فصل 13

THIRTEEN

It took that terrible disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, to slow him down. There is no one I’ve known who found it more difficult to simply do nothing than Leonard. His was a life spent in motion; his mind was always racing ahead to the next project. At the height of his fame, for example, he decided it was time to finally get a college degree. While touring the country with various shows, he earned a degree from Antioch College. “I chewed up the whole elephant,” he said proudly, and he later was awarded an honorary doctorate. I mean, just think about this: his professional success was assured, he had sufficient money in the bank, he was realizing his childhood dreams by performing great theater in front of filled houses—and yet he had a need to fulfill his intellectual curiosity.

Adam Nimoy once said to me, as we wondered about Leonard’s inability to just be still, “Artists do these things because they have to; it’s not even a conscious choice. They just have to stay busy and challenge themselves to create.” Van Gogh averaged two paintings a week for almost a decade, Adam pointed out, which might well have been the source of Leonard’s fascination with his life. “Van Gogh was so focused and driven, and my dad was that way too. Both of them had a passion to create, to express themselves through their art. That’s what really turned my dad on.”

For Leonard, that art was photography. In addition to the economic freedom that Star Trek provided, it allowed Leonard creative freedom. As he told a reporter while rehearsing for the play Sherlock Holmes, “I’ve got nothing to prove to anybody anymore.” For a long time, I didn’t know about his passion for photography. When we were doing the show and he initially appeared with a camera in his hand, I thought, Oh, that’s nice, Leonard is going to take some pictures. But I didn’t have the slightest idea how passionate he was about it, or that he was an artist and this was his medium. In our many conversations during those years, he rarely mentioned photography, or if he did, it was in passing, nothing more than “I just bought a new camera.”

“Great. I’m looking for one too.”

But he must have had this interest that I knew nothing about for a long time. My wife, Liz, and I have some wonderful art in our home, but if I had to divest myself of everything extraneous in my life, except one thing other than my house and my family, I would get rid of the art and go with my horses. For me, horses are great art, and I can participate in the creation of that artistry by raising, showing, and riding them.

Unlike me, Leonard would have sacrificed anything other than those obvious things for his art, for his photography. My relationship to photography was simple: essentially, I enjoyed looking at nice pictures. Photographs, for me, captured memories. But for Leonard, the camera was something very different. And his deep passion for that art actually surprised me over the years. Steve Guttenberg remembers walking with Leonard outside a hotel, where a group of fans were waiting patiently. As those people started taking pictures, Leonard quietly cautioned Steve, “The camera takes your soul. Be careful of that.”

While Steve took it as a metaphor for the business, I suspect Leonard was stating simply the potential of a photograph to convey so much more than a captured image.

He had become fascinated by photography when he was thirteen years old, when his uncle gave him the bellows Kodak autographic camera that had been bought for him on the day he was born—a camera, by the way, that he kept for his entire life—and he learned from a young friend how to develop his own film. “I thought it was marvelous to be able to shoot a roll of film, go immediately into a darkroom—in our case, the family bathroom—develop the film, and make a print. I could buy a package of chemicals from Kodak for fifteen cents, and I loved the idea of being able to capture an image that way.” It was a form that expression that obviously intrigued him his whole life. In the early 1970s, for example, he began studying photography seriously, taking classes at UCLA and, for a time, considered pursuing it rather than continuing to act.

When talking about his photography, Leonard liked to quote his instructor at UCLA, Robert Heinecken, who at that time was championing photography as an art form rather than a technique to capture an instant. The difference, Heinecken said, was how you reacted if you happened to be walking down a street with your camera in your hand and you saw someone falling through space from a tall building: if you shot pictures of it because it was an event in progress, that was photojournalism, but the artist wouldn’t shoot that picture unless the theme he or she was working on had to do with the effects of space on the human figure.

Leonard got that. While for most people photography is visual, for Leonard it eventually became conceptual. “At the most primitive level … you’ve got to be able to capture something that speaks to the audience immediately. Photography works on two levels, one emotional and one technical. The emotional impact has to do with looking for something dramatic happening … something that reaches out and touches somebody in some way. The technical is having to do with composition and framing—light and dark, light and shadow.

“For many years I carried cameras wherever I went and photographed whatever was of interest,” he explained. “That’s changed. I no longer carry a camera looking for someone to take a picture of. I get an idea about a subject, then I get my cameras and explore that idea visually, to find a way to express it in photographs.”

Later he added, “While in film the story can unfold, in photography the story has to be captured in total in one moment. I’ve learned to use cameras to explore thematic ideas.”

While a lot of his work focused on the female form, in the 1980s, he did a whole series called Hands, a series of portraits of, obviously, hands. When you look at these black-and-white photos, some showing age, others elegance, or symbolism, it really does make you pause and think about hands. And then it brings your attention to other people’s hands. After looking at his photographs, it’s almost impossible not to simply look at other people’s hands in a new way, with a new appreciation. Years later, his representative in the fine-arts world described his work as “very sensual. But the other thing about Leonard’s work is that he is always interested in the backstory, why something was what it is.” That’s interesting, because as an actor, the backstory of a character is what we are always searching for and too often don’t find in the script. I’m not a photo critic, I know what I like, but when I look at his pictures I find myself pausing and thinking about that backstory. Whose hands are these? What do they say about that person?

Something else Leonard and I shared was our appreciation for the female form. He had the audacity, or the talent, to photograph. I would kid him about those beautiful nude models, but he was very professional about it. He began photographing nude women early in this part of his career, but it wasn’t the beauty that he was trying to capture. In fact, his models in many of those early pictures wouldn’t be considered especially sensual. The way he described it is that he didn’t shoot the body as an object but rather as a means to express a very specific idea. In the 1990s, he posed his both Caucasian and African American models almost as statues, using lighting to emphasize the beauty of the female form. I thought those photographs were especially beautiful, and I remember kidding him about that. It actually was this series that got me in some difficulty.

My involvement with photography started when I was approached by Playboy to do a guest photography shoot. They asked me to shoot a playmate. And I thought, Wow, Leonard did that, so I should be able to do that too. Although admittedly when I thought about doing this, I suspect my very specific idea was somewhat different from Leonard’s. I knew my beautiful wife, Elizabeth, would probably not appreciate the artistic elements of this, so to spare her that, I decided it would be best not to mention it. I figured, Look, it’s only Playboy; who’s ever even going to know that I did it?

By the end of the shoot, it was all rear ends and stomachs and heads and hands; just like Leonard, I was shooting the female form as an object. A very beautiful object. Not only was I the photographer, I also was the subject: Shatner shoots Playboy models. And as it turned out, I was correct; when Liz found out about it, she did not focus on the artistic merit. My whole rationale—If Leonard can do it, why can’t I?—didn’t seem to make quite as much sense in reality as it had in the decision-making period. To Liz’s credit, she did not ask me, “If Leonard jumped off a bridge, would you have to jump off a bridge?” She also did not admire my photographs as much as we did Leonard’s work.

In his later years, he created three major works in which he accomplished exactly what he had set out to do, use the lens to explore grand themes. For the first one, called Shekhina, he returned to the same subject that had led to the creation of the Vulcan salute. That day in the synagogue in which he sneaked a peek at the congregation hiding their eyes obviously had a lasting effect on him. In these photos, Leonard has photographed lovely women wearing religious items. The point of these works, he said, was to find “the feminine aspect of God.” The photographs as images are striking, but they became quite controversial. They also served to renew Leonard’s own connections to Judaism.

Many times on the high holidays, my wife and I would go to services with Leonard and Susan at their synagogue. The two of us would sit next to each other and pray together. I’m a spiritual person more than a religious person. I’m probably more attached to the energies of various places on earth than with the singular God who wrote the Bible. Leonard retained a much closer relationship to his roots. So on the high holidays, he’d tell me he’d bought tickets for us so we’d go. In some ways, I guess, it was a way of strengthening our bonds of friendship. It was a renewal, a confirmation.

But Leonard once admitted that his Judaism had “gone flat.” By that, I think he meant that while he continued to follow the broad rituals, his spiritual connection had dissipated. As he explained to Nadine Epstein in the magazine Moment in 2004, “A lot of my Judaism had to do with going through the motions. That meant going to the service, knowing when to stand up, knowing when to sit down … I’d come away thinking, did I really get what I was supposed to get out of that experience?… The answer was not always yes. I realized that a lot of the time I was going to these services because I should.”

That was Leonard, always looking for the background story. The concept of the Shechinah, which is not especially well known among American Jews, fascinated him, and this project really allowed him to explore important issues in modern Judaism—as well as forcing other Jews to respond to his photographic statement. And I guess that’s as good a definition of art as any other.

The photographs were published as a beautiful book, and the mixture of religion and sexuality was predictably combustible. When the book was announced, he was invited to speak by several Jewish organizations—but then those invitations were canceled. An Orthodox rabbi in Detroit threatened the Jewish center where he was scheduled to speak that if they allowed him to do so, he would take away the center’s kosher certification. When the Jewish Federation in Seattle disinvited him, a local temple asked him to speak—and about seven hundred people showed up. That’s the kind of response that I absolutely know thrilled Leonard. His photographs were forcing people to react.

You have to remember, photography wasn’t his hobby; it had replaced acting as his profession. His photographs were shown in galleries and sold to collectors. I bought several, and they were hanging in my home. His series that I especially responded to was called The Full Body Project. I suspect it would have been better for me if I had seen these images before I got that call from Playboy. This project started for Leonard at a seminar where he was showing some of his work. Afterward, a very large woman, weighing at least three hundred pounds, approached and said, “I’m a different body type, and I’m a model. Would you be interested in working with me?”

I can almost hear Leonard’s mind clicking into gear. “How do I shoot her?” he wondered. “Was I going to be reportorial? Was it going to be editorial? Was it going to be an art project? How should I light her? How should I present her? Should I present her full frontal nudity? Should I present her as sculpture—which is finally what I chose to do.” They arranged this model in classic poses and “her body took on shapes like marble sculpture.” When he included several of those photographs in an exhibition, they attracted by far the most attention. Leonard had found his theme. His original idea was to replicate famous images of fashion models instead using large women. As his point sharpened, he decided to explore the way American culture worships the thin body, especially our concepts of beauty. As he said, “I became fascinated with this idea.”

Leonard had traveled light-years away from Spock.

Fortunately, he found a burlesque group in San Francisco called the Fat-Bottom Revue in which all the performers were unabashedly and proudly large women. Some of them, in fact, are obese. The woman who formed the group, a trained anthropologist named Heather MacAllister, told Leonard that whenever a fat person stepped on the stage to perform, it wasn’t a joke; it was a political statement. That must have registered deeply with him and certainly was a spark that ignited his creativity. I think he set out to make that statement visually. They were delighted to pose completely nude for him, and the result is an astounding collection that almost forces people to pause and consider their own conceptions of the female form. In one classic photo, he has faithfully recreated the great Matisse painting The Dance using these large women.

As a reviewer commented, “With this work Leonard Nimoy has boldly gone where no photographer has ever gone before.” Proving, of course, that there never was a way to escape Star Trek.

And maybe that’s what Leonard saw when he mounted his last great project, which he called Secret Selves. It was based, he said, on a story he’d read about the Greek philosopher and playwright Aristophanes, who was searching for an explanation for human anxiety. He finally surmised that once humans had come into this world as double people, attached back-to-back with two heads, four arms, and four legs. Since the time the mighty Zeus had split them in half with his sword, people have felt part of themselves missing and have been searching for that lost aspect that makes them feel whole. His theme, he explained, was that “we all have aspects of ourselves that other people don’t necessarily know about or see,” and he wanted to provide an opportunity to finally show that person.

Admittedly, my Playboy photographs did not have such a noble theme.

I understood the point Leonard wanted to make, but in a very modern context. I was thinking about Leonard’s concept while I was having a wardrobe fitting for a show I was doing. The wardrobe lady brought a few pieces of clothing to my house, and we were testing several combinations to see what worked. As my character was supposed to be sharp and cool, she was dressing me to be sharp and cool. And as I looked in the mirror, I actually felt sharp and cool. I liked the feeling. In my life, I am not sharp and cool. No one who knows me well would use those words to describe me. But when I had dressed in this alter ego, I very much enjoyed the feeling and began wondering if we all wear the clothes that best fit who we are, or do we dress as the person we would like to be and then, in some way, become that person?

Leonard always dressed cool. He always had the right man bag, while I was always stuffing things in my pockets. I wanted to look the way he looked. For the Secret Selves project, Leonard invited about one hundred people living in Northampton, Massachusetts, to come to his gallery there, the R. Michelson Galleries, dressed as the person they truly believe they are on the most profound level, their secret self. Over a two-day period, Leonard photographed and interviewed ninety-five people, most of them having dressed for the occasion. He also did a fascinating video of these interviews.

His subjects ranged from the bizarre to the poignant, but each of them revealed something important of themselves to the camera. A painter who did portraits of people who had fought in wars fantasized about living a simpler life in the woods and came dressed as a tree. A woman who had lost her husband several years earlier and hadn’t disrobed for anyone since wanted to feel really beautiful once more and posed nude. An art critic harbored dreams of being “a mad scientist, but not completely mad,” and posed holding a “nuclear blue thing” that he’d made. An accountant whose fantasy was to be a rock star, playing in front of thousands of screaming teenaged girls stripped to his white jockey shorts and started pounding away on his guitar. A young woman who felt robbed of her childhood because her father was a traveling evangelical preacher came in wearing a homemade green hoodie with yellow dinosaur spikes down the back; for just a few moments, she wanted “to be the kid I didn’t get to be.”

As actors, Leonard and I had spent great portions of our careers wearing the guise of other characters, so it is endlessly fascinating looking at these photographs. As with his other work, it’s impossible to look at these pictures without feeling the emotion of the subjects.

When Leonard was asked why he had been so strongly attracted to creative photography, he explained, “I wanted to learn the philosophy of vision, to open my eyes to light and shadow and texture.” But his provocative photographs also were the perfect accompaniment to the written word. When he first began taking studio pictures, he wondered what would be the best format to publish them and decided to produce a book of photographs and words. But rather than explanatory prose, which would have provided information about the pictures but not about the emotion, he decided to write poetry.

His curiosity about poetry began when he was eight years old, he said. He had stopped by a fountain and read the inscription with curiosity: “Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days.” Taking that literally, he tossed pieces of bread into the fountain where they were quickly gobbled by pigeons. But he came back for several days, wondering exactly how many days constituted “many” and what to expect.

I did not know those first few years we worked together that Leonard wrote poetry. Rather, I didn’t know that Leonard was a poet. That was a part of his soul that I hadn’t met yet. That part of the brain that I had become most familiar with was his straight-ahead intellect; he was very focused on the reality of his performance, on solving script problems and negotiating a fair deal. He lived very much in the world of traffic jams, bills to be paid at the end of the month, and the next job, always the next job. Poetry didn’t seem to be part of that world; it came from a very different place, and until his first book of poetry, You & I, was published he had never allowed me—or, as far as I know, anyone else from the show—access to it.

I did know he had a love for the English language; that I saw from the way he worked on scripts. To the occasional dismay of our writers, he wasn’t an actor who settled where he thought there was a better way of doing something or saying something. From that came Spock’s precise use of the language. A lot of humor on the show came from the fact that Spock responded to the specific words that one of us used, rather than the nuance that was intended. Whatever they came from, Leonard’s poems were word pictures of emotion. Just as he did with his cameras, he tried to capture feelings with his words.

I am an incurable romantic

I believe in hope, dreams and decency

I believe in love

Tenderness and kindness.

I believe in mankind

That first book was intended to be a small printing, as he called it “an exploratory lifting of the mask on his inner thoughts,” but the desire at that time for all things Spock made the book far more successful. There were five printings and 50,000 hardcover books in print, and—as Leonard proudly pointed out—the first printing of the paperback was 250,000. What helped sell the book, of course, was the fact that Leonard was willing to promote it by doing bookstore signings. It may have been Leonard’s poetry—but fans were getting Spock’s autograph. There was one memorable evening, though, at a book signing in Oradell, New Jersey, that his competition was doing considerably better than he was. The same day he was signing, Linda Lovelace, who had become famous as the star of XXX-rated Deep Throat, was signing copies of her book. “I had a few people in front of me,” he said, laughing, “but her line was stretching around the block.” Leonard did, however, come up with a strong selling pitch; he told them that You & I made a wonderful gift book, then asked, “Would you give your mother Linda Lovelace’s book for Christmas?”

He published seven books of his poetry over two decades, and you could draw a straight line from the first book through the final book and it would become obvious how little he changed over that period. Trying to understand poets through their poetry requires higher degrees than I have, but it is obvious reading his work that from the beginning to the end Leonard was intent on emotionally defining grand themes like love, compassion, loss, and the endless search for roots. For the man who became famous playing the ultimate dispassionate character, his poems successfully bring out the range of important emotions.

While some reviewers of Leonard’s photography wrote that he had found his voice through his art, in fact he actually found his voice through his voice. Making a living as an actor is in some ways a hustle. You don’t let opportunities pass by. Leonard had a melodic baritone. Close your eyes and just listen; your memory will hear him for you. That voice was an important part of his actor’s instrument, and even after he had mostly stopped performing, he continued to act with his voice.

There are singers who fight their whole lives for that single break; for Leonard and me, singing success came easily. I know it was not something I had ever seriously considered, and I can’t imagine Leonard harbored secret dreams about one day becoming a British singing star. I mean, the rock-star look in the ’60s was the Beatles mop-top and various versions of long hair. Spock’s hair was exactly the opposite, more of a scraping-brush top. While we were doing the original series, a Paramount executive told Leonard, “There’s a gentleman in New York who’s producing an album of music from Star Trek. Your picture as Spock is going to be on the cover. Would you like to be involved in the making of the album?”

That was the appeal of Spock. Put his picture on the album cover and it was going to sell—and Leonard wasn’t going to earn a penny from it. He just inhabited Spock; he didn’t own his rights. Six of the twelve tracks featured on Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space already had been recorded. Leonard agreed to speak-sing the remaining six—as Spock. Leonard cowrote several of the songs on the album, which include “Music to Watch Space Girls By,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth,” and, of course, “Highly Illogical.” One more recent Amazon ‘reviewer,’ while enjoying Leonard’s mostly spoken-word renditions, did describe a song that appeared on several later albums called “Amphibious Assault” as something “George Patton would have written on LSD.”

While Leonard took almost everything he did seriously, which was our work ethic, he did not pretend to be a classic performer, admitting, “I’m an actor who records. I’d be terribly surprised if this singing career turned into anything big. I’m not passing judgment on my capabilities, but I’m thirty-seven years old and I’ve been an actor for seventeen years. I’m just getting off the ground as a singer.”

Dot Records promoted the album heavily. When Leonard showed up at record stores to promote it, he usually was greeted by hundreds of screaming—and record-buying—kids. Although when he appeared in Cambridge, it was his mother who showed up, telling a reporter, “He looks tired. He’s such a tired boy.” About an hour earlier, she’d been with him at a television appearance—and as that reporter noted, she’d brought a bowl of kreplach for him. And as for his singing career, “He did have a certain ability for public speaking. He behaves himself very nice.”

Mr. Spock’s Music was so successful that Dot, which was a division of Paramount, signed Leonard to a contract for several more albums—as himself. Several of the tracks were released as singles, and Leonard appeared on several of the most popular variety and talk shows to promote them. During his musical career he released five albums; his most successful albums were in kind of a folk-rock style. In 1997 music publishers released a compilation of both of our “biggest hits.” Spaced Out, it was called, and one reviewer described it as including “surreal soliloquies, mad monologues and peculiar parlance!”

But the one song that has attracted the most attention and remains the … the highlight of his musical career, brought together two iconic worlds, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings. Talk about when worlds collide. Leonard was a big fan of The Hobbit, so it was not at all surprising that he decided to record “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” It was on his second album, and he performed it on several TV shows, including American Bandstand and a short-lived variety show hosted by Ricky Nelson called Malibu U. When asked about it, Leonard described it as a delightful kids’ song but said it fell under the “be-careful-what-you-do heading, because it lasts a long time.” A video of him lip-synching on the variety show has gotten more than three million hits on YouTube—and when he made a commercial with Zachary Quinto for Audi of America that was the song he was happily singing.

Without question, one of the projects that Leonard had the most fun with was called Alien Voices; the “aliens” being Leonard and John de Lancie, who created the omnipresent Star Trek character Q. In the early 1990s, some of Leonard’s friends were doing a revival of what is arguably the greatest radio broadcast in history, Howard Koch’s adaptation of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds; the story of the 1938 broadcast that was done so convincingly that listeners in several parts of the country actually believed the earth was being invaded by Martians. Fittingly, it was the nation’s first great alien-invasion story. The revival was to be directed by John de Lancie. Leonard was asked to do the Welles role. One of the benefits of being an aging actor of some repute is you can afford to do things just for fun. Leonard and I were both brought up on radio, in which great stories come alive in your mind, colored by your own experiences. Radio dramas are a lost medium, so naturally Leonard couldn’t turn it down.

Apparently, it was as much fun as it sounds like it would be. In fact, Leonard and John enjoyed it so much that they decided to form a company to record more of these classic stories as audio dramas. As John explained, “I told Leonard, ‘Look, you’re an alien, I’m an alien. We’ll call it Alien Voices and do adaptations of classic science-fiction stories.”

Leonard apparently got it right away, telling John, “I’ve been looking for something that would allow me that type of creativity.”

It really was the perfect concept. As John described it, “We all love radio because sound is a pathway straight to the imagination. In an age of dazzling visual effects, the mind still has the power to conjure the best scenery, the fastest space ships, and the prettiest women.” They could bring some of the greatest adventure stories ever written to life for another generation.

The first two projects, which were recorded in a studio and released as audiobooks, were Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. There was, however, an unexpected technical problem: Leonard loved chocolate. Leonard’s love for sweets was well known, but especially for chocolate. Apparently, there was a large bowl of chocolate kisses in the studio, and Leonard dug into it. The sound engineer finally told John that he had to tell Leonard to stop; the chocolate was gumming up the works. Chocolate apparently sticks in your throat and slightly changes your voice. Not wanting to upset Leonard, John figured out a diplomatic solution: he suggested to Leonard, “Hey! Why don’t you have a delicious apple?” Apparently, apples clear your throat.

Leonard burst out laughing and had some more chocolate. But the engineer saved the recording, devising an algorithm that successfully filtered out the chocolate. “The Leonard filter,” as it became known, was employed for the next several years.

After the success of the first two productions, they decided to go a step further, producing a theatrical experience in which actors would read their roles from the script in front of a live audience. That’s when I got involved. They had decided to do a stage reading of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, complete with an orchestra and sound effects. John approached the Syfy channel and was told, essentially, “If we can get Nimoy in any configuration, we’ll do it!” The performance was taped in front of 1,700 people in the historic Variety Arts Theatre. Most of the cast had appeared in one of the many versions of Star Trek. I was absolutely delighted to be part of this, although I was billed as “the surprise guest.” I was cast as the Grand Lunar, King of the Moon! When I walked on stage several minutes into the story, I received a very nice welcome from the audience. I took my place in front of the microphone, held up my script, and said, in a hesitant falsetto voice, “Welcome to the moon.” Leonard and John had to fight to keep straight faces. As an actor, there are few things funnier than being in the midst of a performance watching your fellow actors fighting desperately to remain in character and not break out in laughter. Because once they lose it, it stays lost. They inhale, they suck their cheeks in, they use every possible strategy not to laugh. Leonard and John managed to do it. The audience, however, did not.

The concept was so appealing that Leonard and John took it to Disney with the thought of adapting The First Men in the Moon into a feature film. Disney loved the concept but required two changes: first, they wanted an eighteen-year-old female character added to the story. And second, they did not want to do it as a period piece. When John pointed out that it would be difficult to call a contemporary story The First Men in the Moon, because it was well known we have already had men on the moon, the executive thought about it for a moment and then suggested, “Well, go to Mars!”

Rather than doing H. G. Wells’s The First Men and an Eighteen-Year-Old-Girl in Mars, Leonard and John agreed to return to their original concept. They staged Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World: A Halloween Trilogy featuring stories by Poe, Kipling, and Wilde, and Wells’s The Invisible Man, which of course was perfect for an audio production.

What appealed to Leonard about this format was the emphasis on the story. “When you go back to the roots,” he explained to writer Paul Simpson in the magazine Dreamwatch, “you discover what these authors were really thinking about, and what the social context is of some of these projects, which perhaps has been lost over the years when people have done derivative versions.”

Leonard and John also did an original script that they performed mostly at conventions. Spock vs. Q, in which they debated the fate of earthkind as their legendary characters, proved so popular that they did a second version. Eventually, they began receiving requests from schools and universities for copies of their scripts so they could put on their own performances. It was a perfect concept for students; it didn’t require costumes or sets, and the lines didn’t have to be memorized. Making it easy for kids to act obviously appealed to Leonard, and he and John created another play expressly for students, The Wright Brothers’ First Flight. While staging that play, they created an instructional video that included “important lessons and techniques … including the creation of special effects, sound, and original music.”

Alien Voices was a solid success, lasting four years, and the audio stories remain available.

I don’t think any actor ever really retires; rather I think they remain waiting for that one part that intrigues them, or captures their imagination, or, in some cases, just pays a lot. In the later part of his life, while he was always being offered things, Leonard was able to choose to do only those things that appealed to him.

He did a lot of voiceover work, which, for an actor, is comparatively easy. Easy only in terms of the physical aspect—no makeup! I suspect that was especially appealing to him. His voice appeared in two Transformers films; in 1986’s The Movie, he created the memorable character Galvatron, who blasted his fellow villain Starscream, and in 2011 he gave voice to the lunar-stranded robotic warrior Sentinel Prime in The Dark of the Moon. In the Hanna-Barbera daytime Emmy Award–winning version of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, he served as the children’s guide, Mr. Moundshroud. He did voiceovers in the mostly animated 1994 film The Pagemaster and the 2001 animated film Atlantis: The Lost Empire; he also narrated the video games Star Trek Online and Civilization IV and even appeared in two episodes of The Simpsons. The result, he once said, was that he successfully spanned generations of fans. “It’s very satisfying,” he said. “Many years ago, people used to say to me, ‘My kids are crazy about you!’ Now I have kids saying, ‘My grandparents are crazy about you!’”

He finally reprised Spock one final time in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. In that top-rated show, the ultimate geek comedy, Spock, as portrayed with a toy figure and Leonard’s voice, visits star Jim Parsons in a dream sequence. But if there ever was a doubt of the respect Leonard earned from the great geek community, and the esteem in which he was held, it was answered forever in a 2008 episode of that show in which Parsons’s Sheldon Cooper receives the greatest gift of his lifetime—an autographed cloth napkin that Leonard supposedly used to wipe his mouth at a restaurant. As the shocked and thrilled and perhaps diabolical scientist Parsons explains, “I possess the DNA of Leonard Nimoy … Do you know what this means?… I can grow my own Leonard Nimoy!”

Actually, while they were shooting that episode, Leonard was asked to sign the napkin they would use. It was kind of a gag for the cast, which he did gladly. That napkin, now framed, hangs over the main set of the show.

That voiceover was Spock’s last appearance on TV, although he was always with Leonard. I remember Leonard telling me one day he’d met Barack Obama. This was sometime in 2008, just after Obama had announced his candidacy. It was not surprising that Leonard was invited to a luncheon to meet him. I suspect it pleased him a great deal, given his lifelong political activism, that a young African American would be a serious candidate for the presidency. It was a small group of people at someone’s home—a typical politician’s meet-and-greet and by the way do you have your checkbook with you. But as Leonard told the story, “We were standing on the back patio, waiting for him. He came in and walked through the house, and then he saw me. He stopped—and held up his hand with his fingers separated, the Vulcan gesture. And he smiled, big smile, and said, ‘They told me you were here.’ We had a very enjoyable conversation, and when we were done we shook hands, and I told him, ‘It would be logical if you would become president.’”

He did play one final role; that of a scientist living in an alternate universe in J. J. Abrams’s TV show Fringe. When asked why he took this role, Leonard explained, “I did not intend to do any more work. And the fact is I don’t consider this work. This is great fun.” The show, which ran for five seasons, is a future-fiction drama concerning the crime-solving exploits of the FBI’s little-known Fringe Division. The show is a little bit of a lot of shows, everything from The X-Files, Altered States, The Twilight Zone, and cop procedurals like CSI. While Leonard’s character figured prominently in the plot, he appeared only as a voice; the writers came up with clever ideas when his physical presence was necessary, including an animated episode and a storyline in which he possesses another body.

After the first two seasons, Leonard felt his character, William Bell, had become too nice a person, which left him, as an actor, no place interesting to take the character. But then the writers twisted perceptions, turning Bell into a mostly evil character—and regaining Leonard’s interest enough for him to agree to make a surprise appearance on the show. “J. J. Abrams is a friend of mine,” he said. “When he calls, I listen. I’m still a sucker for a good role, so it was pretty easy to convince me that there was an interesting challenge in the character. It allowed me to play aspects of a character that I haven’t played in a long time.” One last time, he got to play the villain.