Five Easy Decades - Review
Dennis McDougal Writes Jack Nicholson's New Bio
It may be five decades but it's all one Jack - author Dennis McDougal on a half century night on the town with the world's best known Lakers fan
Anything But Easy
Author Dennis McDougal calls his era-by-era look at the long tenure of Jack Nicholson Five Easy Decades. It's a title his subject, the whale-shaped wild card who calls himself Big Jack, might well have chosen himself. After all, Nicholson is as celebrated for his sour, backdoor wit as for his fat pile of high-octane performances. He would concede, as author Dennis McDougal does, that few of the decades he's lived through have been easy.
Five Phases
As promised, the book divides Jack's life into five phases: his formative years as a Kerouackian ne'er do well; his rise to fame in the 1970's; his wallet-inflating ride through the money mad eighties; his years as a Hollywood deity in the nineties and his current, complicated decline.
Same old Jack
It may be five decades but it's all one Nicholson. Through it all, Jack stands fast as the warped wanderer, the marijuana happy hipster who roams L.A., Aspen and London in search of a good time. He's either wooing women, forging high profile friendships and appeasing the press with the same toke-tinged tools: a mix of Reichian psychology, McLuhanesque gobbledygook, tricky introspection and L.A. Lakers zealotry. That, and the trademark smile.
In this book, Nicholson's movie career is well chronicled but analysis of the films or on-set anecdotes are restricted to quick critics' quotes or single lines from marginal sources. The onscreen legacy, in fact, is simply a gimmick by which the author penetrates the privileged, indulgent inner circle known as the Jack Pack, the select, celebrity few the man lets in on his life of "wine, women and bong" (McDougal's wittiest line.)
And though the book tries hard not to slip into tabloid, it loses its footing in the final chapters, as Nicholson begins to appear in the press less often for his films than for his increasingly misogynistic shenanigans.
Where's The Core?
What it fails to explore is the man's core. What is the invisible solidity that constantly sees him through the perpetual reappearance of his demons: the ups and downs of looking after a career in Tinseltown, and enough on-off relationships to sustain a soap opera? The man has found himself on the margins of nearly every major scandal in post war Hollywood history - from Manson and Polanski through to Brando and O.J. (a golfing buddy). Still, he has always managed to crawl from the wreckage with career and soul intact. Something is keeping The Joker in the deck, but McDougal hardly hazards a guess as to what that might be.
Livin' The Life
There isn't a guy on the planet who wouldn't want to be Jack Nicholson; imagine perpetuating one's adolescent bad manners in exchange for million dollar paycheques, a wealth of willing women, and continual public acclaim. All that while going bald, fat and in appearing in stuff like The Bucket List. To his credit, McDougal allows us to live that life for as long as it takes to get through 409 pages ( and a lot of foot notes.) Those whose tastes run beyond an appreciation of Nicholson the night tripper, however, mind find it a dead end.
