Nolte memoir recounts a life on the wild side
Troubled actor looks back on his movie roles, drugs, mugs shots and other ingredients in compelling read
NEW YORK — You might remember Nick Nolte’s infamous mug shot from 2002, the one where the threetime Oscar nominee wears his hair wild and his shirt Hawaiian. But there’s another one from many years before.
In 1961 Nolte was busted for selling fake draft cards, fined $75,000 and sentenced to 75 years in prison, later suspended. In that booking photo, a pre-famous Nolte wears his hair short and a button-down shirt.
Both embarrassing incidents are heartily discussed in his new memoir, Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines. Nolte, 77, is now ready to tell his story — warts and all. The arrests act almost like bookends to a sometimes crazy life.
“I’ve had two mug shots in my lifetime. It’s hard to get those. And if you get them, you’d better make sure you examine the circumstances that you got them,” Nolte said. “The best way to deal with the biggest mistakes in your life is to discuss them. With everybody, including God.”
The autobiography traces the rise of the headstrong Nolte, a Midwestern boy, a natural jock, who found fame later in life when he traded in performing on the stage for movies.
“Acting always appealed to me a lot because it’s risk taking. And it’s something I don’t do naturally. I mean when I’m standing backstage and that curtain is about to open I say, ‘Why would you do this to yourself? Are you really that much of an idiot to just expose yourself to a thousand people?’” he said.
“And then the curtain opens and, if it goes all right, you don’t remember opening night — there’s too much adrenalin. Actors are risk takers. And they’re taking the risks for their own sanity.”
Nolte, whose hits include The Prince of Tides, Cape Fear, Lorenzo’s Oil, The Good Thief, The Thin Red Line and 48 Hrs., self-medicated to quell his inner demons.
“A little chaos around keeps me sane,” he writes.
The book recounts his amazing appetite for drugs — including coke, LSD, HGH and GHB — and the time he single-handedly saved the movie Under Fire by smuggling the film canisters out of Mexico, one step ahead of the law.
We learn he ate real dog food in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and he took real heroin during the eightweek
shoot of The Good Thief to better portray a heroin addict. He slept with Jacqueline Bisset during filming of The Deep but his inability to skate lost him a part in Slap Shot. He was offered Superman but saw nothing super about the role.
Nolte describes his own #MeToo moment when, at 21, a Hollywood agent invited him to his Bel Air home for dinner. After the man
excused himself, he returned wearing only a silk dressing gown and announced: “Hello, cuddle bunny.” Nolte was out the door quickly. “That would be a casting couch. But I was not an actor at that time at all,” he said.
Nolte also has a dim view of Harvey Weinstein, the one-time Miramax company head who had a reputation as a ruthless film editor. (Multiple
allegations of sexual misconduct last year upended his career.) Nolte recounts how his 2000 film The Golden Bowl was “reduced to shreds” by Weinstein’s cut before it was sold back to the filmmakers.
And of course there’s the story of his infamous September 2002 arrest. That day he’d gone to the gym for a GHB-enhanced workout but felt too messed up. So he headed toward an
Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but didn’t go in, instead weaving down the Pacific Coast Highway. “I needed help,” he wrote.
He says his booking photo resembles “an asylum inmate out for a lark in his flower-print Hawaiian shirt.” Now sober, Nolte can chuckle. “I take full responsibility for that one,” he said.