Why my love affair with Jack Nicolson was a let down: A compelling dark tale of how a young woman navigated her way through a sea full of sharks
- Susanna Moore found Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson lounging naked by pool
- Moore’s gives an account of her time as model and bit-part actress in Hollywood
- Her father was a serial philanderer and her mother suffered from depression
MEMOIR
Miss Aluminium
By Susanna Moore (W&N £9.99, 288 pp)
Invited by singer Art Garfunkel to stop by and use his pool, Susanna Moore arrived to find Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson lounging naked by the water’s edge.
Moore refused to be intimidated. ‘I forced myself to look . . . causing [Nicholson] to lower himself into the water,’ she writes. ‘Slowly, his mouth open, his beautiful teeth bared in a wide grin, he sank below the surface.’
Moore’s account of her time as a model and bit-part actress in Hollywood is peppered with famous names, from Audrey Hepburn and Harrison Ford to Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski.
American actor Jack Nicolson starring in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
But this riveting book isn’t just about being on the fringes of celebrity: it’s a compellingly dark tale of a young woman navigating her way through a sea full of sharks.
Growing up in Hawaii, Moore’s father was a serial philanderer and, perhaps not coincidentally, her mother suffered from depression. The oldest of five children, Moore saw it as her job to protect her mother from herself: ‘I threw pills into the toilet, locked her in her room...’
Her mother died in mysterious circumstances when Susanna was 12 and her father married a woman who despised the children. At 17, she left Hawaii to live with her grandmother in Philadelphia.
Her salvation came from this warm, loving Irishwoman and from the rich stepmother of a school friend. She had taken a shine to Susanna and sent her a trunk of glamorous designer hand-me-downs which gave her confidence and the belief that she could reinvent herself.
Susanna Moore, Jack Nicholson, and Lou Adler attend the opening of Jill Gibson's exhibit at the De Vorzon Gallery in Los Angeles
At 19, she and her dazzling wardrobe moved to New York, securing a job at Bergdorf Goodman, the exclusive department store on Fifth Avenue. A friend noticed Susanna always filched the entire bread basket when taken out to dinner. ‘What do you do with all those rolls?’ she once asked, oblivious to the fact her friend was barely scraping a living.
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Bookish and reserved, Susanna had one thing going for her — dazzling good looks with a curtain of dark hair and chiselled cheekbones. She was soon offered modelling work but was so lonely that she married the first man who asked her: a handsome student she names only as Bill.
Her modelling work included dressing head-to-toe in silver sequins as ‘Miss Aluminium’ at a trade show. She was spotted by designer Oleg Cassini, who chose her as one of his runway models.
After the show, he invited himself up to her hotel room and forced himself on her. It never occurred to her to report the rape; it was, she concluded, all her fault. ‘Why had I been drinking champagne? Why had I not been able to stop him?’
Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicolson star in the American comedy-drama film Carnal Knowledge in 1971
A few months later, Cassini secured her a part in a Dean Martin film and, astonishingly, she accepted. She would be paid the then enormous sum of $500 a week and it offered a way to escape from her husband, whom she no longer loved.
On her first day in Hollywood, she began a relationship with the film’s associate producer. She was 21, he was 50, but she had found ‘someone who would look after me’.
The film, in which she played one of a group of beautiful girls who paraded around in bikinis, was dreadful, and put her off acting for life, so she landed a job reading scripts for Warren Beatty.
Moore is very funny about Beatty, who asked to inspect her legs before offering her the job. Despite his countless sexual encounters he told everyone he was madly in love with Julie Christie, which bafflingly only increased his success with women.
Miss Aluminium by Susanna Moore is a totally gripping and tremendously entertaining memoir
Susanna never succumbed to Beatty but she did find Jack Nicholson irresistible. Their affair was a big let-down; years later, Nicholson’s girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, told her he was the best lover she’d ever had ‘and it occurred to me that perhaps it was I who had been disappointing, not Jack’.
Susanna married Dick Sylbert, who rose to be vice president of Paramount Pictures. She brilliantly captures the sleazy glamour of Hollywood in the 1970s, partying with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Roman Polanski, but the marriage didn’t last.
At 30, with an adored young daughter, she realised that she could cope on her own. ‘I would find a place to live,’ she writes. ‘And a real job ... It would be all right.’ She is now a successful thriller writer.
There are times, reading Miss Aluminium, when you are aghast at the choices she makes, but you always understand why she acted as she did. This is a totally gripping and tremendously entertaining memoir.
