Jack--The Biography of Jack Nicholson by John Parker

Author:John Parker [John Parker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784185626
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

11 GOIN’ SOUTH FROM POLANSKI

ON THE EVENING OF 24 MARCH 1977, Princess Anne, president of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, was attending the annual presentation of the British Oscars and fully expected to meet Jack Nicholson, who had been nominated as best actor of 1976 for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Esther Rantzen, the presenter of the live television coverage of the awards from Wembley, announced Nicholson’s name and the cameras swung around to reveal… an empty seat where he should have been sitting. Hasty excuses were made and there were rumours that Nicholson, in the mould of other Hollywood rebels like George C. Scott and Brando, had simply refused to honour the London occasion with his presence. Later that evening, an embarrassed spokesman for United Artists, the film’s distributors, announced apologetically that he had not in fact arrived in Britain as expected, and was still in California ‘going about his normal routine’.

Jack’s friends in England knew he enjoyed being given prizes and, although he would not go out of his way to get in front of British royalty, he would not be rude to them, either. On this occasion, rudeness did not come into it; he stayed out of touch because of the trouble on Mulholland Drive. The reason for his non-arrival was rather more complicated than the bland explanations given by the studio. On the very day he was due in London, Roman Polanski was being arraigned before the Los Angeles Superior Court on six charges, alleging he drugged, raped and committed an act of sodomy on a thirteen-year-old girl in Nicholson’s house, and Anjelica Huston was on $1,500 bail after being arrested on the same day as Polanski for alleged possession of cocaine. At the time that Princess Anne should have been presenting Nicholson with his award, he was holed up in Aspen, Colorado, surveying the sensational mass of world press headlines, which had dragged him into the worst Hollywood scandal since Errol Flynn’s infamous rape case.

This complicated and dramatic sequence of events, which brought the world’s media to set up camp in Mulholland Drive, had its beginnings fourteen days earlier on 10 March. Nicholson was already in Aspen. He was spending some time in the company of, among others, Jill St John, whose own recent companions, including Frank Sinatra and Henry Kissinger, had brought her almost as much publicity as Nicholson’s relationship with Anjelica. Nicholson’s love life had continued to be conducted on and off in the papers since the very public split the previous year with Anjelica. In spite of the pre-Christmas reunion with Anjelica, their relationship had struck another bad patch. Nicholson went off to do some skiing on a separate vacation, while Anjelica was preparing to move out of Mulholland Drive, with no other man in mind. Nicholson did not expect her to be there by the time of his planned return in the third week of March, in readiness to fly to London for the British Academy awards.

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