Okay, that’s not true, but the concept of Leonard with a rifle and a bayonet is difficult for me to imagine. He was as tough as he needed to be, and you always had the feeling if pushed too far, he was very capable of defending himself. But that wasn’t his essence. So after two months at Benning, he wrote to several commanders suggesting that there might be a better use for someone with his experience. Incredibly, there was. The army knew fighting; it did not know television. Television was tough. They intended to produce a weekly, hour-long show featuring talented soldiers. Leonard was asked to write and produce it; and within a few weeks, he was transferred to Fort McPherson, just outside Atlanta, and reclassified as a military entertainment specialist. The show never got on the air, but Leonard spent the rest of his time in the service writing, directing, hosting, and even narrating an array of army programming.
Leonard being Leonard, though, serving in the army, getting married, and having his first child, his daughter, Julie, wasn’t enough for him. He was constantly moving forward, always working or taking classes or, later, teaching classes. When he got off duty at five o’clock, he began acting and directing for a small amateur theater group that later gained recognition as the Atlanta Theatre Guild. Among the plays he directed and starred in there was A Streetcar Named Desire. The hardest thing for Leonard to do was nothing. His son, Adam, described his father as someone whose life “was about working and activity and finding those things he was passionate about and doing them. It was in his blood. It wasn’t a conscious choice; artists have to stay busy and continually challenge themselves to create. He wasn’t simply an actor; he also was a writer, a very successful film director, and I think he was only really happy when he was working.
“Even when he was in downtime at home he never just sat around; he always was building something, paving something, re-landscaping something, making furniture. He always was on the go.”
Two very important things happened while Leonard was in the service. First, as he explained, the army made a big man out of him: “When I enlisted I was at the stage physically where I was beyond playing juveniles and not yet mature enough to play adult roles.” His physical growth and the maturity he gained allowed him to play a much broader range of characters. And the second thing that happened was television, television, and more television.
In the early 1950s, television was a luxury that not many people could afford. Often one person in a building had a set, and he or she would invite the neighbors in to watch the popular shows, usually leaving the door open so people could stand in the hallway and watch. Bars that installed TVs did great business. Because the possible viewership was limited, so was programming. In 1951, there were only 108 stations in 62 cities covering 35 states. By the time Leonard was discharged, the audience had more than doubled and television had expanded throughout the nation. Networks were running “spectacular” events; in 1955 NBC’s Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, attracted an incredible sixty million viewers. By 1955, more than half of all Americans had TV sets. In 1956, sixteen thousand TV sets were being bought every day. That created the need for more programming, which, in turn, created the need for more actors.
The three major networks dominated the industry, but there were independent stations scattered throughout the country—and there was a real shortage of programming. Initially, television was radio with pictures; often, shows consisted of little more than someone looking into the camera and talking. The large movie studios were reluctant to sell their old movies to television, believing that would keep people out of the theaters. Neither the networks nor the independent stations could afford to produce enough programming to fill twenty-four hours, so they simply put a camera on a test pattern and signed off for the night. To fill that void, numerous production companies began creating original shows that they could sell to stations in each market. Frederick Ziv had been creating and syndicating radio programming since 1937. In 1948, Ziv Television became the first TV syndication company. Ziv’s first show, an anthology series named Fireside Theater, aired for the first time in 1949. Leonard’s last job before entering the army was an appearance in a Fireside Theater episode entitled “A Man of Peace.” It was the story of a famous fencing master who retired after an accident, refusing to duel again, until he had to prove he was not a coward by fighting his star pupil. I can guess how Leonard got that part.
By 1955, Ziv had become one of the industry’s most successful syndication companies. It was producing more than 250 low-budget half-hour TV episodes a year, which made it one of the most important producers in television. An entire show usually was shot in two or three days. Directors and actors moved easily and often between Ziv shows. Leonard was discharged from the army into what became known as the Golden Age of Television.
THREE
Steve Guttenberg was directed by Leonard in the hit comedy Three Men and a Baby. It’s the story of three bachelors—played by Guttenberg, Tom Selleck, and Ted Danson—who have to take care of a baby left by one of their girlfriends. It’s generally accepted among actors that the hardest thing to do is work with animals and babies. When I asked Guttenberg if that was true, he smiled and shook his head. “That’s not true at all,” he said. “The hardest thing is not working.”
After being discharged, Leonard and Sandi, who was pregnant with their second child, their son, Adam, rented a small apartment on La Cienega, and Leonard went right to work—driving a cab. He knew it might take time to get reestablished, and they needed to pay the rent. Driving a cab, like waiting tables, was the perfect job for an actor. He could work at night while going to auditions during the day, and when he got a part, he could quit without being missed. “I did that kind of work for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t want to take a responsible job where people depended on me. If I did take a job where there was any dependency on me, I would let them know I could leave abruptly. I’m an actor!”
I actually never knew Leonard drove a cab until much later in our lives, when he just happened to mention that he had driven a cab in the same neighborhood in which he then lived. And then he told me about his most memorable passenger and what he had learned from him. Democratic senator Adlai Stevenson, then trying to get the party’s presidential nomination after losing to Eisenhower in 1952, was speaking at a political dinner being held at the Beverly Hilton. Leonard was told to pick up a passenger at the Bel Air Hotel. That passenger turned out to be Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy found out Leonard was from Boston, he barraged Leonard with questions about the West End, about his parents’ immigrant experience, and about Leonard’s acting career. Leonard told him it was tough, then asked him about Stevenson’s chances of getting the nomination for a second time. Rather than answering, Kennedy leaned forward and said, “You talk to a lot of people. What do you think?”
When they reached the Hilton, something else memorable happened: Kennedy tried to stiff him for the $1.25 fare. “He stepped out of the cab and started to walk away without paying. By this time, he’d been distracted.” One thing about Leonard, when he did the work, he expected to be paid. And as I would learn, he was willing to fight for what he believed he was owed. So Leonard got out of his cab and followed Kennedy into the hotel. “I want my $1.25,” he said. Kennedy found someone he knew and borrowed $3, which he handed to Leonard.
That trip actually had an impact on his life. The fact that rather than answering Leonard’s question, Kennedy turned it around and “made me feel much more worthwhile—more meaningful and important to myself; that a man in his position would ask me for my opinion. He obviously knew much more than I did, but he wasn’t interested in impressing me with his knowledge … That was one of the most important lessons I ever learned, and often I found myself doing exactly what he did. If somebody asks me a question, I may have an answer, but often I’ll say, ‘But what do you think?’ I learn a lot more that way than simply by answering the question myself.”
That really became an important part of his personality. Anyon
e who spent time with Leonard would pick up on that immediately. John de Lancie accurately described him as “a formidable listener. He listened actively, which most people don’t do.”
His first year out of the army, he was cast in several Ziv shows; he was a cowboy in Luke and the Tenderfoot, a sailor in Navy Log, he did an episode of Your Favorite Story and an episode of The Man Called X, a spy story supposedly based on the true adventures of a government adventurer. He also appeared on stage, playing a supporting role in a play entitled Life Is but a Dream at the Civic Playhouse, a show that would have been long forgotten except that Leonard got his first strong review in the LA Times: “Leonard Nimoy carries conviction.”
No one who knew Leonard would disagree with that either; in everything he did, he always carried conviction.
I actually made my debut on American television at that time. I was offered a key role on one of the most popular shows in television’s brief history: I created the role of Ranger Bob on The Howdy Doody Show, costarring with several marionettes and a clown named Clarabell. Clarabell did not speak; instead he expressed his opinions by honking a bicycle horn. That did cut down on meaningful dialogue.
Before coming to New York, I had done several shows on the CBC. In my first major role, I had costarred with the great Basil Rathbone in a live version of Melville’s tragedy Billy Budd. Rathbone had created the role of Sherlock Holmes in the movies, and I probably had seen every picture he’d made. It was a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from a respected veteran actor. Admittedly, I was probably a little nervous, as an estimated ten million Canadians would be watching. The performance seemed to be going very well until that moment Rathbone stepped onto the ship and somehow managed to get his foot caught in a large bucket. While the camera shot him only from the waist up, he was madly shaking his leg trying to get the bucket off. Naturally, he forgot his lines, and when an actor forgets his lines, he begins to sweat. So the great Basil Rathbone, whom I had admired for so long, was standing there shaking a bucket off his foot while sweat poured down his face as he tried to remember his lines. Never in the history of performance has anyone literally tried to act normally with so little success.
But that was quite typical of the things that happened in the early days of television. While Leonard was in Hollywood doing mostly Ziv shows, I was in New York doing live television. While he was playing Native Americans, I was working regularly on Sunday morning religious shows like Lamp Unto My Feet. While I continued learning my craft by rehearsing and working, Leonard believed in learning how to act by studying acting.
I didn’t take acting classes. Not that I didn’t recognize their value, but I learned by doing; Leonard studied his craft. Leonard spent most of his career refining his craft. I actually think Leonard’s acting ability often was underrated, primarily because he made it look so easy. Spock, for example, seemed to be easy to imitate—but it took great skill to create that blatant dispassion. Just before joining the army, for example, he had joined a group of young actors forming a company so they might work onstage. One member of that group, it turned out, was James Arness, and he and Leonard became very friendly. A year later, Arness happened to be in Atlanta promoting a movie he’d made with John Wayne, and Leonard called him. Arness told Leonard he’d just signed to star in a new cowboy series based on the popular radio show Gunsmoke.
Two years later, James Arness was a major television star. That wasn’t too surprising. We were surrounded by that kind of success, so we knew it was possible. So we kept working and hoping that eventually our turn would come. Later, people would remark how amazing it was that Leonard and I appeared together in an episode of U.N.C.L.E. It wasn’t at all amazing; we worked so often with so many different people that it might have been more unusual if we had never done the same show.
Leonard had resumed taking acting classes when he got back to LA, this time with an actor named Jeff Corey. Corey was a very talented actor who had been blacklisted, meaning he was suspected of having Communist sympathies, so no producer would hire him. So he opened an acting school and was well respected. Among the students who Leonard became friends with was Vic Morrow, who eventually starred in the series Combat! That was another link in that long chain that eventually would make all the difference in the galaxies to Leonard’s career.
As incredible as it may seem, most of us were only vaguely aware of the blacklist. I don’t remember ever talking with him about it. It was one of those subjects that just didn’t seem to affect our lives, even though we were right in the middle of it. As Leonard once explained, we were young, naïve, and so totally preoccupied with trying to earn a living that we paid little attention to it. Leonard, who eventually became very politically active in progressive causes, told an interviewer much later in his life, “I’m shocked that there was so much of that going on around Hollywood and I was so totally out of touch with it.” He remembers having to get an FBI clearance to play a bit part on the show West Point. I’m not sure I ever did, maybe because I wasn’t an American citizen.
When the blacklist was finally lifted, Corey began working again, eventually costarring in many movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, and Little Big Man. Leonard had been studying with Corey for more than two years when Corey finally was able to resume his career; when Corey went back to work, Leonard began teaching some of his classes. After doing that for a couple of years, Leonard opened his own acting studio. Among his students were pop singers Fabian and Bobby Vee, as well as Alex Rocco, who played the role of casino owner Moe Greene in The Godfather. Originally, the Italian Rocco auditioned for the part of a gangster, but Leonard apparently was such a fine teacher that director Francis Ford Coppola auditioned the Italian Rocco and decided, “I got my Jew!”
Leonard was a highly trained actor; I was not. Our acting techniques were quite different. In his studio, Leonard taught his version of the then very popular technique known as Method acting. Until that time, acting styles were very broad, often verging on melodramatic. It was very formulaic acting, sort of like acting off a menu of choices. Method acting, which Lee Strasberg had made famous at the Actors Studio in New York and Leonard was teaching in his studio, taught students to “become” the character and express that character’s real emotions. It meant studying the character’s social, physical, and psychological condition. It meant learning as much as possible about the character, even if the actor had to create that backstory himself to understand the character’s—here it comes—motivation. It meant deciding what clothes the character would wear that accurately reflected his or her personality. It meant utilizing body language years before anybody even used that term. It was revolutionary; rather than showing the character’s emotion, the actor actually had to feel it.
An actor’s knowledge of his character started with the script. Leonard always was in awe of the written word, and when he himself wrote, he brought the same diligence and respect to the page as he did to his performance. The script should provide clues to the actor about who his or her character is, what process this person is going through, and how he or she responds. An actor also had to understand the purpose of each scene, “the spine of the scene” he called it, what knowledge is supposed to be conveyed to audience through the action and dialogue in each scene. And then the subtext—what is the intention of each line? What is the character really trying to say? Once an actor understands that, he or she can layer the performance in terms of bringing both voice and mannerisms to that moment. “There are numerous ways of saying, ‘I love you,’” he would explain. How it might be said depends on the situation and the actor’s overall objective. If, for example, a man is telling a woman for the very first time that he loves her, it requires complete devotion; if, on the other hand, it’s a way of ending an argument, it would be said a very different way.
An actor trained in that technique, Leonard believed, would always bring honesty to the role. “A character is like a plant,” he said. “The richer the soil, the better i
t grows. One of an actor’s jobs is to nourish his plants.” In 1977, for example, he was hired to follow Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and Tony Perkins as child psychiatrist Martin Dysart in the Broadway hit Equus. It’s a difficult role in the complex story of the psychiatrist hired to treat a young boy who blinded six horses for some unknown reason. To properly prepare for the role, Leonard advertised in The New York Times, looking for a “horse psychiatrist to help in research.” He received more than two hundred responses from psychologists, veterinarians, trainers, jockeys, and gamblers. He hired an ethologist, a person who studies animal behavior, and, he said, he “came away with a feeling of awe at the power of the horse in the night mind of man.”
To me, describing acting as a technique has always seemed kind of … technical. Meanwhile, my technique is quite different; it is the classic nontechnical technique: I memorized the script and played the character. I tried to find the core of my character, the one word, the one line in the script that best described that character’s intentions, and then moved out from that. Like Leonard, I found clues in the script. My hope is that I can characterize something with enough emphasis that it is very different from myself, the actor. If I could make that core line real, then the rest of the character would follow. Too often, the actor bleeds through his or her portrayal and the character becomes just another version of other characters he or she has played with just a different name and a different costume. When Leonard and I began working together, we approached the material from very different places, but fortunately, perhaps because of the nature of the characters, it worked beautifully. But by then, both of us had been working regularly for a long time.
As an acting teacher and coach, as well as a working actor, Leonard became part of LA’s community of young actors. Like every other business in the world, relationships are important in the entertainment industry. Soon after Leonard was discharged, Boris Sagal, for example, cast him in an episode of Matinee Theater that he was directing. Matinee Theater was a daily live hour-long dramatic show. There were four days of rehearsals and then the actual performance, so there were always five shows in progress at the same time. That meant a lot of work for actors. Sagal hired Leonard for an under-five-line part in a drama starring Vincent Price. Price played his normal madman role, a husband planning to blow up his wife by filling the house with gas, then rigging the phone to spark when he called. Leonard played a nosy deliveryman.
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