(9 of 9)
Though he likes to have people around, Nicholson can still be remote. Anjelica admits that "Jack doesn't tip his hand very much." Instead of trying to explain him, she suggests mistily, one must "sense his essences." Indeed, anyone looking for something any more substantial than that from Nicholson may have applied to the wrong department.
A couple of the old gang wonder. Robert Towne says, "We haven't had a heart-to-heart talk in a long time." Sally Kellerman recalls that she and Nicholson used to share a funny code word which they used as a whispered greeting, "as our private signal that we still love each other. But I haven't said 'Boobs' to Jack in a couple of years."
What revelation there is likely to be from Nicholson will come from the screen. When Nicholson first began to make real progress in acting class, Jeff Corey noted that he excelled at an exercise called "abandonment," where all the stops are pulled out and only raw emotional truth—or the impression of it —remains. This is a difficult exercise for actors because they tend to take it too literally and lose control. There must be some calculation always working, some closed-off part that remains unmoved. For the same reason Nicholson's scenes of anger (particularly in Five Easy Pieces) have such great power. He never does let everything go. There is always something that cannot be reached.
The acting style he has extrapolated for himself out of his own memory and his great talent is a reserved, tentative thing that depends on his stores of introspection and secret turmoil. Newer actors, younger ones, are already doing something a little different. Robert De Niro (in Mean Streets), Richard Dreyfuss (in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) are working in a broader, larger style—no more daring than Nicholson's but more aggressive and open.
Nicholson knows the jungle rules of Hollywood and acknowledges them when he says, "Once they want you, you can be certain the day will come when they won't any more." Now he can savor the effervescence of his new celebrity and know too that for him that day will probably not come. He is well enough established so that the work will be there for him, maybe not always quite so prime, but always available.
So it is simple enough to slip away; there is not so much worry in coming back again. At night, after work, when there is no company, Nicholson will light a joint, put on some rock music, loud, so it seals off every other sound. Then he will start dancing, in front of a long glass door looking down over a canyon below, pleased, easy, alone.