So the theme this week seems to be high profile deaths.
Okay.
John Spencer wouldn’t have been my pick for Greatest Actor of His Generation. He wasn’t on my mind a lot and to his credit you never saw him staring out at you from a tabloid at the checkout line. Maybe that will change next week but I wouldn’t bet on it.
That said, if you dropped his name in conversation the first thing I’d likely say is “Oh yeah, really good actor!”
And if you’d pressed the subject a little further I might have shared “My John Spencer Story.”
It would have taken place in the winter of 1999-2000. I’m guessing it was January or February of 2000 because it was miserably cold and the rain was freezing and the ground was covered in slush.
I was working, as I often did back then, as an extra/stand-in. In this case it was for the actor Tim Matheson, who at that time was a recurring guest-star on “West Wing” playing Vice-President John Hoynes.
It was a night shoot in my home town of Washington D.C. and like I said it was cold. We were outside the D.A.R. Constitution Hall where years earlier my high school graduation took place without the pleasure of my company. (Another story for another time)
The D.A.R. was doubling for a White House driveway, because what the hell, it was white, it had stony columns and the visible actors’ breath was free.
John Spencer and Tim Matheson were supposed to have a tense, hurried conversation about something and then Vice-President Hoynes would retreat into his limo and drive off leaving Leo to wonder if he’d made his point.
Or something like that.
All I cared about was that the heat was on in the limo and when I got to slide into the back, looking as Tim Matheson-ish as possible, it was the closest thing I got to feeling my fingers all night. Then it was “back to one” and stamping my feet and rubbing my arms with the rest of DC’s finest local talent.
During one of several breaks we took I ended up in one of the mens rooms of the DAR and here’s where memory gets a little dodgy after five years. Either I was in a stall and John Spencer walks in or John Spencer is in a stall and I walk in. All I know for sure is that he did not know I was there.
And he starts practicing his lines.
With an intensity and urgency millions of viewers would come to recognize and his peers would reward with an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild award.
I breathed real quietly and realized I had a free ticket to a show, an audit session for an acting class, or just a funny story to tell. So long as I kept very quiet.
Which I did. Maybe two minutes went by as John Spencer continued urging the Vice-President (in absentia) to do or say or not do or say something and then there was a flush, a washing of hands, and a door swinging open and shut and I suppose I must have come out of my stall at that point, very pleased for my backstage pass or whatever it was.
Later that night Mr. Spencer slipped on one of the many wet surfaces around the set and wrenched his knee badly enough that a medic came along and put a brace or a bandage on it.
It delayed shooting by almost no time as, I suppose, a couple of cameras were re-focused to shoot only above Leo’s waist.
That was it. No bitching, no calls to the agent or screaming about who let unauthorized moisture onto the set. There was a scene to be played and it got played, over and over, into the freezing early morning of DC winter.
And then everyone went home to bed until they were lucky enough to get paid to do this again.
John Spencer and I never passed two words to each other that night or any other. That’s too bad because it certainly isn’t going to happen now.
If I could say anything to him I guess it would be along the lines of “Good work.”
If it were me I think that would be okay.
