Jack Nicholson once explained, “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 60.”
The comment was made some 28 years ago, long before Nicholson’s current life laying low and, as reported in The Post, “looking wobbly” at the Carlyle in Los Angeles.
As he nears 90, a recent photo showed him walking with a cane. But over the course of his hell-raising, women-chasing, drug-consuming decades in the 70s and 80s, he spent a lot of time wearing sunglasses.
The iconic Jack Nicholson of yore has been a model for every charismatic, sometimes toxic, male star ever since – Nicholson’s stretch of Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills is not known as Bad Boy Drive for nothing – as he lived a life rife with drugs, sex and debauchery.
The recently unearthed example of his outrageous behavior came courtesy of Ben Dreyfuss, posting a Nicholson tale on X about his mother, Jeramie Rain.
According to Dreyfuss — son of Rain and actor Richard Dreyfuss — his mother was dating Nicholson when he was being stalked by a woman from “Iowa or wherever.”
The apparent stalker turned up in Los Angeles and knocked on Nicholson’s door, then found her way into the house leaving Rain and Nicholson understandably concerned. They all wound up in the living room, then Rain was dispatched to call her boyfriend’s agent and assistant for help.
When she returned, the living room was empty. Rain found Nicholson in the bedroom, allegedly receiving oral sex from the stalker. She understandably flipped out, saying to Nicholson, “What the f–k is wrong with you?”
Nicholson is said to have replied, “She offered me a blowjob. I wasn’t going to say no!”
Rain promptly broke up with the three-time Oscar winner.
Marc Eliot, author of the definitive “Nicholson: A Biography,” is not surprised. “Jack is a raging heterosexual,” Elliot deadpanned to The Post.
“Women are his raison d’etre. That blowjob was the sign of affection that he is always looking for but never receives.”
Eliot attributes at least some of Nicholson’s carnal looseness — and what he claims to be emotional neediness — to finding out age 37, in 1974, the woman he thought was his sister was, in fact, his biological mother.
Making it sting all the more, Nicholson followed her to Los Angeles in pursuit of a better life than he had in Neptune, New Jersey, where they grew up.
“That great deception killed his trust in women,” said Elliot of the shocking revelation, delivered to Nichlson via a reporter from Time magazine who found it out while working on an article about while “Chinatown” was in production. “Plus he liked to have a good time.”
In his book, Eliot writes about Nicholson’s “round the clock drinks, drugs, sex … and hot, willing girls who loved to get just as high as the boys.”
Nicholson’s bold-face conquests include Diane Keaton, Joni Mitchell and Margaret Trudeau (mother of Justin Trudeau). One of his former sex-pals, the actress Karen Mayo-Chandler once gushed to Playboy that Nicholson is “a nonstop sex machine. He’s into fun and games … like spanking, handcuffs, whips and Polaroid pictures.”
Nicholson was only married once, to actress Sandra Knight between 1962 and 1968. They have one daughter together, Jennifer.
When Nicholson spoke to Playboy, he told the magazine that he once spent three months in the 1960s, always nude in his house, “no matter who came by.”
Less understanding about his free and easy lifestyle was Anjelica Houston. She was romantically tied to Nicholson for 17 years, but the final straw was when he took up with actress and model Rebecca Broussard and got her pregnant in 1990.
“Jack didn’t exactly introduce it as ‘This is the greatest news,’” Houston, who costarred with Nicholson in “Prizzi’s Honor,” directed by her father, John Houston, told Vulture. “He said, ‘Someone is having a baby.’ Then he kind of laid it on me. I was really nice about it … But by the time I got home, I was really furious.”
That Broussard would get pregnant — she and Nicholson have two children together, Ray and Lorraine — should not come as a shock. As he claimed in Rolling Stone, Nicholson never bought a condom in his life.
Nicholson bragged to the magazine that over the course of 2006 — when he was, himself, 69 — he’d “covered the territory from 21 to 61,” in terms of the ages of women he’d bedded.
Despite his prowess, it’s not like Nicholson was the easiest guy in the world to go out with. Houston was in his house in 1977 when he and Roman Polanski dropped by for a photo shoot.
One of Polanski’s models was a 13-year-old, whom he is now infamous for admitting to having unlawful sex with in court then running away to France to avoid sentencing over. Police investigating that crime brought Polanski to Nicholson’s house a day or two later. While there, they searched Houston’s purse and a half-gram of cocaine was discovered.
She got arrested. But Nicholson, who was a regular user of cocaine (he once joked to People that he gets high “about four days a week … the average for an American”) got away unscathed. According to Eliot’s book, Nicholson’s drug stash was hidden in fake shaving cream containers.
Despite the legal inequality, Houston goes easy on Nicholson as far as his powdery indulgences.
Nicholson, she told Vulture, “Never took overt amounts. He was never a guzzler. I think Jack sort of used it in a rather smart way. Jack always had a bit of a problem with physical lethargy. He was tired, and I think probably, at a certain age, a little bump would cheer him up. Like espresso.”
Nevertheless, according to Eliot, he was enough of a connoisseur to delineate between the very good and the merely good when it came to cocaine. During his parties, said Eliot, “drugs were everywhere. But there were upstairs and downstairs drugs. The upstairs drugs were for VIPs, best friends and especially beautiful women.”
And what parties they were. “The parties would go on all hours of the night,” said Eliot. “They were loud, with people running around naked and jumping into pools.”
Just one thing, though: Guests had to remember to be well fed before getting to Nicholson’s house. Amid all the partying, according to Eliot’s book, the refrigerator would be all but barren, usually containing beer, pot and milk. The latter was for Nicholson’s sensitive stomach.
One person who was not a fan of the wild house parties on Mulholland was Nicholson’s pal Marlon Brando.
“Brando was his next door neighbor and he called the police chief on [Nicholson],” said Eliot. “He said that Nicholson was disturbing the peace. The police would come, Nicholson would apologize and the next day he would go over and ask Brando why he called the police. He’d say, ‘You guys were bothering me; I was trying to concentrate and the noise was too much.’ ”
But cops coming to the pad of Nicholson for something as minor as a noise complaint wouldn’t be much of a problem. As the former Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss told The Post, “Everyone loves Jack Nicholson and all the cops want to be famous. He has connections with them.”
He proved the depth of those connections at a time when they could have come in handy for Fleiss. Just before she got busted on charges of pandering, she recalled, “Jack drove down to my house [a spread that previously belonged to Michael Douglas].
“He walked around the side of my house and tapped on the bedroom window. I opened the backdoor and he said, ‘They’re onto you, kid.’”
Nicholson was referring to the LAPD planning to arrest Fleiss. But she took no heed: “I thought, how high is he to be telling me this? But the truth is, how high was I not to listen?”
Not long after, she was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 37 months in prison. Right before she went in, Nicholson came through again, showing his soft side.
“Jack called me right before I went to prison and he said, ‘I know this seems forever and like your life is over. But you need to keep looking forward. You can still have a good life. There’s so much good ahead of you.’ “
Fleiss savored the memory and added, “That was so f—king nice. I liked that even better than the warning he gave me.”
