| December 29th, 2004 12:39 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Be my Bebe tonight
When Jack Nicholson met Bebe Buell, it was almost inevitable that they would hit it off
December 30, 2004
The Australian
'HI! I'm Bebe," said Bebe Buell, who'd had sex with some of the best - Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, Jimmy Page, Ronnie Wood, Rod Stewart, Elvis Costello (her favourite because he possessed "femininity without being gay") and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, with whom she'd had a daughter, future movie star Liv Tyler.
"Hey, Beeb!" Nicholson said. "Sooo, Beeb, what do you do? Let me guess. You're a model?"
"Well, unfortunately you're right."
"Well, what do you mean by that?"
Mick Jagger began to tease her, insinuating that Bebe acquired her "juuuicy lips" not from blowing Rundgren, "famous for his huge penis", but from Jagger. That seemed unlikely. Keith Richards "was the member of the Rolling Stones who was particularly well-endowed", Bebe later revealed, adding that his erections were impervious to drugs, and that Bill Wyman also "grabbed honours in this department".
"Stay away from Jack," Mick warned her. "He's naughty ... a womaniser."
Nevertheless, Mick, Jerry Hall and Bebe all ended up in Nicholson's Pierre Hotel suite for champagne and games. The girls donned Nicholson's "very clean, very white men's briefs", fell to the floor and began to leg wrestle in front of the men, who threw money down, betting on who'd win, the six-foot (183cm) Jerry or the five-foot-ten (178cm) Bebe (the former won).
Then Rachel Ward arrived and promptly disappeared into the boudoir with Nicholson. Bebe left with Mick and Jerry, and Jerry wanted to see her "tittles", but Bebe refused to go to bed with them.
The following morning, Nicholson called Bebe, and to make amends he took her to dinner with Mick and Jerry at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, where Jerry kicked a girl flirting with Mick so hard her legs crumpled. Then they went to Mick's house, and Nicholson and Bebe had "very normal sex", she later recounted, "wholesome back-seat sex". She rated Nicholson, Jagger and Warren Beatty in a class by themselves as "perfect practitioners of love. God put them on this planet to make love to women. They really take pride and pleasure at being skilful ... You know you weren't going to walk away from it unsatisfied." The next day, Nicholson sent flowers and asked Bebe to call him "Jeke". He was so fond of her that he even rang her mother in Virginia.
"Your daughter is fantastic," he said. "You did a good job, Mom."
He flew Bebe out to LA, where she stayed with a girlfriend nearby, off Mulholland, and Nicholson drove over in his "cover car", the old Volks.
"Mick tells me that you're gonna hurt me," she said. "Well, I might, but you'll have a damn good time before I do."
With agent Sue Mengers, they took in The Shining in Westwood, and he asked Bebe for the "female point of view".
"She might be right for Postman," Mengers said, referring to a forthcoming Nicholson project, The Postman Always Rings Twice.
"She's a rock'n'roll kind of girl," Nicholson said. "I don't think Hollywood and the Beeb would mix."
Later, he and Bebe parked high up on Mulholland Drive and he showed her the lights of LA before dropping her off at her girlfriend's, where they did it up against the Volks, Bebe hiking her dress up and Nicholson keeping his trousers on and just opening his fly, "high school demure" style. She found it all "very sexy".
"My butt was going 50 miles an hour," Nicholson told her.
When Bebe subsequently put together a rock band, the B-Sides, and played the Ritz in New York, she wrote a song, Normal Girl, with a Nicholson-inspired lyric about how good it was to make out in the car on a starry night. For a while, she and Nicholson continued "fooling around", which upset her lover, rocker Stiv Bators. According to Bebe, at CBGB one night, during a coke and booze-fuelled set with his band the Dead Boys, Bators received oral sex from a member of the audience and later tried to hang himself from an overhead steam pipe. Bebe broke up with Bators, and she and Nicholson kept seeing one another intermittently.
Excerpted from Jack: The Great Seducer by Edward Douglas (copyright 2004; all rights reserved), published by HarperEntertainment, an imprint of HarperCollins, $39.95
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| December 29th, 2004 12:58 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Bed & bored
Lawrie Zion
December 24, 2004
Jack: The Great Seducer - The Life and Many Loves of Jack Nicholson
By Edward Douglas, HarperCollins, 438pp, $39.95
THE latest Jack Nicholson biography has been written by someone calling himself Edward Douglas. He (or she) is said to be a well-known biographer who uses a pseudonym here, we are told, to protect his sources. Personal embarrassment sounds like a likelier explanation. Let's try to put it nicely: if Jack: The Great Seducer were made for the screen, it would be dismissed as direct-to-DVD drivel or bad soft porn.
The prologue, entitled No Need for Viagra, sets the tone. During the course of the next 350 pages we hear so much about Nicholson's sexual exploits that it is a wonder he had time to do anything else. "He could make love all night long. I stopped counting at seven," says one beneficiary of his affections.
Whoever Douglas is, he appears to have gleaned much of his lurid detail through his access to several of Nicholson's former lovers, including Cynthia Basinet, who is named as one of the interviewees. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to have been able to talk to Nicholson. If I were the actor, I would have steered clear as well.
Those unfamiliar with the barest details of the man behind the Ray-Bans may be surprised to learn that he grew up believing his mother was his sister and didn't discover the truth of his parentage until he was 37; and that after a shaky start to his 45-year acting career he has gone on to become the only male actor to have won three Oscars (for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets).
To be fair to our mystery author, there is some interesting discussion about Nicholson's development as an actor in the period up to and including his appearances in Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider, which was his true breakthrough movie. Roger Corman, who directed him in three of his early films, reveals that he wasn't initially convinced Nicholson was star material, and Nicholson himself more or less gave up on the idea, turning his hand to writing and directing.
But the book is a lumbering mess when it comes to making sense of Nicholson's overall legacy as an actor. Attempts to interpret his work are invariably borrowed from film reviews and there are long undigested quotes from lofty secondary sources, such as Dennis Bingham's book, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood.
The argument presented here is - wait for it - that "Nicholson was a deliberately self-conscious or absurdist Brechtian actor who was more complex than the relatively mono dimensional Dean and Brando, simultaneously embodying and critiquing the characters he played by assuming a series of masks ... He made a masquerade of masculine conformity, revealing a character's confident male identity as an unconscious Oedipal identification with monstrous paternity."
Hmm. Perhaps. It's a pity, however, that Douglas drops such pretentious prognostications such as these into his shoddy mix without bothering to analyse what they could possibly mean. The peppering of such academic posturings sit uneasily with Douglas's preferred house style, a typical example of whichcan be savouredin his section on Prizzi's Honor, where we are treated to one of many references to Nicholson's on-again off-again 17-year relationship with Anjelica Huston.
"If Nicholson hadn't won his latest Oscarrace, he'd at least emerged from the model wars with a stable of thoroughbred fillies. Anjelica's position as his main squeeze became increasingly nebulous ... In her days as a Zoli model on Seventh Avenue, she had complained about the danger of becoming a fag hag, but now, ironically she became a sort of hetero hag, unwittingly fronting for Nicholson's serial infidelities with other women."
It gets worse. A passage about the increasing profile of models in Hollywood precipitates an endless sentence containing lists of celebrity pairings that begins on page 215 and doesn't stop to draw breath until the top of page 217. Elsewhere there are lazy repetitions. I lost count of the number of times that we're told how much Nicholson's daughter Jennifer loved buying expensive clothes.
Accounts of Nicholson's relationships with his other children are annoyingly threadbare, especially in the case of Caleb, who was born in 1970 to former lover Susan Anspach. With Anspach, things seem to have become especially sordid when Nicholson foreclosed on her four-bedroom Santa Monica abode in 1996, an incident that attracted the wrath of at least two newspapers.
Should we care? Obviously, Nicholson was no angel and may well have behaved very badly indeed on occasions. But the procession of wives and lovers and their accumulated grievances and gripes is recounted with all the verve of a shopping list. I'm just not as fascinated as I'm clearly meant to be to learn that he "escorted" Lara Flynn Boyle to the Emmys or "squired" her to some prizefight.
On page two of this hollow tome (the No Need for Viagra chapter), Nicholson is presented to us as "a nest of contradictions carried to unimaginable extremes, just as his dancing eyebrows and flashing smile, the most familiar trademarks on the world's screen since Brando's biceps, concealed an unfixably morbid inner life".
But after finishing Jack: The Great Seducer I felt no closer to understanding what made the man tick, although perhaps being a wonderful lover for all those decades is no small achievement.
If only I'd had the sense to judge the book by its cover.
1300 655 191, ABD, $35.95
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| December 31st, 2004 10:37 AM |
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| jb |
Interesting stuff.. |
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