I dedicate this story to Amanda, a fan of Jack Nicholson and a fan of Bostonfictionwriter. She asked me to write a story about Jack Nicholson with her in the starring role.
I agreed to write the story because I've always been a fan of Jack Nicholson's, too. Normally, as you can discern from my name, Bostonfictionwriter, I only write fiction, generally fiction about Boston, Massachusetts. Only, this time, I decided to sway a bit from fiction and from Boston to write the true story of my meeting with Jack Nicholson in Los Angeles, California, only reverting from non-fiction to fiction by changing the character of Jana, Marty Scorsese's real script assistant with Amanda's name and description.
Jack Nicholson's last starring role, the end of an era.
*
"So, again, I pose the question to you, Amanda," said Marty. "What attracts you, a young woman in her twenties, to a man like Jack, who is in his seventies? I've always wondered about that. He's never without a young woman on his arm."
"I don't know about the other women, but I can tell you what attracts me to Jack. He's older for starters," she said with a smile. "I like it that he's a bad boy but he has a good heart, that's obvious and I can clearly read that in him. And he seems pretty powerful. I don't mean physically. Not like he'd rough me up but maybe he'd threaten me and I like being made to feel submissive with my lover and relinquishing my control to him," she said turning a bright red, as soon as she said it. "I can't believe I said all that. I can't believe I revealed so much of myself to you two like that," she said averting her eyes from our stares. "I guess the excitement of meeting Jack Nicholson overwhelmed me," she said fanning herself with pages of my script. "I'm so embarrassed."
"Save the embarrassment for when you meet Jack," said Marty reaching out to pat her knee. "Without a doubt, he'll surely do something or say something to embarrass you more than you've ever been embarrassed before," he said with a laugh. "That's just how he is," said Marty with a shrug of his shoulders.
The limo pulled up to the building where we were to have our meeting and we all got out of the car and walked inside. Thank God for air conditioning. Going from the air conditioned car to the air conditioned building, it was unbearably hot this time of year in Los Angeles and the early morning smog didn't help the air quality either.
Just when we thought we were too late and would keep everyone waiting, especially Jack, just when we thought the elevator door would close and we'd be further delayed and tardier for the meeting than we already were having to wait for another elevator, Jack stuck his head out the elevator door waving for us to hurry.
I couldn't believe it. There he was, Jack Nicholson in the flesh. He was looking at us. He was looking at me. He was holding the elevator door open for us and he was smiling. My hands were shaking, my pulse was racing, and my heart was pounding. I was so nervous that I couldn't stop smiling. I must have looked like an idiot. Yeah, sure, I had met a few celebrities in my life, but nothing like this, nothing so up close and personal and not with such a big star as he obviously was.
And Marty was right. Even though meeting Martin Scorsese was an exciting, unexpected, and an unimaginable pleasure, it was nothing compared to how I felt now when about to meet Jack Nicholson and I pondered the why of that. Perhaps I didn't feel the same way about meeting Martin Scorsese because he's behind the screen and Jack Nicholson, between writers, directors, producers, and a cast of dozens is the conduit of all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes for him to appear alone in front of the screen.
He's the one who stands in the spotlight. He's the one who takes the bow and receives the applause when the movie is a hit or the abuse and bashing when the movie is a flop. He's the one, more than anyone else who is such a big part of the movie and who has his career and reputation on the line. He's the face of all those who worked so hard to make the movie happen. Just as one can't work without the other, so much depends upon the writers, actors, director, et al to work as a team for the artistic sake of making movies.
He looked exactly as he does on screen, only shorter and with a few more wrinkles but, unless he lost weight since his last movie, he didn't look as heavy as the camera made him appear in The Bucket List when he played Edward Cole with Morgan Freeman who played Carter Chambers or in About Schmidt when he played with Kathy Bates and Hope Davis. Maybe it was the makeup that they had on him to make him look older, appear more tired, and seem sicker, but he certainly didn't look that way now. He looked good. He looked energetic and vigorous.
He looked better. He looked more rested. He looked younger. Certainly, he looked like a man more in his fifties than in his seventies. In the way that he carried himself and held his head up high, he looked like the star that he truly was. He looked so good that I wondered if he had some plastic surgery done. Nah, not Jack, he'd never do that. I hoped that I looked as good when I was his age, 71-years-old. Suddenly, when one of his lines popped in my head from the movie, The Bucket List, and only in the way that he could say it in his slow drawl; I knew he was my new muse.
"We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round." I don't know why I remembered that one specific line from that one specific movie, but I think I remembered it because, to me, it sounded like something Kurt Vonnegut would write when he wrote, "And so it goes...tweet, tweet." On the same note, it reminded me of a Peggy Lee song, "Is that all there is?"
I remembered reading a biography about Jack Nicholson once and reading that his biggest fear was of dying, as is most people's biggest fear. Certainly, it's my biggest fear. Who wants to die? Unless you are depressed and suicidal, no one wants to die. We all fear the unknown. No one has returned from the dead to tell us what happens when you die. Maybe, in the words of Jack, "We live, we die," and in the words of Vonnegut, "And so it goes," and like the song of Peggy Lee..."Is that's all there is?"
Only, in Jack's case, maybe dying is a bigger fear for him because he doesn't believe in God. He was once quoted as saying, "I don't believe in God now. I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience."
Apparently, by not believing in God, religion wasn't a soothing experience for him and that made me wonder what was. No doubt, with all the women he has gone through, women were, but were they? Maybe, it was just his work. Maybe his work is what soothed his savage soul. Certainly, I don't think it was money. You can't do what he does just for the love of money. Once you have money, you need more to motivate you to do greater things, as he has done in winning three Oscars and dozens of other awards.
