The Fabulous Jack Nicholson...

[mrentoul]

Actor Jack Nicholson talks about getting older, and ''co-habiting'' with older women

From the Daily Telegraph, London, where they know how to write.

Jack says he's no longer a ripper

After a string of younger girlfriends, Jack Nicholson announced this week that his hellraising days were over. But , he tells Jan Moir she would be shocked to hear what he gets up to at weekends

At a quiet dinner เ deux with his old friend photographer David Bailey in London this week Jack Nicholson wore a smart suit and shirt, combed his hair down nice, and glowed with the imperial stardust of the living legend.

The words "It's Jack!" rippled around the wood-panelled dining room, although no one actually bothered him.

Good. Back home in Beverly Hills, Nicholson doesn't go out much because, when he does, he often "feels like the mayor on parade". There are other reasons he is reluctant to venture forth in public quite so often.

"I don't know the name of a single club in Los Angeles. Anyway, I think it is very unattractive for me to be seen fawning over little, tiny girls. I didn't feel that for a long time in my life, but now I do. It may not even be true, but I feel that inside. And once I feel that, I don't care what anyone else thinks."

Then he adds: "Heh, heh. If I could slip them out the back entrance wrapped in a blanket, that'd be a different story."

For dinner, Jack had frogs' legs to start, then grilled Dover sole, washed down with a glass of cola and two cigarettes. He made a call on his mobile phone - "How is the boy?" he asked - and unwrapped a present from Bailey, a book of photographs. Nicholson seemed pleased. The two men have known each other for decades, through good times and bad. Through many vivid times. "Except for the most rollicking periods of my life," Nicholson says, "when everyone was a bit too stoned for it to be vivid."

Is he one of those people who can't remember the 1960s ?

"Honey," he tells me with a sigh, "I'm one of those people who can remember the 1940s."

Bailey likes to describe Nicholson, himself and their grizzled contemporaries as "the new old" and Nicholson loves that. He says: "It's because old people didn't used to be like us. Sixty-six-year-old guys were never like us. Today, we have good nutrition and positive attitudes. And I believe that a vital sex life is also very good for the ageing process."

You do?

"Yeah. I think that the lifelong repression of our normal id is very tiring and causes a tremendous amount of stress. A recent medical study said that men who have a lot of orgasms in life have much less testicular and prostate cancer. It doesn't have to be full sex, y'know. It can be masturbation or . . .

"But these things are not sociological, after all, they are in our genes. No system would leave it up to the psychology of man to procreate the species."

After this little speech, Nicholson pauses, lifts those eyebrows high in the tanned sky of his forehead. "That's a real clincheroo, hey?" he says. And laughs.

Forget Nicholson's genes, it is what is going on in Nicholson's jeans that has been a hot topic again this week, an amazing 36 years after he first rose to fame in the film Easy Rider.

Now single, with no girlfriend in sight, Nicholson still lives in his Mulholland Drive lair in an area he once dubbed "Bad Boy Hill", due to the proximity of neighbours and fellow hellraisers Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando.

" I'm not a raver any more, all good things come to an end," he said on Monday.

But it is not strictly true. Just ask Diane Keaton.

Their new film, Something's Gotta Give, pits Nicholson's character, ageing womaniser Harry, who dates only women under 30, against Keaton's divorced, repressed playwright, Erica, who believes that dating is over for her. They meet when Harry is romancing 50something Erica's daughter and are thrown together when he has a heart attack and Erica has to help him recover.

In her perfect white beach house, with her cream crockery and silk sheets, he sets off a series of firecracker sexual explosions and gets to cut off Erica's polo neck with nail scissors as all thoughts of her peachy daughter flee from his head. Yeah, right.

"This is a romantic comedy and the adjective 'romantic' flatters me at this point. Usually, if I'm doing a scene with a woman she's a murderer, a monster or straight-over-the-horns crazy. The least of my problems was making it believable that I was attracted to Diane Keaton," says Nicholson, acknowledging, perhaps, the unlikely rumour that the pair of them were dating for real.

"Believe me," he says, "Diane and I are very different with one another than these two characters are on screen. You bet your bottom dollar on that one! Oh, God! She calls me disgusting all the time. She thinks I am sexually distorted. I tease her, I grab her ass. I throw her hair around. She calls me a ham, I call her a piece of cheese. Sometimes, I wind her up a little and tell her what I did on the weekend. Disgusting!"

Nicholson admits that his character ending up with the older rather than the younger woman is an "adjusted truth", but insists he has dated women over 50, and hopes to do so again.

"Why should we all think that everybody drops dead at 50? It is an insane thing to do to ourselves. It is not true. Believe me, I have had enough so-called experience with older women in every way. There are things about them that are no good and things about them that are fabulous. In my own life, my own aesthetics have changed. Nature changes some of your aesthetics for you. Don't rule anything out."

So why doesn't he have a girlfriend, then?

"I don't know. I don't have an answer to that right now. I have to be very interested in somebody to want to cohabit with them. And I don't know anybody right now. And I don't go out enough to meet a lot of new people."

Does it get lonely up there on Bad Boy Hill?

"Yes," he says. "It does."

Nicholson is dressed casually today, popping his sunglasses on and off as the mood takes him. He is real old-style Hollywood, charming to all, in his rumbly drawl, keen to answer questions - except medical ones, which he does not answer for "legal reasons".

"I only take Viagra when I am with more than one woman" is all he will say on the health front, although he believes many a Hollywood marriage could have been saved by a regular infusion of the wonder drug.

"If these men could just take Viagra, say, twice a month, and really throw it to the woman - whether they wanted to or not - this would have saved many marriages I saw break up," he says.

"You know, it is such a death knell when you say to someone: 'Honey, I can't do it. I can't f*** you any more.' If anyone ever said it to me, I don't know that I would ever recover from it. We don't like to admit just how vulnerable we are. Sometimes, the more worldly and sophisticated we are, the more vulnerable we are underneath."

Today, Nicholson is deep of chest and thick of girth, every inch the golfing grandfather who seems to have suddenly aged in the past few years - something that has apparently taken him by surprise. "I am always a little bit shocked when I look in the mirror. I expect to see some earlier version of myself staring back," he says and dates this Dorian Gray version precisely to when he was 42, "slightly after my most physically attractive period".

This would have been around the time of The Shining (1980) and Reds (1981). Nicholson now says that he had no idea of how attractive he was.

"When I see old photographs, I am stunned. I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but I think, Jesus Christ, I was really good looking. I never had that great impression of myself at the time. When my looks were being judged back then, they made me think I was a pretty odd-looking duck."

Yet women were attracted to him like, well, water to ducks. His only marriage, to actress Sandra Knight, ended in 1967. From that union, his daughter Jennifer has provided him with an eight-year-old grandson.

He had a long relationship with the actress Anjelica Huston, which did not survive his relationship with Rebecca Broussard, with whom he has two children, now aged 12 and 13. Since then, he has been connected with many women; most recently he had a relationship with Lara Flynn Boyle that ended a year ago.

Yet these days he spends most of his time alone - and he has discovered that life is simpler when you are single. Travelling alone is easier. You can go to a party and leave when you want. He likes that.

A couple of nights a week, he goes to watch basketball games. He has people over for dinner. Watches a movie. Goes to the opera. Takes his kids out. He keeps young at heart by never allowing himself to "huff and puff" about aches and pains. "All that 'Aw, I used to be so fit'. Don't. That will kill you faster than anything," he says.

But he is, inescapably, getting older. We all are. And when it comes to women - young women - he is beginning to show signs of a grumpy old man's irritation. It's not that the flesh is unwilling, or even that the ability to jump has gone; it's the jumping through the hoops that seems to get to him.

"Dating just does not happen to be my scene at the moment. I am not into it. You know, I don't wanna queue up, I don't wanna get in line, I don't wanna hear the racket, I don't wanna say, no, I don't dance. There are just too many things. And I have always believed that if you are not going to go out and contribute, don't go out," he says. "Of course, I miss the real thing. Of course I get lonely. Not lonely the way I might have been when I was 25 and it would have filled me with angst. I have learned to enjoy times alone. But I wish I had a partner. The success of this movie does not have the snap on it that it would if I were sharing it, first-hand, with someone. And so forth. All those things," he says. "But you know, I am lucky. I have a relatively rich life and a lotta friends."

Has life gone by quickly?

"Honey," he says, "it's been like smoke through a keyhole." - The Telegraph, London

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/08/arts/ane05.asp

[Nat]

Actor Jack Nicholson talks about getting older, and ''co-habiting'' with older women

Jack says he's no longer a ripper

"I only take Viagra when I am with more than one woman" is all he will say on the health front

Still a stud

Saw the short for his new film and it looks really funny - will definitely go and watch it. Must admit as I was watching the shorts kept thinking that some scenes appear true to his own life (perhaps I was reading a bit too much into them ).

The article is an interesting read - he appears to have settled a little. Sounds like his days hanging out at the playboy mansion are over. Age catches up with all of us, but he's still got quite a bit of life left in him - just doesn't see the point in "jumping through hopes"