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Bobby Dupea, strangled by a sense of his own failed talent, allowed Nicholson not only to turn on his own bursting temper, but to flash the charm that has its greatest single emblem in his smile, which seems to be cordially unsettling and made mostly of radium. David Staebler, on the other hand, required Nicholson to master a more dour, slippery confessional mode, to hide his character's feelings from himself under a barrage of autobiographical patchwork. Nicholson was equal to the task. It is his most daring performance, and one of his favorites.
Marvin Gardens, however, was a movie that asked audiences to reach out almost as far as Nicholson, and it flopped. Chinatown, a smooth, period private-eye yarn that works hard to hark back to the '30s and '40s, comes much more easily to hand. In it, Nicholson makes a shrewd choice to play persona rather than character—a commodity hi rather short supply in the script. His JJ. Gittes is cool, ironic, sympathetically small-time, a guy who stumbles on something a little bigger than he expected, or can manage. He also gets the chance to smile a lot. "That smile of his is simply a killer," says Nicholson's friend Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue, who ought to know a little something about smiles. "Jack must know it's devastating, because he uses it very rarely."
Nicholson can employ his rough, warming charm to get himself through a bumpy scene or an insufficient part, but he is usually a careful and thorough craftsman. "He simply doesn't care about the way he looks," says Director Roman Polanski. "I put a bandage on his nose during half of Chinatown, and he didn't object. With Jack, it's only the result that counts." Indeed, for Fortune he gets a weekly permanent to keep his hair Art Garfunkel-style kinky.
Nicholson's patience and zeal are exceptional. When he works over a script, not only are key phrases underlined and notes made, but almost every word is assigned a number, which signifies beats and pauses. "I'm at least 75% of every character I play," Nicholson says. "For the rest, I try to find a character's positive philosophy about himself. You have to search out and adopt the character's own justifications and rationalizations."
Nicholson also likes to get going on every movie set a kind of group feeling, turning a crew into a junior-varsity team. "I've never seen any other actor do it," says Mike Nichols. "Usually everyone has their own cliques—the camera crew, the electricians, and so on —but when Jack's around, that feeling disappears." Occasionally, Nicholson's competitiveness gets in the way of the general bonhomie. Bob Rafelson recalls that during the shooting of The King of Marvin Gardens, all of Nicholson's bottled-up energies would come out in a series of demon Ping Pong games with the crew. Says Rafelson: "He demolished everyone who dared to take him on." Nicholson is smart enough to know when to call off rivalries. He avoided Ping Pong competition with Michelangelo Antonioni, who directed him in the upcoming The Passenger, fearing shaky times if the filmmaker lost.