Nick Nolte Now

Nolte's first starring role in a major film came in The Deep, a box-office smash in which he was upstaged by Jacqueline Bisset's tangible assets. The antidote to that depressing experience was to play the role of a merchant seaman caught up in the Vietnam War drug trade in Who'll Stop the Rain, an adaptation of Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers. Along with Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty and director Karel Reisz, Nolte created magic. It's one of his great roles. Then he did a turn as a pill-popping flanker in North Dallas Forty. He was so determined to get that film made that, for a year, he turned down all other offers even though the project was in turnaround and $1 million in the red from all the various screenplays that were gathering dust. "Pete Gent and I rewrote the script and then, out of the blue, I got a call from Michael Eisner, who'd been one of the 10 VPs at ABC when we did Rich Man, Poor Man. He was now over at Paramount, and he gave me the go-ahead. I don't imagine Eisner calls too many actors these days."

When North Dallas Forty proved to be less than a blockbuster, Nolte's lawyer/advisor, Gary Hendler, tried to explain to him how Hollywood works. "You do a couple big studio pictures which then earn you the right to do what you want to do." Nolte said, "I'm already doing what I want to do, and I'm going to continue that." So he did Heart Beat, in which he played On the Road author Jack Kerouac's inspirational sideman Neal Cassady.

Occasionally he'd backslide into a big, successful studio picture, as he did with 48 HRS. in 1982. This film costarred a skinny kid from Saturday Night Live named Eddie Murphy and at the first script meeting, the guy who served the coffee was named Jeffrey Katzenberg. Three weeks into the shoot, the Paramount executives wanted to fire Murphy because they didn't think he was funny. Nolte offered to give up screen time so Murphy could go off on a few improvisational riffs.

A forgettable film called Grace Quigley is notable for the fact that Nolte costarred with Katharine Hepburn. One morning he rolled in after a night of carousing and Hepburn ripped into him saying, "I hear you've been dead drunk in every gutter in town, and that has to stop." Nolte responded, "I can't stop. I've got a few more gutters to go." (According to one of Nolte's friends, the drinking stopped when he came home drunk one night and scared his son. Ironically, friends said his going on the wagon was the beginning of the end of his marriage.)

Meanwhile, big-time directors were lining up to work with Nolte. Paul Mazursky (_Down and Out in Beverly Hills_), Martin Scorsese (_New York Stories_ and Cape Fear), Sidney Lumet (_Q & A_) and Barbra Streisand, who decided, because of "the pain behind his eyes," that Nolte was her Tom Wingo for The Prince of Tides. That film earned Nolte his first and only Oscar nomination.

"Did you go to the ceremony?"

"Yeah, I went, because I didn't have the courage not to. But I have trouble with awards in general. Winning is the worst, because after you win you start thinking, 'What can I do with this?' But being nominated and not winning is almost as damaging." Moreover, leaving a shoot to participate in the Academy Awards was "like interrupting sex."

The '90s also saw Nolte playing an Italian father in search of a miracle cure for his son (_Lorenzo's Oil_), a Bobby Knight-type of basketball coach (_Blue Chips_) and our third president (_Jefferson in Paris_). He sang in James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, but Brooks later cut all the music. He played a purported Nazi sympathizer in Mother Night and welcomed Julie Christie back to the screen in Afterglow. He's made so many films, he can't remember when he filmed what. Now he's preparing to do another Peter Gent book, The Last Magic Summer, which is all about the father-son relationship that Nolte continues to wrestle with. "I think kids miss their fathers. Let's face it, if you're a studio executive out there making $2 million a year, you're not going to have time for a family. You're not going to have time to help your son make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Athletics used to help with that, but now there's too much money in sports. I guess a bar mitzvah is a kind of transition ceremony." There's too much money in that, too.

Since I am a journalist I have to ask Nolte about his habit of lying to the press. One notorious whopper he told Bryant Gumbel (and others-- it was printed in GQ) was that he had had a testicle tuck because his scrotum was sagging and he kept sitting on his balls. He told another interviewer that his first wife had been a trapeze artist, which was news to her. "He's nuttier than a fruitcake," said Nolte's mother.

"So, are your testicles where they've always been?"

Nolte smiles.

"Why all the phony stories?"

"When it comes to the written word, there's a filtration process. What I say goes through the writer and what the writer writes goes through editors so that what eventually is printed is not from my own mind. And there's a kind of shame when you read what's written about you. You're embarrassed by it. To avoid that feeling, I decided to tell stories that weren't true. Then I wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of being misunderstood. Instead of dwelling on my divorces, the press printed that my wife was a trapeze artist. It protected me. I also realized that nobody who's interviewed tells the fucking truth. Nobody's showing you who they really are. It's all a facade. Look at Larry King. On TV he looks as solid as a rock. In fact, the guy's had seven marriages. Life has an illusionary quality that doesn't allow us to penetrate the truth. I don't know how I became who I am."

"So why do interviews?"

"Because I feel an obligation to make a connection with the public to say that Affliction and The Thin Red Line are pieces of material that I value--take a look at them."

"Do you ever pop Who'll Stop the Rain into your VCR?"

"Yeah. I feel just as proud of that film as I did when I made it. The trouble is you can't chase this thing, this kind of epiphany If you chase it, the further away it gets."

I suspect there will never be another career like Nolte's because the souped-up hype machine has made it too tough to nurture one's talent out of the glare of Entertainment Tonight. On the other hand, for all of Nolte's purity of motive, his choices are, in a way, as selfish as, say, Redford's are safe. Nolte is in it to test himself, stretch himself, learn, explore. If we want to go along for the ride we pay our $8. If we have trouble with the story or Nolte's acting or his accent (as did many who saw Lorenzo's Oil) that's our problem.

Regarding the accent, Nolte gets huffy. "If you put on a tape of the character I was playing and then listen to me, you can't tell the difference. The criticism's idiotic"

There are, of course, the Nolte films in which, like Streisand, you feel the pain behind the eyes and you watch this tortured soul rise or fall and you get the kind of big-screen jolt that no other actor can provide. That's when you realize you're watching someone special.

"If you died tomorrow, what regret would you have?"

"Not loving as well as I could."

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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Carla Gugino for the August 98 issue of Movieline.

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