tribunal. In his best “don’t make waves” mode, my dad called my mom to explain that Patti was hopping mad and wanted Karen to come to the house immediately. My mom gave the phone to my stepdad Chuck, and my dad continued, telling Chuck that it was so hot and uncomfortable for him that it was vital for Karen to come and stand before the inquisitor. My dad pleaded, “Chuck, I can’t begin to tell you how important this is to my marriage.”

I could hear my dad through the phone at Chuck’s ear. Chuck stood silently, deep in thought for what seemed like a full minute. Finally, he replied, “Bob, if this is that important to your marriage, you don’t have a marriage.”

I could feel my dad’s immediate deflation. He said, “You’re right, Chuck.”

So Karen never had to suffer the cat-o’-nine tails or be buried to the waist and stoned, neither of which I would have put past Patti. That incident widened the already uncrossable crevasse between Patti and the rest of my family. It was a pivotal moment. It also showed Chuck at his best.

Luckily, Mary Tyler Moore entered my dad’s life again. Her wildly successful production company, MTM Enterprises, specialized in sharply
written, three-camera shows filmed in front of a studio audience. These weekly comedy series included her own eponymous show, its spinoffs
Rhoda
and
Phyllis,
and Bob Newhart’s show. MTM offered my dad a pilot called
Second Start.
Unfortunately, the one-camera show came with MTM’s third-string lineup of creators, writers, and producers. Jackie Cooper, who had directed some
M*A*S*H
episodes, directed the pilot but clearly missed working with Alda. He and my dad demonstrated a total lack of chemistry. Cooper was a bitter, downcast, former child actor who seemed a better fit for a drama series than an MTM comedy. He barked out orders like a compassionless field general out of touch with his soldiers. Perhaps he felt he had better acting chops than my dad. There was no live audience for the pilot, and with a numbing quiet on the set (my dad’s drums were nowhere to be found) my dad retreated into his own form of paranoia. Lacking trust in the director was antithetical to producing a successful product for my dad—or any actor. He was lonely and missed the warm joviality of Stalag 13.