Years into a tumultuous, on-again off-again relationship with Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston was beyond frustrated at his refusal to have a child with her. So when she learned that Rebecca Broussard, a gorgeous actress and model 12 years her junior that Nicholson had been dating, was pregnant was his child, she flipped out.
After stewing about it for a night, she confronted him on the set of the film “The Two Jakes.”
“She headed straight for the set, brushed aside crew members who tried to stop her, stepped into the action shot and physically mauled Jack with both fists and feet, letting out her fury for every wrong Jack had done to her,” Marc Eliot writes in a new biography, “Nicholson.” “Jack put his head down and his hands up to protect himself while letting Anjelica get it out of her system.”
It’s not exactly news that Nicholson, who Huston nicknamed “the hot pole,” was an un-paralleled ladies man who often had a frenzied effect on women. Still, reading this book, it can be astounding — especially considering his longtime battles, documented here, with weight, baldness and premature ejaculation — to see just how successful he was.
Nicholson and his famous friends often traded Hollywood’s most desirable women between them. When Dennis Hopper’s catastrophic marriage to singer/actress Michelle Phillips fell apart after eight days, she wound up with Nicholson, who was still smarting over a break-up with a woman named Mimi.
Phillips’ other ex-husband, singer John Phillips, sought out Mimi and began sleeping with her as his revenge. But Nicholson’s concern was with Hopper, who he knew had both an explosive temper and a gun. “For a time,” Eliot writes, “Jack slept with a hammer under his pillow.”
(After he and Phillips split, Nicholson told one friend that she was “the only one who makes my wee-wee hard.”)
As Nicholson’s fame grew, he used it to his sexual advantage at every opportunity.
During a break in the filming of 1971’s “Drive, He Said,” which he directed and which required a brief non-sexual nude scene for an actress, Nicholson “decided to operate his own personal casting couch to find the perfect girl. High on dope, grinning from ear to ear, Jack had the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood come to his office and made each disrobe for him. Some were more eager than others, but all disrobed and endured Jack’s near-medical examination. He saw more than a hundred girls before he chose June Fairchild, an actress [he had worked with before, and] likely someone he had in mind for the part all along.”
But Nicholson needn’t have bothered, because for decades he had no trouble seducing the most famous, talented and beautiful women in the world into his bed, even including, according to Eliot, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, Julie Delpy, Melanie Griffith and the married Meryl Streep.
Eliot writes that Nicholson and Streep — who Nicholson had wanted over Jessica Lange as his co-star in the erotic snogfest “The Postman Always Rings Twice” — shook his trailer so furiously on the set of “Ironweed” that it “seemed to be balanced on four overworked Slinkys.” (Nicholson and Streep have both denied any liaison between them.)
As he got older and his girlfriends got younger, Nicholson found his sexual dominance increasingly challenged. In his mid-50s, Nicholson told a UK newspaper, “I’m still wild at heart. But I’ve struck bio-gravity.”
The bottom may have been while doing press for the 1994 film “Wolf,” when Nicholson was interviewed by an attractive French journalist. “He told the woman after the interview, ‘I would have tried to have intimate knowledge of you.’
The woman replied, ‘Twenty years ago you tried to f – – – my mother.”
