From Animal House to Belushi to Seinfeld: Mark “Neidermeyer” Metcalf’s Story

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. There are some of our favorites. Mark Metcalf, as an actor, often identified as playing the role of an antagonist. He is best known for his role as the sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Niedermeyer in the 1978 comedy Animal House, a character he later emulated in the 1984 music videos for the songs We’re Not Going to Take It and I Want a Rock by the heavy metal hair band Twisted Sister. He is also known for playing the role of the Maestro on the hit sitcom Seinfeld. Mark Metcalf sat down with Greg Hangler and shared his story. Here’s Mark.

I was born in Findlay, Ohio, which is the home of Tasty Taters and where Ben Roethlisberger grew up and lived. In fact, in Hancock County, where Findlay, Ohio, is, which is about seventy-five miles south of Toledo. I’m the second most famous person to ever come out of Findlay, Ohio. According to the Chamber of Commerce, or whoever makes those things up, Ben Roethlisberger is number one, and I’m number two, but that’s all right, I’ll take number two. So, I was born there. My mom was from Ohio, and my dad was from St. Louis, Missouri. And they met during the war, in 1945, I guess. My mother was a WAVE, and she was decoding messages in an office in Washington, D.C. My dad, who had served most of the war on a carrier in the Pacific, was back doing some intelligence work, analysis, and things like that. My mother lived in a house. She used to tell this story: My mother lived in a house with five other women, all involved in the war effort, and my father used to come up to their house for dinner. And every one of the women, except my mother, thought that he was going to ask one of them to marry them. He was a good-looking guy, and he was in uniform, and he was a smart guy and a nice guy. And they all thought, except for my mother. She thought because she was kind of tall and a little gawky, and they never thought that he would ask her. But he asked her, and my mother one time showed me the house where I was conceived in Washington, and I was really surprised, but she proudly told me, pointed out the house on a little street in Chevy Chase, you work, and said, “You were conceived in that house.” So, it’s nice to know where you started. Ah. And so after I was born, and then I went back to St. Louis because my father had a job when he got out of the Navy. He had a job with an engineering. He had graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison in engineering. Graduated early. I think he was 20 when he graduated, went to school at 16. He was a real smart guy. He worked on the crew at Furgarif from Parcel that designed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which is a twenty-three-mile-long combination bridge and tunnel across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. National Geographic called it the eighth engineering wonder of the world. And he was put in charge of all the tunnel work, and he became the kind of engineer who at one point was called the world’s foremost expert on tunnels. And I hung out with him. There are two shipping channels in and out of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. They couldn’t build bridge over them because they were the Navy shipping channels. All the Norfolk warships come in and out of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. So they had to build tunnels under these because if you build a bridge over it, the enemy could bomb the bridge into the into the channel and block it. So they had to—so they had to build four islands, and then they brought the tunnel tubes up from Texas on big barges, and then they filled them with water and sank them, put them into the… It was kind of an amazing engineering feat, and that inspired me in a lot of ways to go to college as engineer. I went to the University of Michigan and quickly discovered that engineering was not really for me. It was a little dry, but I didn’t know how dry it was until I got my roommate my sophomore year. I had come audition for a couple of plays. They were doing the three parts of Henry VI, and the girls are really friendly in the theater department. That’s what he told me, and he was right. The girls were a lot friendlier in the theater department. And I got cast in, I think, fifteen different parts, and that kind of hooked me because it seemed like everybody in the Metcalf background was either a minister, a Congregationalist minister, or a librarian, or an engineer. So I went from that rather dry atmosphere to these theater backstage, in the theater where everybody’s yelling and screaming at each other one minute and making out passionately the next minute, and so it’s like, “Oh, brave New world, what creatures are they here?” As Miranda says at the end of The Tempest, it was really kind of magnificent, an eye-opener, and I got stuck in it, and I’ve been doing it ever since. So, I just got it, and I really got into theater. I never thought I’d get a degree in it. I changed from engineering to architecture because it was a little bit more creative. I had to claim a major, so I claimed English was my major for a while, Psychology was my major for a while, Forestry was my major for a while. And I ended up with my degree in theater because it was the only thing I was taking classes in. I just stopped going to classes except for theater classes. In fact, they tried to flunk me out because my grades were so bad. And the theater department—all the teachers in the theater department—wrote letters to the teachers in the English department, the teachers in the French department, the teachers all the classes I was failing because I wasn’t going. And they said, “You can’t fail him! You’ve got to give him—get him a tutor! We’ll get him a tutor, get him a passing grade, because we need him to do plays.” So, I became like a theater jock, the way football players got to take the easiest classes, and I got automatic A’s because they were on the football team in University of Michigan, anyway. And that’s how I got my degree. And I’m ashamed of that. Oh, I’m not that ashamed of it, but I’m a little embarrassed by it.

And you’re listening to Mark Metcalf tell his story. We continue with his story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Mark Metcalf’s story. Starting off as an engineering major, an English major, a forestry major. I didn’t know there was such a thing. And ultimately, well, he becomes, as he put it, a theater jock, being bailed out by all the folks in the theater department who wanted to save him from his own academic failings. And Mark Metcalf, by the way—well, you know him as Niedermeyer in Animal House and you’ve seen him in Twisted Sister videos, the Maestro in Seinfeld and the Master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Let’s continue with Mark Metcalf’s story.

When I graduated, I actually wanted to go to graduate school because I wanted to learn more about the theater. But also, I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I didn’t think the war was a great thing, but primarily I didn’t want to go fight it because I thought I’d be really good at it. I knew enough about myself to know that I was good at taking orders and good at giving orders. So, I fit in that military hierarchy like a cog in that wheel. And I didn’t want to become that guy, so I acted him. Later on, when I did Niedermeyer, I sort of acted that guy because I knew where that guy lived inside me, and I thought I would be good at it, but I didn’t want to become him. I wanted to become something else. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted to become something else. So, when I graduated, I just took off for the West Coast. I hitchhiked. I got one straight—one ride all the way to San Francisco from Ann Arbor. Guy—I can’t remember his name—but he had a 1948 pickup truck that you had to jump-start every time he started it. So, whenever we stopped for gas, we had to try to find a gas station where you could push it pretty easily to jump-start it. Whenever we stopped for the night and slept in the back—which is what we did, or camped—we had to park it on the hill, so we’d get up in the morning and jump-start it really easily. And it ran out of oil about every 120 miles, so we had to carry oil with us. We were real cowboys. We had a great time, but we took us two weeks or so to get across the country to San Francisco. We dropped me off in San Francisco because that’s where I thought the Summer of Love was, in 1968. It turns out the Summer of Love was 1967, and by ’68 it had gotten pretty sour. The day before I arrived on Haight-Ashbury, two kids had died because somebody had sold them acid that was Drano—just a capsule—and it was Drano and ate through their stomach, and they died. So, it was not a—wasn’t peace loved granola. It was—it was the dirty side of being a hippie. I stayed there for a while, and then I hitchhiked down to L.A., and then I felt like I needed to keep moving because the draft board was still looking for me. I guess I didn’t talk to my parents, so I didn’t want them to know where I was, because my parents were the kind of people that would have told the draft board where I was so they could come and get me. And I didn’t want to be gotten, so I hitchhiked up to—I mean, I drove up to Portland first and then took a ride and went out to Mount Hood. But I got a job as the assistant in the rental and repair shop, so I had to learn how to repair skis. After I’d been there for a couple of months, I was skiing on rental skis, and I had a pair of skis back home with my parents in my parents’ house in New Jersey. So I contacted my parents and I asked them if they’d send my headmasters, and they did. But they put in the box with the skis—they put the letter from the draft board saying, “You have to show up at a certain time and a certain date in Newark, New Jersey, for your physical.” And this is kind of person that I was then and still I am. Probably, my figuring was that if I never got the letter, it didn’t matter. But once I had the letter, I had to do it. So, but I didn’t. I really didn’t want to do it, so I tried to get into Canada. I tried to walk into Canada. I got to ride up to the way up in the Panhandle, got to ride a little north of there, and then I got out, and I just thought, “Well, I’ll walk.” Canada’s just over there on the map, you know, like an inch away. 100 miles. I can walk 100 miles through the wilderness. I’ve been living in the wilderness. But no, it’s real tough country up there. So, I hitchhiked back closer towards Seattle. I thought, “Well, I’ll go across on a road rather than try to cross in the middle of the wilderness.” And I got to the border, and Bob Schmaltz, knowing I was trying to get out of the country, had given me his driver’s license—not his passport, but his driver’s license—and I think I even had a birth certificate of his. But I changed my name because I figured in my stone-paranoid state that the government would be looking for me at the border. That’s why I had to sneak across. So, I tried to go across as Bob Schmaltz. But I got turned away at the border because they found my two different sets of ID—as Bob Schmaltz and as Mark Metcalf—and they didn’t want me in Canada because I looked bad, and I was, you know, I was. I had long hair down the middle of my back, dirty on the road. I wore high-fringed moccasins. I was, you know, I was a hippie. So, I hitchhiked back to New Jersey. I didn’t have a lot of guys from my high school were there at the same time, and they all had briefcases filled with letters from doctors about their bone spurs or whatever else they might have had that kept them from going to Vietnam. And I didn’t have any of that stuff. But I was just really crazy, and they saw that right away, and they gave me a 4F so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. So, they had these auditions in Chicago for regional theaters all over the country, and I did that, and they got offered a job at Milwaukee Rep. So, I went to Milwaukee and did a season up there, and when that season was over, they didn’t hire anybody back, and so I didn’t know where to go or what to do. And a bunch of the people that had been working there were from New York and were heading to New York to try to work in the theater—New York—and I just went to New York. And so for the next twenty-five years, I lived on St. Mark’s Place between First and A, from 1970 until 1993, so I guess twenty-three years. The first five years I was in New York, I didn’t want to do movies or TV. I just said no all that because it was beneath me. I was a stage actor. I wanted to do Shakespeare and Chekhov and Ibsen and people like that, but they pay you nice money. And the first movie I ever did, I was doing a play on Broadway called Streamers, and somebody saw it, and they had me come in an audition. I didn’t even have to audition. I just had to meet with the producer and the director. Fred Zinnemann directed it. It was a movie called Julia. They were going to shoot it in England. I only had three days. It was a one-scene part with Jane Fonda, and I quit the play. I was doing the play Streamers in New York for Joe Papp, and I lived in England for six weeks. I worked for three days; they paid me for six weeks. I thought, “This is what the movies were always like.” You got to go to fancy places, they paid way too much money, and you got to do work that was just plain fun. And so I thought the movies were like that. So, I started saying yes to movies. It turns out they’re not all like that, but they’re mostly fun for the most part. The next one I did was Animal House. A friend of mine named John Hurd. He and I lived across the street from each other. I was living with a woman named Pamela Reed, an actress, was engaged to marry her, and he was living with a wonderful woman named Patricia Triani. And we went to see a play in Central Park. But we took a picnic, and Pamela and Patricia made potato salad and fried chicken, and it was a real American feast. And while we’re sitting there outside the theater, this big, heavy guy with long hair, big face, comes walking towards us, and John Hurd, who had lived in Chicago and worked in Chicago for a while. He had met John there because John had been working at Second City there, so he said, “Hey, John, come on over!” And nobody knew who John Belushi was, but we invited him to sit down, have some chicken if you want. “What are you doing?”