My acting career has been fairly successful by the standards of my grossly underemployed profession (though more of a sine curve than a hyperbolic upward climb). I have appeared on Broadway in eleven shows, and my work is available at the local video store. I even popped up occasionally on One Life to Live for a couple years as the vile Todd’s viler dad—which brings up an interesting point: I haven’t played a nice guy in over five years.

They say until the age of forty we have the face God gave us and after forty we have the face we made ourselves.

Indeed, probably less than ten percent of my roles have been the sort of generous, warm-hearted person I like to think of myself as being. Hmmm. What do directors and casting folks know that either I don’t know or I don’t look at? We’ll come back to that question.

I met Beth, a beautiful Juilliard-trained actress, in 1978 while we were both in Of Mice and Men at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre. As Lenny, I was doing the best work of my career (I’ve occasionally felt that I wooed Beth under false pretenses, that I’ve never been as good since); and as I broke Beth’s neck eight times a week for six weeks, we fell in love. We married the next year; and although Beth continued to act, she put our relationship before her career—turning down numerous opportunities to work out of town.

We had two daughters; and when Beth was pregnant with our third child, we moved to upscale Larchmont for the living space and the school system. Shortly after we moved, Tommy was born and was diagnosed at birth with a very rare syndrome called Rubinstein-Taybi-Syndrome that has left him developmentally disabled—what was called mentally retarded in less politically correct times.

Tommy’s syndrome was entirely unexpected; and life since September 18, 1991, has been a process of adjustment and extraordinary personal growth. In my adolescence (scheduled to end shortly after the millennium), I tried to mask my insecurity through an exaltation of my three outstanding characteristics: tallness, blondness, and intelligence. Tommy shattered the glass house of this world-view like a meteorite. Born with a superabundance of sable brown hair and predicted by RTS case histories to be at adulthood the size of a fifth-grader but with lesser intelligence and capabilities, Tommy made me reevaluate both the standards by which I judge people and the extent to which I judge people. What’s so all-fired important about being smart, let alone tall or blond, and who am I to pass judgment on people?

It’s a lifetime of this arrogance that casting directors read in my face when they cast me as pompous jerks or cold killers. They say until the age of forty we have the face God gave us and after forty we have the face we made ourselves. I don’t know how many years it will take to develop a face of castable kindness and generosity, but I’m working on it.

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Adapted from my 1997 college class report. I am still working on the kinder, gentler Nick, and I still play arrogant jerks.

It is the fall of 1974. I have graduated from college. I have graduated from acting school. I am a professional actor. Or I would be a professional actor if I had ever gotten a union job. I get up early on Thursday mornings to look for auditions in the trade paper Backstage. When I find one, I join the long line of the bovine unemployed at the non-union cattle calls.

I have graduated from college. I have graduated from acting school. I am a professional actor. Or I would be a professional actor if I had ever gotten a union job.

As I prepare to “moo” my 32 bars at a call for the musical “Grease,” the accompanist derails the proceedings. Standing at the piano in the pit of the Royale Theatre [now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre], she announces to whatever poor shlub from the casting agency Geri Windsor and Associates drew the short straw and has been forced to endure this open call, “I saw this fellow play Paul in “Carnival!” this summer. He was terrific.”

Down go the sandwiches. The auditors turn their newly de-glazed eyes to the stage. From a dark-haired, bespectacled fellow in the Royale seats comes a question: “Didn’t I see you in Jones and Schmidt’s “Philemon” this spring?” This is unbelievable. Only a couple hundred people total saw that workshop. God bless this theatre devotee. My spirits soar as I confirm this rhetorical question: I am not merely number 278, I am a New York actor with credits.

Perhaps because of this support, I do sufficiently well at the audition to be offered a job — my first union job — by the choreographer Pat Birch and the fellow in the glasses, a casting associate at Geri Windsor named Vinnie Liff. I am to understudy Danny Zuko in a bus and truck tour of “Grease,” and I have that precious imprimatur of professionalism: my Equity card.

It is 1986, and they are casting the original Broadway company of “Les Miserables.” I love the story and the music. My agents think I’m right for the role of Javert, but director Trevor Nunn has decided to go with his “Cats” actor Terry Mann. That’s okay with me because I want to play Jean Valjean: I love that role.

It is 1986, and they are casting the original Broadway company of "Les Miserables." I want to play Jean Valjean.

Valjean is a tenor and I am a baritone; the tessitura is very high for me. Those auditioning have to prepare “Bring Him Home,” a beautiful, tender prayer that sits right at the upper limits of my range and “Who Am I,” whose last note is a B natural — which is absolutely outside my range.  (I sound fine on a G and pretty good on an A flat and sometimes even an A natural; beyond that is territory that early cartographers would have labeled “Here Be Dragons.”)

So I buy the London recording and start practicing. My wife and I go up to the country for the day to visit Mandy Patinkin and his wife Kathryn Grody. (Mandy and my wife were classmates and buddies at Juilliard, our first-born children are the same age, and they lived in the building behind ours in NYC.) Mandy is busy practicing swordplay (he’s about to go off to do “The Princess Bride”), and I’m busy singing Boublil and Schoenberg. Mandy says to me, “Oh yeah, they talked to me about playing Valjean, but the real role is Thenardier.”

Sadly, I don’t listen to Mandy, and I keep working on Valjean. Comes the day of the audition. I go down to the famous rehearsal studios at 890 Broadway, and I sing “Bring Him Home.” I think I sang “Bring Him Home,” but maybe I never got to it. All I remember is that I DID sing “Who Am I.” As I approached the end of the song, a combination of adrenalin, chutzpah and stupidity told me not to flip up into a head voice falsetto for the high B natural on the “one” of “2-4-6-0-1!” but instead to sing it full voice. I believe there is still an ugly stain on the walls of 890 Broadway from my hideous last note.

Epilogue:  Ten years later, they re-cast the majority of the Broadway company of “Les Miz” for its tenth anniversary.  Once again they already had their Javert and they had no wish to hear me do Valjean again but they did audition me for Thenardier.  I got the role and happily played “the Master of the House” for the last six years of the Broadway run.

It is Monday, October 2, 1978. As I wait for my flight to Pittsburgh, I watch Bucky Dent break the hearts of thousands of Boston baseball fans. I am on my way to play Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre. The actor playing George is already in Pittsburgh because he is in the current production. The rest of the cast will arrive in a week, and in the meantime we will have a week to work on the Lennie-George scenes: “Where we going, George?” “Tell me about the rabbits, George.” Etc.

It is Monday, October 2, 1978. As I wait for my flight to Pittsburgh, I watch Bucky Dent break the hearts of thousands of Boston baseball fans.

“Of Mice and Men” has exactly one female character: Curly’s Wife, and in this pre-Google era, I am waiting for the arrival of the rest of the cast to learn about this actress Beth McDonald. The out of town actors are housed in an old Victorian mansion that has been broken up into six apartments, and when I learn on Sunday that the newly-arrived Ms. McDonald doesn’t have enough light in her basement duplex, I grab a standing lamp and head downstairs.

I knock on the door and say “Lamp Man!” A remarkably beautiful curly-haired brunette opens the door, thanks me for the lamp and offers me some tea. I accept and we chat for an hour or so before I return to my apartment. Two days later we have our first read-through and the theater’s photographer is there to take some setup shots and some candids of the cast. He takes exactly two individual candid photos: one of me and one of Beth. In mine, I am watching her read, clearly smitten. In hers, she is watching me read with evident admiration. Two days later, I move in to her basement duplex; and thirty-eight years later, I still celebrate Lamp Man Day every October 8th.

Nick’s story, first published on July 25, 2016 was inspired by Suzy’s story on the Hitchhiking prompt, which she had titled Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. He agreed to have it moved to this prompt, for obvious reasons. Hope you enjoy.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles was the first big-budget movie I ever did.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles was the first big-budget movie I ever did. In comparison, the Nick Nolte movie Weeds, the only other movie I’d done, was practically a guerrilla shoot down in North Carolina. PT&A — or at least my scene — was shot on the streets of midtown Manhattan, with all the attendant permits and crowd control and costs. This was pre-Home Alone, but Paramount had enough faith in John Hughes (and perhaps Steve Martin and John Candy) that cost was a minimal object. The guy in the makeup trailer had the same name — Ben Nye — as the name on all that makeup I’d bought as a young actor. (Just like the costume designer on Catch Me has the same name — Bob Mackie — as the guy who did those flashy clothes for Cher et al.)

Two things stick out for me from that shoot. One was the antipodal reactions of Steve Martin and John Candy to the crowds of onlookers who pressed against the ropes shouting semi-moronic references to “wild and crazy guy” etc. Steve Martin never acknowledged them with a smile, a word, a wave, a look. He kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat, and stared at the twelve inches of sidewalk between us as if he could by sheer will power make himself invisible. John Candy worked the rope line as if he were running for mayor of E.48th Street, laughing, joking, shaking hands, having a great time. Now John is dead and Steve has a multi-million dollar art collection. The moral: never talk to the little people.

The other memorable moment? I was used to doing plays where the script was the script and either set in dead-author stone or subject to occasional overnight revisions that would be rehearsed for some time before being placed before an audience. John Hughes had absolutely no preciousness about his words. They flowed out of him like water and were equally fungible. As Steve Martin and I ran our scene, he kept up a constant stream of “Now say ‘___________’,” “Now try ‘_____________’,” “How about ‘_________’” as if we were sitting around some conference table or living room. On and on we went, changing the sums of money, adding or subtracting references to Thanksgiving, force majeure, etc. etc., while this midtown setup ticked along like the world’s most expensive taxi meter costing Paramount thousands of dollars a minute. In my jaded dotage, I would ascribe this behavior to a) a writer/director being given too much power and/or b) a script being rushed into production to meet a distribution deadline (Thanksgiving) before it had been thoroughly baked. But at the time, I thought it was cool fun to have this giant toy of a big-budget movie to hack around with and delighted that John let me play with him.