Lenny Baker

Lenny Baker is mostly forgotten now. He was ninth-billed in The Paper Chase, but who watches The Paper Chase these days? (I have seen The Paper Chase, but only once.) He was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture for Next Stop, Greenwich Village, which naturally came out after The Paper Chase because the Golden Globes are a joke. He did a couple of iconic ‘70s shows, including my beloved Rockford Files, and his final performance was a guest shot on Taxi as someone from Latka’s home country. And then he died young of thyroid cancer.

It is easy to assume that he is one of many young men who died too soon of AIDS. He was single at 37 and it was 1982. It’s been speculated since then, most notably by David Ehrenstein, a columnist who claimed that it was something spoken about by fellow actor Anthony Holland. And I mean, it wouldn’t be the only death certificate that gave a cause other than what was still known as GRID. But I don’t think the kind of thyroid cancer he was getting treatment for is even associated with AIDS in any way. And this, friends, is why I don’t rely on gossip and implication to fill out a June schedule.

Maybe Baker was gay; maybe he really was the committed bachelor who fooled around with women he said he was. What we can say for sure is that he was well known for his talent. He himself believed that what shaped him best was an experience doing theatre for and with the deaf at the O’Neill Center’s National Playwrights Conference. I’m not an expert, goodness knows, but there are different requirements involved in a situation like that. It would be hard not to learn something from the experience if you had even the tiniest amount of talent.

Baker had a vast amount of talent. He knew he had an uphill battle to fame—he was a tall, skinny guy with a nose he described as being the biggest in the business since Jimmy Durante. But he seems to have made savvy choices in his career and was on an upward trajectory. Instead of being what he called a spear-carrier on Broadway, he instead did theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, preferring to be a big fish in the small pond of a local scene than yet another small fish in the ocean of New York. It certainly helped him draw notice and probably helped lead to his Tony.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village is almost a footnote these days, a movie that is mostly remembered because of its gay black character and appearance in The Celluloid Closet. But Baker gives a charming performance in it, sharing the screen easily. Even if it’s not a debut, it’s worth seeking out. He was capable of being poignant and funny and weirdly threatening as needed in what little I’ve seen of his. Not, in the end, that there is that much more on film to see of Lenny Baker’s career.