Art and dissolution

An exploration of the relationship between them

The immediate catalyst for this post is a profile of Tessa Gourin at the Daily Beast. She’s a 28-year-old actress who happens to be Jack Nicholson’s estranged daughter. Estranged, as in doesn’t feel like she knows him at all:

The actor is known to have fathered at least five children by four different women, but he has never publicly acknowledged Gourin as his daughter, and he hasn’t been present in her life since she was a child. She hasn’t spoken to Nicholson in years, she said, and declined to be more specific.

“From a very young age, my mother told me not to tell anyone that I have this famous dad,” Gourin tells The Daily Beast. “I knew he was powerful and Daddy Warbucks-level rich, so I kind of equated my life to being like Orphan Annie’s.”

Now, their “relationship,” or, more accurately, utter lack thereof, is not so different from a whole lot of entertainment-industry situations.

This one is interesting insofar as it seems to be generational. Nicholson was born in 1937 to a 17-year-old, um, “showgirl,” and who his father was remains uncertain. His grandparents raised him under a false premise. He grew up thinking his mother was his sister, something that wasn’t straightened out for him until 1974, when Time magazine leaked the true situation.

Nicholson, of course, is one of America’s most beloved actors, whose own persona - best expressed through his sly grin and arched eyebrows - has seen him through the several periods of his career: soap-opera work in the 1950s, the decade of low-budget rebellious-young-man movies, period-piece horror flicks and biker sagas under the direction of Roger Corman, and low-budget westerns under the direction of Monte Hellman, writing the scripts for the advertising-executive-takes-LSD film The Trip and The Monkees’ feature-length swan song, Head, his big break as the alcoholic lawyer in the hippie-biker tale Easy Rider, and the subsequent decades of major roles, press fawning, scandal, and, of course, dalliances and offspring.

But, as I say, the case can be made that neither Gourin’s situation nor that of her father is unique. Consider the love child that Clark Gable and Loretta Young had. Then there’s Spencer Tracy, who came closest to faithfulness in the longest-lasting of his many affairs, the one with Katherine Hepburn. In the music world and the realms of literature and visual arts, this is arguably the norm.

But the art - these people’s creations - isn’t that what has the lasting significance?

I sometimes reflect on an observation I made one day at a jazz improvisation workshop I attended for five years in a row a couple of decades ago. There were lots of kids as well as adults who attended it, and I happened to pass a young guy in the hall who was wearing a Charlie Parker tee shirt, that I’m pretty sure he purchased in the workshop’s bookstore. Now, the organizer of the workshop, one of America’s foremost jazz educators, was a clean-living guy, to the extent that he’d work diatribes against cigarette smoking into his holdings-forth on ear training and theory. And he encouraged attendees to listen to lots of Charlie Parker.

And who wouldn’t? Anybody with even a minimal degree of refined music appreciation understands that Parker was one of the twentieth century’s towering musical figures in any genre, and, in fact, a great artist from any form of expression. A genius.

But he was a junkie from the age of 16 until two years before his alcohol-related death at age 34. His personal life was a colossal mess.

At what point in history did human artistic expression become so intertwined with dissolute behavior?

Did it have anything to do with the drifting of art away from its religious moorings?

I’m not qualified to say much about it, but the pioneers of what we consider classical music - Handel, Bach, Mozart - seem to have been pretty clean-living guys. If anybody knows about the personal lives of the great Renaissance Christian-themed painters, I’d be interested in hearing whether they were likewise either on the straight and narrow or confirmed the pattern we see in more modern times.

I do know that Samuel Pepys’s diary, which I read in college and pulled off the shelf again during the COVID pandemic as a train of thought got me curious about how he lived through the Great London Plague of 1665, shows him to have been a bit of a rascal. He wasn’t an artist per se, but he was a great patron of the arts, spending many evenings at the theater and hobnobbing with the celebrities of the day over dinner. And he did play some musical instruments and work on his chops. But a couple of times his wife caught him embracing young women who were staying in their home for one reason or another.

Pepys also tells some tales out of school about Charles II. He’d often write of running into some socialite he happened to know was one of the king’s paramours.

This theory might have some usefulness: When fame became attendant to creative expression, it skewed the artist’s sense of what makes for a worthwhile life. When large numbers of people adulate you, it can seem natural to take that wherever it might lead. Think about the whole nature of the interview (which kind of gets us back to the Daily Beast article with which I started this train of thought). Sitting across a table from a journalist who thinks the way you pick at your salad is a fascinating insight into your unique luminosity just might give you the notion that you have some kind of license to live differently than those who conduct themselves according to a commonly agreed-upon moral code.

Is this kind of sybaritic behavior exclusive to the arts? A look at headlines from any time in the last several decades at least would indicate otherwise. The realm of politics has been increasingly trending this way. And the highest levels of the business world are populated by the likes of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, David Geffen (who took a break from his self-professed homosexuality to live romantically with Cher - herself a case study for what we’re talking about - for a couple of years) and various #Me-Too accusees.

Here, the common denominator would be the above-mentioned fame. These people are sources of fascination because they have made big splashes in the world of commerce and industry by acting on their visions of one kind or another.

I don’t want to go too far down the road of a corny stereotype, but my own experience indicates to me that there is a swath of inhabitants of our society, mostly found in flyover states, who have proceeded through life unaffected by such moral fraying. You knows the types I’m talking about: farmers, skilled tradespeople, small business owners, employees of these types, volunteers and advocates for those in need.

What has kept them on a time-honored track of setting store by family and community, even as the culture around them has deteriorated into unrecognizability?

Is it possibly that an ethos passed from one generation to the next that teaches an other-orientedness is a major factor? That intact families based on loyalty have been incubators in which such folks just took it for granted that the sun didn’t rise and set in their armpit, that considering others at least as important as themselves was a given?

But then, what to do with the great works the artists have bestowed upon us?

Would Shelly have written such great poems if he hadn’t thought marriage was a detrimental institution? Would Picasso have had all those distinct and incredible periods to his painting career if he hadn’t had four wives and three lovers? Would John Lennon have cowritten The Beatles’ extraordinary body of work if he hadn't been abandoned by his father and watched his mother give him a slew of half-siblings with other men?

How’s that for a parlor game?

No hard and fast answers here, particularly because this whole subject applies to my own life. I’ve been faithful to my wife throughout our 33-year marriage, but there’s a track record of rascal behavior before that, as well as one of extensive pharmaceutical excursions. And I have given the occasional shot at nice, solid occupations and civic involvement, but I know what I mainly am is a writer and musician.

This is more than an idle topic for discussion. We need art - great art that moves us to our core. But we need, at least as badly - no, make that more intensely, the sense that the human beings in our lives have our backs, are interested in our futures, and whose word is their bond.

There’s been somewhat of a move in our society to sort of quarantine our artists. This manifests itself as “arts districts” in our cities. You know, let them be who they need to be in their personal lives, so they can keep cranking out the aesthetic stimulation we crave.

Exit question: Is such an arrangement workable in the long run?

Could not the argument be made that this shows that we really don’t care about what happens to these people spiritually?