فصل 03

THREE

Steve Guttenberg was directed by Leonard in the hit comedy Three Men and a Baby. It’s the story of three bachelors—played by Guttenberg, Tom Selleck, and Ted Danson—who have to take care of a baby left by one of their girlfriends. It’s generally accepted among actors that the hardest thing to do is work with animals and babies. When I asked Guttenberg if that was true, he smiled and shook his head. “That’s not true at all,” he said. “The hardest thing is not working.”

After being discharged, Leonard and Sandi, who was pregnant with their second child, their son, Adam, rented a small apartment on La Cienega, and Leonard went right to work—driving a cab. He knew it might take time to get reestablished, and they needed to pay the rent. Driving a cab, like waiting tables, was the perfect job for an actor. He could work at night while going to auditions during the day, and when he got a part, he could quit without being missed. “I did that kind of work for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t want to take a responsible job where people depended on me. If I did take a job where there was any dependency on me, I would let them know I could leave abruptly. I’m an actor!”

I actually never knew Leonard drove a cab until much later in our lives, when he just happened to mention that he had driven a cab in the same neighborhood in which he then lived. And then he told me about his most memorable passenger and what he had learned from him. Democratic senator Adlai Stevenson, then trying to get the party’s presidential nomination after losing to Eisenhower in 1952, was speaking at a political dinner being held at the Beverly Hilton. Leonard was told to pick up a passenger at the Bel Air Hotel. That passenger turned out to be Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy found out Leonard was from Boston, he barraged Leonard with questions about the West End, about his parents’ immigrant experience, and about Leonard’s acting career. Leonard told him it was tough, then asked him about Stevenson’s chances of getting the nomination for a second time. Rather than answering, Kennedy leaned forward and said, “You talk to a lot of people. What do you think?”

When they reached the Hilton, something else memorable happened: Kennedy tried to stiff him for the $1.25 fare. “He stepped out of the cab and started to walk away without paying. By this time, he’d been distracted.” One thing about Leonard, when he did the work, he expected to be paid. And as I would learn, he was willing to fight for what he believed he was owed. So Leonard got out of his cab and followed Kennedy into the hotel. “I want my $1.25,” he said. Kennedy found someone he knew and borrowed $3, which he handed to Leonard.

That trip actually had an impact on his life. The fact that rather than answering Leonard’s question, Kennedy turned it around and “made me feel much more worthwhile—more meaningful and important to myself; that a man in his position would ask me for my opinion. He obviously knew much more than I did, but he wasn’t interested in impressing me with his knowledge … That was one of the most important lessons I ever learned, and often I found myself doing exactly what he did. If somebody asks me a question, I may have an answer, but often I’ll say, ‘But what do you think?’ I learn a lot more that way than simply by answering the question myself.”

That really became an important part of his personality. Anyone who spent time with Leonard would pick up on that immediately. John de Lancie accurately described him as “a formidable listener. He listened actively, which most people don’t do.”

His first year out of the army, he was cast in several Ziv shows; he was a cowboy in Luke and the Tenderfoot, a sailor in Navy Log, he did an episode of Your Favorite Story and an episode of The Man Called X, a spy story supposedly based on the true adventures of a government adventurer. He also appeared on stage, playing a supporting role in a play entitled Life Is but a Dream at the Civic Playhouse, a show that would have been long forgotten except that Leonard got his first strong review in the LA Times: “Leonard Nimoy carries conviction.”

No one who knew Leonard would disagree with that either; in everything he did, he always carried conviction.

I actually made my debut on American television at that time. I was offered a key role on one of the most popular shows in television’s brief history: I created the role of Ranger Bob on The Howdy Doody Show, costarring with several marionettes and a clown named Clarabell. Clarabell did not speak; instead he expressed his opinions by honking a bicycle horn. That did cut down on meaningful dialogue.

Before coming to New York, I had done several shows on the CBC. In my first major role, I had costarred with the great Basil Rathbone in a live version of Melville’s tragedy Billy Budd. Rathbone had created the role of Sherlock Holmes in the movies, and I probably had seen every picture he’d made. It was a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from a respected veteran actor. Admittedly, I was probably a little nervous, as an estimated ten million Canadians would be watching. The performance seemed to be going very well until that moment Rathbone stepped onto the ship and somehow managed to get his foot caught in a large bucket. While the camera shot him only from the waist up, he was madly shaking his leg trying to get the bucket off. Naturally, he forgot his lines, and when an actor forgets his lines, he begins to sweat. So the great Basil Rathbone, whom I had admired for so long, was standing there shaking a bucket off his foot while sweat poured down his face as he tried to remember his lines. Never in the history of performance has anyone literally tried to act normally with so little success.

But that was quite typical of the things that happened in the early days of television. While Leonard was in Hollywood doing mostly Ziv shows, I was in New York doing live television. While he was playing Native Americans, I was working regularly on Sunday morning religious shows like Lamp Unto My Feet. While I continued learning my craft by rehearsing and working, Leonard believed in learning how to act by studying acting.

I didn’t take acting classes. Not that I didn’t recognize their value, but I learned by doing; Leonard studied his craft. Leonard spent most of his career refining his craft. I actually think Leonard’s acting ability often was underrated, primarily because he made it look so easy. Spock, for example, seemed to be easy to imitate—but it took great skill to create that blatant dispassion. Just before joining the army, for example, he had joined a group of young actors forming a company so they might work onstage. One member of that group, it turned out, was James Arness, and he and Leonard became very friendly. A year later, Arness happened to be in Atlanta promoting a movie he’d made with John Wayne, and Leonard called him. Arness told Leonard he’d just signed to star in a new cowboy series based on the popular radio show Gunsmoke.

Two years later, James Arness was a major television star. That wasn’t too surprising. We were surrounded by that kind of success, so we knew it was possible. So we kept working and hoping that eventually our turn would come. Later, people would remark how amazing it was that Leonard and I appeared together in an episode of U.N.C.L.E. It wasn’t at all amazing; we worked so often with so many different people that it might have been more unusual if we had never done the same show.

Leonard had resumed taking acting classes when he got back to LA, this time with an actor named Jeff Corey. Corey was a very talented actor who had been blacklisted, meaning he was suspected of having Communist sympathies, so no producer would hire him. So he opened an acting school and was well respected. Among the students who Leonard became friends with was Vic Morrow, who eventually starred in the series Combat! That was another link in that long chain that eventually would make all the difference in the galaxies to Leonard’s career.

As incredible as it may seem, most of us were only vaguely aware of the blacklist. I don’t remember ever talking with him about it. It was one of those subjects that just didn’t seem to affect our lives, even though we were right in the middle of it. As Leonard once explained, we were young, naïve, and so totally preoccupied with trying to earn a living that we paid little attention to it. Leonard, who eventually became very politically active in progressive causes, told an interviewer much later in his life, “I’m shocked that there was so much of that going on around Hollywood and I was so totally out of touch with it.” He remembers having to get an FBI clearance to play a bit part on the show West Point. I’m not sure I ever did, maybe because I wasn’t an American citizen.

When the blacklist was finally lifted, Corey began working again, eventually costarring in many movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, and Little Big Man. Leonard had been studying with Corey for more than two years when Corey finally was able to resume his career; when Corey went back to work, Leonard began teaching some of his classes. After doing that for a couple of years, Leonard opened his own acting studio. Among his students were pop singers Fabian and Bobby Vee, as well as Alex Rocco, who played the role of casino owner Moe Greene in The Godfather. Originally, the Italian Rocco auditioned for the part of a gangster, but Leonard apparently was such a fine teacher that director Francis Ford Coppola auditioned the Italian Rocco and decided, “I got my Jew!”

Leonard was a highly trained actor; I was not. Our acting techniques were quite different. In his studio, Leonard taught his version of the then very popular technique known as Method acting. Until that time, acting styles were very broad, often verging on melodramatic. It was very formulaic acting, sort of like acting off a menu of choices. Method acting, which Lee Strasberg had made famous at the Actors Studio in New York and Leonard was teaching in his studio, taught students to “become” the character and express that character’s real emotions. It meant studying the character’s social, physical, and psychological condition. It meant learning as much as possible about the character, even if the actor had to create that backstory himself to understand the character’s—here it comes—motivation. It meant deciding what clothes the character would wear that accurately reflected his or her personality. It meant utilizing body language years before anybody even used that term. It was revolutionary; rather than showing the character’s emotion, the actor actually had to feel it.

An actor’s knowledge of his character started with the script. Leonard always was in awe of the written word, and when he himself wrote, he brought the same diligence and respect to the page as he did to his performance. The script should provide clues to the actor about who his or her character is, what process this person is going through, and how he or she responds. An actor also had to understand the purpose of each scene, “the spine of the scene” he called it, what knowledge is supposed to be conveyed to audience through the action and dialogue in each scene. And then the subtext—what is the intention of each line? What is the character really trying to say? Once an actor understands that, he or she can layer the performance in terms of bringing both voice and mannerisms to that moment. “There are numerous ways of saying, ‘I love you,’” he would explain. How it might be said depends on the situation and the actor’s overall objective. If, for example, a man is telling a woman for the very first time that he loves her, it requires complete devotion; if, on the other hand, it’s a way of ending an argument, it would be said a very different way.

An actor trained in that technique, Leonard believed, would always bring honesty to the role. “A character is like a plant,” he said. “The richer the soil, the better it grows. One of an actor’s jobs is to nourish his plants.” In 1977, for example, he was hired to follow Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and Tony Perkins as child psychiatrist Martin Dysart in the Broadway hit Equus. It’s a difficult role in the complex story of the psychiatrist hired to treat a young boy who blinded six horses for some unknown reason. To properly prepare for the role, Leonard advertised in The New York Times, looking for a “horse psychiatrist to help in research.” He received more than two hundred responses from psychologists, veterinarians, trainers, jockeys, and gamblers. He hired an ethologist, a person who studies animal behavior, and, he said, he “came away with a feeling of awe at the power of the horse in the night mind of man.”

To me, describing acting as a technique has always seemed kind of … technical. Meanwhile, my technique is quite different; it is the classic nontechnical technique: I memorized the script and played the character. I tried to find the core of my character, the one word, the one line in the script that best described that character’s intentions, and then moved out from that. Like Leonard, I found clues in the script. My hope is that I can characterize something with enough emphasis that it is very different from myself, the actor. If I could make that core line real, then the rest of the character would follow. Too often, the actor bleeds through his or her portrayal and the character becomes just another version of other characters he or she has played with just a different name and a different costume. When Leonard and I began working together, we approached the material from very different places, but fortunately, perhaps because of the nature of the characters, it worked beautifully. But by then, both of us had been working regularly for a long time.

As an acting teacher and coach, as well as a working actor, Leonard became part of LA’s community of young actors. Like every other business in the world, relationships are important in the entertainment industry. Soon after Leonard was discharged, Boris Sagal, for example, cast him in an episode of Matinee Theater that he was directing. Matinee Theater was a daily live hour-long dramatic show. There were four days of rehearsals and then the actual performance, so there were always five shows in progress at the same time. That meant a lot of work for actors. Sagal hired Leonard for an under-five-line part in a drama starring Vincent Price. Price played his normal madman role, a husband planning to blow up his wife by filling the house with gas, then rigging the phone to spark when he called. Leonard played a nosy deliveryman.

He was hired for another episode, but the director wasn’t comfortable with Leonard’s choices, and he was replaced. That was devastating for Leonard. He didn’t do anything casually. Even when he had only a single line, he worked at it, so to be told he wasn’t good enough or he didn’t understand the character was a real attack on his integrity. He was fighting to establish a career, and this was a big step backward. It actually took him some time to get over it.

Because of the way he worked, in some ways these bit parts were more difficult for him than larger roles. The more dialogue a character has, the easier it is to become comfortable in the role. With only three or four lines, it’s hard to establish any rhythm or create a believable character. But it was work, it came with a paycheck, and so he never turned down an offer and tried his best to create something. In Get Smart, for example, he played a sinister character lurking in the back of a poolroom. So he wore dark clothes and dark sunglasses—this was long before people wore sunglasses inside—and kept the sunglasses on throughout the entire episode. Ironically, the one thing he was rarely permitted to do on camera was smoke. Leonard was a heavy smoker off camera; in fact, a lot of actors were, as it helped them relax between takes. I smoked too. Once, he was playing an outlaw in a western and asked the propman for one of the hand-rolled brown cigarettes cowboys smoked. He intended to use it to help create his character. The propman turned him down. Ziv was churning out these shows without knowing which companies might end up sponsoring them. They were concerned that cigarette companies might not be willing to sponsor a program if bad guys were seen using their product, so bad guys didn’t smoke in those shows. Only heroes relaxed with a cigarette.

As a character actor, Leonard played an amazing array of characters, although his specialty was being the heavy, the bad guy. While some Ziv shows would not use actors more than once, other shows were far more relaxed about it. He did eight episodes of Lloyd Bridges’s Sea Hunt, for example, playing everything from a revolutionary student to an explosives thief. In one episode, he would have a mustache; in another, he’d take off the mustache and wear a hat. He did a variety of accents, whatever it took to earn a paycheck. Most Ziv shows paid $80 a day and were shot in two days; Sea Hunt was one of their most successful shows, so it had a larger budget—they paid $100 a day and shot in two and a half days, so if they needed a Spaniard with a mustache and glasses, Leonard said, “S?, se?or,” pasted on the mustache, and wore glasses. During the next few years, Leonard appeared in many of the most successful series on television, working with some of our best actors—and gaining a reputation in the business as a go-to bad guy.

He became a regular on westerns, playing both cowboys and Native Americans, appearing in Colt .45, Tombstone Territory, The Rough Riders, Mackenzie’s Raiders, 26 Men, Tate—the adventures of a one-armed gunfighter—Outlaws, Death Valley Days, Cimarron City, three episodes of Broken Arrow, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Rebel, and Doug McClure’s The Virginian. He worked with Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine in one of his four appearances on Wagon Train, Clint Eastwood’s Rawhide, Bonanza, and of course four episodes of Jim Arness’s Gunsmoke, as well as all the others. He played a soldier in Dean Stockwell’s infantry platoon on the last day of World War II on The Twilight Zone, a submariner on three episodes of The Silent Service, and a sailor on Navy Log. He played both cops and robbers, he did two episodes of the science-fiction show The Outer Limits, and he worked on medical shows from General Hospital to Dr. Kildare.

A lot of professionalism and little money went into these shows. There was no time for preparation or rehearsal; you just did it. When these shows went on location, they shot from sunup to the last light. They literally would chase the sunlight, running away from the encroaching shadows. The crew would take the camera and reflectors and run up a hill, staying just ahead of the shadow, stopping and shooting for a minute, then picking up and moving another ten feet. Close-ups were often shot against a wall so they could be done after the sun went down simply by lighting a small area. If there was a way to save money, they figured it out. They didn’t deceive themselves into believing they were creating art; they were making television shows.

“It was great training,” Leonard once said. If you flubbed a line or made a mistake, the camera kept rolling, then they would go back and just pick it up one line earlier. There were no lengthy retakes, no second or third takes of a scene. Often the actors didn’t know the context of the scene when it was shot. It was make your entrance, do your exit. Then they shot the close-ups. That was the one chance to show any kind of expression. He believed that “whether or not you got called back had to do with whether or not you could hit your marks and say your lines on demand. I tried very hard to be proficient at that so I would be invited back.

“I remember doing an episode of M Squad, a cop show starring Lee Marvin. I played an arsonist; my brother was played by James Coburn. We worked together for three or four days. One morning we were supposed to be in makeup at 7:30 and on the set, ready to go, at eight o’clock. I got there on time, no Jim Coburn. Eight o’clock, I’m made up, ready to go, on the set, no Jim Coburn. I heard through the buzz that he had overslept. That was unheard of that an actor would hold up a television company. We scrambled and did some other things. I thought, oh this poor guy just ruined his career. We finished the episode and Jim Coburn’s next job was in the movie The Magnificent Seven. He became this big hot star and I remember saying to myself, I was on time; where’s my stardom!”

Leonard was not a star, he never got top billing, but he worked regularly. He took whatever was offered. On the first of his three appearances on Broken Arrow, for example, he played a Native American accused of a hanging crime—and he had no lines. He spent most of the show sitting in the prisoner’s dock listening silently to testimony.

Like the majority of actors, Leonard continued to work at other jobs to support his career. In addition to teaching acting and driving a cab, at various times he ran a vending machine route, delivered newspapers, was a movie usher, and even worked in a pet shop selling exotic fish. It was never an easy life, and as he pointed out, “I went a long time before I could make a living as an actor. Before Star Trek, I spent about fifteen years in Los Angeles looking for work as an actor, and during that time, I never had a job that lasted any longer than two weeks.”

Those were the “character-building years,” as Leonard later referred to them, and every person who has ever tried to earn a living in this profession can relate to that—and knows how hard it is to maintain the dream. Even he admitted that at times he would be very unhappy, very angry. Those feelings are part of an actor’s life; you see people you’ve worked with, people whose talent you doubt or you know aren’t as good as you, get parts that you should be playing or on occasion even become stars. At times, you begin to wonder, Why not me? It often is more frustration than jealousy, but you just keep going. It affects every part of your life. Sometimes, though, that frustration explodes. Leonard’s wife Sandi once told an interviewer, “We had terrible fights. There were times he wanted to give up acting and take a sensible job, and I wouldn’t let him.” Believe me, every struggling actor’s family can relate to Sandi when she continued, “Leonard wasn’t much fun in those days. And I didn’t always appreciate what a strong husband and father he was.”

Few of those small roles gave Leonard a chance to really apply his talents, so he found other ways to exercise his skills. In 1962, he and his good friend Vic Morrow optioned the movie rights to a play they had done in a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch. It wasn’t exactly a hot commercial property. Rather it was a complex, highly emotional story that takes place in a jail cell in which two prisoners are fighting over the affections of the third inmate, who happens to be a killer. He had gotten wonderful reviews in that play and often credited it with getting him noticed in the industry, and after that, he began working a lot more often. It marked the first time he was able to earn enough as an actor to cut back on his other jobs. Following that, his performance onstage in Genet’s better-known play The Balcony consolidated his growing reputation as a talented young actor.

Leonard and Morrow somehow raised $125,000 from small contributors to shoot the film. Just think about that: Leonard was working several jobs and barely earning a living, yet his respect for his profession and his passion for honest and emotional storytelling was so profound that he spent his energies—and probably most of his money—getting this project completed. I can’t imagine that anyone believed this film was going to be a commercial blockbuster. They began filming Deathwatch in 1964 with Morrow directing and Paul Mazursky and Michael Forest costarring with Leonard, while Gavin MacLeod played a minor role. They couldn’t find a distributor, so they booked into select theaters themselves. It opened in San Francisco in 1966. Two years later, after Leonard began to get some recognition, they managed to get limited distribution in art houses nationally.

As it turned out, one of the people who saw that play in Santa Monica was a young actor named George Takei. He was so taken with the performance that he remembered the names of the actors, and when Roddenberry cast him in the role of Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, he immediately recognized the name Leonard Nimoy.

I had also started working regularly on television, making guest-starring appearances in many of them. Live drama was very popular and even a little prestigious at that time, and initially, I appeared regularly in shows presented by a single sponsor like The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Alcoa Premiere, Goodyear Playhouse, Kraft Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, and The DuPont Show of the Month, as well as legendary programs like Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and two classic episodes of The Twilight Zone. While I continued making movies, television was where the work was, and as a new father, I needed to keep working. Eventually, I worked at least once on practically every memorable show from that period, among them Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, and Route 66. On The Outer Limits, I was an astronaut returned from orbiting Venus who can’t seem to get warm. I appeared regularly on The Defenders and actually was offered the leading role. On The Fugitive, I played a former police officer running a youth program, who also may be a serial killer responsible for several murders that Richard Kimball is accused of committing. I appeared on medical shows like Dr. Kildare. On Gunsmoke, I played a wanted man pursued by Marshal Dillon hiding out among the Quakers. None of us had the slightest idea we were in the middle of television’s Golden Age.

When you worked as often Leonard and I did, eventually you would cross paths with many different people. You never knew when one of them might be in a position to make a difference in your career. In 1960, for example, Leonard guest-starred as a deputy sheriff on western writer Sam Peeples’s show, The Tall Man. It starred Barry Sullivan and Clu Gulager as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. That episode was the first one written by a twenty-one-year-old woman named Dorothy C. Fontana, and she was so excited, she went to the set to meet the actor. She recalled, “I told Leonard this was the first thing I had ever sold, and he asked me some questions and was very encouraging and polite. The producers liked his character and the way he did it, so they brought him back for a second episode. But then they killed him, and he was off the show.”

The magic struck Leonard’s friend from Jeff Corey’s classes, Vic Morrow, who starred in the successful World War II action series Combat! Morrow helped Leonard get a nice role in an episode entitled “The Wounded Don’t Cry.” He was cast as Private Neumann, a GI who translates German—thank you, Yiddish—when his battalion finds an enemy aid station. Among the viewers when the show was broadcast was a casting director named Joe D’Agosta, who really appreciated Leonard’s performance. D’Agosta kept good notes about who was being hired to do what, his way of finding talented young actors. Not too long afterward, D’Agosta was doing the casting for producer Gene Roddenberry’s first show, The Lieutenant. The Lieutenant was the story of a Marine infantry battalion stationed at Camp Pendleton during peacetime. The title character was platoon leader and training instructor Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice.

Tiberius? What an interesting middle name for a character. But where have I heard that name before? Oh, I remember—a great Roman emperor.

In the episode entitled “In the Highest Tradition,” Leonard played a slick Hollywood producer who wants to use the facilities at Pendleton to shoot a film about a Marine hero—who turns out to be somewhat less than heroic. Also appearing in that hour-long show were Gary Lockwood as the lieutenant and Majel Barrett. It was directed by Marc Daniels, whom Leonard had met previously when Daniels was directing an episode of Dr. Kildare featuring Leonard’s acting student Fabian. This kind of flamboyant producer was not normally the type of part Leonard played, but his agent, Alex Brewis, was known for his persistence. D’Agosta once described him as “a likable bulldog.” No matter what D’Agosta was casting, Brewis would show up in his office telling him, “That’s the perfect role for Leonard. You got to bring him in for it.” It didn’t matter what it was. “That’s perfect for Leonard.” D’Agosta remembered being impressed with Leonard’s work in Combat! and brought him in to read for the part. While initially Marc Daniels didn’t think he was right for the role, Leonard’s audition convinced Daniels to give Leonard the part. Leonard said that this turned out to be the most important audition of his life. It was a small decision that had enormous ramifications.

The Lieutenant turned out to be the stepping-stone to Star Trek for several people. Star Trek was the next program Gene Roddenberry produced, and he asked D’Agosta to help him with the casting. Majel Barrett married Roddenberry and appeared in every version of Star Trek, both on television and in the movies, often both as a character and the voice of the computer. Gary Lockwood costarred in the second Star Trek pilot and several years later appeared with me in my series T.J. Hooker. Marc Daniels eventually directed fifteen episodes of Star Trek; in fact, after the two pilots were done, while we were all waiting to see if the network picked it up, Daniels directed Leonard in an episode of Gunsmoke called “The Treasure of John Walking Fox,” in which once again Leonard played an enigmatic Native American.

D’Agosta also cast several other actors who appeared in episodes of The Lieutenant in Star Trek, including Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols, whom he’d discovered in an acting workshop. Actually, The Lieutenant episode in which Nichelle appeared was never broadcast, but perhaps more than any other episode in this series, it demonstrated what Gene Roddenberry intended to do with Star Trek.

Gene Roddenberry had a quiet vision of what television could be at its finest. He understood the impact it could have on society, but he had to spend a lot of time trying to sneak his social message past studio executives and the censors. This episode, entitled “To Set It Right,” was shot while America was in the midst of the civil rights movement. Nichelle Nichols played the girlfriend of a white Marine, and Dennis Hopper played a Marine who objected to white men dating black women. It was a very controversial subject, and NBC decided it was too controversial to put on the air. I’ve spent considerable time with network executives. They think in bottom-line numbers, so it would be fascinating to have heard the discussions that must have taken place. It was extraordinary for a network to absorb the cost of producing an hour-long show and not broadcast it. The pressure from affiliate stations in different parts of the country must have been enormous. Knowing Roddenberry, I suspect he fought hard for this show, and though he lost the battle, he kept fighting his war. Setting Star Trek three hundred years in the future allowed him to focus on the social issues of the 1960s without being direct or obvious. The fact we were doing future fiction enabled him to film the first interracial kiss in American television history, when Captain Kirk is forced through telekinesis to passionately kiss Nichols’s communications officer Lieutenant Uhura. The fact that Kirk had no control of his actions is demonstrated by the fact that Spock sings, dances, laughs, and also shares a passionate kiss with Barrett’s Nurse Chapel, so clearly none of the crew members were acting of their own free will. Kirk was forced to kiss the beautiful Uhura!

Clearly that was fiction on many levels.

Joe D’Agosta was responsible for Leonard being cast in the role of Mr. Spock. Although D’Agosta was working at another studio when the Star Trek pilot was being cast, Roddenberry was unhappy with the actors he was seeing and asked him to help. He wasn’t paid, although Roddenberry sent him a check for $750 when the series was picked up. “When I told Gene I didn’t have time to do the casting,” D’Agosta remembered, “he told me to just give him a list of names, and they would bring them in and make their deals through business affairs.”

Roddenberry provided D’Agosta with a ten-page document that included only some broad character outlines. “There wasn’t a lot of description of Spock in the script other than he was a half-human, half-alien Martian,” he continued. “But what Gene wanted was a tall, lean Lincoln-ish character, who conveyed a sense of serenity. He had more of a physical image than a personality in his mind. He wanted an actor whose mostly humanlike appearance conveyed that he was a man of few words but had firm conclusions and thoughts. He was looking for someone who appeared to radiate a higher level of intelligence. Leonard fit that physical description but also projected that aura of intelligence. I eventually recommended three or four actors to Gene Roddenberry, and Leonard was one of them.”

In Roddenberry’s original outline, Spock was an alien member of the crew of the spaceship USS Yorktown, serving under Captain Robert April, as it traveled throughout the universe trying to offer assistance to civilizations in need. While Roddenberry always described it as the successful western series Wagon Train in space, for me it was more like the novelistic adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower in space. There certainly wasn’t anything quite like it at the time. The audience loved westerns and detective shows; the only science fiction was being done on episodes of anthology series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Richard Arnold, the acknowledged expert of Star Trek who worked on several of the movies and TV shows, as well as organizing conventions, knew Roddenberry well. “Star Trek was a chance for him to tell the kind of stories he desperately wanted to tell. The timing was perfect because we were in the middle of the Cold War and the nuclear scare. He got his chance to do it in a science-fiction series because it went right over the heads of the censors. They didn’t get it. He’d distracted their attention with a female character looking too sexy while telling stories about Vietnam, about sexual equality and racial issues, subjects you were not allowed to touch. Normally the censors would cross that all out, but because Gene used to say it all took place on purple planets with polka-dot people, they simply didn’t get it. The role of Spock was pivotal; he was to be the representative of an intelligent society.” In fact, in later interviews, Roddenberry described him as “the conscience of Star Trek.”

There had never been a character quite like Mr. Spock. In most movie or TV portrayals, aliens from other planets were monsters either in being or deed, but whatever they were doing, it turned out to be bad for Earth. Spock was unique. Gene Roddenberry was creating a truly interracial and interspecies crew for the Enterprise. And Spock was half-human and half-alien, meaning he wasn’t completely comfortable in two worlds. He actually wasn’t identified as a Vulcan until the fifth or sixth episode. But the real function of Spock was to serve as an observer of human behavior and to comment on human variables, tendencies, habits, and beliefs. He was to be unfettered by normal human emotions.

Leonard learned he was being considered for a leading role in some new space show from his agent, who told him Roddenberry had liked his work on The Lieutenant and had him in mind for a character on a science-fiction series in development. I have no doubt how Leonard reacted; this was the kind of call agents make to clients to reassure them they are out there pounding the pavement on their behalf. While he must have been flattered, as apparently this was the first time he was considered for a leading role in a network series, he probably didn’t take it very seriously. Calls like this one, and today e-mails, happen quite often in the life of a working actor. No one gets excited about them. It wasn’t as if Leonard realized that this was going to be his big break and so fought to get the job. Sometimes these calls go a few steps further, but only rarely do they even progress to an audition, much less being cast in the role. I’m sure Leonard dismissed it before even hanging up the phone: a producer who was developing a pilot that might never get shot had him in mind for a role he might never get. Even if he got the role and the pilot was made, it had only a small chance of being picked up by the network.

But several weeks later, Brewis informed him that Roddenberry wanted to see other work he’d done to get a sense of his range. Leonard sent him an episode of Dr. Kildare in which he’d played a shy, sensitive character who befriended a blind girl and read poetry to her. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the brash producer he’d played on The Lieutenant. It turned out Roddenberry actually had seen that episode of Kildare but hadn’t realized that was Leonard. Impressed, he invited Leonard to a meeting. “I went to that meeting expecting to audition for him,” Leonard remembered. “Instead, he suggested we take a walk. We went to the scenic design department, and he showed me the sets and introduced me to the designers. We walked over to the prop department, and I saw some of the props being made. We went to wardrobe, and I began to realize this is interesting; it’s like he’s selling me on doing this job. I thought, you know what, if I keep my mouth shut, I might have a job here.”

Roddenberry hadn’t yet fully developed Spock in his own mind. As Leonard explained, “The best thing Gene Roddenberry gave to me when he offered me the part was to tell me that this character would have an internal struggle.” The one thing that Roddenberry was adamant about was that the crew of this gigantic spaceship roaming through the universe would be an example of diversity. At a time when television was pretty much lily-white and all-American, Gene created a crew consisting of both men and women, people of color, different ethnic groups, and even a Russian to suggest the Cold War had ended. So he insisted Spock be obviously extraterrestrial; he wanted to make it clear that Spock came from another world and that these voyages were taking place far in the future, when interplanetary travel was common. That was the importance of the large, pointed ears.

What Leonard did not know until many years later was that Roddenberry already had decided that he wanted him to create the role of Mr. Spock. Dorothy C. Fontana, who had written the episode of The Tall Man in which Leonard appeared, was working as Roddenberry’s production assistant. As she recalled, “I asked Gene, ‘Who plays Spock?’ And in response he slid a picture of Leonard across his desk at me.”

The question was, who was going to play Captain Christopher Pike opposite him? Lloyd Bridges, James Coburn, Patrick O’Neal, and Jeffrey Hunter were all considered, but Hunter, who had appeared in numerous television series and movies—although he had played Jesus Christ in the movie King of Kings—got the part. In the first pilot episode, entitled “The Cage,” Captain Pike is lured to a planet by a society with an amazing ability to, as Dr. Boyce, who would be replaced by Bones, explains, “create illusions out of a person’s own thoughts, memories, and experiences, even out of a person’s own desires—illusions just as real and solid as this tabletop and just as impossible to ignore.” Their intent is to mate him to and produce children with a deformed human female who had crash-landed there. To make it incredibly difficult for Pike to resist, they transform this survivor into the women of his deepest desires.

Even in that initial voyage of the Enterprise, Roddenberry was using futuristic societies to tell relevant stories. In the pilot, one of the aliens lays out the simple rule that would govern many of the planets the crew would visit, as well as the communist nations then existing on Earth: “Wrong thinking is punishable; right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You will find it an effective combination.”

It was the most expensive pilot NBC had ever produced, and the network didn’t like it. Basically, it was too intellectual, and there was not enough action. But the executives still liked Roddenberry’s concept and made the almost unheard-of decision to make a second pilot. This is where I came in. I’ve been told that Jeffrey Hunter’s wife started making extraordinary demands, and as a result, Roddenberry fired him. The first choice to replace him was Jack Lord, who asked for 50 percent ownership of the show. That’s when Roddenberry called me. I’ve never known why he offered the role to me. Perhaps it was because I’d played leading roles in several major TV series. I’d played major roles in several motion pictures, including Judgment at Nuremberg and Incubus, the first motion picture made entirely in the universal language of Esperanto.

Or, it also might have been that he was getting desperate, I was available, and I was the right type. Leonard was dark and brooding; I was blond and bright-eyed. Leonard displayed little emotion; I was a walking mood ring. As I have often explained to audiences at Star Trek conventions, I suspect Roddenberry felt I was the perfect choice for the lead role in a show because I wasn’t too intelligent for the audience and he didn’t have to pay me a lot of money.

I was in a New York hotel room when he called. I had just finished doing a legal series called For the People. He explained that he’d made a pilot for a science-fiction show called Star Trek, and NBC hadn’t bought it, but they liked the project enough to make a second pilot with a different cast.

He asked me to come to Los Angeles to see it, with the idea of playing the captain. I don’t remember his precise words, but I presume he’d said something like, “It’s the leading man. He gets the girl. He fights the villains. He runs, and he jumps. And he gets first billing.” However, I am quite certain during that first conversation he did not mention that I would be playing against a half-man, half-alien with, as Leonard later described them, “Dumbo ears.”

I thought the pilot was magical, and even with all its problems, the potential was obvious. These many years later, after all the amazing space movies and special effects that have made us all feel as if we are in space, it’s absolutely impossible to accurately convey how innovative this concept was at that time. These were normal people hundreds of years in the future, and when they weren’t otherwise occupied saving the universe and their own lives, they were dealing with the same issues and relationship problems the audience dealt with every day. But after viewing that pilot, I told Roddenberry I thought the characters were taking themselves much too seriously. Every line seemed meaningful. There was no sense of fun or playfulness. The characters seemed to be talking at each other rather than relating to each other. Ironically, just about the only person who smiled in the entire episode was Spock.

Roddenberry agreed with me and offered me the role of James Tiberius Kirk.

A lot of changes were made before the second pilot was shot. As Variety reported on November 5, 1965, the only two members of the original cast to be retained, Majel Barrett and Leonard Nimoy, had been signed for the pilot of “an hourlong color science fiction adventure series to be produced by Desilu for NBC.” That brief item actually was wrong—the series was shot in black and white. When that item appeared, Leonard was doing exactly what an actor should be doing—working. He was costarring with the beautiful Juliet Prowse in a Valley Musical Theater production of the show Irma la Douce.

In addition to a new script in which Barrett’s role was reduced and replaced by a relationship between Spock and Kirk, fundamental changes were made to the character of Mr. Spock. Spock was the result of all the work Leonard had done in his career. While he made Spock so realistic, it was easy to believe he was based on a living being; in fact, he started from very little. Because Leonard did such a remarkable job bringing Spock to life, I’m not sure he ever got all the credit he deserved for the creation of this iconic character. As Joe D’Agosta remembered, “Spock was not on that page. The whole character, other than the physicality that was described by Gene, was created by Leonard. He embodied that character with its essence.”

But initially, at least, Leonard hadn’t gotten a good hold on the character; he was experimenting to see what fit. After that first pilot, Spock never smiled again. “I knew it was a mistake after the fact,” Leonard told me. “When I saw it, I thought it destroyed the mystique. It destroyed the design of this person. This person smiling is not appropriate. This person is not necessarily a negative or dour person, but this person is not a frivolous person. This person must be played as a scientist and a student of what’s going on.”

The appearance of Spock also continued to evolve. Initially, when the show was going to be in color, Fred Phillips, who did his makeup, tinted his skin a reddish color. It was supposed to suggest a Martian heritage. But when it was tested on black-and-white sets, it just looked black. The character was not a black person. So Fred substituted a Max Factor makeup called “Chinese Yellow,” which gave Spock’s skin a slightly yellowish tone. It was enough to emphasize that he wasn’t Caucasian, but much better than the Martian red.

Leonard initially thought Spock should have a crude look, with a jagged haircut and bushy eyebrows. He had his eyebrows shaved and then drawn in. But Spock’s quite-famous ears always were an issue. Roddenberry wanted him to have pointed ears, which instantly would inform viewers that he was from another planet. Leonard had some trepidation about those ears, wondering if they looked too comical. But Roddenberry insisted on it. The studio contracted a company to produce the original prosthetic ear pieces, and they were terrible. “Grotesque and funny,” Leonard called them. It took some time and a lot of effort before he was satisfied.

There continued to be considerable debate about Spock’s appearance. After we shot the second pilot and NBC picked it up, the publicity department began promoting it. One afternoon, Leonard got a copy of the brochure announcing the show in the mail. It was taking place in the twenty-third century, would go where no man had gone before, blah, blah, blah. It included photographs of members of the cast. But when Leonard looked at Spock, something seemed not quite right. As he looked closely, he realized that the photo had been altered; Spock’s curved eyebrows had been straightened, and the pointed tips at the ends of his ears had been removed. Leonard’s reaction was to feel threatened. He wondered if these changes meant they weren’t satisfied with the character. As he said, this was going to be the first steady acting job he’d ever had, the first time a job had lasted more than two weeks. He called Roddenberry, who admitted he was getting pushback about the character from the sales department. They were concerned about a number of issues but primarily that the ears looked devilish, which they believed would make it difficult to sell the show in the Bible Belt. They didn’t believe those people would welcome a character that reminded them of the devil into their homes each week. Roddenberry reassured him that Spock was an essential element of the show. Those ears, which took hours to put on each morning, eventually became the most defining feature of the character. Leonard loved to tell a story about the night he attended a promotion party on the Paramount lot; he was sitting in his chair when suddenly he felt two large hands squeezing his shoulders from behind, and then he heard the instantly identifiable voice of John Wayne whispering in his real ear, “I recognize you. You had your ears fixed!”

The second script added more dimension to the character, and it was gradually becoming clear that Spock would be more intellectual than reactive. That he would be controlled and logical rather than emotional. The precedent for that character was created by Michael Rennie in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Rennie played an alien who came to Earth to warn against moving forward into the atomic age. The character was extremely intelligent and totally detached, rational, cool, and peaceful.

To better understand the core of that character, as Leonard had been trained to do, he looked into his own life. Spock wasn’t simply an alien—he was alienated; the product of two very different civilizations, he didn’t fit comfortably anywhere. Leonard drew on his own experience growing up in Boston, explaining, “I knew what it meant to be a member of a minority, in some instances an outcast minority. I understood that aspect of the character well enough to play it. Coming from my background, growing up in a neighborhood of immigrants trying to assimilate into modern American society, believe me, I understood that deep sense of not really belonging anywhere.”

Leonard liked to tell people that he had been born in Boston, his parents had come to America as immigrants, aliens, and then he went to Hollywood to become an alien.

If there was a character that he drew on to create the sense of alienation he needed, it probably came from one of his favorite movies, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the great Charles Laughton created the unforgettable Quasimodo. Quasimodo was the essential outsider, and Leonard had so much empathy for him that he wanted to cry when he saw that movie. He wanted the audience to empathize with Spock, who was caught in an internal struggle between his human side and his Vulcan side, which resulted in a continuous struggle between logic and emotion. “I knew that we weren’t playing a man with no emotions,” he once said, “but rather a man who had great pride, who had learned to control his emotions, and who would deny what those emotions were.

“In spite of being an outcast, being mixed up, looking different, he maintains his point of view. He can’t be bullied or put on. He’s freaky with dignity. There are very few characters who have that kind of pride, cool, and ability to lay it out and walk away.”

Spock was the result of seventeen years of being kicked around but remaining dedicated and respectful to the craft.

Ironically, a lot of the character’s movements also came from an unlikely source. In the 1950s, Leonard went to the Greek Theatre, a famed Los Angeles amphitheater, to see the great Harry Belafonte perform. The stage was dark. A single spotlight suddenly focused on Belafonte standing alone, his hands on his thighs, slightly hunched. He received a big ovation, which he did not acknowledge, then began singing. When the sound ended again, there was huge applause. Belafonte still didn’t respond; he simply began singing his second song. “He must have been on stage for ten or fifteen minutes before making a gesture,” Leonard recalled. “And then, in the middle of a song, he simply raised his arm. It was gigantic because it came from a very minimal place. The theater exploded with a roar in response. The whole place shook. Wow, what a lesson that was. If you are minimal, then even a small gesture becomes a big deal. I learned a lot from that.”

James T. Kirk was considerably easier to develop because it was a familiar character in American culture. He was the square-jawed hero running into the abyss to save the damsel in distress. In fact, joining the cast so late in development, I had to rely at least somewhat on the lines that I was given to define my character. I was so concerned with learning my lines, getting them out, becoming comfortable with the set, and my relationship with the other members of my crew that I didn’t have the opportunity to look deep in Jim Kirk’s psyche. For the first few weeks, at least, I was feasting on my own narcissism, as actors will do, because I was mostly fighting for survival.

Everyone attached to the production in that initial stage had his or her own concerns. The only person concerned solely about my part was me. It was my complete focus. It becomes the bone the dog is guarding, and the longer it goes, the more ferocious the dog guarding it becomes. That led me into a tunneled point of view on the creation of Kirk.

It took me a while to take what Leonard and later DeForest Kelley were doing with their characters and amplify it through James T. Kirk.

I have no memory of meeting Leonard on the set. I’m sure we were polite. I suspect we shook hands firmly. One of us might have even made a little joke about the adventure on which we were about to embark. But both of us—all of the actors—had done so much television by this time that we had been through the meeting and greeting numerous times. On occasion, there would be an actor whom we’d worked with before and we’d spend a few minutes catching up, but in this case, I didn’t know anyone in the cast. I doubt either Leonard or I even realized we’d worked together previously in U.N.C.L.E. That’s just the nature of our profession.

There actually was probably more pressure on me than anyone else when we started. The first pilot had failed. Roddenberry was being given a second—and last—chance to create the future. I had starred on Broadway. I had starred in movies. I had been the lead in a previous television series. I was asked to do the role of Captain Kirk. I didn’t audition like everyone else did, so ostensibly, I was the star of Star Trek. I got top billing, and if the show failed, the message would be Shatner can’t carry a show.

I don’t know what was going on in Leonard’s mind. I think what goes through the actor’s mind is simply, I’ve got a good role here, it looks like the show is going to go, and I’ve got to play this role as best I can. At this point in his career, Leonard was an experienced professional actor, although he hadn’t played leading roles. He had always been a supporting actor, often playing a bad guy or an ethnic character. At the beginning, I suspect the concept of wearing pointed ears and a blunt haircut might have seemed a bit bizarre to him. If it had been me, I know I would have been thinking, I’d like to get rid of these ears and appear more normal.

As the actor who spent considerable time looking directly at Spock, believe me, those ears were noticeable. Eventually, time—and Leonard’s commitment to the part—made them seem somewhat normal.

Leonard did tell me years later one of his goals for this part: in all his other roles, his name had been written on his dressing room door—when he did have his own dressing room—in chalk. Just once he wanted to see his name painted on the dressing room door.

The second pilot episode was entitled “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Basically, the plot involves the Enterprise and her crew being threatened by crew members who develop malevolent psychic powers after the ship passes through an invisible barrier.

The very first scene we shot took place on the Enterprise’s bridge. As George Takei remembered it, “Leonard and Bill, Jimmy Doohan were there, Paul Fix, playing our doctor, and I came on board. Nichelle Nichols was not in this episode, but Sally Kellerman was. In that first scene, we were all trying to work with this new set. People were figuring out how to move, how to touch, how to sit, and Leonard was very calculated in everything that he did. He was trying to figure out how a being of superintelligence and logic would move or touch the buttons. He was finding out how he would relate to his console, how he would move from the console down the steps to the lower deck, to the captain’s chair and navigation console. He didn’t just move; he planned every step in character.

“Then we began to discuss the scene. What I found fascinating about Leonard was that, while the other actors had our lines memorized and were just going to go through it, he wanted to question and discuss everything before the scene began. He asked endless questions. He was a very thoughtful and analytical actor. He needed to understand why he was doing what he was doing. It took tremendous preparation to make what he did seem so natural.

“I was impressed by that, and I did the same thing. I made every button specific for me.”

From the very beginning, Leonard and I worked together easily. I approached a scene very differently from the way he did. When the scene began, I was where the director needed me to be, and if the director was any good, he’d let the actors feel it out. While Leonard would plan the entire scene, I just let things happen, delivering my lines in a manner that would be commensurate with what people were doing. If Leonard stayed at his station, for example, because he felt that was where Spock was most comfortable, then Kirk would go to him. I would move over to him or either sit or stand in response to what he was doing. He had to play unemotional, so for me, that was a great part of the challenge, playing against someone who wasn’t showing any emotion.

Leonard had to learn how to work with me too. He told me once, “There was a significant difference between my playing against Jeffrey Hunter and playing against you. One of the reasons for the shift in Spock’s character was that you came on board. Jeffrey Hunter was a very internalized actor. A fine actor, an intelligent man. This was the way he worked: he was very internalized, very thoughtful. There’s an old joke about two actors trying to play a scene. One asks the other, ‘What are you going to play in this scene?’

“And that actor says, ‘I’m playing nothing.’

“Then the first actor says, ‘No, no, no. You can’t play nothing. I’m playing nothing!’ So with Jeffrey Hunter I felt the need to help drive the action. Otherwise, we’re both playing nothing. When you came on board with your energy, and a sense of humor, and a twinkle in the eye, I was able to become the core Spock.” Then he added, “And I never smiled again.”

From the very beginning, Leonard fought to bring a real sense of dignity to Spock. While other actors might have chosen to play the character with the type of whimsy normally associated with Spock’s pointed-ear appearance, he took everything Spock did absolutely seriously. Nothing was silly or frivolous. While we’ve seen others bring characters like this to life since then, especially with franchises like Star Wars, Leonard proved it could be done.

It wasn’t always easy. Several weeks before the show went on the air, NBC had us doing promotion. It was a typical publicity event: groups of reporters moved from one character to the next, asking the same questions over and over. They asked questions like: What’s the show about? What can you tell us about the character you play? What planet is he from? Does he really have pointed ears?

“We’re doing real stories,” Leonard responded. “We’re doing stories about overpopulation. We’re doing stories about racial issues. We’re doing stories about ecology, about loyalty and brotherhood.” Spock, he explained, was a fascinating character. He was very intelligent, and he had great dignity. Spock was a scientist, he continued, emphasizing the fact that this was not your typical alien character, and any preconceptions the media had based on all the science-fiction stories that had come before really didn’t apply.

The next day, the reporters were invited onto the soundstage to watch us film a scene. It was an opportunity for Leonard to demonstrate his commitment to the integrity of the character. Unfortunately, this particular scene took place in the sick bay. Spock had been seriously wounded in a fight. As Kirk rushes in, Spock is lying on a bed, bright-green blood dripping from his foot. “What happened, Spock?” Kirk demands.

“Captain,” he responds with as much dignity as he can muster, “a monster attacked me!”

Obviously, I didn’t have to fight the same battles for dignity, because Kirk actually was fighting battles. As it quickly developed, Spock was the mind of the show; DeForest Kelley, who joined the cast as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy was the heart; and I was the action hero. Captain Kirk was the classic warrior, leading his men into battle against great odds to emerge battered and bruised but victorious.

And then we went on the air.