HEADLINE: Women - With my nature I've just got to have them under control
BYLINE: JANE KELLY
TITLE: Daily Mail
DATE: 07/03/1998
EDITION: 1ST
Jack Nicholson's eyes looked like dark half-moons under the heavy lids. Despite the fact that he is a portly old boy, in a baggy old sweater, he is still the kind of man who can make a woman feel dizzy and strange.
He does it by charm – anything you want to talk about, he can talk about. An art show you’ve just seen, he’s seen it too. A book you’ve just read, he knows it well. For that certain few minutes that he has to talk you, who ever you are, you are the most important person in his world.
For some women of course there is the sexy fact that he is now said to be worth about £200 million.
But ladies beware – charismatic Jack is the product of a disastrous, wounding childhood, brought up in an all-female where his own mother refused to acknowledge him as her son.
From this, Nicholson has grown up driven by an urge for control, if not punish, which has played havoc with his personal life. This danger about him, his anger of course increases his attraction.
In 1993, his girlfriend Rebecca Broussard, 34, dumped him. She met him when she was a waitress in Aspen Colorado. After three years of being his official mistress, she was tired of being used as a sex toy, getting calls for her to go over and sleep with him after she hadn't seen him for weeks.
Last year, when Broussard declared she was going to marry Daniel Quinn, 36, Nicholson threatened to take back the £1.8 million house in Los Angeles he'd given her. She called off her marriage.
They are now back together, but during our interview he whispers vague insults about her, as if she might be listening in the next room. In fact she probably is.
She was given a bit part in his film The Two Jakes and the lead in a movie that was so disastrous it was never released. Now she is keen to get a part in another picture.
'She wants to play Amelia Earhart, the aviator,' Nicholson tells me wearily.
“She wants me to put her in the movies,” he whispers. “She screams and shouts at me to make a film and give her the leading role.
“I asked her a few questions about the character, she went crazy at me, screaming: "You don't take me seriously, you SOB!" ' 'She half killed me,' he said sadly. 'It was a nightmarish row. I didn't know what I'd done. It's not an intellectual thing between us and she disagrees with everything I say, but I am happy when she's around.'
I almost feel sorry for him – but not quite. Five years ago, actress Susan Anspach had to fight to get him to acknowledge their son Caleb, born in 1970. In retaliation, he tried to throw them out of a house he'd given her.
He has made a career out of bullying women on and off screen. Some of his most famous scenes include him intimidating Shelley Duvall in The Shining and driving Meryl Streep to despair in Heartburn.
Nicholson's career of on screen misogyny has been a phenomenal success. His manic, lupine leer has entered the iconography of popular culture, alongside Marilyn Monroe's pout and James Stewart's drawl.
In real life, he has left a string of forlorn lovers behind him. He and Broussard have two illegitimate children. Before them there were at least three love children, their mothers paid off and kept from public view.
When Broussard became pregnant in 1989, he was having an affair with British actress Karen Mayo-Chandler and still in a 17-year relationship with actress Anjelica Huston, who called his behaviour a 'betrayal' and 'a dagger' in her heart.
But none of his bad behaviour stops the flow of women into his life.
He tried a brief stint of matrimony in the Sixties, to actress Sandra Knight, producing his one legitimate daughter Jennifer, 35. Since then he has avoided marriage.
Not being wed or cohabiting represents for Nicholson his ultimate control over women. Despite Broussard's tantrums, controlling women, maintaining the exact distance and closeness to them that he chooses, has been the core of his adult life. 'I suppose,' he says, 'that my devilish persona on and off the screen has been some kind of strategy.'
Was it developed to manipulate people, particularly women? 'Yes, that's it,' he admits. 'I've done that. The way I am is all about getting your own way. But I think things are better when they go my way.' He flashes that wolfish smile and you want to agree with him.
'I'm not trying to control others but I like taking them out of the control of others,' he says. 'I like to destabilise.'
Playing with other people is a great game for him. He has no fear and he expects others to be the same.
'Most people have a fear of real freedom,' he says. 'But I've never had that.'
John Joseph Nicholson was born in April 1937 in Neptune, New Jersey, the illegitimate child of 17-year-old June Nicholson, a blonde chorus girl desperate to get into showbusiness.
There have been numerous rumours about the identity of his father, but he says that in adult life he has had 'no interest' in finding him.
June had landed a part in the chorus line of Fools Rush In, in New York, when she fell pregnant. When Jack was two months old, she went back to the stage and left him with his grandmother Ethel, known as 'Mud' (short for mother).
He grew up believing that Ethel was his mother, and June his big sister. He didn't find out the truth until he read about it in a magazine in 1974, when he was 37.
Asked if he felt angry about that, he talks about what he calls 'the deceptiveness of women' as if that is a given fact. 'I didn't need that incident about my birth to find that out about them,' he says.
He fears women and needs them, or rather needs them to love him.
From infancy, he was the centre of a world of women. His surrogate mother Ethel and his Aunt Lorraine adored him.
Nicholson doesn't want to admit that his mother deserted him. 'I don't look at it like that,' he says.
'Leaving me was not up to her. It was probably Mud's idea. If I thought my mother had wanted to leave me, that would be a different issue.
'But looking back I see that there was conflict. I fought with her like a brother, not a mother. She was always saying: "Jack, you are ungrateful." It must have come from her secret, but I didn't understand it.' He says that, as a boy, he never saw Ethel or his 'aunts' as women.
They were some indeterminate sex, who made no demands of him, but made him feel special.
Ethel, who made £2,000 a year running a beauty parlour, was the dominant figure in the house. 'As a boy I was indulged,' he says.
Nicholson's doting female relatives made sure he was treated differently from other boys.
'They always encouraged me. I was aware from the start of how much extra freedom I was allowed,' he says. He claims he was able to explore sex more freely at an earlier age than other boys.
The result was that he grew up sexually delinquent, but at the same time always under pressure to succeed. 'We always had food on the table, but there were no extras,' he says. 'We never borrowed money and that made me self-sufficient.'
A matriarchal upbringing gave him a lasting need for the opposite sex, but at the same time he fears the dominating power and control of women and expects their constant indulgence.
His closest male role model was Ethel's husband, his namesake and grandfather John Joseph. An Irish Catholic, John's own father had died when he was five.
John was artistic. He won awards as a window dresser and worked for major New York stores, but he took to drink and abandoned Ethel, June and the family when Nicholson was a baby. 'He was drunk, but elegant,' says Nicholson. 'He had a split life - he was talented, but destitute.' Illegitimacy and poverty gave him the extraordinary independence of spirit that has characterised his life and work.
His aunts told him he was great and then he had to go out and prove it, with the terrible example of his grandfather as a warning of how feckless his sex could be.
Nicholson grew up with an ambition to be someone. 'I always wanted to be a film star,' he says, 'rather than just an actor. I knew other people wanted the same they just wouldn't admit it.'
In 1954, aged 17, he arrived in Los Angeles penniless, with no great looks. Almost all he had going for him was his confidence with women.
His first job was as a messenger boy at the Disney studios. He gave himself a decade to succeed and it wasn't until Easy Rider, in 1969, his 21st film, when he was 33, that he became what Mud termed 'a hit'. Until then, he'd been earning less than £1,000 a year as an actor for ten years. He'd 'accepted the inevitability of not being a successful actor' and his agent was urging him to give up.
In the Seventies he became a star in an assortment of films, good and bad. But he always appeared on screen with a strangely original quality. Part of that was his independence of mind shining through.
It was also his deliberate creation of a screen image, of himself as the Prince of Darkness, his deviousness emphasised by black clothing and Ray Ban sunglasses.
'I've noticed that if people think I'm a total libertine, it's good for business,' he says cynically but shrewdly.
The poverty of his background shows in his attitude to money. He is one of the most expensive actors to hire, commanding £5 million a picture. Since he made Batman, in 1989, and earned close to £56 million from a percentage of the licences and spin-offs, he has become one of the richest stars in Hollywood. But he still weighs people up by the way they handle their small change.
'I watch people taking money out of their pockets. The way they handle it tells me about their character,' he says.
'I've got all kinds of pension plans and trick ways to make money. I worry about the future, even though I don't need to. At home I go round turning off lights and TV sets all the time. Once you've been poor you never forget.
I've come a long distance from where I started out.' AFTER winning two Oscars (best actor for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and best supporting actor for Terms Of Endearment) and eight nominations, he says he has achieved more than he expected in his wildest dreams.
In fact he is still bemused by his success. Even the beauty of the area in the Hollywood hills where he lives amazes him. But he has remained essentially alone and worries constantly about what it is to be a man, as if he feels his maleness, like his financial fortune, is fragile and under threat.
'Women have the power that comes from man's inability to think about anything but women,' he says. 'The havoc in relationships comes from militant feminism. These past 15 years, women have been very hard to please.
'I don't accept that men are to blame for everything. I am proud of being a man.' But what exactly 'being a man' means he is not so sure. 'Being a father is the role I am least sure of,' he says. 'I am very caring. I spend a tremendous amount of time with my children, but I'm often confused.
'It is not easy for me to care for anything more than I care for myself, but I care more for them.' But this confusion about his role as a man, his frequent anger against women and resentment of his need for them, are part of his motivating force. Why does such a rich man go on working, especially as he says he'd prefer to paint rather than act?
He is thoughtful for a moment.
'Well, if I went away you'd miss me, honey.' He says it with utter conviction. And he's right.
* AS GOOD As It Gets opens in cinemas next Friday.