Don’t call him St. Nick
NICK Nolte. People magazine once labeled the Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee who made over 40 movies Sexiest Man Alive.
This movie star, who early on married three women, was now at the 92nd Street Y hustling his autobio “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines.”
And, oy, he looks different. A mirror wouldn’t recognize him. Forget so gorgeous you wanted to crawl into his bones. Think instead David Letterman.
Huge white beard. Fluffy snow-white hair. Oversize cap that overlapped over-thick eyebrows. He ambulated gingerly.
His addiction, his famous mug shot from his 2002 arrest for driving while drugged, his rehabilitation, his wish to rejuice his career, all fueled the man’s need to write a tell-all. Boring, it’s not. It starts with “my testicle tuck.”
Interesting yesteryear tales drop names like Robert Mitchum, George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara. Bits like: “Don’t get into a fight with director Billy
Friedkin. He can clean your clock.” And director
Ang Lee’s “great. He liked my thoughts of creating different colors for different thoughts.”
His acting technique: “I had dyslexia and wrote down dialogue of my characters in longhand. Slowed it down so you got the poetry of the words.”
Unorthodox life? “I like to create puzzles that can’t be solved.”
Moviemaking? “I never liked Hollywood’s formula. I’d re- form a whole script. Put in my own commentary. Break the script into beats. I’d speak my lines in my bathtub until they became my own words.” Well-known mug shot and arrest? “California Highway Patrol dispatched a couple of cars to herd mine to the side of the road before I killed anyone. I needed help. I was a mess. They said I was drooling.” Nolte talks of being “selfish,” of “surviving,” of “raging,” of “standing in the face of fear.” And now of “scrubbing my old identity.”