The commune owned by Jack Nicholson
If you’re talking cult figures in Hollywood, few figures shine as brightly as Jack Nicholson. The actor somehow managed to straddle the mainstream and the counterculture simultaneously: the man who shone in The Trip and appeared in Easy Rider also wrote a Monkees movie. The man who has three Academy Awards is the same man who turned going to LA Lakers games into a second occupation.
The gravitational pull that Nicholson had around him extended beyond songs by Prince and Joni Mitchell and even briefly blossomed into a full-on commune. While being interviewed by Andy Warhol in 1976, Nicholson discussed a plot of land in New Mexico that he had purchased in order to provide a safe haven for his friend, artist Gabe Katz, to use while he was on extended acid trips.
”[Gabe Katz] found this land while he was wandering that he described to me in great detail and I was at the point of view at the time of giving land back to the people,” Nicholson explained. “So I bought this piece of land for them for this commune.”
“They lasted about six months. So I now start getting communiques that someone’s trying to push them off the land, and then, after a few months of that, Gabe shows up and said somebody actually drove them off the land with guns up there,” he continued. “So I don’t do anything. I just sit there owning the land. Another few months go by, and I get a very unusual letter—not too legibly written, no too great spelling—from a young guy who was a clown and is now on the property. I don’t know what they’re doing. It said ‘putting in fruit tree’ and did I mind if they stayed?”
“The gun people have now disappeared […] I returned to the letter, and about three days after I read it a girl rides up to my house in Beverly Hills on a horse and claims to have ridden all the way down from New Mexico on this horse because they hadn’t got a reply to this letter and was it alright if they stayed?” Nicholson said. “I said, ‘Sure. Go ahead.’”
“I still haven’t seen it. So the next thing that happens—this is the last thing I’ve heard—is I leased part of it through my business manager, and now they have been pushed off literally by a Butch Cassidy group,” Nicholson concludes. “They’re bandits living on this land and it’s a very high mountain, and nobody will go up and get ‘em. So it’s now an outlaw’s hide-out. And I’ve never seen it.”
So, to recap: Jack Nicholson bought a plot of land for his acid-freak friend, turned it into a commune meant for Native Americans, had its inhabitants driven off by gun-wielding psychopaths, agreed to let a former clown reside on the property, and then leased it a bunch of modern-day wild west cowboys. Just another day in the life of Jack Nicholson.
