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"FacebookPinterest\n\n When Nick Nolte spoke with GQ for a recent profile__, he mentioned that, returning home after his 2002 arrest (DUI of GHB on PCH), he was called by a friend who advised him not to run away from his problems. The profile noted that the friend in question was Marlon Brando but\u2014so many are the rich details of Nolte's long and convoluted life\u2014there was no time to explain how it came to be that the most famous and celebrated and eccentric actor of the previous generation was telephoning Nolte with advice. But it's not like we didn't know. And so now, in honor of Nolte's newly-announced third Oscar nomination for his remarkable portrayal in Warrior of a ragged and wrecked father searching for some kind of dignity and forgiveness, here is Nick Nolte and Marlon Brando\u2014The Full Story.\n\n\n\n \"We had an ongoing conversation,\" Nolte remembers. He had been introduced to Marlon Brando some years before by a mutual friend, Sean Penn, and they hit it off. Their relationship centred around regular phone calls. \"We'd talk every day, for quite some time,\" says Nolte. \"We'd talk of everything. I mean, there wasn't anything the guy wasn't fascinated by.\" One time Nolte sent Brando some eyeglasses with lights attached to them and Brando really liked those. He said they made it much easier to find things in his closet. Sometimes they'd even talk about acting. \"Marlon\u2014he said, the only thing that was different with us is we're lying for a living,\" says Nolte. \"That was his theory of acting: lying for a living.\"\n\n Still, Nolte insists that Brando \"really respected the art form\". His problem was a more specific one. \"He hated being a leading man,\" says Nolte. \"He just hated it. He showed me one thing\u2014this is amazing. When Coppola was insisting on using him in The Godfather, Marlon knew for sure that the Paramount ecutives would never hire him\u2014he hated them, they hated him. So he said 'when this kid [Coppola] was on his way up to shoot the video, I thought, well fuck, I gotta do something\u2014what do I want to say to them? I'll put shit-paper in my mouth\u2014that's what I'll do.' And he showed me a little video of it\u2014he blacked out his teeth, he gelled his hair and sat straight up, and he had paper hanging out...\"\u2014Nolte indicates with his hand on his own face how the paper came out of sides of Brando's mouth\u2014\"...and it was all bulging up in here. He looked like a maniac. He didn't look like the godfather. It was to say 'I've got shit paper in my mouth\u2014that's what I think of you guys'.\"\n\n Brando's perspective on Nolte's acting career was typically idiosyncratic. His favorite work of Nolte's was the unheralded 1990 Sidney Lumet movie QA\u2014Brando's son, Christian, later told Nolte that Marlon always travelled with a copy of it. \"Because he would watch films over and over again,\" says Nolte. In QA, Nolte plays a foul-mouthed, corrupt, sadistic, sexually-ambiguous New York cop. \"He just wanted to know how I did that. Because there was no indication that I could do a New Yorker type of character, and the racism, and the homosexuality of the transvestites, and reaching down and grabbing things down there. 'Did you really reach down?' 'Yeah'\"\n\n They both had roots in Omaha, and almost had some shared history, or at least that's what Nolte let Brando believe. \"They sent him to Shattuck Military School,\" says Nolte. \"This is where you send everybody from Omaha. If you're a bad boy, you go to Shattuck. There was some discussion about sending me to Shattuck, but the problem was they wouldn't accept me. That is what I told Marlon. That's not true, but that's what I told him.\" Nolte sighs in acknowledgement of the actual situation. \"The truth was that, you know, there was no reason to send me to Shattuck Military School. But it was a disciplinarian school. And he just went there, and of course, he just had a ball with all the authority and all of that. And it just propelled his pranksterism fine there, you know. He loved wit. He loved jokes. He loved to expose supposedly the underlying truth of things, you know.\"\n\n For all the respect he had for Brando, and perhaps even because of it, it sounds as though Nolte felt that their friendship was best served by a certain distance. Penn had hinted at something like this. \"'You got to be careful\u2014he may want you to come pick him up',\" remembers Nolte. \"And then you become his driver. I think Sean was having this problem driving him around. But it never evolved that way.\" Nolte was one of those invited to the famous semi-public acting classes Brando held over two weeks in his later years, filmed by the director Tony Kaye (American History X). He describes the opening day. \"The first thing he did was put on a bunch of lipstick. And we all kind of laughed. And he's, 'Now that I've made a fool of myself, we can begin. Because if you're not willing to make a fool of yourself, you can't be an actor'. He said, 'Everybody here will be a participator\u2014nobody is to sit and watch. So work on something and bring it in'. That's when Sean and I looked at each other.\" Nolte was even more alarmed by Brando's next announcement. \"He said, 'the second half of the class will be taught by either Nick Nolte or Eddie Olmos...\"\u2014and here is where fate and vowel-sound confusion saved Nolte because Brando continued\u2014\"...but we'll go by alphabetical order, so Eddie, you're up first'. He thought 'Olmos' started with an 'A'\" Nolte mimes the actor Edward James Olmos turning toward him, objecting and Nolte immediately saying a silent \"No...\" By now Nolte knew what he needed to do. \"I went up to Marlon and said, 'Marlon, I have a couple of meetings I've got to get to...'. He said, 'Alright, baby, here's a big kiss' and out the door I go.\" Nolte didn't return. \"I would have liked to have been there every day if I didn't have to participate. Sean went back the very last day\u2014he had a closer relationship with Marlon\u2014and by that time Marlon was now lying in a bed. He was exhausted. And Sean is talking about Sam I Am and how he had to walk on his toes, and Marlon is going 'Liar!...Liar!...' \"\n\n When Nolte returned from rehab, Brando called him once more, ready to resume their conversations. \"And I just wasn't ready to talk much about it,\" says Nolte. \"He said, 'you're not ready to talk?' and I said, 'Nah, not quite yet'. And he said, 'OK, well give me call when you're ready to talk'.\" But weeks turned into months, and before Nolte ever got around to picking up that telephone, Brando was dead."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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