Nixon? Moi?

I was the adoring son of a Welsh Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater. Dad saw Richard Nixon’s ski-nose stuck deeply into the wrong side of nearly every one of the controversial political issues, from Taft-Hartley to McCarthy, from Alger Hiss to Howard Hughes. “Tricky Dick” was not just my father’s be^te noire, he was the bogeyman under the bed.

By 1996, both my father and Richard Nixon had died. I am now a 50-year-old character actor and part-time political junkie. Among the roles I’ve played on stage, television and in films were politicos as diverse as Abe Lincoln, Juan Peron, Herman Goering, George Wallace and both Roosevelts. Then last summer, I was given a crack at playing that quintessentially American politician and my family’s perennial dartboard target: Richard Milhous Nixon.

Dad’s political patrimony wasn’t the only issue here. My Catholic adolescence had begun during Camelot and had ended in Dallas. My first presidential primary vote was for Bobby Kennedy. While Nixon would live to a ripe old age, all my heroes, including my father, died young. The man who had haunted my sunlit youth was elected president in 1968--and became my commander-in-chief in 1969. Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon’s.

The script that landed on my doorstep from Showtime Original Films was titled “Elvis Meets Nixon.” It was a mock docudrama of their December 1970 meeting in the Oval Office. As depicted in the screenplay, these two isolated and self-destructive men, both at the pinnacle of their powers, eagerly arranged to meet in a White House besieged by protesters. Both fairly seethe with resentment, anger and paranoia. They also share a weird and unexpected vulnerability. But, best of all, in this twisted recounting of an odd but minor footnote to history, both Elvis and Nixon are hellaciously funny.

One small detail: I had one day to prepare. A challenge, yes. Impossible? I didn’t think so. I really felt that somewhere deep in my soul, I’d been researching Richard Nixon for most of my life.

I started in front of the bathroom mirror. I do not resemble Nixon; however, a glob of Dippity-Do gel gave me his widow’s peak pompadour. Wads of cotton, wedged between my gums and cheeks, helped form the requisite jowls. A piece of cosmetic sponge plumped my upper lip. The nose? Hmm. Mine was certainly substantial enough, but . . . aha!

I remembered an old character actor’s trick. I ran to the drug store, purchased a pair of ordinary baby bottle nipples. Back home, I snipped off two half-inch sections and stuffed one oval into each nostril. With a little manipulation, I was able to vaguely suggest Nixon’s most singular, ski-nosed flare. My final cosmetic touches were darkened eyebrows and some mascara-enhanced stubble.

What about the voice, and Nixon’s uniquely awkward physicality? I’m more a natural mimic than a Method actor. I had learned early on in my theater work that mimicry won’t carry a scene, much less a script. Still, with one day to prepare, a little mimicry might just carry off an audition.

The one facet of Nixon’s external reality that eluded me completely was his flickering, occasionally dazzling, smile--a smile that seldom seemed to make it as far as his eyes. I attempted his radiant, open-mouthed version but, stuffed with all that cotton and latex, I looked like a periodontal patient. I think I got the eyes right, though.

I studied myself in the mirror while trying out some Nixonian cliches. “Let me make one thing perfectly clear” . . . “I want peace, but I want peace with honor.”

It was then I began having serious second thoughts. I started seeing flashes of Dan Aykroyd skits and hearing echoes of David Frye impressions. What about Anthony Hopkins? At that point I hadn’t seen his “Nixon,” but, it seemed, everyone else in the business had. My agent, Joe Rice, thought that well-known “names” had refused to consider this role, understandably daunted by the prospect of comparisons with an Oscar-nominated rendition by one of the great actors of the English-speaking world.

What--me worry?

Now, fully armed, drilled, camouflaged and motivated, it was time to consider strategy. Nixon’s kisser and voice are among the most recognizable on the planet. Those few people who might recognize my face associated it with intense, non-comedic villains and authority figures such as the warden in “The Shawshank Redemption.” This audition was, clearly, no time for charming chitchat, clever line-readings or cerebral banter about Nixon’s “motivations.” These Showtime folks wanted to experience Richard Nixon. And they wanted to laugh.

I decided my mission was to walk into the room totally “in character.” To get their attention, I would have to reflect their notion of Nixon. To get the job, I’d have to replace it. Three words: Blow them away.

FIRST PERSON

The next day, suitably suited and coiffed, cotton and latex inserted into the appropriate places, I strode across Universal Plaza in the late-summer midday sun, trying out Nixon’s self-conscious walk, with its curious bounce, arms swinging, slightly out-of-sync with the legs.

Heads turned. Eyes peered over the tops of sunglasses and sandwiches. I cast darting glances to my left and right, while aping Nixon’s rigid, two-blinks-a-second composure. Inside the office tower, elevator passengers quickly parted to make room for this glowering, oily (the hair gel) stranger.

I arrived at the Showtime floor and signed in. I was, by then, irrevocably committed to speaking only in that jowl-flapping Nixonic diction, lest I lose its rhythms and my courage. I said little to the wide-eyed receptionist. I said nothing at all to the small clot of fellow actors awaiting their run at the presidency. I sat down, carefully crossed my black-stockinged legs, hunched my shoulders and retreated into intense, uncomfortable, Nixonian isolation.

I’d decided that morning not to audition with any of the “sides” (extracts of scripted scenes) that the director had originally requested. I was simply going to walk in the room as President Richard M. Nixon.

“Excuse me, Bob?” Beth Klein, the casting director, approached.

“What? Oh, yes. Ah . . . sorry, I was just . . . ah . . . “

“Alan and Alan are ready for you now.”

“Fine, fine. Now, you’ve told them . . . ye’ know, that I’m not going to . . . to . . . ?”

” . . . Yes, they know. They’re fine with that.”

“Fine, fine.”

A quick walk down the hall. My stomach begins to knot. I feel a deep Niacin flush on my face. Another deep breath. My shoulders rise. I keep them there. I enter the conference room.

“Gentlemen. Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. President.”

Alan Arkush and Alan Rosen--the director and the writer. “Won’t you have a seat, Mr. President?” They both gesture toward a chair across the table. Well, at least these two fellows were “on the same page,” as they say out here.

I remain standing. The two of them sit. I put my hands behind my back. Lift my chin. I imagine I’m in the Rose Garden, facing Daniel Schorr and Dan Rather. I blink my eyes rapidly.

“Let me say, first of all, that . . . I have great respect for Showtime. Now. I could say that . . . finding an individual, ah . . . properly qualified and experienced enough to play the 37th president of the United States is a . . . ah . . . serious and very important task; and . . . that to give any actor only 24 hours in which to prepare is a demeaning, disrespectful and idiotic thing to do. I could say that. Ah . . . but that would be wrong.”

Howls. Sputters. Cackles. Then they start winging it.

“Mr. President, how do you feel about Elvis Presley and his influence on the youth of this country?”

“Ah. Well. Let me say this about that. Mr. Presley is, of course, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and I feel. . . .”

I truly don’t recall much of the rest of this colloquy. But the two Alans seemed to be having one hell of a good time. So when, at length, they asked “Mr. President” if he’d possibly agree to read through a few scripted scenes, Mr. President graciously complied.

Twenty minutes later, I walked out of the room, trembling, breathing heavily, and, of course, perspiring. In my own voice, I cheerfully greeted an actor with whom I had worked in “The Shawshank Redemption.” While chatting, I removed spittle-soaked cotton and a deteriorating piece of sponge. In my hyperventilating excitement, the nursing nipple nubs had become lodged in my nasal passages. As my actor-friend David looked on, I tried to blow them out of my nostrils--not a pretty, nor very presidential picture at all.

My agent called 15 minutes before I got home. I was their guy. Expect an offer, he said. They loved me, really loved me! I’d pulled it off!

Then, days go by. A week. Finally, a phone call from my agent. It seems that the head of programming for Showtime who, purportedly, “knows and loves your work”--(Uh oh)--just didn’t “see” me as Nixon. He’d been out of town during auditions. “So, Alan and Alan were wondering if you would . . . “

No. Oh no.

“Hey, the writer and director love you,” my agent railed, catching my angry disappointment. “I say screw ‘em! We say, ‘C’mon, my guy walked in and nailed it! Make an offer.’ ”

In my long silence, his high dudgeon modulated. “My gut feeling is . . . I dunno. It’s your call.”

Oh, God. A call-back?

I pondered my choices, but my buzzing head and pounding heart told me I had to go back. And I had to assume I hadn’t “nailed it.” Since I had gone about as far as I could go with external verisimilitude short of surgery, it seemed that my only recourse was to grapple with the character of Nixon on some deeper level.

For the next six days, I immersed myself in the life and character of this man I had passionately hated and, now, desperately wanted to play. I read Jonathan Aitken’s sympathetic 1993 biography, “Nixon--A life.’ I watched the acidic and hilarious “Milhous,” a video collection of self-damning, sordid and silly Nixon speeches, and every minute of the 1977 David Frost interviews. I toured the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

What most affected me was a brief video clip of ElliotRichardson, a Nixon supporter, rival and victim, speaking of the man who had fired him in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre. In words I will only paraphrase, he explained that there were really only two or three, relatively minor flaws in Richard Nixon’s personality. If, Richardson suggested, those flaws had been corrected, Richard Nixon would never have won the White House. The very flaws that doomed his presidency (ruthlessness, paranoia, isolation, insecurity) were the same elements that fueled his ambition and determination.

I again watched all the documentary images flicker across the TV. Even amid the trappings of power, before adoring crowds, at events of great historical moment, I saw Nixon’s sweaty and shocking emotional transparency.

That final White House farewell is nearly too painful to watch. He touches upon many of the themes of his lifelong inner struggles: his self-perceived inferiority, his lack of wealth, willpower, hatred, sacrifice, pettiness, greatness. He invokes the memory of his mother and his “old man,” while, in the background, his devoted wife and daughters dissolve in sadness, shame and sorrow for the man they obviously loved so deeply.

In his final words as president, Nixon says “only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” After a week devoted to his saga, I was struck by the implied reverse of that observation: What must it be like to have fallen from that height to those depths?

By age 50, I’d had six, 10, maybe a dozen “crises.” Some of them had been wrenching and shameful. However, each had unfolded within the privacy and security of my family circle, or in the solitude of my own conscience. I could barely conceive of enduring, surviving, some would say, emerging triumphant from that long and public odyssey of victories and defeats, honors and embarrassments that was Richard Nixon’s life.

On the appointed day, I insert the nursing nipples and cotton, pencil the brows, slick back the hair, put on the well-shined, plain black shoes. The voice is deeper now, whether from over-use or relaxation, I can’t say. The emphatic gestures, still two beats out-of-sync with the words they’re meant to underline, are spare and precise. Back muscles tense, lifting the shoulders. The head is cocked to the left side. The neck slightly twisted. The chin dipped to the right. That enumerating index finger makes three things “perfectly clear.” The body weight shifts, from one foot to the other. When those “three things” are made “perfectly clear,” hands clasp behind the back. Then, the chin lifts and the eyes narrow in confrontation and defiance.

I comb and spray that pompadour one last time. More serene now than I ever would have expected, I head out to become Nixon one more time.

I walk into the office of Showtime’s president of programming, Jerry Offsay. Apparently, he’s been forewarned. He jumps, rather gleefully, into the “improv.” He’s even gone so far as to decant an obviously treasured Humphrey-Muskie button.

Off I go. “Now you know, ah, Hubert was a hell of a guy. Johnson really put his ass in a sling. Ah . . . the war, Chicago . . . and the rest. And . . . ah . . . Ed Muskie was a strong man, strong campaigner. Of course, until that thing in the snow . . . the press conference, breaking down, his wife and so forth. Now . . . some have said that our campaign had some . . . ah, dark hand in all of that, which, of course, was never proven. There are others, of course, who maintain that it was all a play by the Kennedys to derail the whole Democratic effort in ‘68, to save ’72 for Teddy. I don’t believe that but . . . well, you know, if you . . . ah, can’t stand in the snow, you’d better go sit in the kitchen.”

Reassured by the laughter and relaxed banter coming from the room, I continue.

“You know, I have the greatest respect for Showtime. And of course, it’s absolutely essential that they take the strongest possible measures to . . . ah, ensure that the actor chosen to portray the 37th president of the United States is, undeniably, the best qualified, most experienced individual for that position. The executives at Showtime need to know that the actor playing Richard Milhous Nixon is not a schnook. Well, gentlemen, I am not a schnook! . . . I . . . I’ve earned every acting award I’ve ever received.”

Big laughs. But I’m not through yet.

“I know it’s easy to criticize . . . Monday morning quarterbacking, and so forth. Ah . . . but, I think the question needs to be asked. I need to know. More importantly, the American people need to know. Why didn’t Showtime record my initial audition? I mean, you know . . . how difficult could it be to install a taping system?”

I turn on my heel, make a clumsy exit, hoping to find a Ron Ziegler surrogate to shove. The casting director catches up with me. She beams. I have the job. They’ll be making an offer later that day.

I haven’t seen “Elvis Meets Nixon” yet. (It premieres next Sunday to coincide with the August anniversaries of Elvis’ death as well as Nixon’s resignation.) However, a test audience has seen a “rough cut,” after which, from the lobby and various car phones, two producers and Alan and Alan called me to pass along the good word. “Listen, they passed out these response cards for the audience to fill out,” Arkush says, bubbling over. “A whole bunch of them came back saying things like, ‘This movie has completely changed the way I think about Richard Nixon.’ ”

I hung up, and remembered how I’d walked onto the movie set--a full-scale mock-up of Nixon’s canary yellow Oval Office--and found myself inexplicably choked up.

Yeah, I thought. Me too.