My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life

by Adam Nimoy

  That’s when Jung Duk Shin walks into class.

  “Who are you?”

  In a thick accent he answers, “Brian.”

  “Brian?” I look at the roll sheet. “I don’t have a Brian in my class.” He tells me in broken English his real name, Jung Duk Shin, which is Korean, but he tells me it’s okay to call him Brian.

  “I don’t like people to be late to my class, Brian. Why are you late?”

  He sits down looking bewildered.

  “Just for everybody’s information, the only excuse I’ll accept is if it’s because of romance, if it’s because of a guy or a girl. Because we can always use a little more love in the world. Why are you late, Brian?”

  Alex: “Tell him, Brian. Tell him about the girl.”

  Jeff: “Tell him, man.”

  Cindy: “Tell him about your girlfriend, Brian.”

  Brian sits there like he doesn’t have a clue as to what we’re talking about.

  Brian: “Last night. . . . She was wonderful.”

  TYPICAL CONVERSATION WITH A TEENAGE DAUGHTER #233: THE WONDERS OF CALL-WAITING

  MADDY CALLS ME and she’s hysterical because she’s just learned from Nancy that I’m not coming over to the house for dinner tomorrow night when the Longs and Lance and Donna are coming over. She’s absolutely hysterical.

  “Dad, I can’t believe you won’t do this for me. Why won’t you do this, Dad?”

  “Because, honey, I have other plans.”

  Crying and begging and tears.

  “But I need you here, Daddy. You have to come. Just say you’ll come, say you’ll do it for me, Daddy. If you care about me you’ll come. Please, Daddy, please!”

  “Maddy, you know I care about you, but it’s simply not necessary for me to be there. I’m sorry.”

  Tears and begging and crying.

  “Daddy, if you don’t come I’m going to kill myself!”

  “Oh, Maddy.”

  “I will, Dad. I will. Why won’t you come to dinner? Please. Just for me? Just for me, Daddy, please!”

  Begging and tears and crying.

  And then a call comes in. I can hear it click in on the line and I know it’s for her because I don’t have call-waiting. And the next thing I hear is this cool, collected voice.

  “Wait, Dad, hold on a minute.”

  And then she clicks over to the other line.

  THE GOOD MOTHER

  IT’S THE EARLY 1980s and I’m in law school and I’m going to be an attorney. I’m going to have a steady job and make lots of money. I’m going to be an entertainment attorney and represent big stars. I’ll be eating at Morton’s or Spago or the Palm or wherever. I’m going to do something my old man can’t do. I know what I want and I know where I’m going and I feel sorry for other people who still need to “find themselves.”

  I found a job. A huge health-care law firm with a small entertainment department. “What’s that? I’m going to be working for the litigators before you move me into the entertainment department? Well, I’m really not a litigator but okay, sure. What? You want me to catalog lab reports? You want me to write deposition digests? You want me to draft pleadings? It’ll be a year before I join the entertainment department? Oh . . . okay, no problem.”

  “Every job’s an opportunity,” Dad would say. I’m just paying dues.

  Three years later. I’m looking out the window of my office, looking out on Century City. Every day now I’m looking out wondering what I’m doing here. The partners are nice and I’m working in the entertainment department now, but this is not what I thought it would be: the mountains of paperwork, the phone lists, the staff meetings, the billable hours, the difficult clients, the nasty negotiations. Some people were born for law firm life. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.

  “It’s important that you feel passionate about your work,” Dad would say.

  “Hello, Dad? I’m leaving the firm. I’m going to EMI America Records. I’ll be in business affairs, which is still legal work but it should be much more fun. I used every connection I had in the music industry to get that job. The competition was fierce. I want to be in music. That’s where my passion is.”

  EMI America! I love this job! The zany people, the concerts, the merchandising, the art department, the bands. I met David Bowie! Yeah, there’s still plenty of paperwork but I love this job. I really love this job.

  Absolutely certain where I’m going.

  “Back-to-back hits with Star Trek IV and Three Men and a Baby? Way to go, Dad. You’re still out of town? I gotta read you this article in the L.A. Times. It says you’re the common link between those two movies. You’re the reason that they’re hits. Way to go!”

  My parents are getting divorced. I’m thirty and old enough to know it’s been coming for some time. Ironically, Dad’s in Toronto working on The Good Mother, about a woman fighting for the custody of her daughter.

  I’m on the phone with him while he’s in Toronto.

  “Dad, it’s over at EMI. I know it’s only been a year but they haven’t had any hits and they’re merging the company and I’m out. Maybe I should have seen it coming. There’s not much happening right now. Tommy Werman got me an interview at Polygram and it went really well. But I just talked to him and his sources at the company say I’m not black enough. I don’t know if that’s an excuse or what.

  “I’m looking at the music publishers and the other major labels and I’m working part-time for another firm, but they don’t have a full-time position. I’m interviewing at the talent agencies and even thinking about production. I need to look for other things and keep all options open because there are simply too many attorneys in this town looking for work.”

  The response from Toronto is neither encouraging nor helpful. Here’s my side of the conversation:

  “That is so untrue. I followed up on every lead you gave me.”

  “Dad, he wasn’t looking for me and I wasn’t looking for him.”

  “Trust me, it was the wrong situation. If I’m going to work for an independent producer, we have to click and we didn’t. That was clear to both of us.”

  Over the phone, I can hear the sound of ice hitting the glass.

  “Nothing I say is ever good enough, so what’s the point.”

  “Yeah, I know I told you agencies were out of the question, but I’m looking for a job. It’s so tight out there right now I have to consider all the possibilities.”

  “That is not what I said, and when you start in like this, you’re not being helpful.”

  “Oh, yeah, okay, Dad, you just keep swinging. That’s right, give it the ole one-two. Enough of the left jab, just go for the knockout with your right. In fact, I’m on the canvas now, so why not just go for the kick in the face to finish the job.”

  “Stand up and take it? You’ve got the wrong guy. I think you’re just being mean because you’re so miserable. You are so incredibly miserable and I feel sorry for you.”

  “Because you’re obviously in so much pain.”

  “Oh, Dad. I don’t think so. Just look at yourself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this miserable.”

  GOT RAGE?

  I’M A SUCKER for Horatio Alger stories—where any member of society can achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, and determination. That’s why I love the stories about where Dad came from, born in Boston of Russian Jewish parents who scrimped and saved to provide for their two sons. Max, his father, was a barber. Dora, his mother was frugal. They lived in a Jewish-Italian tenement in the West End of Boston. During the Depression, Dad sold newspapers in Boston Common. As a teen, he sold vacuum cleaners and life insurance. I still remember the early ’60s when, between acting jobs, Dad had a business servicing office fish tanks. He also had a route of gumball machines, worked in a pet store, and managed an apartment building in Venice where some of the tenants pretended to be out when he came to collect the rent. I remember all these things because they remind me of where we came from. But I n
ever had to work those kinds of jobs and the differences in our upbringings laid the cornerstone for the conflict that was to come.

  “You both have a problem,” Bernie Francis, Dad’s business manager of forty-plus years used to say. “His is in understanding you, yours is in getting through to him.”

  Dad and I came from different worlds, or planets, so sometimes it was very difficult for us to communicate—especially about sensitive subjects. My father grew up in a household where talking about your feelings was not a top priority. And his celebrity only made matters worse. Since the beginning, people have been coming up to Dad from every direction wanting something, whether it was an autograph, or to have a picture taken with him, or to get an endorsement or maybe a contribution. Naturally, Dad had to be very guarded when dealing with these types of situations and oftentimes, he forgot to let his guard down when relating to me.

  By the time I was a teenager, the combination of dealing with the usual issues of school and socializing, and a celebrity dad who had trouble differentiating my needs from those of the fans brought on an acute sense of frustration, even rage. And then there was the acting out that comes with rage, like stealing the Riv, fighting with my sister, and running with a fast crowd who taught me how to drink and take drugs.

  But Mom was paying attention. So she sent me to therapy.

  Jack had games in his office. Week after week we played cards and checkers and pickup sticks. The man knew how to play. Jack was like Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People—for the first time an adult male took an interest in my thoughts and feelings. The fact that he was paid to was not terribly relevant. And after three months of playing games, we finally got down to business. The rage got better but it was still there—along with an ever-widening black hole. Sure, I had a better understanding of why Dad did the things he did: his disapproving mother, the competition with his brother the college graduate, being raised in the Depression, the obsession with his career and generating income just to survive. Jack helped me figure it out. But that’s all intellectual. Just because I’m smart enough to understand doesn’t mean I can just let go of everything—everything that happened or didn’t happen, everything that he said or didn’t say, everything that’s in my hard drive. In this case, unlike Paula’s “Feelings are not Facts” it’s more like “Facts are not feelings”—just because I have the facts straight doesn’t mean my feelings are going to automatically fall in line. For that, I’m now convinced, I also needed the tools of 12-Step recovery. And during most of my adult life, I simply didn’t have those tools. And so the hole got bigger. Enter drugs and alcohol to fill the hole and that’s how I coped. “Self-medicating” the therapists call it. But that kind of self-help goes only so far. Because rage combined with the drugs and alcohol and the pressure cooker of working in Hollywood created an awful lot of trouble on the set. When the producers would start making demands and pushing my buttons, my insides would start bubbling and I would just want to kill somebody. I was one big walking emotion ready to react at any given moment. Not unlike what my daughter feels when she writes me hate e-mails or tries to grab my steering wheel to make a point. Except she was fourteen. I was forty.

  I did have many outstanding experiences in TV, and I produced a lot of work that I’m very proud of, not the least of which was the episode of The Outer Limits I directed, with Dad in the starring role. But there were a few too many crashes.

  Remember Terrence Howard, who played a TV director in the film Crash? There’s a scene in that film where white-bread Tony Danza, who plays a TV producer, starts to lecture Terrence on how to direct black actors, that one of the actors in the scene Terrence just directed was talking “less black” than he should be. Terrence just laughs it off but Tony challenges him by asking, “Is there a problem?” Then they cut to a close-up of Terrence, and you know what’s going through his mind, because of all the things that happened to him in the movie, you know he’s thinking: “Fuck you, white honky.” You can see it in his eyes. And you’re wondering, What’s he gonna do? What’s he gonna do? What’s he gonna do? But then he gets a grip and his mouth says, “No, we don’t have a problem,” and they go back for another take.

  That’s where Terrence is a better man than I, because a TV show is not the place to go toe-to-toe with the producer. It’s the producer’s show, not the director’s. It’s Tony’s show, not Terrence’s. Freelance TV directors are just hired guns for that episode, and then we leave to go to another show. That’s why Terrence is a better man than I. At least in that situation, he controlled his rage—only to let it fly later in the movie. Quite often, I didn’t have that control. When that happened to me, when a producer came over to put the squeeze on me and tell me what to do, and I happened to think that he was full of shit, more often than not my mind was thinking, Fuck you, white honky, and my mouth was saying, “Fuck you . . . white honky.”

  And after I told him to stick it, the producer would pull me off the set and inform me that I was shooting myself in the foot. And when I finished directing those shows, after I had shot one or both of my feet off, I would hobble home, pull my bottle of Canadian Club off the shelf, grab my bong, go out back, and proceed to finish the job by blowing my head off.

  THE NEVER-ACTUALLY-TAPED DICK CAVETT INTERVIEW

  SOMETIMES I HAVE this fantasy that Dad and I are on The Dick Cavett Show from the ’70s—only it’s taking place in the present. It’s “Celebrity Father and His Wayward Son” interview night and we’re talking about all kinds of things, like the night Dad hung out with Jimi Hendrix in Cleveland, the reasons why he decided to become an actor, and how I switched from the law to directing. And the conflict. We’re talking about the conflict and the differences between us. And Dad is saying things, things I want to hear, things I need to hear.

  Here’s what it looks like without the commercials:

  DICK: Adam, you talked earlier about the generation gap and the difficulties you and your dad had with each other when you were growing up and when you were out of work.

  ADAM: Well, yeah, I think it’s sometimes difficult because, in a way, Dad never really had a childhood. He had to grow up pretty fast just as a matter of survival. He’s the son of immigrant parents who ended up in Boston and he was raised during the Depression, so from early on, he was extremely focused on work and generating income. But being raised in sunny Southern California in an affluent family was a totally different experience, and although I really admire Dad’s work ethic and have tried very hard to emulate it, sometimes I think that the huge difference in our experiences created obstacles between us that we’ve both had to work very hard to overcome.

  DICK: Leonard, would you say that’s a fair assessment?

  LEONARD: I think Adam’s right. I was raised a certain way with a certain attitude and mind-set. When I came to Hollywood, it took me eleven years of supplementing my acting income with odd jobs before I was able to support myself in my profession. Once things started happening and I was actually getting somewhere, I was pretty much focused on staying on the train and keeping the ride going.

  DICK: The train meaning the trajectory of your career.

  LEONARD: Yeah, it’s been my experience in Hollywood that you need to spend a lot of time and energy trying to break through, which is probably true in any profession. But acting jobs can be over fairly quickly and your career can fizzle out very fast. So you’re constantly looking for work to stay in the game and it can really drive you crazy. Remember, we were only on Star Trek for three seasons.

  DICK: I was always under the impression that it was much longer than that, like thirty seasons, maybe.

  LEONARD: Seventy-nine episodes were all we made so I really had no time to relax and feel safe that I had “arrived.” I felt compelled to keep feeding the monster as well as finding new ways to supplement my income through personal appearances and recordings and conventions and theater work. And unfortunately, all of that does take away from focusing on family time and family issues, issues that I was not
necessarily capable of addressing. So in that respect, my work was an escape. It may very well have been my obsessive need to keep working and my fear of not having enough work that made me nervous about the times Adam was out looking for jobs and considering other career avenues after he put so much time and effort into his law career. . . .

  * * *

  “Okay, Dad, I think I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “Dad! Can I get a word in edgewise?”

  “Just let me say a sentence.”

  “If you don’t stop yelling I’ll have no choice but to hang up.”

  “Now, I’m doing the best I can in a very unfortunate situation. I’m considering all possibilities, yes, including getting on a desk working for an agent or getting into film or television development. Just be patient. Something will turn up.”

  Something did turn up. I received an offer from Enigma Records to join the Business Affairs department doing what I did at EMI. It was another great gig and I was back on track to where I thought I was going. Except that three years later, with no major hit records, the company disappeared and I was back on the street.

  Maybe I should have seen it coming. One thing was for sure: My passion for my chosen career was fading.

  * * *

  DICK: Leonard, Hollywood is full of stories of people who come from nowhere and make it big and even more where people come to Hollywood looking for fame and fortune and never find it. Such as myself. I’m wondering what your perception is of all that in terms of your story.