From Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times by Dennis McDougal:

Jack kept shredded currency heaped in a bowl on his living room coffee table, which, in addition to being his favorite conversation piece, put his riches into perspective. Once used as an ashtray, the bowl became home to dead dollar bills after a visit from the novelist Richard Brautigan, who demonstrated his own contempt for cash by pulling a pair of fifties from his wallet, tearing them up and tossing them into Jack's fireplace.

"Well, the next morning, I find some of the torn $50s on the floor and I just mindlessly put them in this thing here," said Jack. "It's some sort of a candy dish, but everyone always used it as an ashtray." Thenceforward no one dropped their ashes in the bowl. "Instead. people would always ask me about it — what's with the torn money in the dish?" Jack continued. "And I started to realize that I was creating a work of art. It was sculpture, as much as that Salvador Dalí piece over there. In fact, of all of the things that are in this room — the Picassos, the Francis Bacon, the Magritte — this bowl of money is the one piece of art that always draws the most comments and attention." (p. 225)

NOTE: Benjamin Svetkey? refers to this same incident in his interview with Jack Nicholson.

Through all of these debacles, Jack's star remained aloft. Ashby? attempted to cast him opposite Clint Eastwood? in a screen adaptation of the novelist Richard Brautigan's "gothic Western" The Hawkline Monster and Michael Douglas offered him the Jack Lemmon role in The China Syndrome (1979). But as Kubrick's The Shining marathon ground to a close, Jack remained noncommittal about his next project, much to the annoyance of those who clamored after him. (p. 228)

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