Off-Balance Heroes

NICK NOTLE HAS NEVER BEFORE PLAYED A CHARACTER like the one you’ll encounter in November at the start of Martin Scorsese’s remake of the 1962 thriller “Caper Fear.” Sam Bowden is well respected and prosperous. He dresses meticulously, shaves every morning, belongs to a health club. He’s a lawyer, which means that at some point, he must have regularly attended classes, turned in papers on time and got the addresses right on his law school applications.

Why Nolte would even be interested in such a conventional part is baffling, until I notice him moving painfully across a parking lot in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where we’ve arranged to meet and talk. It’s about an hour past sunset on a spring evening, and the actor has just emerged from the Stygian night inside Stage 27, where much of the film’s violent ending is being shot. The set represents a houseboat on a secluded stretch of the Cape Fear River, where Bowden and his family have been cornered by a vengeful ex-con named Max Cady, who Bowden unsuccessfully defended for rape 14 years earlier. Cady, played by Robert De Niro with a maniacal flair of a Southern television evangelist, has put his old lawyer on trial for so badly representing him, found him guilty of treason and sentenced him to “learn about loss,” starting with the rape and murder of his wife and daughter.

Now, as Nolte, still in character, makes his way to his trailer, his blond hair, blue denim shirt and khaki pants plastered to his shivering body, he carries himself like a man who has lost every shred of identity. Nolte doesn’t lift his feet, he pushes and drags them across the cement. By the end of the film, he explains later, Bowden has been “reduced to zero.”

Over the next couple of days, as Nolte studies the opening ape scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Edouard Henriques, a makeup artist, prepares a small rubber appliance to be inserted under the actor’s upper lip, and the word “monkey” is bandied about like a password, it gradually becomes clear that Bowden’s Gregory Peck portrayed as a righteous hero and playing him as a moral cipher so lost that his only hope is to be obliterated back up into the trees.

“He’s going to go from upright, civilized man to stooped, crouching man,” the actor says. “In the end, he’s going to be all down, like this”: Nolte is out of his chair and into a squat, wildly flailing his arms, his blue, deep-set movie-star eyes revealing nothing but atavistic terror.

Nolte is confiding his devolutionary concept to Scorsese, the man often hailed as one of modern cinema’s great auteurs. Says Nolte, “He’ll tell us if we’ve gone too far.”

FOR THE LAST 16 YEARS, NICK NOLTE HAS BEEN offering his own dysfunctional version of Hollywood leading man. His is himself a recovering alcoholic and former drug abuser, who has been through divorce three times and a palimony suit once, and the misery shows in his work.

A Nolte hero is rarely a pretty sight. Whether a career cop like Jack Cates in the two “48 Hours” movies or a career criminal like Lee Umsetter in “Weeds,” a guy living in the street like Jerry Baskin in “Down and Out Beverly Hills” or an enormously successful painter like Lionel Dobie in “Life Lessons” (the Scorsese-directed portion of New York Stories”), he stands humbly before us a complete and utter mess.

Nolte’s thesis is that to be an American man right now is to be bewilderingly screwed up. “You have a President of the country,” he says, “who hasn’t worked out the rage against his own father.” In fact, in the Nolte cosmology, sincerely trying to kill yourself, as both Umsetter and Baskin do, is good karma. It’s when you pretend you have your act together, like Sam Bowden, that you’re asking for trouble.

Nolte just has no time for the seriously unflawed. Offered the part of Superman, the actor said he was interested only if he could play him as a schizophrenic. And, in a fashion statement about his own precarious psychological and emotional predicaments, Nolte’s standard off-camera attire, even on the golf course, consists of light green surgical scrubs. On the set of “Life Lessons,” he extended the theme with a hospital gurney, which he rested on between scenes. “He had everything but an IV,” says Richard Price, who wrote the screenplay.

Like the actor himself, Nolte’s characters are almost invariably self-destructive, manic-depressive and alcoholic. Phil Eliott, the uncanny wide receiver in “North Dallas 40,” can’t go 15 seconds without inserting a beer, pill, cigarette, Tiparillo or joint into his mouth. Cates, the cop, starts his day with a stiff drink, then resorts frequently to a pocket flask, and Dobie can’t paint unless he’s being sexually tormented by his miserable, untalented assistant.

In “The Prince of Tides,” which opens in December, a Nolte character finally gets a chance to unburden himself, as he spends much of the movie recounting his bizarre, tortured childhood to an understanding psychiatrist, played by the film’s director, Barbara Streisand.

Yet, despite being beset by Nolte’s own problems, his characters remain distinct. His alcoholic athlete doesn’t blur into his alcoholic Abstract Expressionist, or his alcoholic cops. And Nolte plays them utterly straight, without the decadent chic of Mickey Rourke or the wink of Jack Nicholson. They are rarely more charming or witty than the average citizen, and often look worse.

To play Phil Elliott, a veteran football player who has been abusing himself for years, Nolte spent months lifting weights, then stopped completely, and put on 40 pounds of fat, until he could proudly parade around the locker room with pale, dimpled, cellulite thighs. In the movie, when Elliot meets a beautiful girl, he falls asleep with a beer and a cigarette in hand, breaks into a loud nasal snore and, as she spreads a blanket over him, instinctively outs his hand between his legs.

“There is no attempt to woo the audience,” says Karel Reisz, who has directed Nolte twice: in 1978, in the Vietnam-era drug-smuggling tale, “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and, more than a decade later, in a detective thriller, “Everybody Wins.”

“He doesn’t know how, “ says Debra Winger, who has played opposite Nolte twice. Winger reveals some of her frustration with his will opacity when she tells me: “The title of your story should be, ‘Courageous or Stupid? You be the Judge.’”

Indeed, Nolte’s most significant lack of vanity applies to his mind. While many good actors invite us to watch them think, he offers an obstructed view of an average or even impaired cluelessness. “He’s a master of the inchoate, the deeply mixed-up,” wrote the former New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.

Nolte is just as modest about his own grasp of objective reality. He probably can’t shed much light on his past, he says, because “it’s all been abstracted and exaggerated by imagination.” After declining to talk about any of his three marriages, including the seven-year one just ended to Becky Linger, the mother of his only child, Brawley King, Nolte says, “I’ve never been able to get a handle on the whole male female thing.” And at several points during these interviews, Nolte had the unsettling habit of saying, “Now, Pete, you know all the stuff I was telling you about yesterday, I have no idea if it’s true or not.”

NICK NOLTE HAS BEEN getting good reviews since “Who’ll Stop the Rain” in 1978, when he played Ray Hicks, a tightly wound Vietnam veteran who gets killed delivering heroin for a friend, Still, he’s had reason to feel underappreciated. John Hancock cast him in “Weeds,” but only after his relationship with Robert De Niro, whom he directed in “Band the Drum Slowly,” had curdled. Jack Nicholson, Paul Mazursky’s first choice for derelict Jerry Baskin in “Down and Out,” was unavailable, and the initiative to cast Nolte as the artist Dobie didn’t come from Scorsese, but from Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Disney mogul.

Nolte’s response has been just to keep working. “Cape Fear,” his 20th film, will be his eighth leading role in three years, and he offers no apologies for those movies that were critical and commercial failures. “The whole idea of trying to control a career is something I’ve always found kind of strange,” he says. “If the drive is there then you have to go ahead and do it. And I do think that some of the better actors who do control it end up later with a body of work that is rather skimpy.”

Recently, with Lionel Dobie, his portrait of a great artist as a petty dog in 1989, and Mike Brennan, an Irish rogue cop in last years “Q & A,” Nolte has found ways to portray his characters even more nakedly. His Brennan, a psychotic, racist, broken-hearted, secret-homosexual killer, who has a weakness for transvestites, is one of the most sexually audacious performances since that of Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.” “Nolte has moments that people will talk about for years,” the critic David Denby wrote in New York magazine about the performance.

And, as Nolte begins to work most consistently with the top directors, his stocks keep rising. “Nick has poetry,” Mazursky says, “there’s just something that shines through everything he does. He could have played all of Nicholson’s part, and he could have played all of Bogart’s.”

“It’s as if he’s heading toward becoming the major American actor,” says Sidney Lumet, the director of “Q & A.” “He’s been sneaking up on it for a long time.”

NICK NOLTE WAS BORN IN OMAHA IN 1941, descended from educators and giants. In his mother’s family, the Kings, was a grandfather who did agricultural research at Iowa State, invented the hollow-tile silo and was prominent in early aviation. On his father’s side, was a 6-foot-4 German grandfather who had a big farm in Hampton, Iowa. His enormous sons included Nolte’s father, Franklin, 6 feet 6 inches, and his Uncle Beaner and Uncle Poob. One of Nolte’s favorites was his Great-Uncle Cole. “Uncle Cole raised jack mules and liked to drink straight whiskey,” says the actor in a scratchy, scruffed-up voice that has never lost its sweet-and-sour twang. “He’d take a shot, then take a hunk of butter the size of his fist, put it in his mouth and smiles.” The 6-foot-1 actor is the smallest male Nolte ever. His sister is as tall as he is.

From the beginning, Nolte had a talent for heedlessly immersing himself in whatever attracted him. As a young boy in Ames, Iowa, it was hunting for snakes, which he’d transport around the neighborhood inside the handlebars of his bicycle. When he got a little older, it was sports. By high school, Nolte was a three-season star. “He had the perfect everything,” says Bill Cross, an actor and screenwriter who has been helping Nolte create his characters since “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and has been the best man at his of his weddings. “Like he used to be able to punt a football farther than anyone, but instead of going to school, he’s just kick all day.”

“I come out of the 50’s, “Nolte explains,” a certain ambiance. All these guys came back from World War II, and when they returned no one wanted to rock the boat. Passions went unexpressed, families glossed over things, schools were strict, women wore girdles. Being raised in that kind of mentality created a lot of rage.”

With ethnic actors you don’t need all the details to have a sense of where they came from, to imagine the clogged streets, the obsessive matriarch. Nolte comes from a wide-open, emptier place. “It wasn’t the kind of family in which people took their sense of security and identity from the family,” says his sister, Nancy Nolte. “You had the take responsibility for yourself.” Asked to describe her son as a young boy, Helen Nolte, who worked as a buyer for a department store, offers a startlingly detached reminiscence: “He was a lot of fun. I always liked him.”

Nolte showed a precocious empathy for the irrational. In her prime, Grandma Kind rant he student union at Iowa State, but as she got older she drifted easily in and out of reality. “She was charmingly vague,” Helen Nolte says. And, according to his sister, Nolte would accompany Grandma on her hallucinations, “entering her spells with her, so to speak.”

Nolte stayed in Iowa until his teens, returned to Omaha for high school and has been moving around ever since, starting with four or five years as a seasonal migrant football worker. Every fall he’d arrive at a different junior college, make the team as a walk-on, play the season, then flunk out.

Between football seasons, Nolte would hit the road, Kerouac style, once traveling down to Nogales, Mexico, where he moved into a whorehouse. "I got the idea," Nolte says of his football wanderings, "from a guy name Pudge Cammerata, who had a farm in Iowa, and when we were kids, used to draw out plays for us in the dirt. The story about Pudge is that he played for eight different universities in the 30's. Back then, they didn't check. He finally got caught at U.S.C. because he got so damn good."

Unfortunately, Nolte never showed that kind of improvement. He started as a quarterback, but because of bad grades and bad attitude, it was quickly determined that he was not quarterback material, and by the end of his career had played almost everywhere, inflating and deflating himself to fit different positions, just as he does for roles today. Though it's never become part of his résumé, the way is has for De Niro, Nolte has drastically reshaped his body at least as often. To get that sheer mass of brutality for Brennan, he ate and drank himself up to 230 pounds, and to be a more convincing victim of De Niro in "Cape Fear," he is down to 180, and looks startlingly gaunt, the skin hanging in long folds from high cheekbones.

BY THE TIME THE FUTILITY OF HIS FOOTBALL CAREER sank in, Nolte was worse off than your average misguided athlete. He was a convicted felon -- having received in 1962 a suspended sentence of 45 years in jail and a $75,000 fine for selling counterfeit government property (fake draft cards) -- and he could barely read. The prospect of starting over prompted what he has called, in the past, a nervous breakdown.
"Oh, I was probably talking real honest to someone," Nolte says. "It wasn't a nervous breakdown or anything, but a crisis, you know, of some kind. I don't talk about it because journalistically you can't get it right. You'll never understand the experience. It was basically a rebirth."

After his parents separated, Nolte, then in his mid-20's, moved into his mother's house in Phoenix, where, according to his sister, he locked himself in a room for a year and taught himself to read, a remarkable achievement, especially since Cross, who has often had to decipher his varicose notes on a script, believes Nolte is dyslexic. Nolte reads constantly today, but when he reads aloud from his extensive "Cape Fear" file on lawyers, his long, thin, middle finger follows beneath the words.
Desperately looking around for something he could hook up with, Nolte took a photography class at Phoenix College, taught by Allen Dutton, a big, bearded man, who would become the model for Lionel Dobie. A former student of Minor White, Dutton says Nolte was as talented as anyone he ever taught. "If Nolte is a Method actor now," Dutton says, "then he was a Method photographer."

"I would go to a little Mexican cemetery," Nolte says, "and sleep in it, and then shoot in all different phases of light. Plastic flowers, statuary of Christ, whatever appealed to the eye. I can still remember the image of every photograph I ever took."

Nolte isn't sure, of course, but he believes that what attracted him to the theater was the chance to live out his characters' stories. "My interest didn't come from watching film," he says. "I hadn't seen any plays. It came from inside."

Although he hasn't been on stage for 15 years, Nolte maintains that his long apprenticeship in repertory and stock companies throughout the 60's and early 70's was as satisfying as what he is doing now, arguing, perhaps implausibly, that he considers himself a better stage actor than film actor. Staying in the sticks enabled Nolte to play major roles, but he also spent a lot of time playing handsome leading men in lightweight comedies, did runway and print modeling (his face was on a Clairol box for years) and, according to Don Stolz, the director of the Old Log Theater in Excelsior, Minn., where Nolte spent more than two years, he was intent on getting into movies from the beginning.

Nolte eventually landed in Los Angeles in 1973 with a Phoenix production of "The Last Pad" by William Inge that had so impressed the playwright he insisted on importing it with the original cast. When Inge committed suicide on opening night, the play received more than its share of attention, and much of it centered on Nolte. A couple of years later, when he was 35, Nolte played the teen-age Tom Jordache in the television mini-series "Rich Man, Poor Man." Physically, Nolte was a late developer -- "It's why I look so damn young," says the actor, who is now 50. In the early part of his career he played adolescent characters at least 10 years younger than he was.

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE HE didn't learn how to read until he was in his 20's, or because he dropped a lot of acid in the 60's, but Nolte has never trusted the mind alone to reveal anything of much value. Even language has to be absorbed through the body. When Nolte started acting, the first thing he did after getting a part was write out the entire play by hand. "It would take a long time," he says, "time to feel the words, how the writer put it together."

Rather than working from the head down, Nolte builds his characters from the ground up. From the tightly coiled samurai movements of the ex-soldier Ray Hicks in "Who'll Stop the Rain," to the loose, stooped, ursine shuffle of Lionel Dobie or the deranged lurch of Jerry Baskin, Nolte evokes a wide range of personality and history from the way his characters move. Now, on every trip between trailer and sound stage on the set of "Cape Fear," he's honing Bowden's living-dead walk, "trying anything," he says, "that might break down a normal gait."

Shoes are important because they affect the walk. For the renegade cop Mike Brennan in "Q & A," he wore five-inch heels to pitch him aggressively forward, then doubled the sense of uninvited intimacy with a lisp hidden by a huge, dyed-black walrus mustache. "I didn't want you to know where the words were coming from," he says. "I wanted you to just feel the air coming out all mixed with booze, fear and hate." In fact, for many Nolte characters, dialogue falls somewhere between verbiage and breathing, drawing heavily on a vocabulary of sighs and stammers, hmmmphhs and muttered expletives that brings to mind a macho Jimmy Stewart.

Nolte can spend weeks acquiring a skill that may be used only in a single scene, and might easily be faked. Cross, who in helping Nolte create Ray Hicks in "Who'll Stop the Rain" offered up a great deal of his own bitter Vietnam experience as a 24-year-old Army captain, says that for the movie Nolte practiced breaking down and assembling a combat rifle until he could do it blindfolded in 19 seconds.

To prepare for "Life Lessons," Nolte stayed up all night drinking and painting with the artist Chuck Connelly, who painted the huge canvas, "Bridge to Nowhere," that is the film's central prop, until, Connelly says, Nolte developed a brush stroke less self-conscious than his own. "He was as raw as you can get," Connelly says. "Like an animal."

"Nick finds a way of working that's very personal," says Paul Mazursky, "and you realize by the time you start shooting that he has become that character." Mazursky says that after filming the scene in "Down and Out" in which Baskin gets thrown out of a department store, and ends with a shot of Baskin from behind walking down the street, he neglected to yell "cut." Nolte just kept walking, and when a couple of production assistants tracked him down 20 minutes later, he was still rambling around in character somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard. "And Nick bonded with the dog," adds Mazursky. "He took it very seriously."

NOLTE IS ALWAYS hustling work. he got hold of the script for "Q & A" from the woman working wardrobe on "Everybody Wins." When he heard that Scorsese was casting "Cape Fear," Nolte put on a suit and tie, wire-rimmed glasses, combed his hair and went as Sam Bowden to the New York opening of "Goodfellas." To convince Mazursky that he was right for "Down and Out," he invited him over to his house and did a complete read-through of the script. And in the studio executives, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, with whom he has made a total of five movies, he has cultivated a couple of well-placed friends. "I think of Nick for everything," Katzenberg says.

Nolte works so steadily, and his personal relationships have proved so transitory, that visiting him on location may offer the most accurate picture of his daily domestic life. "There has got to be some kind of hole you're trying to fill, to spend six months at a time in a trailer, if you don't have to," he says. Over the last decade, he's spent more time in Winnebagos than anywhere else, and his most enduring relationships have been with the men paid to help him survive the experience.

In addition to Cross, there are Eddie Henriques, his makeup artist since "The Deep" in 1977, and his nephew, Eric Berg, who is being broken in as a possible replacement for Cross, as Cross's own acting and screenwriting career takes off. Such a support group is essential in the sensory deprivation tank of a big-budget Hollywood production, where the leading actors and the director are dropped off and picked up at their own trailers by their own drivers, and can go for months without an off-camera exchange.

The isolation isn't just physical. In an interview in his trailer, Scorsese explains that he wasn't that aware of Nolte before working with him on "New York Stories" because, "it's very hard for me to watch contemporary films." Asked if he knew where Nolte is from, he guesses, "the hills somewhere, the mountains, whatever, Virginia."

And Nolte, encamped 100 yards away outside his own trailer, where every morning Berg takes out Nolte's huge Cleveland Classic golf bag and sets it up beside a driving mat, can't name a single contemporary actor or performance that has made a strong impression. "I used to watch John Wayne when I was a kid," he says.

Under these circumstances, Nolte, Berg and Henriques go about creating Sam Bowden as if he were a separate production. Before shooting begins, as the team breaks down the script, Henriques and Nolte discuss how they can build the most dramatic arc into the character. Nolte has latched onto the idea of the "legal mask," an arrogant front that lawyers and other prestigious professionals hide behind, and, as the film begins, Bowden's makeup and grooming are masklike. Every hair is in place, every blemish covered. As Max Cady starts to break through this smug veneer, the makeup gets lighter, then vanishes altogether. For the last part of the film, Henriques starts adding stress lines, bruises, welts and finally the little appliance under the upper lip to give Nolte that monkey-man look.

A year ago, Nolte began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, sometimes twice a day, and, according to Henriques and Berg, he has been sober ever since. Until then, drinking was part of the job, and to preserve their livers, Henriques and Cross would take alternate nights.

Fights and mayhem were not uncommon on a Nolte pub crawl. "Trouble just finds Nick wherever he goes," says the soft-spoken Berg, who one night in a bar, during the making of "Life Lessons," got hit on the head with a hooker's high heel. The dangers can be heightened by the location and the character. "Every movie he's different," Berg says. Nights on "Q & A" may have been the ultimate challenge for Nolte's nephew, who had to navigate the bars of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan (Nolte always drank where his characters might have) with an actor who had transformed himself into a 230-pound psychotic paranoid racist.

Although Nolte's strong constitution has limited the damage to his work -- colleagues were always amazed at how he could get up off the floor, wash his face and hair in the tiny sink at the back of his trailer and walk out looking very little worse for wear -- it may have profoundly affected his career. "If you're indulging in various excesses," John Hancock says, "it's smart to pick roles of someone who appears to be drunk." And Debra Winger does an imitation of Nolte going to the director before the start of a film, no matter what the piece, saying, "Ahhh, you know I really think this guy drinks." She points out that he even did this on "Everybody Wins," after he had stopped.

Nolte's drinking may -- or may not -- explain occasional fits of pique in the past. Berg says that, while working on "Q & A," he made the mistake one morning of going to work out without telling Nolte. When he got back, the locks on his apartment door had been changed. And Henriques says that when he declined to work on "Another 48 Hours" for less than his going rate, he was punished by not being asked to work on "The Prince of Tides."

But Berg, Cross and Henriques are fond and proud of Nolte, and they can forgive an occasional trespass, which is fortunate for Nolte because they are about all he's got. Nolte says that in "Life Lessons," a line that particularly hit home was Dobie saying, "I don't have any friends, just associates and colleagues." The obvious exception is Nolte's 5-year-old son, Brawley, who, with his long blond hair and small mouth, bears a strong resemblance to his father, and with his exceptional size for his age, reveals his giant lineage.

Already, Brawley is being initiated into his father's male clan, getting dropped off at the set by his nanny every afternoon. "Oh, you know, he's my best buddy," Nolte says about his son, "the whole deal." When Brawley falls and hurts himself, he seeks the comfort of his father, not his nanny. And when Brawley is missing for about five minutes one afternoon, Nolte's alarm is evident as he runs through the overgrown grass between the trailers, calling for him, until Brawley is spotted poking through the debris behind Stage 27, hunting for Florida lizards.
And that night, after shooting the houseboat scene, as Brawley, Nolte and Berg sit on the steps of Nolte's trailer, Brawley joins his father and cousin in a chorus of a song the two have taught him: "Love on the rocks/Ain't no surprise/ Just pour me a drink/And I'll tell you some lies."