• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 668 0

—they’ll bore your head off. God, it’s just painful to listen to them. Fifteen minutes in a roomful of these people is like turning your head into a husk. Health foods have become the basis of a religion. Let’s see, ESP, of course, flying saucers, anything is fertile ground now. There’s a new messiah born every day. That’s why Jimmy Carter made such a colossal mistake in not preaching. He’d gotten away with murder as it was, getting elected as a born-again Christian. That’s what people wanted. If he had just ranted and raved for the last three years about the depravity of the people, they would have loved it.

Tell me, where are you going to turn your eye next? Are you at loose ends, or casting around?

I’m doing something that I’ve had on my mind for a long time, which is a Vanity Fair book about New York, à la Thackeray. When I went to Leonard Bernstein’s party [to report on Radical Chic], it was with the idea of gathering material for what was going to be a nonfiction book, which could be done, incidentally, if you could find enough events or scenes like that to move into. My impulse now, though, is to try to do it as a novel, since I’ve never done one, and to just see what happens. I’m also very much aware of the fact that novelists themselves hardly touch the city. How they can pass up the city I don’t know. The city was a central—character is not a very good way to put it, but it was certainly a dominant theme—in the works of Dickens, Zola, Thackeray, Balzac. So many talented writers now duck the city as a subject. And this is one of the most remarkable periods of the cities. Who has been the great novelist of New York since the Second World War? Nobody. Or Chicago or Cleveland or Los Angeles or Newark, for that matter. My God, the story of Newark must be absolutely amazing.

So you’re going to be out prowling the streets?

Well, I don’t know if I’ll be charging into people’s houses, but I will have to do a lot of reporting. There’s more good material out there than in any writer’s brain. A writer always likes to think that a good piece of work he has done is the result of his genius. And that the material is just the clay, and it’s ninety-eight percent genius and two percent material. I think that it’s probably 70 percent–30 percent in favor of the material. This ends up putting a great burden on the reporting, and I don’t think many fiction writers understand this.

JACK NICHOLSON

by Nancy Collins

March 29, 1984

Garrett Breedlove, the astronaut you played in ‘Terms of Endearment,’ is hardly a matinee idol. Any qualms about playing a clearly middle-aged, out-of-shape guy?

No, because I’ve always wanted to play older. Some of my early heroes are Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, Charles Bickford. They didn’t have any problems with it. This middle-life thing has become a phobia; people think it’s got to be a big problem, when it’s simply not. I know from real life that middle-aged people are very attractive. I feel I’m beating out all those guys who stay on rigid diets. They run; they go crazy; their skin is always in fabulous shape. I feel like I’m going to scoop the pot going the other way. Besides, I’ve been physically dissected more than any frog in a biology class—it’s my eyebrows, my eyes, my teeth. And now it’s my stomach. For twenty-five years, they’ve been writing that I’m totally bald, and now they’re all bald and—have a look [points to his head].

I’ve been overweight since I was four years old. Of course, I have all the normal defenses against it. But it’s always bugged me. I don’t want to overinflate my role and my job, but isn’t there more to me than what I weigh?

One of the themes of ‘Terms’ is middle-aged sexuality and crisis. You’re forty-six. Have you suffered any form of midlife crisis?

Oh, sure. You’re aware of the rings in your tree. It’s like when Mick Jagger says it would be terrible to be singing rock & roll at forty. Well, it’s not so terrible, as he now appreciates. I’m aware that in the job I do, age is a big factor, so it’s the first time in a professional