Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando’s friendship started when Jack moved to Mulholland Drive in 1969, living in a house next door to Brando. Brando was Jack’s idol, since Jack was a small boy living in New Jersey. He said Brando was a reclusive neighbor “I don’t see him much. He plays classical music late at night, and if I’m out walking around in the moonlight, I hear it up there. He’s the perfect neighbor.“
Once, during one of Jack’s Halloween bashes, Brando called the cops on him. “What does Marlon want from me?” Jack said. “Does he want me to move back to Neptune?“ Jack once shared his weed with Brando’s son, Christian, until he caught him stealing his stash. Brando blamed Jack for his boy’s drug problems.
They starred together in The Missouri Breaks (1976) and Jack said “It’s a pleasure to be in the same sentence with him, no less in the same movie.” but later complained about Brando’s method: “Marlon’s still the greatest actor in the world, so why does he need those goddamned cue cards?“
Brando manipulated Tom McGuane’s script and director Arthur Penn to enlarge his role in the movie. By the time Jack realized what was up and began to protest, Brando had already given his role an Irish brogue and was trying to transform Jack’s character from a noble horse thief to a noble red man. For their penultimate scene together, Brando gave Jack a full-moon target by heaving his naked bulk into a bathtub and daring Jack to shoot.
Promoting the movie, Brando stole the show. "I actually don’t think Jack Nicholson’s that bright” Brando told the reporters “Not as good as Robert De Niro, for example.“
Brando also suggested that he and Jack might be having an affair, and as preposterous as that sounded, Brando told his fictions with as straight a face as his convictions, levaing the gullibe in the media to sort out the truth.
"Poor Nicholson was stuck in the center of it all, cranking the damned thing out while I whipped in and out of scenes like greased lightning”
When Brando died, in 2004, Jack wrote an epitaph: "Marlon Brando is one of the great men of the 20th and 21th centuries, and we lesser mortals are obligated to cut through the shit and proclaim it (…)“. He also purchased his neighbor’s bungalow for $6.1 million, with the purpose of having it demolished. Jack stated that it was done out of respect to Brando’s legacy, as it had become too expensive to renovate the “derelict” buildingwhich was plagued by mold.
