JACK NICHOLSON, DOWN TO THE LAST DETAIL

In 1974, when Jack Nicholson was in Manhattan to promote "The Last Detail," he had not yet won an Oscar. But we were all willing to bet it was just a matter of time. And "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Terms of Endearment" and "As Good As It Gets" proved us right. On his very best behavior for this New York Times interview, he nevertheless revealed traces of the eternal bad boy that he surely is.--Guy Flatley

I've felt weird all day long, like I'm standing aside and watching myself. And I look strange. What do you suppose this bump is on the side of my face? I've never had anything like that before. And my eyes feel all squinty. I must look like some guy doing a Bufferin commercial."

His eyes do look a little squinty, but he could never pass for a guy hooked on Bufferin. Nor does he look much like Jack Nicholson, the blissfully blunt, boyishly lewd cut-up of "Five Easy Pieces" and "Carnal Knowledge." Yet it is Jack Nicholson sitting there on the lumpy hotel sofa, slumped sideways, droopy-eyed, thin-haired, decked out in conservative gray slacks and a red-and-blue plaid skirt like the one you gave your dad for Christmas back in the fifties.

But after a while, just about the time the aroma of pot has disappeared, telltale signs begin to surface--a cynical smile here, a sudden flash of wicked laughter there, an obscenely accurate appraisal of one public official or another. He's the same bad boy who made good as a boozy dropout in 1969's "Easy Rider," all right, and he's nipped into town now to promote "The Last Detail," a salty saga in which he is so good as "bad-Ass" Buddusky--a sweet-souled, sewer-mouthed, trigger-tempered, beer-belching, skirt-chasing sailor--that he's sure to grab the Oscar nomination that Hollywood mysteriously denied him for his knockout performance as Jonathan, the kinky womanizer, in Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge." (To read Guy Flatley's 1976 interview with Mike Nichols, click here.)

"The Last Detail" opens today at the National and Coronet, and like a good boy, Nicholson is here to spread the hoorays--partly because he's in for a percentage of the profits. But it's clear that an interview is the last detail he really wants to bother with. "Oh, my God, I've been through this a million times," he sighs, not genuinely vexed, just sort of embarrassed. "'Born in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1937...got a job in the cartoon department at MGM...acted on television and in horror movies...kept company with loose women...got into drugs...became quasi-political...' And then the reporter simply figures out the best stylistic way to say it all over again."

Well, just tell me if my questions get out of bounds.

"Nothing's out of bounds. You take your chances, and I'll take mine."

Your father abandoned your mother when you were born?

"My father and mother separated when I was a baby. I saw him extremely intermittently. He was a nice man. He's been dead for some time. My mother is also dead. So I'm an orphan."

It's also been said that the formative days and nights of Jack Nicholson were devoted to raising holy Ned in Neptune. "Just regular adolescent frustrations. I wasn't a car thief or anything, though I've seen one or two stolen in my day. Actually, I was in competition with the school for entertainment value. I was even in high school plays, much to the horror of my immediate peers."

Although Nicholson--more charismatic than conventionally handsome--is considered by the Playboy set to be the bachelor's bachelor, a free and frolicking agent with his pick of Hollywood's prettiest, the truth is that he got married in 1961 and did the domestic drudgery bit for five frustrating years. He is also a father.

"Jennifer is 10 now," Nicholson says in his quiet, nasal drawl that seems more Nebraska than New Jersey. "I see her every week. We have a real good relationship, very one-to-oneish, if you know what I mean. It's always been easy for us to talk to one another because, genetically, we have the same emotional tracks."

Nicholson also finds it easy to talk to Anjelica Huston, the dark and fetching daughter of director John Huston-possibly because Tootie, as Nicholson calls her, is seldom more than a whisper away. Even now, she is in the very next room. Would Nicholson, a lotharian legend in his own time, care to take a stand on the sticky issue of sexual fidelity?

"I don't think you can have a policy about it," he says after a second or so of meditation. "I think everybody is possessive--it's one of those things than enhance male-female feelings. Of course, being overly possessive is obviously going to irritate the person you're having a relationship with. But I don't like to share my lady, really. And I assume she feels the same."

Nor does he necessarily want to share a marriage contract with his lady. "It's not that I'm dead set against marriage. But I really do find--except for the purposes of an interview--that it is not the least rewarding to have opinions on these things. Once things start happening, you will do what you will do, no matter what pronouncements you've made in the past."

Spoken more like an elder statesman than a raunchy rebel. Is Father Time playing some premature trick on Nicholson? "I'm aware that I'm getting older--I'll be 37 in April. I don't really think much about it, but there was a song at the Dylan concert--I think it was called 'Forever Young'--that started me wondering just how much anxiety I do feel about growing old. I try to feel that it's just the actual meat that's getting older. I gain extra weight and I wonder if maybe this time I won't lose it again. There are dark circles under my eyes that may not go away. My hair is going away. Of course, if I weren't a maniac, I wouldn't be noticing these things.

"Old age--so what? If a truck hit me, I'd be gone right away. And if there were cures for cancer and the other diseases, I'd start worrying because I'd know I was going to die a violent death. Anyone who reaches a certain age senses a loss of his powers. I just did two movies back to back, and some days I was so tired that I knew I couldn't do what I was supposed to do. That never happened to me before. Oh, I went ahead and did the work, but not really. I guess we all have an anxiety about growing old, about being excluded. Thinking, 'Am I the wrong age now for this kind of behavior?'"

Sad to say, flocks of feminists equate Nicholson's kind of behavior with the behavior of a male chauvinist pig. Maybe it's because he's so vividly vile as the man who treats women as sex objects. The unsettling images of him ditching Karen Black in the ladies' room of a gas station in "Five Easy Pieces" and bully-bruising Ann-Margret to the brink of suicide in "Carnal Knowledge" cling stubbornly to the brain.

"I played those characters; I didn't editorialize them. They are legitimate representations of male attitudes of our time, attitudes which result in crippling negativism. I didn't try to make those men any more or any less palatable to the audience than others I've played. That would be pandering and pandering is the deadliest disease of the artistic community. I don't try to force the audience to feel one way or the other.

"A certain segment of women say we can't know them, because we're men. Well, they're hurting themselves with their rhetoric and their propaganda. And I'm not talking on a theoretical level; there has been a very real backlash. Men are writing fewer female roles than ever before because they're made to feel that if they do write about women, they must give those women a point of view about the movement. And that is very limiting. I'm afraid it will be another five years before this quasi-dance of seduction between the opposing political forces comes to an end. I myself try to duck conversations about sexism. It's all so dehumanizing.

"I was a feminist long before women's rights became a fashionable topic for discussion. I was talking with Bertolucci last night after the Dylan concert and when I made some intimate little gesture to Tootie, he said, 'Ah, you really do understand women, don't you?' 'Of course,' I said, 'just as you do.' And then he said something which I find to be so true. 'You can write a book or a play or do almost anything,' he said, 'but you cannot make a movie if you don't appreciate women.'"

Maria Schneider, the awesomely liberated sex kitten who is amply appreciated by Bernardo Bertolucci and who helped him hugely in making his "Last Tango in Paris" the red, hot and blue firecracker it became, will no doubt generate megatons of heat as the recipient of Nicholson's passion in"The Passenger," a top-secret flick directed by Michelangelo Antonioni last year in London, Munich, Barcelona, Almeria and the Sahara Desert.

"Working with Antonioni has its ups and downs."

Could the downs possibly have anything to do with the Maestro's celebrated habit of viewing actors as sticks of furniture?

"Oh, I didn't mind that," Nicholson says, somehow managing to wink without so much as batting an eyelash.

Forget Antonioni. What do you do with a problem like Maria?

Maria and I were old friends. I'd been out with her. I always think of her as a female James Dean--she's a great natural. It's funny--Tony Richardson told me he asked Maria what she thought of me and she said, 'Well, Jack is a professional. He likes to know what he is doing. I do not.'"

And, professionally speaking, Jack is doing plenty these days--perhaps in an effort to make up for a slight dip in popularity stemming from "Drive, He Said," a bleak look at lust and lethargy on campus which Nicholson directed, but did not star in, in 1971, and "The King of Marvin Gardens," Bob Rafelson's enigmatic 1972 drama in which Nicholson was cast as the sexually insecure brother of superstud Bruce Dern. Although the public spurned this somber side of Nicholson's talent, both films have gone on to achieve cult status among discerning buffs.

Not that Nicholson didn't have his pick of the plums. "I passed up Michael in 'The Godfather' and I passed up 'The Sting.' Even though I am a non-mercenary artist, I had a pretty good idea of the commercial worth of those properties. But, creatively, they were not worth my time."

Presumably, "Chinatown"--Nicholson's third movie set for release in 1974--was worth his creative time. Directed by Roman Polanski and co-starring Faye Dunaway and John Huston, it's a darkly bizarre detective story set in the thirties. And, later this year, Mike Nichols, who charted Nicholson's path through "Carnal Knowledge," will team him with Warren Beatty in an offbeat comedy called "The Fortune."

And, with a little bit of luck, it will not be so bloomin' offbeat that they'll ban it in Georgia--as they did "Carnal Knowledge"--on the grounds that it is pornography, a judgment made possible by the recent Supreme Court rulings on obscenity.

"They're crazy! All I've got to say is I wish the people who bring the actions against a movie like 'Carnal Knowledge' would have to appear at these tribunals and give their reasons in their own words. No, I take it back. I don't wish that at all. They'd just make fools of themselves and then I'd feel sad. Let them stay hidden out there with their dumb ideas."

Nicholson feels that dumb ideas have been bouncing about the land for some time now, none dumber than the idea that "Easy Rider" was guilty of glorifying dope dealers. "The kind of dope dealers shown in that movie need a little glorification. Those guys aren't even in business any more. Their use is up. Today, the big money is in hard drugs. I myself am not a heavy drugger. I know it's not fashionable to be an old pothead, but what can I do? That's pretty much my level.

"The whole repression-of-drugs movement has had the exact opposite effect of what was intended. Drug experts advised Nixon against it, and they were proved right. Ever since he began cutting them off at the border, there has been an extreme increase in the use of cocaine. But Nixon...oh, forget Nixon, it's the whole country."

Nixon, however, is not an easily forgotten man. "I, for one, don't want him to resign. I would like him to turn upon his constituency and fight for his life and reveal the pressures that have motivated him. Let's get a good look at the man, let's not accept some political step-down that is made 'for the good of the government.' If we let that happen, everything will be the same as before.

"I say this guy is running for a third term. I wouldn't put it past him. And I'm sad to say the reason he still has his job is that there is no one around who is willing to step up and say 'I'll do the job.' If I were Nixon, I'd say, 'I'll put the issue before the public--they'll believe me. I'll tell them I want a vote of confidence, that this whole Watergate thing is nothing more than a muckraking media plot.' I mean, who's going to run against the man? All the politicians are too busy eating each other.

"I've hesitated saying these things about Nixon in the press because I've been so afraid he'd like my ideas and use them," says Nicholson, shaking his head in despair. "Come to think of it, I may be the only man to fill his job. I'd better get on the phone--quick!"