Nick Nolte on movies and mug shots
Actor’s embarrassing incidents are heartily discussed in his memoir ‘Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines’
You might remember Nick Nolte’s infamous mug shot from 2002, the one where the three-time Oscar nominee wears his hair wild and his shirt Hawaiian. But did you know he has another one from many years before that arrest?
In 1961 Nolte was busted for selling fake draft cards, fined $75,000 (Dh275,445) 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 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 — literally, because he had the bizarre habit of headbutting parked cars. He was a Midwestern boy, a natural jock, who found fame later in life when he traded in performing on the stage to 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 adrenaline. 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 eight-week 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.
May Chen, his editor at Harper-Collins, said Nolte wrote some of the book by telling his stories out loud. Those anecdotes were later stitched together, alongside journal entries and his own longhand writings. She calls him a “very self-aware” author, not afraid to delve into his own darkness.
“He’s not embarrassed about it. This is his life. Obviously, I sure he’s regretful of some of these things but he’s not embarrassed by it. He owns up to it,” she said. 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 quick. “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 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 11, 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.