The other day, Susan Bay Nimoy—actress, writer, director, philanthropist, and widow of Leonard—stood at the entrance of a historic Art Deco theatre in Westwood, which she had helped to restore and convert to a live-performance space. On the marquee, lit bulbs spelled out the theatre’s new name: the Nimoy.
“There’s a lot of history,” Bay Nimoy, an exuberant eighty-year-old, said. “I called Jane Fonda and asked if she would come to the press opening, because her mother, Frances, funded the theatre.” More history: during the Second World War, newsreels played at the theatre; “Dr. Strangelove” had its first L.A. screening there, in 1964. Two decades later, when Disney managed the theatre, “Three Men and a Baby” was the opening film. Leonard was the director; Bay Nimoy accompanied him to the première. “It was certainly in the eighties, because I wore a black suit with big shoulder pads, with a lot of jewelled things on them,” she said.
In the lobby, large letters spelled out “Live Long and Prosper,” Leonard’s catchphrase from a half century playing Mr. Spock from “Star Trek.” “It’s from the Jewish tradition,” Bay Nimoy said. The “Star Trek” writers, she explained, had been looking for a greeting that would be unique to Spock. Leonard, who grew up Orthodox, in Boston, thought of the Birkat Kohanim, a prayer said by priests with their fingers spread apart. “The priest in the temple would go blah-blah-blah-blah-blah in Hebrew to bless the congregation,” she said, making Spock V’s with her hands. “It meant, essentially, May peace be with you.”
The Nimoy is part of U.C.L.A.’s Center for the Art of Performance. “Theatre for Leonard was his first love,” Bay Nimoy said. “That living, breathing black box.” At eighteen, he took a train from Boston to Los Angeles, so that he could study at the Pasadena Playhouse. “He looked around, he had to support himself in a variety of ways. Theatre usher, taxicab driver, stocking vending machines—he did all of that.” He found work doing Yiddish theatre, and later hired a professor at U.C.L.A. to tutor him in the language.
Bay Nimoy met Leonard in an acting class. (He was the teacher.) Years later, when she was a development executive on the Paramount lot and he was shooting “Star Trek,” she looked him up. “We found each other and saved each other’s lives is really how it came down,” she said.
“Leonard and I came from very poor backgrounds. His father was a barber. My dad was an accountant,” Bay Nimoy said. The couple invested their Hollywood earnings in California real estate and contemporary art. “Leonard was not a fancy person,” she went on. When they met, she said, “I was driving a Honda.” Their goal was to give their children—he had two, she had one—a buffer, and no more. “They will not be gabillionaires, but they have a leg up,” she said. “And the rest we’re giving away.” They built a Jewish day school (their rabbi asked them to), a new theatre at Griffith Observatory (Leonard loved outer space), and a theatre for Symphony Space, in New York (where Leonard used to perform short stories).
Bay Nimoy popped into the dressing room, which is named for her son, Aaron. That day’s matinée, performed for public-school students, was a show about a once vital lower-Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. The creator, Omar Offendum, a Syrian American m.c. and poet, introduced Bay Nimoy to his collaborators. Thanks Joey, the beat-maker, wore Adidas track pants, an Ecuadorian poncho, and a trim, scholarly beard. He was from Brooklyn; his Syrian grandfather was a famous oud player. Ronnie Malley, a multi-instrumentalist from Chicago with Palestinian roots, was wriggling into a black thobe.
“We had them made in Qatar because we performed at the World Cup,” Offendum said. “It costs more to get them dry-cleaned here than it cost to have them made.”
It was time for the show. “This is Leonard’s seat,” Bay Nimoy said, gesturing to an empty seat on the aisle. “This is mine.” She sat down and tipped her face toward the stage.
Leonard died in 2015. “J. J. Abrams came to me,” she said. “He said, ‘When you feel like writing, call me. I’ll give you an office.’ And I said, ‘Well, when I can get out of bed, I’ll call you.’ ” Eventually, she wrote, directed, and starred in a short film about a septuagenarian architect who loses her husband of many years and has a fling with a man some forty years younger. It was shown at Sundance in 2018.
She is writing again, a one-woman show about the experience of being eighty. “It’s bawdy, it’s moving, it’s very truthful,” she said. If it comes to the Nimoy, she plans to be in her seat in the audience. “I can’t remember my name, let alone a show,” she said. “You know, someone like Helen Mirren can do it.” ♦
