Books Film/TV

Nicholson: A Biography by Marc Eliot (Crown Archetype, $30)

 

by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!

“He’ll tell you that Jack is the hippest place in the universe, coolest place in America, the Independent Republic of Jack.  The hardest thing to do is wear a gift well, and Jack wears it with a killer smile and a pair of shades.”

-Mike Nichols

Very few actors can legitimately lay claim to the title “True Hollywood Legend.”  Among the men who have earned that status are names like Gable, Bogart, Dean, Brando, and the most recent member of that elite group and subject of Nicholson:  A Biography, the new book by New York Times bestselling author Marc Eliot, the one and only Jack Nicholson.

Marc Eliot is a prolific veteran biographer having written over fifteen books including Michael Douglas:  A Biography, Steve McQueen:  A Biography, Paul Simon:  A Life (nice to know he titled a few differently) and Cary Grant:  A Biography, (to be honest I felt Nicholson would have more appropriately been called Jack:  A Biography, but that’s just me).

Nicholson, unlike many recent biographies that feel the need to start at midpoint and jump back and forth, commences at the beginning and for the most part unravels in chronological order from his beginnings in Neptune, New Jersey to Hollywood, and every stop in between, covering both the personal and professional sides of the iconic star.  For the book Eliot did not speak to Nicholson himself, but rather gathered bits from magazine articles and interviewed a number of people who were at one time or another close to the three-time Oscar winner.

Reading Nicholson I had issue with Eliot’s writing style, especially a number of redundant and awkwardly worded sentences like “…the basis for his semiautobiographical novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in an Oregon state mental hospital in Salem, Oregon, which depicts the lives of several inmates and their supervisors, including one inmate…” and “…except for one boating sequence, Forman had chosen to shoot the film in sequence.”  Did Eliot not have a thesaurus handy?  The author also begins every chapter with a quote from Jack himself (taken from old interviews done by others) which inexplicably seemed placed there at random, not always having something to do with the sections that follow, (I often had to struggle and stretch to make even the mildest connection).

To be fair Eliot is not an awful writer, but the book reads more like a series of magazine articles; very short on details and real substance.  It offers no revelations and nothing all that new to anyone who has read other biographies by or about the likes of Robert Evans, Roger Corman, and Dennis Hopper (to name a few).  In fact Eliot begins by teasing us with a terrible family secret, of which most fans of Jack’s would already be aware.  Sadly, Nicholson never delves much deeper than an episode of A&E’s Biography.

The book does occasionally show some character, with lines like “Brando didn’t even phone in his performance; it was more like he used two soup cans and a string…” and did tell me a few things I didn’t already know (although like stated earlier, nothing that was previously unpublished).  It also contains a filmography and list of awards and honors bestowed upon Jack during his career that I felt was useful and made the work seem a little more complete.

Although a decent encapsulation of a life, in the end Nicholson:  A Biography is a simple, lightweight portrait of a complex man, meant more for the casual fan of Jack, and not recommended for anyone seriously into the screen legend.

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