Their troubled love story is sprinkled with Nicholson’s lavishing expensive gifts of cars and jewels and art on her, but there is something about an especially schmaltzy love poem on a birthday that could make a woman stay longer than she ought to.
“She’s a dark, coiled spring of a woman with long flowing lines… She’s got a mind and a literary sense of style, and you better believe she’s got imaginative energies. She’s absolutely unpredictable and she’s very beautiful. What is it that holds me to her? It’s love, I guess, and only love!” Nicholson told People in 1985. They had just costarred in Prizzi’s Honor, for which Anjelica won an Academy Award. Peers of the two corroborated his claims to love her madly but stopped short of intimating that Nicholson was faithful. “He’s never going to leave Anjelica. There’s no one else he really wants. He was a glittering vagrant, and she gave him the solid core he needed,” said producer Bob Evans in the same feature story. But never leaving is not the same thing as never straying, and Anjelica herself alluded to his infidelity in stating, “I don’t like the word commitment. It has a gloomy sound. When I hear it, I see myself enduring a long dreary ritual. Understanding is a better word than commitment. Jack and I have an understanding.”10
The terms of this understanding were wrecked, however, when Nicholson broke the news to her in 1989 that he was having a child with a twenty-six-year-old woman. News of the split made headlines, and women with whom he’d had affairs emerged from the woodwork with sordid tales that the tabloids ate up. “An article on Jack’s sexual prowess at Christmas is hardly my idea of a nice present over the Yuletide season. It’s something that I won’t look at on the newsstand, or condescend to open and invest with my interest and my power,” she told Vanity Fair in the year after the breakup.11 Since reading the profile, “I won’t invest my power in that” has become my go-to response when refusing to suffer indignities, fools, or bullshit more generally.
And Nicholson’s bullshitting days were far from finished. After the split, he sent her a diamond-and-pearl bracelet that had once been given to Ava Gardner by Frank Sinatra. “These pearls from your swine. With happiest wishes for the holidays—Enjoy—Yr Jack,” he signed off in the note, perhaps unaware that the only thing he refused to be was hers.12 Nicholson would linger in her periphery for years, popping back into the frame with gifts and terms of endearment that had his signature charm. But in the light outside of his shadow, she had more clarity than ever about just how bright her future might be.
Nicholson was furious about the Vanity Fair cover story that soon followed. In Marc Eliot’s biography of him, Nicholson claimed, “It hurt. It wasn’t realistic. She knew there was another woman and a baby, and then it was just all out there in the public eye and the privacy and intimacy were gone.”13 He seemed not to register that embarrassment is not the same thing as hurt, nor that he had robbed his relationship with Anjelica of its intimacy for the decades he spent being unfaithful to her. His reaction has an air of bafflement, the classic “How could she do this to me?” that doesn’t acknowledge what he’s done to her all along. It is the panicked realization that a woman will take only so much. In the article, Anjelica recalls how her own mother navigated her unfaithful relationships in noting, “She could have moments of great gaiety, but she was very unhappy a lot of the time. And I think it’s because she wasn’t selfish enough.”14 Anjelica’s commitment to selfishness, and even to self-indulgence at times, is what draws women like me closer to her despite having none of her breeding, money, or inherent charm.
Phoebe tells me it was the Vanity Fair she bought in South Dakota that elevated her interest in Anjelica from admiration to idolization. “It was the first time I thought about her in this long romance where the average woman would have left much earlier. But this is part of what makes a woman strong, and ultimately the most important thing that I’ve learned from loving Anjelica: You get to set your own boundaries and don’t have to live by everyone else’s.” I already empathized with her for staying with Nicholson too long, but I think of this often when I judge the way Anjelica writes of her jet-setting lifestyle and casualness about ostentatious purchases. The circumstances into which Anjelica was born destined her for wealth and privilege, and her refusal to play it down or ingratiate herself to readers by constantly stating how grateful she is for her good fortune is a relief. Anjelica’s memories are unapologetically steeped in Hollywood decadence and the class privilege that accompanied her fellow travelers on these journeys. She is just fucking cool about it.
Within three years of parting ways with Nicholson, Anjelica married sculptor Bob Graham. With twenty years behind her, she did not respond to attraction with a “Now, there’s a man you could fall for” but with the more cautious but still hopeful “‘Hmm, I wonder.’ It was a strange feeling, being around him. There was a strong attraction but also a feeling of destiny.”15 Unlike her descriptions of awe at watching Nicholson perform and engage, she writes of Graham with an intimate admiration for the quiet elegance of his work: “Bob was a beautiful man at all times.”16 His gentleness was not in competition with his passion, and though they traveled often, the most touching anecdotes from their love story took place in the home he designed for them and in which they lived together until his death in 2008. They were married for sixteen years, just one year shy of the length of time she spent with Jack. It is uncommon to have two once-in-a-lifetime romances, but it should not be surprising that Anjelica is among those who have experienced that.