In his new book, Nick Nolte recounts mug shots, movies
NEW YORK — You might remember Nick Nolte’s infamous mug shot from 2002, the one in which 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 and sentenced to 75 years in prison, later suspended. In that booking photo, Nolte has short hair and wears 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 told The Associated Press. “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, as he had the bizarre habit of head-butting parked cars. He was 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 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,” “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 singlehandedly saved the movie “Under Fire” by smuggling the film canisters out of Mexico.
Nolte has nice things to say about co-stars Eddie Murphy, Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. He has less than nice things to say about Debra Winger (“hellfire”) and Edward Norton (Nolte vowed to “slit his throat”).
May Chen, his editor at HarperCollins, calls him a “very self-aware” author, not afraid to delve into his own darkness.
And, of course, there’s the story of his infamous Sept. 11, 2002, arrest. 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.