Struggling actor
Adams was an avid reader of fan magazines and came to believe he could meet agents and directors by being seen at the Warners Theater in Beverly Hills. He got a job there as doorman, usher and maintenance man, which included changing the notices on the theater marquee. He was fired after he put his own name up as a publicity stunt.
Adams' earliest reported paid acting job in Los Angeles was a stage role at the Las Palmas Theater in a comedy called
Mr. Big Shot. Although he was paid about $60 a week Adams had to pay $175 for membership in Actors Equity. He also earned $25 one night at the Mocambo nightclub, filling in for Pearl Bailey who had fallen ill. Eight years later Hedda Hopper told Adams she recalled writing about him at the time and he replied by reciting back to her, "Nick Adams, gas station attendant from New Jersey, did an impersonation of Jimmy Cagney and a scene from Glass Menagerie."
After three years of struggle and optimistic self-promotion, his first film role came in 1951, an uncredited one-liner as a Western Union delivery boy in George Seaton's
Somebody Loves Me (1952). This allowed him to join the Screen Actors Guild, but he was unable to find steady acting work, even when "creatively" claiming he had appeared with Palance in
The Silver Tassie in New York. Undaunted, Adams joined a theater workshop run by Arthur Kennedy. In January 1952 Adams was drafted into the United States Coast Guard.
Supporting actor
Two and a half years later, in June 1954 his ship docked in Long Beach harbor and after a brash audition for director John Ford during which Adams did impressions of James Cagney and other celebrities while dressed in his Coast Guard uniform, he took his accumulated leave and appeared as Seaman Reber in the 1955 film version of
Mister Roberts. Adams then completed his military service, returned to Los Angeles and at the age of 23, based on his work in the hit film
Mr Roberts, was able to secure a powerful agent and signed with Warner Brothers.
Adams had a small role (as Chick) in
Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Also that year Adams played the role of "Bomber" the paper boy in the widely popular film adaptation of
Picnic (1955) which was mostly filmed on location in Kansas and starred William Holden, Kim Novak and Susan Strasberg. He was not perceived by casting directors as tall or handsome enough for leading roles but during the late 1950s Adams had supporting roles in several successful television productions including one episode of
Dead or Alive (1958) starring Steve McQueen and films such as
Our Miss Brooks (1956),
No Time for Sergeants (1958), Steve Canyon (1958) and
Pillow Talk (1959).
James Dean
Adams may have first met James Dean in December 1950 while jitterbugging for a soft drink commercial filmed at Griffith Park. Adams spent three years in the US Coast Guard between the time this commercial was shot in late 1950 and the start of filming for
Rebel Without a Cause in March 1955. Actor Jack Grinnage, who played Moose, recalled, "Off the set, Nick, Dennis, and the others would go out together--almost like the gang we portrayed--but Jimmy and Corey Allen... were not a part of that." They became friends during filming. During breaks, Dean and Adams entertained cast and crew with impersonations of Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan (who had directed Dean in East of Eden). A 1955 Warner Brothers press release quoted Dean as saying, "I shall be busy for the rest of 1955, and Nick will be doing film work for the next six months. Come 1956, however, I wouldn't be surprised to find myself with Adams doing a two-a-night nightclub routine--or acting in a comedy by William Shakespeare." When production was wrapped, Dean said in another press release, "I now regard Natalie, Nick and Sal as co-workers; I regard them as friends... about the only friends I have in this town. And I hope we all work together again soon." Following Dean's 1955 death in an automobile accident, Adams overdubbed some of James Dean's lines for the film
Giant (these are in Jett Rink's speech at the hotel) and dated co-star Natalie Wood. Adams tried to capitalize on Dean's fame through various publicity stunts, including a claim he was being stalked by a crazed female Dean fan, allowing himself to be photographed at Dean's grave in a contemplative pose, holding flowers and surrounded by mourning, teenaged female fans along with writing articles and doing interviews about Dean for fan magazines. He also claimed to have developed Dean's affection for fast cars, later telling a reporter, "I became a highway delinquent. I was arrested nine times in one year. They put me on probation, but I kept on racing... nowhere."
Elvis Presley
Nick Adams' widely publicized friendship with Elvis Presley began in 1956 on the set of Presley's film
Love Me Tender during the second day of shooting. Presley had admired James Dean and when the singer arrived in Hollywood he was encouraged by studio executives to be seen with some of the "hip" new young actors there. Meanwhile his manager Colonel Tom Parker was worried Elvis' new Hollywood acquaintances might influence Presley and even tell him what they were paying their managers and agents (usually a fraction of what Parker was getting). Elaine Dundy called Parker a "master manipulator" who used Nick Adams and others in the entourage (including Parker's own brother-in-law Bitsy Mott) to counter possible subversion against him and control Elvis' movements. She later wrote a scathing characterization of Adams:
...brash struggling young actor whose main scheme to further his career was to hitch his wagon to a star, the first being James Dean, about whose friendship he was noisily boastful... this made it easy for Parker to suggest that Nick be invited to join Elvis' growing entourage of paid companions, and for Nick to accept... following Adams' hiring, there appeared a newspaper item stating that Nick and Parker were writing a book on Elvis together.
Dundy also wrote, "Of all Elvis' new friends, Nick Adams, by background and temperament the most insecure, was also his closest." Adams was Dennis Hopper's roommate during this period and the three reportedly socialized together, with Presley "...hanging out more and more with Nick and his friends" and glad his manager "liked Nick." Decades later, Kathleen Tracy recalled Adams often met Presley backstage or at Graceland, where Elvis often asked Adams "to stay over on nights": "He and Elvis would go motorcycle riding late at night and stay up until all hours talking about the pain of celebrity" and enjoying prescription drugs.
Almost forty years later, writer Peter Guaralnick wrote that Presley found it "good running around with Nick ... — there was always something happening, and the hotel suite was like a private clubhouse where you needed to know the secret password to get in and he got to change the password every day." Presley's girlfriend June Juanico complained the singer was always talking about his friend Adams and James Dean. As with Dean, Adams capitalized on his association with Presley, publishing an account of their friendship in May 1957. In August 1958 after Elvis' mother Gladys died, Parker wrote in a letter, "Nicky came out to be with Elvis last Week was so very kind of him to be there with his friend."
The Rebel
In 1959 Adams starred in the ABC television series
The Rebel playing the character Johnny Yuma, a wandering, ex-Confederate, journal-keeping, sawed-off shotgun toting "trouble-shooter" in the old American west. He is credited as a co-creator of
The Rebel but had no role in writing the pilot or any of the series' episodes. Adams had asked his friend Andrew J. Fenady to write the pilot as a starring vehicle for him. The series' only recurring character, publicized as a "Reconstruction beatnik", was played by Adams. He reportedly consulted with John Wayne for tips on how to play the role. Adams wanted Presley to sing the theme song for
The Rebel but the show's producer wanted Johnny Cash, who made it a hit. Guest stars appearing on the series during its two year run included Dan Blocker, Johnny Cash, Leonard Nimoy, Tex Ritter and Robert Vaughn. 76 half-hour episodes were filmed before the series was cancelled in 1961. Reruns were syndicated for several years. Adams went back to TV and film work, along with a role in the short-lived but critically successful television series
Saints and Sinners.
Twilight of Honor
Adams was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as an unlikeable murder suspect in the film
Twilight of Honor (1963) which featured the film debuts of both Linda Evans and Joey Heatherton. He campaigned heavily for the award, spending over $8,000 on ads in trade magazines but many of his strongest scenes had been cut from the movie and he lost to Melvyn Douglas.
Toho Studios
In 1964, Adams had a leading role in an episode (
Fun and Games) of
The Outer Limits television series. A review of this episode written over three decades later would characterize him as an "underrated actor." By this time Adams' career was stalling. He had high hopes his co-starring performance with Robert Conrad in
Young Dillinger (1964) would be critically acclaimed but the project had low production values and both critics and audiences rejected the film. Also that year Adams guest starred in an episode of the short-lived CBS drama
The Reporter.
In 1965, after publicly insisting he would never work in films produced outside the US, Adams began accepting parts in Japanese science fiction monster movies (kaiju). He landed major roles in two science fiction epics from Toho Studios in Chiyoda, Tokyo. His first Japanese movie was
Frankenstein Conquers the World, in which he played Dr. James Bowen, a radiologist working in Hiroshima who encounters a new incarnation of the Frankenstein monster. Adams next starred in the sixth Godzilla film,
Invasion of Astro-Monster (known in the U.S. as
Monster Zero), in which he played Astronaut Glenn, journeying to the newly discovered Planet X. In both film plots his character had a love interest with characters portrayed by actress Kumi Mizuno. Actors at Toho Studios later fondly remembered Adams as a "team player". On the set of
Monster Zero Adams and co-star Yoshio Tsuchiya (who played the villainous Controller of Planet X) reportedly got along well and played jokes on each other. Adams made four films in Japan during 1965 and 1966. During this time he also co-starred with Boris Karloff in
Die, Monster, Die! (1965), a gothic horror—sci fi movie filmed in England.
1967: TV episodes and low budget films
In early 1967 Disney released
Mosby's Marauders, a now mostly forgotten but successful Civil War drama told from a southern perspective with Adams in the role of a cruel Union army sergeant. Adams guest-starred in five episodes of four TV series that year, including an installment of his friend Robert Conrad's
The Wild Wild West, an appearance in
Combat! and two episodes of
Hondo (a short-lived western which also had an ex-Confederate theme). Throughout 1967 and early 1968 he also worked in three low budget films. One of these was
Mission Mars (1968) which, having been released the same year as Stanley Kubrick's widely praised
A Space Odyssey, has been described as "rarely seen, and utterly dreadful." Adams' costume for this movie included an off-the-shelf motorcycle helmet. Reacting to
Mission Mars over 30 years later, SciFi reviewer Gary Westfahl wrote, "The only quality that Adams could persuasively project on film was a desperate desire to be popular, to be liked.... which helps to explain why Adams got his foot in many doors..." Adams' last US production was a more solid B picture, a stock car movie filmed in Iowa called
Fever Heat. His last film appearance was in the little seen Spanish-language western
Los Asesinos filmed in Mexico City, Mexico.