‘People’s Parties’: the Joni Mitchell song inspired by the wild Jack Nicholson
American actor Jack Nicholson has led a career like no other to become one of cinema’s most cherished living names. Nicholson’s first big break came in 1969 with the arrival of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination. Since then, he’s maintained a steady career brimming with accolades; in fact, with 12 Academy Award nominations, Nicholson is the most nominated male actor in the institution’s history with three wins to his name.
Throughout the 1970s, Nicholson soared through high-profile movie appearances, including those in Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and ended the decade on a career-high with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Over this period, Nicholson consequently earned more money than one could shake a stick at, and like many A-listers before and after him, he revelled in the party lifestyle.
Nicholson was once famously dubbed “the guy men want to be, and women want to bed,” while his drug-fuelled parties became a thing of legend, with his abode labelled “the wildest house in Hollywood.” The house in question, where Nicholson has lived for many years, is on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills; his neighbours through the ’70s were Marlon Brando and Warren Beaty. It didn’t take many of Nicholson’s wild soirées before the road was nicknamed “Bad Boy Drive”.
“There was round-the-clock partying, drinks, drugs, sex, lots of tea (of the smoking kind), and beautiful, hot, willing girls who loved to get just as high as the boys and have a good time,” Marc Eliot noted in his book, Nicholson: A Biography. “The refrigerator never had any food in it. Just milk (for Jack’s sometimes sensitive stomach), beer, and pot in the freezer to keep it fresh.”
Naturally, such a lifestyle rarely comes without a hefty dose of collateral damage. Fortunately, Nicholson appears to have emerged from a hedonistic youth mostly unscathed, but he left a trail of broken hearts along the way.
The folk star Joni Mitchell was among the many A-listers to mingle with Nicholson through the 1970s. She once used a true story to write a song about her close friend, but not one that necessarily casts him in a good light.
In the early parts of that decadent decade, the famed hairdresser Ara Gallant hosted a party at her address on West End Avenue, New York. Among her esteemed guests were Anjelica Huston, Jack Nicholson, Joni Mitchell and Apollonia van Ravenstein, a famous Dutch model whom Nicholson allegedly called “Apples only.”
At the time, Nicholson was dating Huston, who was close friends with van Ravenstein as the pair had “often modelled together in London and New York,” as Huston wrote in her 2014 memoir Watch Me. According to Huston, at some point during the party, van Ravenstein broke into tears. “[van Ravenstein] had been crying that night – laughing and crying, it was hard to figure out which or why,” Huston wrote. “She had balanced a lampshade on her head; tears were pouring down her cheeks.”
The source of the tears was kept under wraps until a few days later when van Ravenstein came to visit Huston in London. “During dinner, she let slip that she’d slept with Jack at Ara’s the night I’d left. She told me they had been in a relationship before he met me,” Huston wrote. “Now I understood the reason behind the lampshade hat and the tears. I hadn’t understood that she loved him. When I confronted Jack on the telephone, distraught, sad, mad, he said, ‘Oh, Toots, it was just a mercy fuck.’…somehow he thought it was an acceptable answer.”
The fiasco was immortalised not just in Huston’s memoir. In 1974, Joni Mitchell released the song ‘People’s Parties’ on her critically revered sixth album, Court and Spark. The track references the awkward events of the party at West End Avenue.
In the second verse, Mitchell documents van Ravenstein’s tearful breakdown, singing, “Photo beauty gets attention/ Then her eye paint’s running down/ She’s got a rose in her teeth/ And a lampshade crown/ One minute she’s so happy/ Then she’s crying on someone’s knee/ Saying laughing and crying / You know it’s the same release.”
“I told you when I met you/ I was crazy/ Cry for us all, Beauty/ Cry for Eddie in the corner/ Thinking he’s nobody/ And Jack behind his joker/ And stone-cold Grace behind her fan/ And me in my frightened silence/ Thinking I don’t understand,” she continues in the third verse, perhaps prophesying Nicholson’s future role in Tim Burton’s Batman. While it may not have been the immortalisation Nicholson would have desired, it is perhaps one of the most accurate.
Listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘People’s Parties’ below.
