One Man's Métier

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by BLAKE GREEN
Staff Writer

NICE GUYS aren't driving Chris Noth's career these days. His Mr. Big, in various states of undress in HBO's "Sex and the City," spent last season shirking commitment, then impulsively dumping his long-suffering girlfriend to marry a younger woman. This season, he's an adulterer, back and forth between beds.

In "Gore Vidal's The Best Man," the political melodrama opening Sunday night, Sept. 17, at the Virginia Theatre on Broadway, Noth plays the unctuously strait-laced Sen. Joe Cantwell, an all's-fair-in-politics-and-war, mammothly ambitious candidate for his party's presidential nomination.

"The Best Man" is set during the 1960 national convention, strongly hinted to be the Democrats', and on a late summer evening, not long after this year's batch of nominating conventions, here is Noth, if not nice, nicely chiseled and as plain-clothed and brash as Mike Logan, the detective he played for five years on NBC's "Law & Order."

His Greenwich Village apartment was the subject of a gushy In Style article earlier this year, but the actor likes to hang out at Da Marino, a subterranean restaurant in the theater district that he began frequenting back in his "Law & Order" days and where an occasional scene from both of his television series was filmed.

Sipping red wine and puffing a cigarette, Noth seems minus that much-touted brooding quality of his recent characters. The word hunk springs to mind of course, although the tall, dark-eyed actor, who gives hope to fortysomething males everywhere, turns out to be a man of ideas and varied interests as well. Ethan McSweeney, director of "The Best Man," says he thinks of Noth as "a character man trapped in a leading man's body. I don't know how comfortable he is with his fame. He's very unpretentious; he doesn't act like a sex symbol at all."

Noth collects art -- his selections, made on his travels, give him "a certain amount of calm and feeling of home," he says -- and he is an aspiring writer, not just of film treatments in which he stars, his only credit to date. (The television film "Exiled," a 1998 "Law & Order" extension of the adventures of Det. Logan three years after his role was written out of the series, was created with Charles Kipps.)

Calling poetry "my secret mistress," Noth says he's aware this opens the floor to skepticism. "An actor writing poetry is so loaded. It sounds suspect; the prejudice goes too deep -- and has nothing to do with the fact I've written all my life.

"You always like your character," Noth says in defense of unscrupulous Caldwell, indecisive Big and the rest of his resume gang, back to Faust, his dramatic debut in Marlborough College days ("It got me out of Latin class"). Later -- after Yale Drama School -- he tackled Hamlet, perhaps the first of his brooders.

Could that affinity be there because there's a lot of Noth in the characters he plays? For the record, the actor doesn't think either Mr. Big or Sen. Caldwell is a bad guy. "Is it his [Mr. Big's] fault she's so susceptible?" he asks about "Sex and the City" girlfriend Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker).

But later, in a rare departure into his personal life, Noth, linked romantically with an assortment of high-profile celebrity babes but unattached so far, says: "I look at marriage like John Keats looked at poetry: 'It either comes naturally or not at all.' I had relationships all through my 20s and I thought I was going to marry every one of them. But it didn't work out. If I don't feel that now, it's just because I don't feel it now. The women aren't right in terms of that commitment."

As for Caldwell, he says, "Anyone who wants to be president of the United States has to have ambition and a certain amount of ruthlessness." That the character seems totally void of a sense of humor is, of course, something else; Noth's, accompanied by a slightly maniacal cackle, seems more than adequate.

Asked if he's ever considered politics a personal option, he replies, "I'm not qualified; I have inhaled -- many a time." Back on the subject of his writing, he says, "Literature has been the foundation of my life. Books are my solace. That and music, friendship, wine -- and women."

"Chris is definitely not the guy you see on the show," says Darren Starr, the creator of "Sex and the City." "He has a really great sense of humor and is more a guy you can really hang with than the guy he plays. He's a lot more of a free spirit than Mr. Big."

Having completed the filming of this season's television package, Noth says he jumped at the chance to be in the revival of Vidal's play. "Believe me, good material is hard to find," he says, relishing having gotten to fly to Italy, where the playwright lives, to discuss the character with one of the country's most illustrious literary figures.

Vidal's historical novel "Burr" is one of Noth's favorite reads, he says. "I think it would make a great movie." (Vidal, who's been in town for previews of his play, chuckled as he supplied a footnote from their conversations: "I think Chris wants to play Burr. Of course, I've had to point out that Burr was only five-foot-four.")

Noth also has a detailed plot outline for an epic story, set in revolutionary Russia -- the country is another of his interests -- that he says he'd like to persuade Vidal to write, "and soon, so it can be made into a movie before I get too old to play one of the brothers." (Vidal complimented the story as "interesting," adding, "When there's time, I'll think about it.")

More to the moment at hand, Vidal, who'd been aware of Noth's "Sex and the City" work only "dubbed in Italian," says that in other revivals of his play, actors [playing Caldwell] "have gone for the villainy. Chris has taken the approach that he really believes he's the best man, the people's candidate. It's very helpful when you have an actor who sees through the surface of the character."

Starr is also appreciative of Noth's grasp of his HBO role: "Chris had a lot of insight into a successful guy who was very wary of commitment. He saved the part from being a cliche." Big was brought back for a second season "because the relationship seemed so fertile."

Playwright Romulus Linney, whose adaptation of Ernest Gaines' "A Lesson Before Dying" is running at Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre, cast Noth in "Patronage" in 1997 after becoming a fan of his work on "Law & Order." "He's the type of actor who can do whatever he wants," says Linney, with whom Noth hopes to write a play about Delmore Schwartz, the late poet they both admire.

"He was a poet of immense promise," Noth says, explaining his fascination with Schwartz and admitting to having been a bit chagrined to discover that Vidal, "who knew him, didn't like him."

Might such an endeavor lead to Noth's playing Schwartz at some later juncture in his career? In this case, the actor wouldn't have to convince himself that he liked the character. As for identifying, well, the poet supposedly was quite a ladies' man...

Noth smiles, but he doesn't fall for that route into his personal life. His is a more serious interest: "In a short span of time he was completely discarded like an old overcoat," he says of Schwartz, "who died alone in an old hotel. As you get older, you think about things like that."

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