|
Nick Adams (1931 - 1968)
Graduating from St. Peter's College, Adamschock hitchhiked to Manhattan where he attempted and failed to get a reading for Mister Roberts. The play's star, Henry Fonda, advised him to get some dramatic training, which Nick tried to get from a book on acting he purchased from a local store. Soon after, he bumped into Jack Palance, who by coincidence was also a Nanticoke native, and after a luncheon date Palance referred the young man to a junior theater for practical training and experience. It was here that he met several young and aspiring actors, including James Dean, with whom he became roommates and close friends. Nick had been supporting himself using the pool hustling techniques he had learned growing up in Jersey, but through Dean he learned the equally lucrative art of hustling gay sex on the streets. Eventually tiring of small roles on the New York stage, Nick, now using the name "Adams," hitchhiked to Los Angeles with $350 to his name, and worked numerous odd jobs while renting a basement apartment. One job, that of ticket taker and usher at a movie theater, was lost after the manager caught Adams putting his name on the marquee, "just to see how it looked." When the draft board called in 1952, Adams opted for a stint in the US Coast Guard. Three years later, on a ninety day shore leave, he auditioned for and got the part of Reber in the film version of Mister Roberts. This was quickly followed by the role of Billy the Kid in Strange Lady in Town, released that same year. Nick Adams' film career had finally taken off. Next came Nick Adams' first critically noticed role in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean and Natalie Wood, whose virginity Adams later claimed to have taken. Dean's death in a car wreck later that year devastated Adams, who actually began speeding and driving recklessly to the point that he was placed on probation. In memory of his lost friend, he agreed to dub some of Dean's dialogue in some scenes from Giant whose sound required re-recording. With the help of a young actress named Carol Nugent, Adams was able to reconcile with the loss of Dean and actively pursue his career. His persistence paid off in 1958 when he played Andy Griffith's side-kick in No Time for Sergeants, followed quickly by a role in the Doris Day / Rock Hudson vehicle Pillow Talk. With these successes in his pocket, Adams approached television producer Andrew Fenady with a treatment for a series about a former Confederate soldier traveling the West as a gunslinger. The result was The Rebel, in which Adams played the starring role of Johnny Yuma, his favorite. Rebel ran for two years, and was quickly followed by guest appearances in numerous other popular series of the time, including Ben Casey and Burke's Law, and the classic episode, "Fun and Games" of the original Outer Limits. Adams and Carol Nugent were married and had two sons, born in 1960 and 1962. In 1963 came a role in the film Twilight of Honor. After spending over eight thousand dollars on his own publicity campaign, Adams was able to secure a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance, but lost the award to Melvyn Douglas, who won for his role in Hud. This disappointed was followed by the discovery that his wife was having an affair. A divorce coupled with a bitter custody followed, with Nick eventually proving Carol to be an unfit mother and winning custody of his two children, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life. While Adams' divorce fight had ended in victory, it had also drained much of his financial resources, and roles were not forthcoming. Friend Robert Conrad arranged for Adams to make a few guest appearances on The Wild, Wild West, and a few other guest roles on television manifested, but Adams was not offered any series of his own, and the few films he did, including Young Dillinger, were box-office bombs. Eventually Nick Adams sought and found work overseas in B-grade horror and science fiction movies, including the Japanese films Godzilla vs. Monster Zero and Frankenstein Conquers the World, and Die, Monster, Die, a British film with Boris Karloff which demonstrated all too well the near impossibility of translating H.P. Lovecraft's writings to the screen. Adams' frustration at finding regular and rewarding work began to manifest itself in increasingly belligerent behavior. Reports are that he also began drinking heavily, though many who were close to Adams have refuted this claim. In February of 1968, Adams' lawyer drove to the actor's house after he had failed to show up for a dinner engagement. His attorney found Adams in his bedroom, sitting against the wall, his eyes wide open and staring out blankly. An assistant coroner's examination reported lethal levels of paraldehyde, a drug used to treat delirium tremens in alcoholics, in the actor's system. A follow-up examination, however, reported much lower levels of paraldehyde, together with sedatives in Adams' stomach. The conclusion was that the actor's death resulted from mixing the two drugs and was accidental. Those unaware of this follow-up report used the first one to report that Nick Adams' death had been a suicide. Others believe that Adams took the paraldehyde to get high and simply overdosed. However, because family members reported receiving numerous hang-up calls in the hours before his death and several items, including his Johnny Yuma cap from The Rebel, a typewriter given to Adams by James Dean, and several tape reels containing his most recent diary entries were missing, many of Adams' friends and colleagues, including Robert Conrad, Forrest Tucker, and Broderick Crawford, went on record as saying they believed Adams was "knocked off" and that for reasons of its own, Hollywood preferred to have the whole matter hushed up. His death remains one of the great Hollywood mysteries. Following Nick Adams' death, reports of his bisexuality began to surface. Interestingly, while most have come to accept that James Dean was bisexual, many in the mainstream press continue to insist that Nick Adams was straight. Granted, this could still be possible, as Hollywood is replete of stories of otherwise heterosexual actors, including Clark Gable and Robert Mitchum, who succumbed to the gay casting couch to secure the roles they desperately wanted. However, questions still remain as to Adams' continued association with many members of the gay community in Hollywood, including Pillow Talk co-star Rock Hudson, long after he had secured his place as a starring actor, and the reports by Martin Grief and others that when he died, Adams was in a sexual relationship with "a movie actor who can only be identified as R______ C_____." Most likely, the attempts to cover up Adams' bisexuality is motivated by people's continued tendency to see non-heterosexual behavior as somehow sordid, coupled with a desire to protect his reputation. In actuality, his sexuality was quite irrelevant to Adams' worth as either a person or an actor, though it may have had something to do with the circumstances of his death. Nick Adams' credits include Somebody Loves Me (1952); Strange Lady in Town (1955); Mister Roberts (1955); Rebel Without a Cause (1955); I Died a Thousand Times (1955); Picnic (1955); A Strange Adventure (1956); The Last Wagon (1956); Giant (voice, 1956); Our Miss Brooks (1956); Fury at Showdown (1957); Teacher's Pet (1958); No Time for Sergeants (1958); Sing, Boy, Sing (1958); "The Rebel" television series (1959); Pillow Talk (1959); The FBI Story (1959); Hell Is for Heroes (1962); The Interns (1962); "Saints and Sinners" television series (1962); A Girl Named Tamiko (1962); The Hook (1963); Twilight of Honor (1963); The Young Lovers (1964); Young Dillinger (1965); Die, Monster, Die! (1965); Furankenshutain tai chitei kaijû Baragon (1965, realeased in the US as Frankenstein Conquers the World, 1966); Kaijû daisenso (1965, released in the US as Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero, 1970); Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title (1966); International Secret Police: Driven to the Wall (1967); Mission Mars (1968); Fever Heat (1968); and Asesinos, Los (1968), plus guest appearances on the televisions shows Zane Grey Theater; Wagon Train; Wanted: Dead or Alive; Cimarron City; The Dick Powell Show; Burke's Law; The Outer Limits; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; Rawhide; Ben Casey; The Wild, Wild, West; and Mr. Blackwell Presents. Note: Nick Adams is also the name of a character in a series of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. Links:
The Unsolved Death of Nick Adams Nick Adams Wild, Wild West Pics Nick Adams' Coast Guard Service
|
||||||||||
