Leonard (3 page)

That job also changed Boris Sagal's life; he forgot about studying law and was accepted at Yale School of Drama and eventually became a successful TV and movie director—and would work with Leonard again.

Coincidently, I was just about the same age as Leonard when I got one of the first real parts of my career—appearing in a production of Clifford Odets's
Waiting for Lefty
, a pro-union play being done at a Communist organization meeting hall in Montreal. Both Odets plays communicated a strong political philosophy, but I didn't care at all about that, and I suspect Leonard didn't either. At least not at that time. It was an opportunity to stand on a stage and act. That was all that mattered.

Many years later, Leonard's son, Adam, was making the transition from being an attorney to becoming a director. His TV career had gotten off to a good start when, he remembered, “I got an offer to do an independent production that I didn't think was going to lead anywhere. It felt like a step back, and I was going to turn it down when my dad asked me, ‘Well, do you have another offer to do something else?'

“I didn't, I told him.

“‘Well, then, take the job. You take the job because you need the job. You don't want any downtime. And number two, I guarantee you, you will either learn something from that job or you'll meet somebody on that job who's going to help you. You take the job. Don't turn down work if you don't have work to replace it.'”

If there is an actor's mantra that is it: take the job. We all lived by that, although for a long time most of us didn't live very well by it.

In 1949, Leonard was cast in the comedy
John Loves Mary
being done at a neighborhood temple. The director, Alysso Ristad, was a student at Boston College. Ristad invited the head of the school's theater program, a Jesuit priest, to see the play. Backstage, after the performance, the priest offered Leonard a half scholarship—valued at $37.50—to attend a summer acting program at Boston College. That seemed like a great deal, but Leonard had to raise the other half, which actually was a substantial amount of money for him at the time. Leonard always described the West End as a village, a place where people looked out for each other. The head of another settlement house agreed to sponsor him. That program gave him the professional foundation he needed. He remembered, “It was a very enchanting eight weeks of theater, acting classes, helping build sets, learning how to design a set, how to light a set.”

At the end of that summer, Leonard was offered a scholarship to attend the college, but he had already made up his mind: he was going to Hollywood to become an actor. It was a decision, he once said, that left his parents “grief stricken.” An actor? Who becomes an actor? It's not a profession for a nice Jewish boy. Stay in Boston, they told him; go to college. Like most immigrant parents, they wanted him to have a real profession, preferably as a doctor or a lawyer. His older brother had gotten his college degree and become a chemical engineer, a real job, not like acting.

“My father's response was amazing,” Leonard said. “He warned me, ‘You'll be hanging around with gypsies and bums.' I understood that his vision of actors were the people who came into Iziaslav, in the villages and towns as a company, and did a performance in the town square and passed the hat—then maybe steal a loaf of bread, make love to the mayor's daughter, and leave in the morning. There was no future that he could see.

“And then he offered me one piece of advice, ‘Learn to play the accordion.' Because if I could play the accordion, I could always make a living working bar mitzvahs and weddings. I was okay about that, because I understood what his thoughts were.”

It was Leonard's grandfather who stood up to his parents, telling him to go and do and be, telling him to live his own life. Leonard always kept a little leather pouch with a zipper his grandfather had sewn from scraps, and it was one of his most valued possessions. “He was my guy,” Leonard said about his grandfather.

Just imagine the desperate passion that Leonard must have felt to leave his parents and everyone he knew behind to go to California and take up this strange profession that in fact he knew so little about. The world was very different then. Hollywood existed as much as a fantasy as a real place. It wasn't easy to travel back and forth across the country; flying was much too expensive, and trains took several days. It was so expensive to call there that people in the east would wait until nighttime when the rates went down before telling the operator in solemn tones, “Long distance, please.”

Maybe the hardest part of it was leaving his mother. There was a Yiddish poem written by Itzik Manger that he loved. It's told by a young boy, who sees a tree “left alone, exposed to the storm.” He decides that he will become a bird and rest on that tree and bring it comfort with his beautiful song. But his mother objects, crying, “Maybe you will freeze to death on the tree.” So she makes him put on winter clothes and boots, a scarf, and a cap, and as a result, “I raise my wings to fly, it is too heavy for me … Her love hasn't let me become a bird.” Leonard always identified with that poem. “I got away,” he said, “but it was tough. It was very tough.”

In addition to the $600 Leonard had saved from selling vacuum cleaners, he sold his prized possession, an electric-blue Ford, to his friend Henry Parker, and bought a $100 coach train ticket to Los Angeles. His parents went with him to the train station, and his mother stood there crying as the train pulled out. “I was an adventurer taking off for another world,” he said. “To be an actor.”

There really are only two places in America for actors to find work: Hollywood and New York. Hollywood was the center of the film industry; New York was the place for theater. The television industry was just beginning in both places, but for an actor, it wasn't considered either prestigious or important. A well-known actor's joke tells the story of several actors from New York who get in a car to head for California, while at the same time several Hollywood actors set out for New York. As these two cars pass each other in Kansas City, all the actors lean out the windows and shout, “Go back!”

Neither Leonard nor I became actors because we thought that someday we would be stars earning considerable fortunes. Leonard always said his goal had been to earn $10,000 a year as an actor; my goal was to earn $100 a week. It wasn't the possibility of stardom and money—there simply was nothing else we could do with our lives and feel fulfilled. It was who we were.

My experience was remarkably similar to Leonard's. I was in my third year at McGill University in Montreal when I told my father that I was going to be an actor. He was devastated. He tried to talk me out of it: “Acting isn't a respectable job for a man,” he said. I wouldn't be able to earn a living at it. I'd be like one of those minstrels, never having a real home. Didn't I want a real life, with a home and a family? To his credit, he let me fly. When he finally accepted the fact that I was completely serious, he told me that, no matter what happened, there would always be a place for me. He asked only that I didn't become a hanger-on, someone who was dependent on other people or public assistance. That was his way of telling me to be a man.

While Leonard went west to California, I went south to New York. My career path was considerably different. I worked in summer stock in Canada and during the winter was a member of the Canadian National Repertory Theatre—a very, very minor member. But I was learning my craft every day. After three years, I was invited to join the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, which already was recognized as one of the finest rep companies in the world.

One day while I was driving to Toronto in a tremendous rainstorm and as I crossed a bridge, a mammoth eighteen wheeler coming from the other direction raced by me, spraying water from its front tire wells. The combination of a massive blast of water and the wind generated by the truck almost blew me into the Ottawa River. I realized something about myself at that moment: if my car went into the river, I would have left no tracks on this earth. Beyond my family, there was no one who truly cared about me. I had no close friends; I knew a lot of people, I'd worked and shared experiences with a lot of people, but there was no one who would miss me if I disappeared beneath the river. And conversely, there was no one other than my family that I cared enough about to miss if something happened to them. That understanding left me with a terribly empty feeling, but I didn't have the slightest idea what I could do to change that.

At Stratford, I eventually became a leading man. In 1955, my third season, we did Marlowe's
Tamburlaine the Great.
Anthony Quayle played the lead. I was the second lead. The play was so successful, we moved to the largest theater in New York, the Winter Garden. Our scheduled twelve-week run lasted only eight weeks, but by that point, I had been working regularly for several years and had proved that I could make a living as an actor. As long as I could survive on one meal a day.

It was much tougher for Leonard in Los Angeles. He enrolled at the once-respected Pasadena Playhouse but quickly was disillusioned. Students at the playhouse weren't eligible to perform on the main stage until their third year. Coincidently, they were doing a production of the same comedy Leonard had done in Boston,
John Loves Mary.
But as far as he was concerned, they weren't doing it as well. “I thought,” he said, “I have to study here three years in order to do this level of work, and I'm already doing better work.” After six months, he left, and within a couple of years, the school closed.

Go to law school and become a lawyer. Go to business school and become a businessman. Go to acting school and become a waiter, a cab driver, or—as in Leonard's case—work the counter in an ice cream parlor. Leonard moved into an inexpensive rooming house off the Sunset Strip. Most of the people living there were just like him, young actors looking for a break, or at least an agent. It was a grind; he went to all the talent agencies and casting agencies handing out his eight-by-ten head shot, looking for an opportunity. It was the same path that has been followed by countless young men and women hoping for the big break. Most times it never happens. It was a good thing his grandfather didn't get to check the soles of his shoes.

Leonard considered himself a character actor rather than a leading man. He always said his idols growing up were Paul Muni and Lon Chaney, actors who carefully crafted each one of their characters. Being a supporting actor rather than a lead was an interesting choice for Leonard. Once, thinking about that, he told an interviewer, “I'm a second child who was educated to the idea my older brother was to be given respect and not perturbed. I was not to upstage him. I was to give ground. So my acting career was designed to be a supporting player, a character actor.” That seemed to be a part of Leonard's personality; while he certainly appreciated the benefits of his success, I never saw him act like a star. I actually remember thinking as I watched him at a
Star Trek
convention that on some level he seemed perplexed or even amused by the concept that fans adored him. Conversely, I was the only boy in our family; I had two sisters and a mother who adored me. I felt like a leading man in my childhood.

Leonard's problem was that agents were looking for leading-man types rather than supporting players. He couldn't find an agent to represent him, to send him out on casting calls, so he had to try to pick up work wherever he could find it. For example, one of his coworkers at the ice cream parlor introduced him to a producer on
The Pinky Lee Show,
a live half-hour children's show. It was the usual kid's comedy show, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. They also did short sketches. In Leonard Nimoy's first appearance on television as a professional actor, he played the role of Knuckles, a nasty crook pursuing Pinky Lee, whom he and his gang mistakenly believed had found the money they had stolen. He was called Knuckles because he continually cracked his knuckles—actually a sound effect created offstage by crunching strawberry boxes. They rehearsed for four days and performed the show the fourth night. For his performance he was paid fifteen dollars.

Now, obviously I didn't know Leonard then, but if there is one thing I am absolutely certain about, it is that he was the best possible Knuckles. I suspect no one ever cracked his knuckles more ominously. Leonard had total respect for his craft. He took every performance—even a broad comedy sketch on a children's show—seriously. Almost fifteen years later, when Gene Roddenberry hired him to create an alien with noticeably large ears, a character that in another actor's hands might well have become something quite different, it was exactly this same approach that imbued Spock with the dignity and humanity that made him so unique and appealing.

And when we first started working together, it was his personal investment in the character that almost caused a serious rift between us, when I made the mistake of treating Spock with less than complete respect. It was not a mistake I made a second time.

At that time, very few actors took television seriously. Leonard hadn't even seen TV until he moved into that rooming house. There was no real work on TV for a serious actor. It consisted primarily of people looking directly into the camera and talking or disc jockeys playing records. One camera would zoom in on the turntable and show the record spinning as the music played. When the song ended, the camera would focus on the disc jockey, who would say a few words, then put on another record.

Leonard made his second appearance on TV as a contestant on the show
Lights, Camera, Action
. Aspiring—and sometimes perspiring—young actors were handed a brief scene to do, and a panel judged their work. Showing how far television has come in sixty-five years, it was essentially the same format as shows like
American Idol
and
Dancing with the Stars
. In the sketch, Leonard was digging a hole in the basement of his home when his extremely irritating wife came downstairs and asked him what he was doing. The answer, I suspect, was a malicious, knowing smile.