Tricky Business

On June 17, 1972, five burglars were arrested in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington. The break-in sparked the biggest political scandal in U.S. history and resulted in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, who promptly returned to his native California to write his memoirs. Nixon would later acknowledge mistakes of judgment on Watergate, but he died in 1994 still denying he’d committed an impeachable offense.

So it was startling, the other day, to see Nixon at the Beverly Hills Hotel eating scrambled eggs. At least it looked like Nixon.

Dan Hedaya, who portrays our 37th president in “Dick,” Columbia Pictures’ teen comedy about Watergate that opens Wednesday, sat at a table in the hotel’s Polo Lounge. A veteran of more than 70 films, from “Clueless” to “A Civil Action,” Hedaya, 59, has an unforgettable scowl, and he has often played the scoundrel. (On “Cheers,” for example, he was Carla’s deadbeat ex-husband, Nick Tortelli.) But at first, he said, playing Nixon--even a comic Nixon--seemed like a stretch.

Dave Foley, best known for his role as Dave Nelson in the TV series “NewsRadio,” had no such apprehension about playing White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. Over breakfast with Hedaya, the 36-year-old actor--whose blond mop of hair bore no resemblance to the crew cut he wears in the movie--admitted to nurturing a longtime obsession with Watergate that made him jump at the chance to, as he put it, “remind people how bad [the Nixon aides] were.”

Also at the table was Saul Rubinek, 50, who with black-framed glasses is the spitting image of Henry Kissinger in the movie. An omnipresent character actor (“Unforgiven,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Against All Odds”), Rubinek so convincingly aped the president’s chief foreign policy advisor that Andrew Fleming, director and co-writer of “Dick,” expanded Kissinger’s role in the film.

No heavy political movie, “Dick’ is instead a light-hearted satire. The comic premise is that Nixon was brought down by two teenage girls who accidentally discovered his role in Watergate, named themselves “Deep Throat” after a porn movie, and leaked what they knew to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Days before the mock Nixon, Haldeman and Kissinger sat down to breakfast, The Times had consulted with Fleming, who said that his cast--which also includes teen stars Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams--found that putting a humorous spin on Watergate was, in a way, redundant.

“How do you make a satire out of a farce?” Fleming asked. “There were so many shenanigans and so many kooky characters, we kind of felt freer to be more broad. These people were being so irreverent with the public trust, we didn’t feel we were being irreverent to them.”

While Foley and Rubinek are Canadian, that didn’t stop them from joining Hedaya (a native New Yorker) in discussing Watergate’s effects on American culture.

Question (to Hedaya): How did you go about capturing Nixon, particularly that halting, uncomfortable voice?

Hedaya: When Andy Fleming offered me the role of Nixon, I read the script and liked it a lot. But my immediate apprehension was: How could I do it? I’m a Jew from Brooklyn. You can make a fool of yourself. There’d been [Anthony] Hopkins [as Nixon], this one, that one. I was truly apprehensive. Fleming called me and started talking as if I’d already said yes. I said [laying on the New York accent], “Andy, I’m very flattered that you thought of me. But do you hear me speaking?” Andy said, “Don’t worry about it.” I said, “Don’t worry about it?” He said, “We’ll loop. We’ll do something.” But they got me this great voice coach. And in just one hour, you couldn’t shut me up. He jump-started me and then it just flowed.

Q: Did you watch videotapes of Nixon speaking?

Hedaya: No. You live, you watch it like everyone else. We have an impression. It’s like when I was a kid, I loved baseball and I used to spend hours trying to bat like [Mickey] Mantle. You’d stand with his posture, arrange your legs, swing the bat like him. I don’t think it’s unrelated.

Foley: Now I understand why your Nixon looked so much like Mantle. [Everyone laughs.]

Q: As actors, what is most challenging about portraying real historical figures?

Rubinek: When you’re doing a role like this, there are certain basic things about the character--you hope physically you resemble them and that there’s something about your voice that’s right. But eventually you’ve got to forget about that. The more you try to create some impersonation, the less it’s going to be believed.

Hedaya: I had one of the most enjoyable times ever on a set. One scene that didn’t make it into the movie had Nixon kneeling down with Kissinger, on the night before his resignation, to pray. We started shooting at 11 at night. It was the last shot. I don’t think we finished until 2 in the morning. I’ve never laughed so much. It was just three lines, but what should have taken 15 minutes took three hours. It was one of those uncontrollable things where you have to bite your tongue. You go, “All right, action.” And you know you’re gone.

Rubinek (displaying a Polaroid of the scene, with both men on their knees): We laughed our [butts] off. We couldn’t stop. I turned to him and I said [in Kissinger’s voice], “Would you like a hug?”

Hedaya (as Nixon): “No hugs, Henry.”

Rubinek: At least I have the scene for my home video collection.

Hedaya: It’s interesting that the film is about a topic that generated so much tension and paranoia and so much darkness. But in the making of the movie, it was the opposite. There was no tension, no mean-spiritedness, no nastiness.

Rubinek: And we were working with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams--how old are they? That can be a difficult thing, they were working with older, more established actors.

Foley: And they’re not as cute as we are.

Q: How much improvisation went on?

Rubinek: There was some riffing for all of us. It was hard to separate what we did and what [Fleming and co-writer Sheryl Longin] wrote. The script was hilarious, but he had an atmosphere that we could riff on what was there. It happened naturally.

Question (to Foley): We all know what Haldeman looked like, but I don’t think I ever had a sense of his voice.

Foley: That was the advantage of playing Haldeman. No one really knows anything about him.

Q: So how did you decide how to portray him?

Foley: Well, as I always do, I threw myself upon the limitations of my skills as an actor to make those decisions for me. It was pretty much: Well, I’ll get the flat top and some fake teeth. And I read his diaries.

Question (to Rubinek): How did you approach Kissinger?

Rubinek: You learn from other actors. You can make the mistake, which I’ve definitely made, where I could have been better because I was trying to be funny. It would have been a lot better if I’d played it straight and let the circumstances do it. On this set, everybody was straight. I had a little deja vu, though, because I was in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” so I was in the White House with the other Nixon [Hopkins] and the other Haldeman [James Woods].

Hedaya (gesturing to himself): And who played Bebe Rebozo?

Rubinek: That’s right! You were there too. So didn’t it feel weird?

Hedaya: No.

Foley: It must have felt like a promotion.

Hedaya: Another job, another movie.

Foley (whispering): I think Dan was a better Nixon.

Hedaya: For me, I wasn’t thinking of it as a spoof. [In the film] Nixon has a lot of very intense moments, places where he gets very angry or frightened, which were real. I didn’t know how to approach it as a comedy and it didn’t feel like one. This is a guy who comes from a Quaker background that is, above all, pacifist. I also went to a Quaker school, Brooklyn Friends School. Their credo is tranquillity, serenity, tolerance. Nixon violated every element in the Quaker belief. He didn’t embrace the best part of his background. His anti-Semitism was appalling. It’s a paradox.

Q: You brought a surprising humanity to your Nixon.

Hedaya: You don’t want to be a stand-up comic. When I saw the movie, I liked it because it is both funny and it adheres to the main elements of the history. It doesn’t matter how the toppling [of the Nixon administration] occurred and it doesn’t matter really who Deep Throat was. The significant fact is that there was a crime committed, there was a great transgression, there was corruption and arrogance.

I’m not prone to hallucinations of grandeur, but when you put on the suit, something happens. I remember one day, we broke and I was walking to lunch and someone said, “Morning, Mr. President.” It was half in jest, but I swear to God, nobody ever said hello to me like that. It was like a kind of transference. My last day on the set, when we finished, they played “Hail to the Chief.”

Foley: I think that’s why the movie works. Because Nixon has to be a real and believable villain, which he is. Dan is scary when Nixon is ranting and raging. The reality of those scenes makes it all the funnier--this man is bringing the full weight of his power against two teenage girls.

Q: There’s a line in the movie where Nixon says something like, “I have a way with young people”--that is based on the real Nixon. He felt he was in touch with the youth of America.

Foley: Oh, yeah, he snuck out once past the barricade they’d set up to protect the White House, just to hang out with the hippies.

Rubinek: It’s so sad. There’s an odd sweetness about him.

Question (to Foley): Your most recent work displays quite a range: Haldeman, the voice of Flik in “A Bug’s Life,” and the voices of the Baldwin brothers in “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

Foley: Yes, it’s the two extremes in the art of animation. I’m a constant beneficiary of bad casting. I don’t know how to explain it.

Question (to the group): Where were each of you when Nixon resigned in 1974?

Hedaya: I was working at a Mexican restaurant, serving burritos. Just starting to act.

Rubinek: I was a member of a theater company I’d helped found in Toronto. I couldn’t have been further away from politics. We were working on a play based on a 17th century Jewish character who claimed he was the Messiah. I had yet to step in front of a camera.

Question (to Foley): Rumor has it you had something of a Watergate obsession as a kid. What was that about?

Foley: I watched all of the hearings on television. At the time, I thought [presidential counsel John W.] Dean was a hero. Anything that was hurting Nixon, I was all in favor of in those days. I remember being really impressed by America in that they were doing this soul searching, really examining their flaws and determining to root them out. Which I don’t think we would do--in fact, I know we wouldn’t do--in Canada because several years later when they found out that the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] was bugging everybody in the country and throwing people into insane asylums without warrant, everyone said, “That’s horrible! We should create a new police to do that sort of thing so the RCMP doesn’t have to.” So we did. That was the Canadian way.

But I remember the day of the resignation. I was 11 years old, living in a very small town north of Toronto. My whole family gathered around a little black-and-white TV. We were all very excited. But as much as I despised Nixon and thought he was an evil man, watching him give his resignation, I felt so sorry for him. I literally almost teared up watching him resign, get on the helicopter and leave. It was the most pathetic spectacle I’d ever seen.

Rubinek: Watching Americans play Watergate out in public was kind of refreshing to a Canadian. There’s something about it that’s really healthy.

Foley: The sad thing is, though, that America lost its appetite for it after Watergate for about 20 years. Iran-Contra was a hundred-fold more heinous than what happened in Watergate, you know? And a million-fold more heinous than what Clinton was involved in. But America wasn’t ready to analyze itself yet. That was probably the biggest damage that Watergate did to America: It made America tired of criticizing itself.

Rubinek: There’s a comedy in there somewhere. We should do a musical called “Contra” next.

Q: What’s the difference between Nixon and Clinton?

Hedaya: Nixon was not too interested in sex, whereas [with Clinton] that is not to be said. . . . Clinton was like: “I did not. Hear me: I did not with this woman.” You know, you lie. And when you’re caught, you don’t lie.

Foley: Clinton’s recanting should have just been: “Oh! Her!”

Q: Fleming says that he thinks that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has made Watergate more relevant. If you were going to portray a political character from the current period, who would you be?

Hedaya: I don’t like any of them. That little guy who’s written a book, Mr. Smartypants?

Q: Former White House advisor George Stephanopoulos?

Hedaya: Yeah. All of them.

Q: Did you find yourself having a difficult time letting go of the voices after you’d mastered them? Were you talking in character to your friends and family?

Hedaya: Yeah. I had a great time. What I was very nervous about in the beginning turned out to be a source of great pleasure. Then I had to stop after a while because it was getting ridiculous.

Rubinek (as Kissinger): I couldn’t stop. [As himself] But then I had to stop doing it because all my friends could do it way better than me.

Foley: That’s the problem with hanging out with actors.