Nick Nolte reveals Streisand always wanted him naked

Nick Nolte has been called, alternately, one of the best actors of his generation, the ‘sexiest man alive,’ and a wild-haired alcoholic mess.

To hear him tell it, and he does, finally, in his long-awaited memoir, Nolte has ‘bit life on its a**’ and has taken big risks and found ways to celebrate or survive them.

‘Chaos has always followed me like a randy dog,’ he writes. 

The Academy-award nominated actor arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s from the midwest and drifted right into the crazy drug-fueled scene of Laurel Canyon and Barney’s Beanery, a rustic restaurant where a carnival of people met.

Just 21 years old at the time, he was already drinking heavily.

Now in Southern California, ‘I loved adding other kinds of inebriates to my recreational repertoire and exploring where it would take me, but even I struggled to hold my own with the over-the-top kinds of insanity that were standard fare’, he writes in Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines, his compelling, much anticipated memoir, published by William Morrow.

Nolte (pictured with Barbra in a publicity shot for the film) admitted to being ‘powerfully drawn to her just as she was to me’ that he knew ‘early on’ they shouldn’t slip into a romantic and sexual relationship with each other while working 

He grew up with a manic energy that he exercised in playing football back in Iowa and Nebraska, but in Los Angeles, that energy adrenaline addiction had dissipated and he was now ‘confused and lost’.

He often found himself passed out on Santa Monica Boulevard in front of Barney’s Beanery and in grave danger of being run over.

He continued to head-butt parked cars as some kind of distraction from his emotional state.

Before escaping the sunny southland and heading back to the mid-western cornfields, he connected with acting coach Bryan O’Byrne, who became a mentor to him and encouraged Nolte to ‘focus on acting as a method of studying the human soul.’

It would be a decade before Nolte ventured back to Los Angeles.

In those intervening ten years he pursued acting in regional theaters in Iowa and Nebraska – until he was ready for the big time.

Flash forward to 1989 when he got a call and was asked to read for the role of tortured Tom Wingo in the bestselling novel, The Prince of Tides, which was to be directed by screen legend Barbra Streisand.

He tells how Barbra, who also co-starred, wanted Nolte to come over to her house, have a cocktail and introduce himself. 

She was staying at her apartment in Manhattan at the time, an entire floor of a park-side building.

She poured him a glass of red wine and they made small talk while she worried about him spilling the wine on her white carpets. 

Barbra wanted an extra scene in the film and asked if Nolte would jointly kick in $500,00. He agreed but admits he wasn’t sure if that scene even made it into the film.

Nolte’s Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines will be released January 23, 2018

Streisand had a reputation for being mean but Nolte saw ‘she was totally thorough and prepared, and did a lot of research.’ 

They talked extensively about their characters’ relationship and the romantic pull – and suddenly it was happening in real life.

‘I was powerfully drawn to her just as she was to me, so much so that I knew that early on we needed to talk about the reasons why we shouldn’t slip into a romantic and sexual relationship with each other as we worked,’ Nolte writes.

He warned her it would be dangerous for the film – ‘to have to carry a relationship and the story at the same time.’ 

‘We can live in the fantasy of a relationship and that will survive, but an actual physical relationship might not survive the film,’ he writes.  

However, shooting scenes, Streisand always wanted Nolte naked while she was covered with layers of sweaters.

‘How come I’ve got to show my a** and you never show anything?’ Nolte asked her.

‘They don’t pay me enough for me to show these tits,’ Barbra responded.

While the film was going through editing, Nolte recalls Streisand had called him asked him to, ‘come out and live with me.’

‘I want to be with you,’ she told him.

At the time, Nolte was raising his son Brawley and declined.

But he later realized what had inspired the call. Streisand had been watching the dailies – the unedited footage – and had fallen in love with Nolte’s character, Tom Wingo, he says. 

‘What do you want to be to me?’ Streisand asked. 

Nolte responded: ‘A good friend’.

‘You don’t know what I ask from my friends.’ 

Nolte, who has been married three times, married British actress Clytie Lane in 2016. Above they are pictured in 2010 

Nolte also dated comedienne and actress Vicki Lewis (left) who lived with him for ten years. He married Rebecca Linger (right) in 1984. Linger is the mother of his son Brawley 

Nolte had a love affair with The Deep co-star Jacqueline Bisset (pictured) but it was short-lived and over before they finished shooting after Bisset accused him of sleeping with every girl on Peter Island

The film was released that Christmas and received seven Academy Award nominations and Nolte was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.

The movie’s success landed him on Good Morning America in 1991 where he admits he fabricated a story about getting a ‘testicle tuck’ because they had succumbed to gravity.

However, the morning show was on to his exaggerations and pulled the plug. They were off the air and he was caught in a lie.

‘It has been said that I lie to the press, that I make up outlandish stories to protect myself. Many accuse me of telling falsehoods just for the sheer joy of pranking. Looking back, I can see a morsel of truth in both’, the actor writes.

‘Or maybe I just rebel with a little lie.’ 

But before Hollywood embraced Nolte’s acting skills, football was his world and there was never a plan B.

His first girlfriend left him for her first love and broke his heart. He wasn’t a good student and didn’t care about his studies while attending at Eastern Arizona College near the Mexican border.

There he spent time in a little cantina, drank tequila, listened to the mariachis play, and frequented a whorehouse to experience all the sexual pleasures and overcome any sexual inhibitions.

To make some spending money, he sold fake draft cards and segued into a criminal lifestyle, driving an old funeral limo wearing black clothing.

When an accident scattered the blank IDs on a local country club golfing green, the FBI came knocking at his door.

Nolte got out of town and the family moved to Iowa.

A year later he was arrested and charged with seven counts of selling counterfeit state and federal documents. But his $75,000 fine and 75-year jail sentence was suspended and he was on probation for the duration of the Vietnam war.

The FBI believed he was selling the fake IDs to keep guys out of the army and out of Vietnam — which was considered ‘treason.’

While working in a regional theater in Phoenix in 1966, Nolte, 25 at the time, made a love connection with actress Sheila Page.

The stunning brunette was ten years older, divorced with two children, and attracting every man on the set, but she was hot for Nick.

Married by a justice of the peace, Sheila declared it was to be an open marriage.

‘The free-loving sixties were in full bloom and I couldn’t believe my good fortune,’ Nick writes.

Nolte made headlines after his infamous arrest in 2002. He was arrested for reckless driving after taking GHB 

‘Our dalliances with other people seemed to suit both of us – except for the one time when we engaged in an entirely disastrous foursome.’ 

That hookup lasted ten years and was over when Nick caught her sleeping with their friend, Ted. That might have been the only arrangement ‘off-limits.’ 

Nolte moved back to Southern California for good with a theater production and writes that it was his role as Tom in the mid-60s television mini-series, Rich Man, Poor Man, that changed his life as an actor.

He had been declared ‘an overnight sensation’ although he had been a professional actor for 13 years. He was now in demand.

‘But I was wary of Hollywood and losing myself in the falsehood of fame, so I retreated to my childhood sanctuary of nature and got the hell outta dodge’.

Nolte moved 26 miles west to what is now called Agoura Hills and into a big Normandy-style house.

Hippie girlfriends came and went in the actor’s freestyle of living and open house.

Nolte signed on to star in the film, The Deep with co-star Jacqueline Bisset who ‘transformed derivative schlock into a blockbuster’ with the see-through white T-shirt she wore that was like a second skin when she came up out of the water.

Romance – or sex – naturally followed for the stars but it was short-lived and over before they finished shooting after Bisset accused him of sleeping with every girl on Peter Island. 

But he claims the actress was flying off frequently to see her French boyfriend.

‘Even more than football or acting, women have been the major passion of my life. I’m fascinated by them. Totally fascinated. And fascinated by myself in relation to them’, Nolte writes. 

He hooked up with Karen Eklund, a wild grifter in Minnesota but that dissipated quickly and she asked for $4.5 million in palimony.

Hanging at a popular restaurant and disco on Sunset Blvd, Carlos n’ Charlie’s, Nolte met Sharon Haddad and endearingly nicknamed her ‘Legs.’ 

After their first night of coke, they were inseparable.

She didn’t fit in with his hippie style of living out in Agoura Hills, so they moved into town together and quickly jetted off to Vegas and tied the knot at the Chapel of the Bells for $70. 

Nolte says it was his role as Tom in the mid-60s television mini-series, Rich Man, Poor Man – which he starred in alongside Peter Strauss and Susan Blakely (pictured)  – that changed his life as an actor 

He played ‘poor man’ Tom Jordache who boxed for a living 

Nolte and Peter Strauss on stage at the 28th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on May 17, 1976

‘Legs’ was 14 years younger, a wild woman, and just as rowdy as Nick.

When she attended his premieres, she twirled in a little skirt revealing she wasn’t wearing any panties. In fact, Nolte writes, she never wore panties.

He reveals he had to pay off the tabloids many times to keep those pictures out of the pages.

‘I guess it was erotic in the cocaine days, but Jesus Christ. You don’t need to show it to the whole goddamn United States,’ he writes.  

Nolte married Rebecca Linger who gave birth to his adored son, Brawley, but that relationship dissolved when he caught her kissing another guy.

He dated comedienne and actress Vicki Lewis who lived with him for ten years.  

But throughout his life, the actor still struggled with drugs. 

In 1992, the film, Lorenzo’s Oil awakened the actor to health and wellness and he began investigating how to get back in shape.

Five years later, he was introduced to ‘hormone imbalances and replacement strategies, and the human growth hormone (HGH) therapy’ to recover his youth and energy.

He started injecting HGH into his stomach every day at the cost of $2-$3,000 a month – and worth it, he writes.

Nolte used ozone therapy to detox his body and connected with a New York City doctor whose focus was on brain health.

Now he was using positron emission tomography, PET scanning, to search for miniscule tumors and diseases; loss of bone density; a brain SPECT scan to diagnose Alzheimer’s and evaluate memory loss.

Nick Nolte and family members attend his being honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 20, 2017 in Hollywood. His son Brawley is pictured third from the right 

The doctor’s conclusion – ‘I had the brain of a man who would battle with addictive behavior all his life,’ he writes. 

Nolte was hooked and wanted to learn as much about the body that he began studying his own blood as well as his son’s under a microscope.

He continued to inject HGH into his stomach, take vitamins, hormones, ozone and accept being called ‘Nick the weirdo’.

Nolte quit his massive consumption of cocaine, quit drinking in 2002, and started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

His mother and father were now dead and his son remained his life’s greatest joy.

But he was hooked on GHB, gamma hydroxybutyric acid – a naturally occurring neurotransmitter that induced relaxation, gave one a mild euphoric feeling, pain relief, and increased libido.

It was legal and prescribed by his doctor for four years to help him sleep, but he later began to increase his dosage himself and took it before going to the gym.

In September 2002, he took it before heading off to an AA meeting. He sat outside in his car and never went in before driving back home along the Pacific Coast Highway.

He was suddenly so euphoric he had no idea where he was going and neither did the California Highway Patrol who pulled him over and thought he had been drinking. Their report read: ‘He was drooling.’

The mugshot of Nolte, with his hair wild, and looking ‘like an asylum inmate out for a lark in his flower-print Hawaiian shirt,’ he writes, went round the world.

Nolte flew back east to a psychiatric institute to detox and walked out in 30 days.

‘My old identity had worn me out and I was grateful to have freed myself from it’s grasp’.

‘It was time for reinvention and reentry into the world’.

With a new titanium hip replacement and a new knee in 2016, the actor writes he has turned into something of a geezer. 

But at age 75, he has appeared in 99 credited roles in TV and film between 1969 and 2017 – ‘an extraordinary run by anyone’s measure’.

Nolte declares he’s addressing dying without undue fear and suspects he got five years or so before it’s time ‘to head elsewhere’.

‘I’ve had a wonderful time living and I look forward to a good time dying’, he concludes.