MY LATE FRIEND Susan Sontag didn’t miss much. My permanent friend Diane Keaton, nor my other permanent friend, Diane’s sister, Dorrie Hall, don’t miss much either. In my experience the one Hollywood figure who misses nothing is Barbra Streisand.
The great diarist James Lees-Milne, whose twelve-volume diary describes nearly every picky person to appear on the London social scene over more than half a century, said that Cecil Beaton, the photographer and lover of Greta Garbo, missed the least of anyone he had known, which is pretty much everybody.
Barbra Streisand is my Cecil Beaton, the host who spots the speck of potato on the chin or hairs growing out of one’s nose. I once played tennis as Barbra Streisand’s partner; I didn’t play that badly, but so intense was her focus, so pervasive her radar, that, on the trip back to my hotel, the Chateau Marmont on this occasion, I leaned out the window of my car and vomited the whole way. Barbra had been perfectly cordial but it was still scary to play tennis with her.
It didn’t help that Barbra had a French cook—after the tensions of the tennis court eating a lot of rich French sauces proved to be a bad idea.
I supply this ridiculous incident merely to show that really big stars—Jack Nicholson, for example—often have an impact that emanates from their fame. When the Lakers are playing at home and Jack is there in his place, all’s more or less right with the world. Take away Jack and the whole of the Staples Center seems to be tipping out of balance.
This great star’s mere presence has become an integral part of Lakers basketball.
Probably only a handful of the millions who have seen Jack Nicholson in that seat remember that he once directed a fine little basketball film himself: Drive, He Said, adapted from a novel by Jeremy Larner.
Long ago Diane Keaton and I offered him our screenplay Somebody’s Darling. He made no response, at least to me, for more than a decade before calling me one night, out of the blue, to thank me—it was a rambling conversation, the sort at which I don’t excel, as the director Ang Lee was to find out to his sorrow decades later. I believe Jack’s fallen in love with my luminous friend Diane Keaton at least twice—indeed, who wouldn’t? Onlookers report that Jack was extremely courtly during the making of Something’s Gotta Give, rising when she entered, certainly a rare courtesy in Hollywood now.
Some weeks later, while she was stuck in a traffic jam, Diane called me. I’ve helped ease her through hundreds of traffic jams, on both coasts, for decades.
“I have issues but at least it’s not boring,” she said. Then the light must have changed; she hung up and I was left to wonder what the issues were.
There have been no further references to the biggest movie star who happens to live on Mulholland Drive, now that Marlon Brando has passed on.
I’ve rattled on about this because I find the fact of stardom itself to be interesting. My conclusion is that everyone who has a chance to be a star by all means should—but they had best go into it with their eyes open, for sooner or later stardom takes its toll. It will become like Lakers basketball without Jack Nicholson, the most inspired male actor of his generation, hopping around on his expensive seat.