Rebel Read online

  Endpapers

  Dedication

  To Sophie and Brawley

  Epigraph

  The only people who ever called me a rebel were the people who wanted me to do what they wanted.

  —NICK NOLTE

  We act to save our lives every day.

  —MARLON BRANDO

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpapers

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1: Younger Brother

  CHAPTER 2: A Date with Humble Pie

  CHAPTER 3: Zero Point

  CHAPTER 4: Corn-fed

  CHAPTER 5: Football

  CHAPTER 6: Little Theatre

  CHAPTER 7: Rich Man

  CHAPTER 8: A Quiet Place

  CHAPTER 9: Something to See

  CHAPTER 10: Under Fire

  CHAPTER 11: Down and Out

  CHAPTER 12: Family

  CHAPTER 13: Turning of the Tide

  CHAPTER 14: Against Type

  CHAPTER 15: Fathers and Mothers

  CHAPTER 16: H, GHB, and the PCH

  CHAPTER 17: Sophie

  CHAPTER 18: Graves Condition

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgments

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY TESTICLE TUCK. AFTER THE success of The Prince of Tides, I decided that I couldn’t just sit on my assets and let things succumb to gravity. The procedure was the latest in Hollywood plastic surgery and I was all for it. So, I decided to make the investment. Well, at least that’s what I told Good Morning America one lovely spring day in 1991. Immediately they said, “Say, ‘Good morning, America, Nick,’” and we were off the air. Caught.

  It has been said that I lie to the press, that I make up outlandish stories to protect myself. Many accuse me of telling falsehoods just for the sheer joy of pranking. Looking back, I can see a morsel of truth in both. I’ve tried not to fudge. Part of the impulse could be attributed to my deep shyness amidst a tabloid-driven industry. Fame is a false high. It’s not a real place. It’s fake. When it’s tested, it fails. There’s no security in the fame at all. And if you believe in it, it turns out very badly, because it has no substance for you to believe in. So, maybe I find it fun to play on the absurdity of fame. Or maybe I just rebel with a little lie.

  A memoir offers the opportunity to tell your story your way. I have control over how I tell the story. This appeals to me. Unfortunately, my best intentions may be trounced by a rose-colored reckoning. I’ve never been any good at real life. Those closest to me would no doubt agree. And my old friend anxiety lurks like a latent virus. I suppose there was ample evidence in my childhood to predict a bumpy ride, but I was twenty-one before I debunked the first of many stories in my life—the story of who I thought I was and what the world was about.

  The only place to start this story is at the end of another one. I had a breakthrough. It was the kind of event people watching from the sidelines would call a breakdown. Crack-up. But I saw it as a self-inflicted coming-of-age ritual and one of the best things to happen to me. Those familiar with the insect that undergoes a process of metamorphosis into a flying creature may understand what the hell I’m talking about. Pardon the tired-out metaphor, but it’s exactly what happened to me. I was in a chrysalis.

  A crack in my veneer let the truth out. My real tale spirals out from there, shedding fictions and building new skins. This is where I start my story. A peek at the corn-fed, ill-equipped young man I was prior to the breakthrough. I was caught in my own act, woven from the stories and identity I inherited. Only the little room in Phoenix could help me get free. And God knows, there’s no one to be but yourself after that. You’re either renewed or you’re dead. And I wasn’t ready to be dead. I wanted to act.

  CHAPTER 1

  Younger Brother

  THERE WAS A CRASH AND THEN A WOMAN YELLING. I RAN upstairs through throngs of artists and jazz musicians, all the while following a cascading stream of water that led me to the bathroom. The door was open and my roommate Jeanie was on the floor, next to a broken sink, and her lover was pulling his pants up. She had apparently been sitting on it when his insistent thrusts brought it smashing to the floor. Everyone was laughing riotously while water gushed out of the wall.

  “Can you take care of this, Younger Brother?” Jeanie asked me innocently as she headed back down to the party. I nodded and proceeded to do the best drunken plumbing a twenty-one-year-old Midwestern boy knew how to do. Then I went out into the street and ran headfirst into the side of a parked car to relieve a little stress.

  IT WAS THE EARLY SIXTIES AND I WAS LIVING IN A PART OF LOS Angeles called Laurel Canyon with a couple of older gals named Jen and Jeanie. People were beginning to live together in a communal fashion as “brothers and sisters,” and Jen and Jeanie treated me as if I were their kid brother and they were my older sisters.

  I had met my “older sisters” some months before at a favorite hangout, Barney’s Beanery, a ramshackle Santa Monica Boulevard restaurant that had been drawing high- and lowlife clientele for several decades. They both were still in their thirties and they were legends of sorts. Together, the two generated a bright light, a kind of aura that all sorts of people were drawn toward. They took a quick look at me and called me “Younger Brother,” a role I took on wholeheartedly, and crashing at their bungalow in lower Laurel Canyon was wonderful—until it wasn’t. The household was a cultural hub of artists. There was a constant stream of amazing people coming and going, and I found myself in an exotic world that I didn’t fully understand and began to wish I could be part of.

  Although I was never invited to sleep with either of them, both women were very liberal with their romantic alliances. The man who had broken the sink was the gregarious but deeply troubled painter John Altoon.

  Altoon was an abstract painter and a big deal in the L.A. art world. Tragically, John is as well-known for the art he destroyed, always his own, as he is for what he created. Either his perfectionist sensibility was incapable of satisfaction, or he became convinced that his art was inadvertently revealing characteristics that he’d rather have kept private. Now I can relate, but back then, I had no idea what to make of it.

  In addition to Altoon’s regular visits, actor Lawrence Tierney lived at the house for a while as well, and lots of wild characters used it as a crash pad. Jeanie and Monty Budwig, bass player at the venerable Hollywood jazz club Shelly’s Manne-Hole, were an item, and every kind of musician, artist, actor, and party person rolled in and out of our pad at all hours.

  Jen and Jeanie decided who was welcome and who had to be shown the door, and I became their unofficial bouncer, sending dozens of wannabes and troublemakers back down to the city if they weren’t welcome. Over the course of my months at the house, every time either gal said a quick word or signaled to me with her eyes, the misbehaving son of a bitch was toast.

  One of the perks of my position was that people who visited the house were eager to stay on my good side and quick to offer me every mood-altering tablet or pill I could consume. Uppers, downers, twice-arounders, Jeanie would inspect each and inform me which I could keep and which required a pilot far more experienced than me.

  Damn, that house was always happening! One night, the R&B band the Treniers were so stoned they couldn’t talk but could play jump blues for hours on end; then the next evening the walls of the house were covered with paintings for an impromptu art show. You never knew what the night would hold except that it would be unconventional and that everyone would be full-tilt boogie.

  It was the coolest scene I’d ever been par
t of and Jeanie in particular was a fascinatingly liberated woman—someone living far before her time in many ways. Though the house was the hippest, most creative place in West L.A., I was on the verge of dying. Around-the-clock booze and pills were beginning to take their toll on my soul. And if one more heroin addict needed to be dumped in downtown L.A., I might’ve joined him.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Date with Humble Pie

  HOW DID I GET HERE? A MIDWESTERN BOY ABOUT TO careen off the tracks?

  It was 1962. I’d made my way to Los Angeles and Pasadena City College, playing football in my third junior college in as many years as coaches were delighted when an athlete of my caliber walked on. But I didn’t last at any of the colleges because I never intended to go to class—and succeeded in that brilliantly.

  I had inherited my mother’s nonconformity and propensity for imaginative living. Schools, churches, institutions of every kind were bullshit as far as she was concerned—and she taught me well, worried that school might otherwise turn me into a robot.

  I knew I didn’t want anyone telling me what I was going to be, and I craved every kind of experience I could get. I didn’t envision myself as a student—or anything else but an athlete. As far as the future was concerned, I felt destiny would eventually take hold, so in the meanwhile I would concentrate on fishing and football and surviving Jen and Jeanie’s. I liked Southern California and sure as hell wasn’t heading back to the Midwest any time soon.

  It was a day like any other when destiny came calling. My good friend Tom Connelly, who was an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse, suggested that I come watch a play in which he was appearing.

  Those days I was up for just about anything, so I agreed to go. The play was okay, but I didn’t really think about it again until a few weeks later, when Tom asked me to join him for an acting class led by Bryan O’Byrne, who had been a successful character actor for many years and who now coached several young talents. Tom was being considered for a major role in a new television series based on the steamy novel Peyton Place, and he knew he had to work as much as possible with Bryan.

  Bryan lived near the top of Laurel Canyon, and on the day he ushered us into his house, Tom was scheduled for one-on-one instruction. Tom told him I just wanted to observe; Bryan wouldn’t have it. He informed us if I wanted to stay, I’d need to read for him, too. I wasn’t really comfortable with the notion, but neither did I want to cause Tom problems, so I reluctantly agreed.

  Inside Bryan’s house, I simply observed as he worked with Tom for a while, the two of them discussing the family life of the character he was reading, imagining where he would have grown up and what his relationship with his brother would have been like. I had never considered before that an actor had to know more, imagine more, than simply the words the playwright had given him to speak. That I could use my imagination to create an entire life for the character, then slip inside it and try it out.

  When they took a break, Bryan offered me something to read and I studied a bit before we reconvened. I can’t remember what it was except that it was some famous soliloquy that young male actors cut their teeth on in those days, and when I started to read I was nervous as hell. If I’d been trying out a new sport or meeting a girl or something, I would have been fine. But then I thought, Fuck it, I can read this thing, and I did. Silence followed. It was obvious from the look on their faces that I’d done something right. Bryan finally said, “Well, that was good, Nick.”

  Later he motioned for me to follow him, and out of Tom’s earshot he said, “You don’t know it yet, but you’re an actor. When you realize you are, I’ll be happy to work with you. You’ve got the thing—that someone either has or he doesn’t. You’ve got it.”

  It felt nice to hear, but I was more certain I still had some football in me. I continued to define myself—to the degree I gave the subject any real thought—as an athlete, and Bryan’s encouragement was interesting, yes, but I didn’t make too much of it that afternoon. Besides, I had a decent job at the moment.

  Jim Nelson, who was a fullback with me at PCC, was a young guy with a persuasive personality who had enthusiastically informed me that the local ironworkers’ union was hiring. There was lots of work to be had, he said, because Los Angeles was installing storm drains throughout the city, and big, strong kids like us could quickly learn to haul pipe and hand rebar to the fellows who tied it. It would be hard but satisfying, and the best part, Jim contended, was that we could work for three months at fourteen dollars an hour—a fortune in those days—then draw unemployment and find other adventures for the rest of the year.

  President Kennedy was still in the White House. The decade was beginning to rev up. The established order of conventionality was teetering and verging on its collapse, and you could feel the terrible stranglehold on every free thought—the demand for conformity that had driven me mad in my early years in Iowa and Nebraska—beginning to loosen. Change was in the air, but none of us had a clue where we or the times were going. All that was clear to me was that having a bit of money in my pocket and a few good fellows to travel from one bar to the next with was enough. Yet as my interests began to widen, I started to feel that I was growing out of my old skin, and I was quickly going to need a new set of skills if I was to survive it. L.A. teemed with cultured creativity, and I felt like a rube in its midst. My old persona had evolved under the cultural regime of the conformity-loving forties and fifties, and was patently unsuited for whatever lay ahead.

  Jim Nelson fit into the new vibe of the sixties seamlessly and could shuck and jive with the best of them. As did the leader of my union local, 433, an H. L. Mencken aficionado named Conrad Monte. A cynical son of a bitch, Conrad hated everyone and everything and was always eager to tell anyone who would listen why. I didn’t like Conrad, but it sounded to my young ears like he’d read every book ever written.

  It was Conrad who unknowingly spurred my desire to begin educating myself a bit about why the world wags and who wags it, and, like he did, I began to spend lots of my free time in bookstores—a new pastime for me.

  It was in a Hollywood bookstore, too, where I smoked my first joint. I knew the store’s owner from Barney’s Beanery. The bookstore was nearby and all of us who frequented Barney’s acted as if we were fast friends, and the bookstore owner, whose name I can’t remember, invited me into his stockroom, where he casually lit up.

  A few puffs later, I knew weed and I were going to go steady for a while. I felt both calmer and more clearheaded, and began to think about things in intriguing ways. I noticed that I was at ease with myself—at peace with the person who often made me so uncomfortable—in ways I never otherwise was, except perhaps on the football field.

  I loved it. My mind seemed to kick into a higher gear. I connected disparate dots as it encouraged my already fertile imagination, and I remember going back to the bookstore a day later and buying an ounce—which we called a lid—from the store’s proprietor. I took it home, locked myself in my bedroom, and stayed stoned for most of a week, getting to know myself in entirely new ways and pondering just who was growing out of this new skin of mine.

  I DIDN’T HAVE ANY ANSWERS YET, BUT I WAS GETTING BETTER at framing the questions. I knew I liked the vigorous work of punking steel—a chore that involved lugging giant pipes from trucks to huge holes in the ground. I liked having some money to spend on each evening’s entertainment, and I liked Barney’s and the carnival of people it attracted. The story was that Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, and many others all had been regulars in their day. I didn’t know about that, but an array of characters was always in-house in the early 1960s, including art-world up-and-comers like painter Ed Ruscha; photographer, painter, and actor Dennis Hopper; and character actor Lawrence Tierney.

  I was barely twenty-one and strong as an ox, and I’d already become very well acquainted with alcohol before my arrival in Southern California. I loved adding other kinds of inebriates to my recreational repertoire and
exploring where they would take me, but even I struggled to hold my own with the over-the-top kinds of insanity that were standard fare at Jen and Jeanie’s. I knew my tenure there likely would be brief.

  It was at about that time when a Rolls-Royce slowed to a stop one day as my buddies and I were punking steel at the intersection of Beverly Glen and Sunset Boulevard. A well-dressed, chinless man rolled down the car’s window, caught my attention, and asked, “Are you an actor?” I told him I wasn’t, and that seemed to be the answer he was hoping for.

  If I wanted to be one, he informed me, he could help; he promised to put me in the movies because he was a Hollywood agent. What he didn’t explain was that his name was Henry Willson, or that he had paved the way for Robert Moseley to become Guy Madison, for Arthur Kelm to morph into Tab Hunter, or for an awkward truck driver named Roy Scherer to turn into Rock Hudson.

  Bryan O’Byrne’s recent revelation to me that I had what it took to be an actor still was simply that—a bit of encouragement I couldn’t turn into either cash or a career—but neither did the idea seem like a terrible one. So, when Willson continued his introduction by handing me his card with his home address scribbled on the back and inviting me to come to dinner that night to discuss possibilities for stardom, I couldn’t refuse.

  Willson answered the door at his Bel Air home a few hours later and the two of us had drinks and dinner, and yes, he was absolutely certain that I could be a big star—if it was something I truly wanted. When I agreed that the prospect intrigued me, he excused himself for a moment and returned wearing only a silk dressing gown.

  “Hello, cuddle bunny!” he said, and suddenly I understood.

  A feeling of deep unease shot through me from head to toe; I awkwardly excused myself and was quickly out the door, thinking that Hollywood could wait. I was outta there.