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.
The winner that week was a singer who did a Broadway medley.
Television was something an actor did to pick up a few bucks while looking for real work on stage or, most importantly, in the movies. But nobody turned down work. As Leonard knew, every job came with the possibility that it might lead to something else. One day, for example, a young actress living in the rooming house asked Leonard, “Can you fence?” Not “Can you act?” but “Can you fence?” Fence? Of course. Who can’t? I suspect she could have asked him anything short of “Can you fly an airliner?” and he would have responded seriously, “Of course.” And he might have even said yes to the airliner, as he eventually became a skilled pilot. And, in fact, he had been in the fencing club in high school, although they used a thin foil as opposed to a broadsword.
He was cast as d’Artagnan in a children’s theater production of The Three Musketeers. It ran for four Saturday mornings. There was no pay, but it was an opportunity to be on stage in front of an audience. An audience of children, but still an audience. Several weeks later, he went on an open casting call for the movie version of a very popular radio and then television show entitled Queen for a Day. This was a show in which women competed to see who had the most difficult life. Each day several women would tell their sad story and describe their most desperate need. I’ve got nine kids and my washing machine broke. My car broke so I can’t drive to work and my family is starving. Then the audience would vote on which one of them should be queen for a day and receive the necessary help. I suppose the other contestants just walked home. It was an awful concept, but the audience loved it. Maybe it made them feel better about the smaller difficulties of their own lives. When the casting director asked Leonard about his recent work, he replied that among other things he’d been in The Three Muskeeters.
The casting director’s face lit up. “At the Coronet Theatre?”
Leonard nodded. “Yeah.”
“I saw you,” he said excitedly. “You were d’Artagnan, and you were wonderful.” It turned out that show had been produced by a woman who had worked at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago with this casting director. The Three Musketeers turned out to be the first link in a chain that would stretch for decades.
In 1951, thanks to his swordplay, Leonard was cast in his first movie, Queen for a Day. He played the son of a contestant, a young man who had run away from home to join a carnival. It was a small part, and his name was incorrectly spelled “Nemoy,” but it was a real film credit. It meant he was a working actor. That same year he played a supporting gangster in the movie Rhubarb, a comedy about a cat named Rhubarb who inherited a small fortune and a baseball team, the Brooklyn Loons.
Maybe because of his lanky, brooding look, Leonard began getting cast as a bad guy. He eventually played a crook or a gangster in a lot of B-movies. Many years later, he would claim that in his entire career he had never played a character anything at all like himself; Mr. Spock, for example, “didn’t talk like me, look like me, walk like me, or act like me.” But there was at least one role for which he was perfect. Coincidently, Boris Sagal also moved to LA, and the two men had become friends. He recommended Leonard for a part in a play being staged at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Leonard was perfect for it, Sagal said—they needed an actor who spoke a little Yiddish! The play ran for three performances, and Leonard was paid thirty-five dollars. But it also made him one of the go-to actors in Hollywood when they needed someone who spoke Yiddish and worked cheap.
Unfortunately, there was little demand for an actor who spoke Yiddish and could duel. But in 1920, the founder of the great Yiddish Art Theatre in New York, Maurice Schwartz, came to LA to produce Sholem Aleichem’s comedy It’s Hard to Be a Jew in a theater on Los Sedalia Boulevard. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye became the basis of Fiddler on the Roof. This was sort of a homecoming for Schwartz, as he had directed a very successful version of the play at the Hollywood Civic Playhouse before World War II. If ever there was the perfect play for Leonard, this was it. Paul Muni had played the role on Second Avenue in New York. If there was one thing Leonard knew so well from his own experience, it was how hard it was to be a Jew. When Leonard went for his audition, Schwartz’s wife looked at him and told her husband, in Yiddish, that he looked too much like a gentile to play a Jew.
Leonard responded in perfect Yiddish that he was very Jewish. Naturally, in a brilliant burst of typecasting, he was cast as the gentile. He had to dye his hair blond for the role. I’ve seen Leonard in numerous costumes and with all types of makeup; I’ve seen him as an alien, I’ve seen him as a 1930s Chicago gangster, but it is difficult for me to imagine him as a blond gentile. The plot line is that his character’s Jewish friend sighs and tells him, “It’s hard to be a Jew.” Leonard’s character doesn’t think it is so difficult, so they make a bet that he can pose as a Jew. Naturally, hilarity ensues. It’s the traditional gefilte-fish-out-of-water story. The play ran for a few months, and during that time, Leonard became close to Schwartz. “He was a wonderful theater man,” Leonard remembered. “He was brave on stage; he was big, he was bold, he was theatrical. Given an opportunity on stage he would get hold of it … and chew it!”
Perhaps more importantly, he wrote a long letter to Leonard’s parents in Boston, telling them
to stop worrying so much. A letter from Schwartz was a big deal. Maurice Schwartz was a big macher. He wanted to be Leonard’s theatrical father, he wrote, and assured them that their son was a nice kid and he was going to be fine.
What Leonard did not dare tell his parents was that he had stopped going to shul. That was a big deal for him and probably would have been difficult for them. A few months after arriving in Los Angeles, he had bought a ticket for the High Holy Day services being held in the Shrine Auditorium. He walked in expecting to find a welcoming communal atmosphere; instead, the first thing they did was raise funds for some cause. He was shocked—and stood up and walked out. His experience had been that a shul was a place for a community of people to come together to celebrate meaningful rituals. This was more like the department-store version of religious observance. Many years later, my wife and I would go with Leonard and his second wife, Susan, to his synagogue to celebrate those holidays. My religious experience was different from his; my father spoke Yiddish, but I didn’t. And while my sisters continued to keep kosher when they had their own homes, I didn’t. I was more a spiritual person than a religious person. But there was something wonderfully familial about sitting in synagogue next to Leonard and praying with him. His great love of the traditions and his respect for the history that brought us there together on those holidays was quite meaningful. When I was with him on those days, I could understand why he was so appalled about what he perceived to be the commercialization of religion.
While working on It’s Hard to Be a Jew, Leonard met a lovely young woman actress named Sandi Zober, who was working as an understudy. She had the kind of exotic background that must have appealed to him; her parents had emigrated from Latvia and somehow ended up in Cordova, Alaska, where she was born and raised. It was a small town that could be reached only by plane or boat. She had that kind of creative exuberance that hadn’t been dulled by growing up in a large city. She had moved to Los Angeles when she was sixteen and graduated from USC. Leonard always had an inquisitive mind. He was open to possibilities; he always wanted to know more. And Sandi, as I got to know her, was very much the same type of person. They married while he was on leave from the army in 1954. Being married in those days was something people did; I did it myself in 1956. I was starring in a CBC play I’d written, and a beautiful young woman named Gloria Rosenberg was cast opposite me as the beautiful female lead. She was known professionally as Gloria Rand, as Rosenberg carried with it a certain … a certain Rosenberg. This acting business brings together a lot of good-looking young people, and many of them pair off. We were married four months after we’d met. In the 1950s, people married for better and for worse and for life. Or so we believed. The general belief in the acting community was that two people could starve as easily as one. So when Leonard and I met, we both had been married more than a decade.
Although in the early 1950s I was working more regularly than Leonard, I’m quite sure we shared that trait most common among young actors, an unshakable belief that no matter how impossible it seemed at times, whatever it took, we were going to be successful. Success was easy to measure: paying the monthly rent on time. The confidence and resiliency of young actors is amazing: they go to bed every night believing tomorrow is going to be the day. So we lived from job to job, eating the least expensive items on the menu, learning the craft. But if someone had asked Leonard or me, “How can you do this?” I have no doubt at all that both of us would have responded, “How can you not do this?”
Every single job mattered. Leonard earned a reputation as a good actor who showed up on time every day, knew his lines, and caused no problems, very desirable traits. Most often, he played the heavy—offbeat, nasty guys glowering in the background who said very little. They said very little because the pay scale changed after five lines. He also played ethnic characters—Latinos and Native Americans, for example.
Eventually, he was even able to sign with a Hollywood agent. This was not one of the large agencies; it was a hardworking guy who lived in a trailer in one of the canyons. He sent Leonard to audition for a low-budget movie called Kid Monk Beroni. Leonard sat in the waiting room all afternoon; one thing every actor eventually becomes an expert in is waiting. His name was never called because he wasn’t on the list. I suspect in every actor’s career he has heard those words: “You’re not on the list.” My first major movie role was as Alexi Karamazov in director Richard Brooks’s The Brothers Karamazov. It was an incredible opportunity. The cast included great actors like Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb, and Claire Bloom. I’ve made it, I thought as I drove up to the front gate at MGM. It would be impossible to express how proud and excited I felt at that moment. It would not have surprised me to hear trumpets heralding the appearance of this young soon-to-be star. The guard, a man whose name I shall never forget, Ken Hollywood, looked at his clipboard, shook his head, and said those memorable words: “You’re not on the list.” I turned around and went home.
Leonard didn’t leave, however. He talked his way into the room and got the title role. This was his first major role. He played a disfigured Italian kid from the Bronx whose appearance leaves him with a chip on his shoulder. Under the direction of the kindly parish priest, he becomes a successful boxer and meets two women, one of whom steals his money. Eventually, he saves enough for plastic surgery and ends up with the sweet and supportive girl from his neighborhood who has always loved him.
The film had a ten-day shooting schedule but was finished in nine. Leonard was paid $350 plus the suits he wore. He also got his first review in Variety; the most memorable thing about this film, the reviewer wrote, was that “it serves to introduce a young actor named Leonard Nimoy in the title role. He is a capable juve who merits attention.”
There is no best way to build a career. As an actor, Leonard once told an interviewer, “You’re always out of work and looking for the next job. Even while you were working you were worrying about what you were going to do next.” Oddly, Leonard wasn’t an especially good athlete, but after playing a professional boxer, he played a football player in Francis Goes to West Point—Francis being a famed talking mule. Then, he played an alien for the first time in his life in the Republic Pictures serial Zombies of the Stratosphere, which consisted of twelve fifteen-minute cliff-hanging episodes to draw kids to the movies each Saturday. Leonard played Narab, one of three villainous zombies from Mars who come to Earth intending to blast it out of its orbit so Mars can fill that space. They arrived on Earth in a cigar-shaped spaceship that wobbled across the silver screen, leaving a trail of white smoke, dressed in what looked like latex sweatsuits with hoods covering most of their faces. Leonard’s costume had a sprayed-on rubber surface that made it so rigid it took several men to pull it on. And the rubber didn’t breathe, so it was really hot; it was so hot that every few hours, they would have to take a break to pour the puddles of perspiration out of their boots. That role actually turned out to be excellent preparation for Star Trek.
Naturally, as a leading-man type who was emoting in great Shakespearean dramas as a member of a celebrated Canadian National Repertory Theatre, I wouldn’t have appeared in anything like Zombies of the Stratosphere. Instead, the series I was in at just about the same time Leonard was doing that was called Space Command. Like Leonard, it was my first time in outer space. Space Command was a TV series made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. According to the announcer’s opening, “[These are tales of] the infinitesimal lives of men dedicated to the planet Earth and its perilous … Space Command!” While Leonard was coming from Mars, we were going to Mars. The most memorable aspect of that show was that one of the leads was James Doohan. It was the first time we worked together. Maybe it wasn’t Shakespeare, but for me, it was far more important—it was a job.
While most Americans had this image of Hollywood being a glamorous place where actors often worked with stars like Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, and John Wayne, that was not Leonard’s world or my world. The real world was about
going to as many auditions as possible and taking what was offered without being discouraged. Just imagine the challenge of trying to play a Martian zombie in a latex suit with integrity! It was the humorist Will Rogers who gave what might be the best advice to a young actor I’ve ever heard. In the early 1930s, in the middle of the Depression, Rogers ran into John Wayne on the same Republic Pictures lot. Wayne looked very unhappy, and Rogers asked him what was wrong. “Oh, they’ve got me playing a singing cowboy in these western serials,” Wayne began and then complained about the dumb roles he was getting. Rogers listened patiently until Wayne finished, then asked, “You working?”
Wayne nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said.
“Keep working,” Rogers told him, then kept walking.
Leonard kept working. In Republic’s western with music The Old Overland Trail, he played Chief Black Hawk and got a nice billing just below star Rex Allen’s horse, Koko. In the classic horror film Them!, he was a soldier passing along a strange report that a pilot had spotted giant ants the size of flying saucers, a report Sergeant Nimoy laughed off—unfortunately for civilization, as the ominous musical soundtrack suggested.
That role actually prepared him for his command performance as a member of the United States Army. Rather than being drafted, in 1953, he enlisted in the Army Reserve, which meant he had to serve two years of active duty. After completing basic training at Fort Ord, California, he was shipped to Fort Benning, Georgia, for ranger training. It was there, in hand-to-hand combat training, that he first encountered the paralyzing Vulcan neck pinch.
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