The School of Hard Knocks’ Drama Dept.

When The Times printed an article I wrote detailing my efforts to win the role of Richard M. Nixon in Showtime’s “Elvis Meets Nixon,” I was thrilled and delighted. I was proud. I was even . . . paid.

Five days later, when The Times’ Howard Rosenberg slammed my performance in that movie--and the movie itself--I was angered, disappointed, saddened and embarrassed.

The Times giveth, and The Times taketh away.

After first assuring myself that The Times hadn’t slapped a stop-payment on the check for the article, I consoled myself with the usual shibboleths, such as, “Opinions are like . . . certain fundamental body parts--we all have them.” I calmed myself with “remembered laughter”--the symphony of lusty belly laughs that had filled the theater in which I had watched the finished film for the first time. Finally, I had to admit that if, in my work, I had to sit and watch as much television as poor Rosenberg must, my sense of humor might atrophy.

*

Then I noted, in an adjacent pillory, Kenneth Turan’s observation, as he slammed Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts’ latest efforts, that “no one ever said life is fair, even for actors.”

How true, how true.

For my three days of work on “Elvis Meets Nixon,” I was paid more than my father ever earned in a year of eight-hour days and six-day weeks. That’s unfair.

We actors aren’t paid for romping in costume in front of a camera or an audience. That’s for fun and for free. We’re compensated for having our best efforts reviled, misunderstood or, worse, ignored. We’re given honorariums for enduring our public failures, then moving on. We’re paid for lugging our brokenness, our experience, our resilience to the set or the stage, and again, getting up the nerve to “put it out there.”

We offer our “talent to amuse,” our overactive imaginations, our hard-earned insights into other flawed humans. We surrender our careers, our lives, ourselves to a mysterious and unpredictable alchemy that can produce hits, and misses and messes.

Sometimes--rarely--our efforts evolve into art. But even when that happens, we can’t take a bow. We realize we were simply a conduit. We’ve only been blissfully, blessedly used.

Many of us bring diseased egos to our life’s work, seeking respect, validation--love. A shrink I know contends that if you can live sanely and honorably in L.A., you can do so anywhere. I suggest that if an actor with a diseased ego can survive “the business,” he or she may well be on his or her way to redemption. Which is why, I guess, I’m here.

Well. The Times has had a lot of fun with me. But . . . isn’t it a shame, because . . . you won’t have Bob Gunton to kick around anymore. You see, gentlemen, this is my last. . . .

Just kidding. . . .