Men's Journal

You can learn a lot about a man by playing poker with him. Especially a man who doesn’t know how to bluff.

By Walter Kirn

Mel Gibson has no poker face. What he has is just the opposite: a face that tells all, continuously, helplessly, with a crease for every success and every failure, a line for every joy and every sorrow. It’s a face that’s all too human, slightly worn, apparently unmolested by the scalpel, and as incapable of masking emotion as Paris Hilton’s party dresses are of concealing her reproductive organs. It’s also a restless face, like Gibson himself. Going from concentration to distraction, amusement to annoyance, its expressions change every couple of seconds, driven by a hectic, humming energy that Gibson once told a British chat-show host originates in his remarkably large kidneys (which he said an MRI once revealed).

Gibson’s high-voltage kidneys also help explain why he’s crazy for poker, famously breaking out his deck on airplanes, on movie sets, at home, wherever he can locate a flat surface. Among his most frequent opponents is Alan Nierob, his longtime friend and publicist, who’s here tonight for the frankly stated purpose of taking his client’s money, which he tells me he does quite regularly. (Nierob boasts that chips he took from Gibson covered his kids’ college tuition.) When I ask him to characterize Gibson as a player, he answers dryly: “A loser.” Then he adds, his features still locked in place, “A good loser, but a worse winner.”

The wisecrack instantly causes Gibson’s face to twist into a complicated grimace that seems to combine mock outrage, honest rivalry, and a ferocious craving for a cigarette. I can’t wait to see this guy try to bluff.

Sitting next to Gibson at a card table in a smoke-filled New York City loft, where we’ve come to spend a Sunday evening playing poker with five of his colleagues and acquaintances, I’m struck with the thought that he probably shouldn’t be doing this. Poker, a game that calls for self-restraint. Poker, a game that, as the night wears on and the ashtrays fill up and the pizza slices are swallowed, tends to relax the mind and loosen the tongue. Poker, a game that a fellow like Mel Gibson, who isn’t famous for his self-restraint but is infamous for his loose tongue, might enjoy playing in private, with his pals, but perhaps should think twice about playing when there’s a journalist armed with a tape recorder at the table.

Especially now, at this peculiar moment in his life — in the midst of a divorce from his wife of nearly three decades and awaiting the birth of his eighth child, this time with his new Russian singer girlfriend. Especially now, just after the expunging of his drunken-driving rap from that unfortunate night three years ago when he fell off the wagon and said some things he shouldn’t have, did some things he shouldn’t have. Especially now, when he is staging his return to the screen after an eight-year absence as a leading man.

It’s a bit, well, brave of him to face the spotlight at a card table, surrounded by bottles of booze that he can’t touch and engaged in a game he can’t control.

No, he probably shouldn’t be doing this, but because he’s Mel Gibson he’s doing it anyway.

—-

Before the cards are dealt, Gibson unzips a small black case containing a mysterious plastic tube. He squirts a smelly yellow ointment onto one of his stout forearms and vigorously rubs it into his skin. He offers the other players a squirt as well. The substance — derived from cow’s brains, Gibson says, and obtained from a doctor in North Carolina — is called Selegiline. He claims that it “cleans the neurotransmitters” and sharpens mental focus, but Nierob, who’s wearing a “cut the crap, let’s play” look, dismisses the reeking goo as “horse piss” and hints that it’s one of the crude practical jokes for which his client is well known. (Gibson described one to me before the game: You sneak up on a napping buddy, smear some mayonnaise across his chin, add a freshly plucked pubic hair or two, and then, when your victim finally wakes up and touches a finger to the sticky mess, you draw his attention to your open fly.)

Later on, through internet research, I learn that Selegiline isn’t a joke at all. One of the many supplements and potions that Gibson totes around in a bulging knapsack, the stuff is a potent MAO-B inhibitor used to treat Parkinson’s disease and alleviate depression. Gibson probably shouldn’t be flashing the medication, let alone passing it around to others, but that’s how he operates: on impulse. His next impulse is to light a cigarette. It’s one of perhaps a dozen he’ll smoke tonight, despite informing me when he arrived that “if you’re still smoking past age 50 [Gibson is 54], there’s something wrong with you.”

When it’s finally time to play, Gibson shuffles the cards in the air from hand to hand. He reveals that he learned the intimidating trick on the set of Maverick, the 1994 Wild West comedy he starred in with Jodie Foster, whom he says he introduced to poker at his house one night. “She literally had no idea,” he recalls, “but she walked away with such a fucking pile of money.” Now he’s working with Foster again. Having finished comeback movie number one, January’s Edge of Darkness (a classic balls-and-bullets Gibson rage-fest about a surly Boston cop seeking to avenge his daughter’s murder by shoving gun barrels into bad guys’ cheeks and ordering them to cough up what they know before he sprays their brains onto the wallpaper), he’s shooting the Foster-directed The Beaver. This movie, whose script was long regarded as one of the best unmakeable properties in Hollywood, isn’t as easily categorized. It’s the tale of a suicidal sad sack who forms a bond with a furry rodent puppet that somehow restores his will to live. Its theme, Gibson tells me, is “depression,” a condition he says he’s suffered from himself. He blames the funk on creeping “male menopause” and believes it is alleviated by MAOs. (Thus the tube of Selegiline, apparently.) But depression is also a state of mind, says Gibson: “Usually, it’s a perception problem. Things are never really as good or bad as they seem. A guy once said it to me this way: ‘Depression lies. Depression lies to you.’ ”

The somber moment doesn’t last. Gibson deals a round of cards and it’s time to size up the other players. There’s Sam, a rising celebrity chef whom I mark as a novice with a fierce will; Elliot, a boyish English actor who seems like fresh meat who is aware that he is fresh meat; Andy, a marketing consultant who’s played in Vegas and seems to know what’s what; Mark, a producer who seems confused about how to hold his cards; Alan, who’s clearly an old dog to watch out for; and me, the pessimist who folds and folds until he gets bored and bets big while holding crap.

And then there’s Mel, who plays for kicks, I gather, telegraphing his thoughts as each card comes to him. Right now he looks pleased, which is why it’s no surprise when he ends up taking the first pot with a full house. He then kindly tells us all we need to know about his strategy from here on out: “I have stupid money now. Now I can be stupid.” Still smiling with triumph, he refers to one of his cards as a “RuPaul,” which he says is gambling slang for a “black queen.” Clever, that quip, but it hangs there for a moment, considering it’s coming from a guy who almost sacrificed his reputation to a taste of impromptu ethnic commentary. But let’s cut the man some slack. It’s poker night, and guys will be guys. Them’s the rules, are they not, boys?

The cards fly across the table. Bets are placed. Gibson pays close attention to the action, monitoring the buy-ins and the raises and rendering judgments on whose hands beat whose, even catching a slight mistake along the way. It’s a wonder that he even cares, since he’s by far the richest player here, worth upward of $900 million, reportedly — for which he can thank his bold investment in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, which the big studios declined to finance but the meek multitudes embraced. That fortune is on the line, thanks to his participation in one of life’s greatest gambles: a Hollywood marriage. Robyn, his wife of 29 years and the mother of his first seven children, filed last spring for a divorce that may end up being the costliest split in showbiz history. (His eighth child, a daughter, would come prematurely only a few days after this game, birthed by 39-year-old girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, the first singer signed to Gibson’s fledgling record label, Icon Distribution.) And though Gibson, a vocal advocate of Roman Catholic moral doctrine (including, perhaps, its rejection of modern birth control), took full blame for the bust-up on The Tonight Show, casting Jay Leno in the role of his network father-confessor, he surely knows Judgment Day will be stormy anyhow. That the back-and-forth flow of measly $5 chips can hold his interest this evening is astonishing. That Selegiline cream must focus the mind.

The game tonight is mostly seven-card stud, not the vastly more popular Texas Hold ’Em, which Gibson says he doesn’t like because it relies on “communal” cards. This preference for a style of poker that leaves each player on his own seems to line up with the rugged individualism that, along with his burst of bigotry and his refusal to placate Jewish leaders angered by his portrayal of their faith in The Passion’s let’s-get-Jesus scenes, has made Gibson, for certain liberal types, a symbol of neomedieval simplemindedness. Of course, for those who don’t require movie stars to function as social paragons, Gibson’s rough-and-ready ways are what make him compulsively watchable.

The man is no cultural Cro-Magnon, though, as his card-table conversation proves. Hoping to elevate our discourse above clubhouse cracks such as a salty Gibsonian pun that defines “innuendo” as an anal sex act (think about it for a second — or don’t), I throw out a question to the table: Which of Shakespeare’s major characters would make the most effective poker player? Gibson thinks it over for a minute, falling back on his training as a thespian at an elite Australian drama academy that he attended before he went all Visigoth as Mad Max. He settles on Coriolanus, the pitiless Roman soldier. Elliot, the young English actor at the table who is also a student of the Bard, counters with Iago, the Machiavellian sneak who brings down Othello.

Gibson nods. “Iago,” he conjectures, “would deal from the bottom of the deck.” But then he comes up with another candidate, Brutus, who plunged a dagger into his good friend Caesar. Excellent choice. But Gibson isn’t satisfied. He ponders the question further and votes for Cassius, the envious archplotter in the same play and a more obscure figure all around. Elliot shrugs and Gibson wins the point.

A few hands later things get raw again. Somehow the talk drifts to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Gibson brings up a book, On the Trail of the Assassins, which inspired Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-theory-riddled JFK. Gibson, who once starred in a movie called Conspiracy Theory, declares the film Stone’s masterpiece. Then he ventures another joke. What, he asks, was JFK’s last thought as the fatal bullet smashed his skull? The poker players pause, look up. Broadly aping Kennedy’s Boston accent, Gibson delivers the morbid punch line: “Why is my wife making meat loaf on the back of the car?” Ta-dum.

Oh, well.

—-

Mel Gibson, over the years, has made mistakes, but mostly he’s made movies. In a lot of them he goes berserk: painting his face blue and beating an English army by piercing their charging steeds with sharpened stakes (Braveheart), waving his gun around so erratically that even his buddies shrink back in trepidation (the Lethal Weapon series), and training his lens on a panting Mayan peasant as he flees from an orgy of human sacrifice shot with such anatomical brutality that as I was watching it I touched my heart just to make sure it was still inside my chest, not throbbing and dripping on a stone altar (Apocalypto). Gibson’s penchant for scenes of bubbling gore, rib-cracking combat, and testicular fury would seem to mark him as a man who’s either unmoved by physical misery or mystically intrigued by it.

But back in his 20s in the Philippines, after playing high-stakes poker late one night, he had another encounter with human suffering, not cinematic but actual, that weighed him down with shame. The way he told it to us around the table, he’d just dropped $12,000 on a card game when he strolled out into the street at 3 am and found himself surrounded by “crawling” beggars, some with missing limbs. Suddenly, he was disgusted with himself. For the money he’d blown on a silly game of chance, he could have helped these gravely tortured souls. The realization haunted him — so much so that once he’d grown a little richer he decided, with his wife, to found and guide a charity, Mending Kids International, devoted to paying the medical expenses of ailing underprivileged children.

So his worst night of poker brought out the best in Gibson. From folly came guilt, from guilt compassion, and from compassion a plan to seek redemption. It’s a cycle that Gibson has since become familiar with: a succession of lows and highs and highs and lows whose spiritual rigors probably account for his acutely careworn face. People magazine’s very first “Sexiest Man Alive,” with the flashing blue eyes and the impish, crooked grin, is not quite so smooth now, not so bright and cocky. He’s also feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle, now that he’s chosen to rejoin a business that’s changed a lot — for the worse, he feels — during his time off.

“It’s a different game now. The power balance has shifted dramatically.” (From the talent to the studios, he means; from the artists to the money guys.) “I guess they figured, Why are we killing ourselves?” Gibson doesn’t believe that the independents, the little guys, are likely to improve the situation. “The indies are trying to do the films the studios don’t do anymore, and they’re not doing them as well as the studios used to.” Genre movies don’t bother Gibson if they’re done well. “There’s nothing wrong with romantic comedies as long as they’re funny. And romantic.” His subtext is that they’re rarely either nowadays.

Looking reflective rather than despairing, he admits that he’s thought about retiring permanently as he tosses down what may be his worst hand yet (“Uglier than a handful of rectal surgery”). As often happens in casual poker games after an hour or two of steady play, the novices are winning big now, especially the producer who’s sitting directly across from Gibson and counting up much of what used to be Mel’s money (and a fair portion of everyone else’s) with the loathsome glee of the rank amateur. Gibson is playing mechanically, by rote, letting slip random observations and anecdotes that might not be interesting coming from just anyone but are noteworthy coming from a star who’s lived through a period of what he’s termed “humiliation on a global scale” and who might be forgiven for clamming up entirely now that his goal, his modest goal, is simply to make a few more decent movies.

“Definitely Jimmy Woods,” he says, naming the best showbiz poker player he knows.

“A couple,” he says in answer to a question about whether Jodie Foster tells any good beaver jokes. But then he adds, quickly, “I think the world of her.”

Then, on the subject of artistic compromise: “Someone asked me to put on the Batman suit once and I wouldn’t do it.”

Also this: “It’s difficult working with a puppet.”

And finally, responding to my inquiry about whether there are top-secret anti-aging pills available only to stars like him and capable of creating the appearance of perennial freshness and vigor: “Just look at me.”
I do look. Closely. I see he’s right.

—-

The poker game is winding down and so, to judge by his pink, glazed eyes, is Gibson. He’s been playing cards for more than three hours, but his night isn’t over yet — not close to over. In a few minutes a car will come to ferry Gibson to a press event timed to the high-definition DVD re-release of Braveheart, which first hit theaters 15 years ago and established him as something more than a swaggering, smirking leading man. His best director Oscar for Braveheart helped him found an exclusive club of one: a star who could open a range of motion pictures (even limp trifles like What Women Want) to blockbuster first-weekend grosses but who could also create, produce, and helm massively profitable, epic experiments set in ancient foreign lands and cast with unknown actors speaking obscure languages.

It was such a grand artistic run, unprecedented — the true, raw material of megalomania, which isn’t a delusion when it’s working, only when it convinces the vaulting ego that it can work forever. No wonder Gibson pushed his luck. No wonder he crowned himself the King of Malibu, chewed out the cop who couldn’t see his crown, and then, when it came time to straighten up his act, withdrew for a while behind his infamous mug shot. He doesn’t speak about that period of emotional recuperation; however, that the Malibu judge who expunged his drunk-driving conviction praised him for taking his recovery seriously suggests that he swallowed his medicine like a big boy. His so-so performance at poker tonight may be another sign of health, judging by a story he told earlier about his history with another game, chess, during a previous major bout of melancholy.

Gibson was about 40, he recalls, and feeling like a total bloody mess when suddenly, inexplicably, amazingly, he started moving his bishops, rooks, and pawns like a late-blooming Bobby Fischer. Hunkered down behind a board in Los Angeles’s Grand Havana Room, he took on all comers, beating them consistently, thanks to a spell of eerie strategic omniscience that he describes as “when I had this overview of everything.” But then Gibson’s inner chaos began to clear, taking with it his supernatural mastery. He compares the process to the story Flowers for Algernon, about a young man with an unusually low IQ whom scientists briefly turn into a genius before he lapses back into confusion. “As soon as my life got better,” Gibson says, “my chess game went to hell.”

What his life is like these days, with the divorce, the baby, the new movie, and the troublesome beaver puppet to contend with, only Gibson knows for sure — but the fact that he’s out among the guys without an off-the-chart blood-alcohol level and running on nothing stronger than Selegiline suggests that he’s headed in the right direction. He drinks the last of several Diet Cokes, deals one last hand, is beaten by his own publicist, and settles back into his chair to count his money — as if it might possibly matter. But Mel’s a “cheap bastard,” according to Nierob, and he carefully tabulates his evening’s losses (23 bucks from a hundred-dollar buy-in) before pocketing a few wrinkled bills.

Earlier, in the middle of the game, while discussing Edge of Darkness and The Beaver, he claimed that he doesn’t make movies for the money, but for the privilege of “doing it.” After watching him play poker, I almost believe him. Passing around his MAO-B inhibitor, making tasteless JFK jokes, and cracking wise about a black transvestite, Gibson walked the edge at times, but he seemed to know where the edge lay. He seemed like himself, in other words, whatever some people may think about that self — and he knows that a few of them don’t think much of it.

What he seemed to relish most about the game was physically manipulating the cards. He made them jump; he made them skip and dance. And he held them at precisely the right angle to keep me from catching a glimpse of even one of them. Not that I ever tried to peek. With Gibson, that simply isn’t necessary. It’s what made him a star, as watchable as any, and what will assure that he stays one, probably, if the Diet Cokes and Selegiline hold out.

Gibson wears what he’s holding right there on his face.

—-

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.