All the gossip, if not the life

Jack: The Great Seducer

The Life and Many Loves of Jack Nicholson

Edward Douglas

HarperCollins: 438 pp., $26.95

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Jack NICHOLSON is a great seducer. Who knew? From its title to its final page, the biography “Jack: The Great Seducer” is stuffed with well-worn facts interspersed with lesser-known, more salacious ones. Despite the ponderous epigraph, taken from a Henry James biographer -- “To catch the life that throbbed behind the work, this is our task” -- this attempt at dissecting Nicholson’s life story reads like a lengthy magazine piece and aside from juicy gossip doesn’t reveal much about its subject.

Credibility is hard to come by when the author’s own bio note reads, “Edward Douglas is the pseudonym of a well-known biographer.” He seems to revel in any insider’s anecdote, no matter how trivial or inane. The book opens, for instance, with a former Nicholson girlfriend recalling the strange sight of “the legendary superstar, who was worth $250 million, bringing home a doggie bag from a caterer’s spread” on a movie set. (Apparently Nicholson had a special fondness for Mexican refried beans.) A few pages later, she reflects on her time with Nicholson: “More than anything, I just knew that this was a neat friendship.”

Throughout the book, Nicholson is portrayed as both loathsome and admirable. Douglas marvels at his subject’s complexity (“He was a nest of contradictions carried to unimaginable extremes”) -- unmindful that people are generally full of contradictions and don’t always add up to a cohesive whole.

Nicholson comes across as a man whose entire Weltanschauung originates from his pelvic region. He is a lonely man who allegedly hasn’t fallen in love since breaking up with Anjelica Huston in 1990. He wants to seduce women despite being repelled by them. He never knew his father, and wouldn’t learn until 1974 -- at the age of 37 -- that his “sister” was in fact his mother, and his “mother” was his maternal grandmother. It’s no wonder Nicholson seems so mixed up about women. “The wild philandering of Jack Nicholson, America’s preening Don Juan, a pioneer and hero of the sex revolution of the sixties and seventies, was a reaction to his own bizarre, traumatic, and troubled childhood,” Douglas writes.

Of course, Nicholson has been the subject of numerous books exploring both his personal life and his long career as a film actor. Since Douglas has no interviews with Nicholson himself, he plunders other books for anecdotal material. He also uses newspaper and magazine articles from the Los Angeles Times, Variety, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Playboy and Vanity Fair -- not to mention less-reputable sources such as the National Enquirer, Star and Globe.

Douglas plods through behind-the-scenes stories from Nicholson’s great early films, including “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Carnal Knowledge” and “Chinatown,” and more recent films such as “About Schmidt” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” Along the way, he offers tidbits of bad behavior (on one movie set, Nicholson demanded a chair with a built-in ashtray!) and probes into Nicholson’s relationships with actresses such as Lara Flynn Boyle, to whom he devotes an inordinate number of pages. (After their breakup, Douglas reports, Boyle took to calling her ex “Jackpot Belly.”) The author also plays the role of armchair film critic, declaring that 2003’s “Anger Management” belonged in a trash bin, but conceding that he was unable to watch the movie to the end.

Despite the folderol that fills these pages, Nicholson is an undeniably fascinating subject: He comes across as cerebral, passionate, charming and a brilliant actor even in the most mediocre films. He also happens to have one of the best private art collections in the United States, including famed pieces by Picasso and Matisse.

“Jack” is a book perhaps best left to die-hard Nicholson fans, who may very well yearn to devour its stale, tawdry nuggets. Devoid of authorial style or insight, and filled almost entirely with recycled gossip, Douglas’ biography is about as draining to read as People magazine -- and nearly as memorable.

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Carmela Ciuraru is a regular contributor to Book Review.