I call my friend Dennis McDougal Feb. 6. Audio Audio
His latest book came out in October: Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times.
Luke: "What are your thoughts on Sam Zell taking over the Los Angeles Times and the Tribune company?"
Dennis wrote the best book on the L.A. Times: Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty.
Dennis: "My knee-jerk reaction was, ‘Here’s another Chicago carpetbagger. Do we really need that?’ The Tribune company came in like gangbusters, installed a couple of people who did a stellar job, encouraging the staff and winning a stack of Pulitzers. Then the profit motive took over. It was adios John Carroll… It was a march towards disaster. No one since Otis Chandler has understood what a newspaper is all about."
"I think Sam Zell is going to be more of the same. We have another round of cuts. The prevailing notion is that you get rid of the expensive ‘deadwood,’ i.e. the people who have been around 20 or 30 or 40 years and are dinosaurs and fossils but have institutional memory and know what is correct and what is worth covering, and you replace those people with hungry kids fresh out of journalism school and want to make their nut and a grand ol’ institution such as the Los Angeles Times becomes as dependable as the Pennysaver."
Luke: "If you were appointed Editor and Publisher of the Los Angeles Times with the task that you need to maintain at least an industry average level of profit, what would you do?"
Dennis: "I got into journalism because it was the one place where an individual could have an impact on the culture. It was one of the last places where rugged individualism still meant something in terms of earning your daily bread. That’s all been washed away by corporate journalism. There are precious few rugged individualists. Everything is done by committee and focus groups. I don’t know that I’d be successful. I’m an old dog. I don’t learn new tricks well. The first time a terrific expose came along that would upset the apple cart and send the mighty to jail where they belong, I would probably say to hell with the profit margin and send people out to the streets to gather information."
Luke: "Why did you write the Jack Nicholson book?"
Dennis: "Because somebody asked me to. I pitched a book several years ago about Edgar Bronfman Jr. and the collapse of the Bronfman clan. That struck me as terribly instructive and a great morality tale for our greedy times. As Sam Bronfman once said in the 1930s, a dynasty usually goes from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. That caption was posted under Grandpa Sam’s portrait which was posted over Edgar Jr.’s desk at Bronfman headquarters in New York. Of course Edgar fulfilled that notion to the tee. He took the Seagrams empire that Sam built from nothing right back down again to nothing.
"I pitched it all over New York and there was scant interest except from John Wiley and Sons. Even they passed on it. The editor who wanted to do the book came back to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing something else. He gave me several ideas, none of which I cared for much, including a biography of Jack Nicholson.
"I said, ‘I don’t do star biographies. I find them tedious, self-serving and deceitful human beings. I don’t know if they contribute much. I’m not interested in perpetuating their myths. He said, ‘Well, we want to do it different and you seem like the right person to do it. It’s less a biography of Nicholson than a look at the industry. The craft and business of movies using his career as a vehicle for telling that story. He has rolled with the punches for almost half a century and always come up smelling like a rose.’
"I said, ‘That’s an interesting idea. That’s the second chapter of the story I started to tell with The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood. If you track Wasserman’s life, you can see how the motion picture industry evolved over half a century. Maybe you can pick up the story with Jack Nicholson and bring it to the present.
"That was the original premise of the book."
"Who knew that I was going to find out that Jack Nicholson was half-Jewish?"
Luke: "Tom Wolfe said that when he started out writing books, he thought the ingredients for a good book were 60% writing and 40% material and that now he thinks it’s 90% material and 10% writing."
Dennis agrees.
Luke: "Where does your book break new ground?"
Dennis: "In two or three key places. His paternity."
"It breaks new ground on his oddly mercurial and contradictory personality. He’s comparable to his lifelong hero Frank Sinatra… He’s generous to a fault. If someone he’s known for years comes to him for help, Jack has an open wallet and an open heart. But he keeps track of every dime. Like any godfather, he suggests there will always be a quid pro quo. When anyone crosses him, or he feels slighted, he becomes a petulant five-year-old again and acts out and wreaks havoc on those who have offended him. I’m thinking in particular of Susan Anspach. He has bad blood with her going back many years."
According to Wikipedia: "He has one son, Caleb Goddard (born 1970), with actress Susan Anspach, his Five Easy Pieces co-star."
Dennis: "There was a story in the ’90s about Anspach losing her house because Jack was foreclosing on her. He could be remarkably generous seeing to the needs of his illegitimate child and the mother but the second she crossed him and went public and said, ‘Jack fathered my son,’ he’s sending out his lawyers and business manager to sell her house."
Luke: "Did Jack try to thwart your book?"
Dennis: "I think so. It’s predictable. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, to quote Professor Peabody. Jack has never cooperated with any biographers ever. He doesn’t do television or radio interviews except to promote a project. He doesn’t do anything that he can’t control. My book by definition was a portrayal of him he could not control… Once it came out, he was going to do everything he could to limit its impact. Though I have no hard proof of it, I think that’s precisely what he did. Throughout the spate of interviews he did to promote The Bucket List, not once did he mention Five Easy Decades.
"There were several magazine pieces scheduled to appear [on Five Easy Decades]. Men’s Journal was going to do a cover piece. The New York Times Sunday magazine. Entertainment Weekly. Good Morning America and the Today show were interested in promoting the book and interviewing me. But all those things disappeared."
Since Nicholson’s longtime publicist Paul Wasserman was sent to jail about a decade ago, Jack has been represented by Pat Kingsley ("one of the original silent killers," says Dennis) and most recently by The Dart Group.
Dennis: "I could not get to him. Even in my role as a New York Times reporter, they wouldn’t let me talk to him."
"When the book came out, I think he called in whatever chits he had so that nobody would know it was coming out."
"I heard from my publisher last week and apparently the book is selling well in spite of all of Jack’s efforts."
McDougal’s book got rave reviews in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and said it was the definitive Nicholson biography as did Library Journal. "All of that is for naught if you can’t get Barnes & Noble and Borders to stock it and you can’t get enough buzz going among the mainstream media."
Luke: "Have there been any news articles about the book? I can’t find any."
Dennis: "There were some advance pieces on TMZ and in the New York Post last summer. After the publication, I don’t think anybody did anything."
Luke: "Nobody wrote a news article about how the book breaks ground and how Nicholson and his people reacted. This is a great story crying out to be told."
Dennis: "And by God, you’re telling it!"
"I have an old time publicist pal of mine who works in the Valley. He said, ‘I don’t understand why the Jewish press hasn’t jumped on it. The Forward or the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Jack Nicholson is half Jewish. I don’t think anybody knows that. That’s an astonishing note.’
"I said, ‘You know how the game is played. If somebody with the power of Jack Nicholson doesn’t want something known, it doesn’t get known. That’s a no-brainer.’"
Luke: "This reminds me of your Lew Wasserman book. Didn’t it encounter a similar news embargo?"
Dennis: "Pretty much. I seem to have that problem. I seem to pick subjects and write books that the subjects of the books don’t want people to know about."
Luke: "A few years after you, Connie Bruck published a book on Lew Wasserman that didn’t break any new ground, yet her book was hailed in the media and excerpted in The New Yorker."
Dennis: "Yeah, but it didn’t sell many copies."
"She’s a staff writer for The New Yorker."
Luke: "But it didn’t advance the story. So why was that heralded and yours ignored?"
Dennis: "I was labeled early on ‘A West Coast Writer’. And if you are a West Coast Writer, you are not taken seriously by the Eastern establishment. Connie Bruck got her start as Steve Brill’s girlfriend when he ran American Lawyer. She was anointed by the East Coast media machine. She paid her dues. She was an East Coast journalist. She came out with Predator’s Ball, which gave her a patina of serious journalism. It gave her the credentials to move on to other subjects and to become a staff writer at The New Yorker. Once you’re a staff writer at The New Yorker, you can do anything.
"That wasn’t my career path. I’ve never lived in New York. Wouldn’t want to live in New York. I’ve always considered myself a West Coast journalist. My highest aspiration was to be a staff writer of the Los Angeles Times. I still consider that to be the apex of my daily journalism career. From 1980-86, I considered the L.A. Times on par with and day-to-day better than the New York Times and the greatest newspaper in America.
"The Los Angeles Times began going to hell in a hand basket the day Shelby Coffey was named Editor."
"Within weeks of the publication of ‘The Last Mogul,’ Bert Fields called my publisher and threatened a lawsuit unless the book was withdrawn. The publisher asked him if he had any factual corrections. He didn’t. The publisher told Bert Fields to pound sand and the book became a best seller despite the news blackout at the Los Angeles Times.
"To this day, Wasserman’s former son-in-law [Jack Myers] maintains that my book killed him."
Luke: "How do the tabloids treat Jack Nicholson?"
Dennis: "They treat him with a certain respect that is not accorded most Hollywood actors. There’s a certain respectful tone in even the most tawdry reporting. If Jack is reported to have had a threesome with young women some place in London, it’s always well, Bad Boy Jack is at it again, hahaha. Not, ‘Why is this 70-year-old adolescent trying to get his jollies at the expense of women a third his age? What sort of damage might he be inflicting? Even though the women maintain its just a lark.’
"Nobody asks the deeper tougher questions with regard to Jack. He manages to maintain the notion that he’s Peck’s Bad Boy all grown up. So he gets a pass."
Luke: "You know there’s going to be a biography of Jack Nicholson coming out in the next five years that’s going to be heralded akin to Connie Bruck’s book on Lew Wasserman."
Dennis laughs. "Right. And I’ll be left in the dust again. What do I do about that? Do I sit around and weep and moan?"
Luke: "It’s just interesting. I’m fascinated."
Dennis: "It all comes out in the wash. Enough time has passed so that you can look at Connie Bruck’s effort and compare it to mine and you can see. The proof is in the pudding."
Luke: "It’s fascinating that one book is hailed and one book is ignored irrespective of the merits of either. It’s just like elementary school. There are the cool kids…"
Dennis: "I get that. I agree with that. I’m not the cool kid. I never have been and with any luck I never will be."
"Maybe Connie is pouring over my book as we speak, picking out the best parts and claiming them as her own and we’ll see her take on Jack Nicholson some time in 2010 in The New Yorker."
Luke: "Did Jack’s people leave any fingerprints in their efforts to squelch your book?"
Dennis: "No."
"My editor at Wiley would tell me from time to time, ‘I don’t understand this. It was a lock. They told us they had it scheduled. And now it has fallen out.’ I was going, ‘I understand, dude.’"
Luke: "Did you have a conversation with your own newspaper about why they lost interest in your Sunday Magazine piece?"
Dennis: "No. The New York Times is a bizarre, byzantine place. David Cay Johnston is a good friend of mine. He just came out with a book. He’s on staff and writes about the IRS. The book is now on their best-seller list. David had several conversations with me about how his own newspaper, his own editors, have looked upon his book as…second-rate."
Luke: "It got a bad review in the New York Times."
Dennis: "Yeah. His own newspaper raked him over the coals. He says that’s a direct result of the back-biting jealousy in a major newspaper or magazine. You can never over-estimate that kind of attitude. It is not enough to succeed. You have to see your friends fail."
Luke: "In researching your book, did you encounter people who told you, ‘I’ve been told not to talk to you’?"
Dennis: "Sure. I encountered that a lot, especially the closer you got to the inner circle. There were a number of off-the-record interviews because people did not want to upset Jack."
"I made no secret with Jack who I was and what I was going to do."
"Far too often, journalists these days don’t [make reporting the truth to their readers their priority]. That’s one of the reasons we have the president we have."
Luke: "You said that you knew writing this book would be dangerous. Dangerous to you how?"
Dennis: "That I wouldn’t have Jack’s cooperation…"
"When I was working on ‘The Last Mogul,’ I was speaking with a good friend of mine, a screenwriter, shortly after I set out to do the book. When I told him what the subject was and what I was trying to do, he said, ‘My God, aren’t you afraid that you’ll never write in this town again?’
"I said, ‘I’m just going to forget what kind of cliche passed your lips… I never wrote in this f—ing town in the first place. I don’t care if I write in this town again because I don’t do what you do. I am beholden to no one. That’s the only reason I am recognized on the other coast as the kind of journalist that book editors want to get into bed with. Because I can’t be bought and sold.’
"I ran into variations on that scene throughout my research on the Nicholson book."
"I think it’s a myth that you’re not going to find an outlet for your work if you step on too many toes."
Luke: "Was this book harder or easier than your one on Lew Wasserman?"
Dennis: "It was easier. No one had dared to write about Lew Wasserman. That’s the reason I did the book.
"I was covering the writer’s strike for the L.A. Times in 1989. This name kept cropping up. People kept saying, ‘When Lew Wasserman weighs in on this, the whole thing will be over in about five minutes.’
"I had been covering Hollywood for about ten years. I said, ‘Wasserman? You mean the guy over at Universal?’ Yeah! OK. So what? Some studio head has control over the Writer’s Guild?
"I started getting an education in how Hollywood really works. I went to the L.A. Times library and looked up Wasserman and there was one envelope of clips. Only a half dozen articles were more than a few inches long. I went, ‘That’s weird. How could this guy have so much power and the paper of record in Los Angeles have written almost nothing about him?’
"I started asking around and I found out that Lew Wasserman was powerful because he worked in the shadows."
Luke: "Why do you think Jack has lasted in Hollywood when so many have self-destructed?"
Dennis: "Because Jack is calculating. Because Jack learns from his mistakes. Because Jack knows how far he can go without going too far. I suspect he’s going to run out the clock. Jack rarely makes mistakes. Jack is a master at indulging his private fantasies without making waves. Jack knows how to use drugs. Jack knows how to get a hooker to service him and to never have to pay the bill. Jack has procurers out there.
"One young woman told me about how she wound up in Jack’s bed a few years ago as a direct result of having met a real estate man at a party. He said, ‘I know exactly the guy for you.’
"A week later, she gets a call from Nicholson inviting her to come up to his roost. They had a fling that lasted for a few weeks and parted friends. To this day, she felt like could call on him in a pinch and he’d come through for her. She never once felt that she was being used or that the real estate guy at the party might have been pimping for Jack. Yet any outside observer hearing the facts of the case would know exactly what was going on. Jack has been doing that for decades. And he does it with impunity."
Luke: "Sounds like Warren Beatty."
Dennis: "Same thing."
Luke: "Do you think Jack read your book?"
Dennis: "Yes."
Luke: "When you watch a movie, is that you on the screen or are you just sitting back watching others act?"
Dennis: "Both. If it is a really good movie and I can identify with it, then certainly I identify with the protagonists. That’s what Hollywood wants me to do. When I watch Five Easy Pieces, one of my favorite movies, I identify with it a lot."
Luke: "Which Jack Nicholson character do you most identify with?"
Dennis: "Most days, Jake Giddes [Chinatown]. I fancy myself a Chandleresque literary gumshoe but by the end of the picture, I usually come to recognize that I don’t know half the s— I thought I did."
Luke: "There’s my headline."
"Would you like to be friends with Jack Nicholson?"
Dennis: "We could be. Yeah. I share a lot of his tastes, in art…"
Luke: "Young women?"
Dennis: "I prefer the young women he knew as they are now. For instance, Michelle Phillips is a stone-cold babe in 2008. Back when he was messing around with her, I’m not so sure. I share his tastes in literature and movies. I certainly share his politics. There’s that side of Jack that people know little about but I agree with his views on the future, on the importance of renewable energy sources…"
