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Joker: Folie à Deux is making headlines for the wrong reasons, having opened to terrible reviews, scoring an atrocious 35% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, matched by a 36% audience rating. This has been matched by a disappointing opening weekend at the box office, with the sequel having little chance of matching Joker‘s billion-dollar success.
But if Joaquin Phoenix isn’t having a great week, he can at least be relieved that he’s not Jack Nicholson in 1989. While in full Joker mode during the filming of Tim Burton’s Batman, Nicholson was exposed as cheating on then-partner Anjelica Huston with a former model, indulging in secret “kinky sex sessions”:
Perhaps this is unsurprising, Nicholson already had a well-earned reputation as “the fling king” of Hollywood. He was once asked if the rumor of him having slept with over 2,000 women in his life is true and he answered that he doesn’t keep count.
For 14 years, he had an on-and-off relationship with Anjelica Huston, daughter of Oscar-winning director John Huston and a movie icon in her own right. Wanting to demonstrate his commitment to her, Nicholson visited John Huston on his deathbed and vowed that his not-so-secret promiscuity had come to an end:
Yet, in 1989, “leggy” British model/actress Karen Mayo-Chandler revealed that she had a year-long affair with Nicholson, adding that he spent a wildly passionate night with her on the eve of John Huston’s funeral, leaving Anjelica to grieve her father’s death alone.
Anjelica Huston explained in her 2014 book Watch Me: A Memoir that the Mayo-Chandler expose was the last straw, especially as it came alongside Nicholson confessing he had a child on the way with another woman, actress Rebecca Broussard. Huston detailed her fury in her book. “I beat him savagely,” she wrote. “He was ducking and bending and I was going at him like a prizefighter.” This, perhaps understandably, was the definitive end of her relationship with Nicholson.
The headlines at the time were more concerned with the salacious details, with Mayo-Chandler saying “No one can compare to Jack Nicholson in bed. He took me to heights I could’ve never dreamed. He put me on another planet.” Yowser.
Several intimate and bizarre details piqued the public’s interest. Mayo-Chandler referred to Nicholson as a “horny little devil,” and nicknamed him “Spanking Jack.” She explained he was so kinky that he was, in her words, “a guaranteed non-stop sex machine into fun and games like spanking, handcuffs, whips, and Polaroid pictures.”
She went on to detail their marathon sex sessions and threw in the fun detail that Nicholson would refuel by gobbling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Mayo-Chandler delighted in calling him a “naughty little boy”. We suspect Anjelica Huston had had stronger words.
After the smoke cleared, Nicholson wasn’t with Huston or Mayo-Chandler, but with Rebecca Broussard, the mother of his newborn child. None of this affected Batman‘s runaway blockbuster success, with his performance as the Joker universally considered one of the movie’s highlights. So perhaps it’s true that all publicity is good publicity – though we suspect Warner Bros. would rather Folie à Deux be making more positive headlines right now.