Harry Dean Stanton on living with Jack Nicholson: “It was mostly good”
The beautiful thing about Hollywood is that it serves as a safe haven for the stars of the acting world, providing a certain degree of anonymity in the land where every other person is famous. The result is that last friendships are formed with the film and music industries, and one such moment of camaraderie formed between the Hollywood icons Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton.
In fact, Nicholson and Stanton went so far as buddies that they actually decided to live together, an arrangement of habitation that would ring true throughout the history of Tinseltown. The environment was one, no doubt, that saw its fair share of debauchery, but it was also a place where the two young actors could flex their creative muscles and hone their respective careers in the process.
It was in the 1960s that the two actors first arrived on the film scene in the most significant way, with Stanton appearing in Cool Hand Luke and Nicholson in Easy Rider. While Stanton befriended countless figures in Hollywood during his time there, it was Nicholson who seemed to be his closest ally. Not only did the duo share a house, but Stanton also served as Nicholson’s best man at his wedding in 1962.
“It was mostly good,” Stanton told Uncut of the pair’s time living together. “Jack is a very strong-minded person. Nothing was really bad, actually. We’re still very close friends. He gave me this advice in Ride In The Whirlwind [1966]: he said, ‘Harry, I want you to do this part, but I don’t want you to do anything. Let the wardrobe do the character; just play yourself.’”
The advice ended up playing a central part in how Stanton viewed his professional life, and Nicholson’s words became “the beginning of my whole approach to acting.” The way the two came to cohabit with one another came around because Nicholson had been living with two pets that he wasn’t entirely keen on.
“How did we come to live together? I don’t know whether he’d gotten a divorce at the time, but he was living with Bob Towne, a writer,” Stanton said. “Towne had these two big, mangy dogs, I can’t remember what kind they were, those big bony kind, what are they called? Afghans? Maybe afghans. Jack called me and said, ‘Harry, Towne’s dogs have eaten the drapes half way up the wall, can I come and stay with you?’”
Stanton signed off on his memories of living with his fellow American cinema legend, “I lived in a little adjoining house down the bottom of Laurel Canyon and then we rented a house way up towards the top on Skyline Drive. We lived there for two and a half years then he did Easy Rider and that’s what got him started.”
