فصل 02

TWO

It was in our neighborhoods that both of us took our first steps into the future. Acting is such an odd profession. It’s a profession in which you spend your life trying to convince people you are someone else. There isn’t any single reason young people become actors. Obviously, it can be a lot of fun and play, but I think for most people who take it seriously, it fulfills some type of need. John de Lancie, who created the character Q for several Star Trek generations and worked closely with Leonard doing staged readings of great plays, explained he became an actor because “it was the first time in my life that anyone had responded well to anything that I’d done. I grabbed onto it like a life preserver. It gave me an identity.”

My mother enrolled me in the Dorothy Davis School for Actors when I was about eight years old. We met in somebody’s basement. My mother was a frustrated actress. She would act out monologues at home for an audience of me. But I suspect she thought it would be a good activity for me; I didn’t have any close friends. I suspect it hurt her to see me walking to school each morning all by myself.

Like me, Leonard found acting when he was eight years old. The settlement house was the center of most immigrant neighborhoods. As Leonard described it when he gave the 2012 commencement address at Boston University, “It was a community settlement house which was created to help immigrants find their way into the culture. They offered classes in language, cooking, shopping, kitchen sanitation, dental care and how to apply for a job. There was a gym and a sports program. And there was a small gem of a theater.” It was the place to hang out and learn how to be American. Immigrant families had neither the time nor money to spend on culture.

In Leonard’s apartment, for example, there were no books. His family had a radio and an old record player and three or four Yiddish records. They would play the same record, a collection of songs sung by Yiddish theater star Seymour Rexite, over and over and over. The Elizabeth Peabody House had a 375-seat theater in which they presented programs for both adults and children. Leonard actually had a pleasant singing voice; he used to sing in his synagogue choir. In fact, his singing at his own bar mitzvah was so good that he was asked to perform the whole ceremony again a week later at another shul. He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good! Who else made a guest appearance at a bar mitvah?

Apparently, one afternoon when he was hanging out at the settlement house, they were casting a children’s show. They brought him into a music room where a woman was sitting at a piano and asked him to sing. While he never remembered what song he sang, it was enough to earn him a leading role in a production of Hansel and Gretel.

Acting came easily to him. It was playing. He could memorize lines, he could sing, and he enjoyed performing. In those days, there were numerous local radio shows for children, and both of us worked on some of those programs. While I was performing heroic acts on Saturday Morning Fairy Tales, Leonard was doing Bible stories. Obviously, there was something symbolic about that. Many years later as Captain Kirk, I would be busy rescuing civilizations in distress on distant planets while Leonard’s Mr. Spock would be examining the morality of man- and alienkind.

In the pursuit of most professions, there is some sort of loosely defined career path. There are educational requirements that have to be fulfilled or mechanical skills that have to be mastered or an apprentice program that has to be completed. There is no path leading to an acting career; no right way or wrong way, no tests to pass. Talent matters, of course, but it is not enough. I have known many wonderfully talented people who just never got the right opportunity. Often, it is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having some often undefined quality or desirable look; in many situations, it’s as much marketability as acting ability. But every actor needs that first break. For Leonard, it was meeting Boris Sagal.

Sagal also had come from Ukraine. He was a Harvard law student with an interest in theater. The settlement house, which was only a ten-cent MTA ride across the Charles River from Harvard, let him stay in one of its guest rooms in exchange for directing plays. He was casting a production of the Clifford Odets play Awake and Sing! and put seventeen-year-old Leonard in a leading role. That was the first adult play Leonard had ever done, and it fit him perfectly. It was the story of three generations of a lower-middle-class immigrant Jewish family living together in an apartment in the Bronx. Leonard’s character, Ralph Berger, is an idealistic young man who rejects materialism but needs money to buy his own freedom. When I interviewed Leonard on my TV show Raw Nerve, he told me about the impact that play had on his life.

“I thought, this is really interesting. This is about people like me … It’s about our lives and the pressures and the loves and the hates and the angers and the frustrations, the fears.

“This kid I’m playing has the same concerns that I’ve got: what am I supposed to do with my life and who am I supposed to be … The show closes, and I go to the theater to pick up my wardrobe, the clothes that I was wearing in the play. They were my own clothes. The theater was four or five blocks away from my home in Boston. I pick them up, and I’m walking home through the streets of Boston … and I realized I was going in the wrong direction. I’m saying to myself, I’m more comfortable there than I am at home. I want to do what’s there in the theater. I don’t want to do what’s happening in that house. There’s nothing for me there. I’ve got to get out of there. That’s when I realized I’ve got to get away.”

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.

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.

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.