فصل 04

FOUR

Unlike the enigmatic Spock, Leonard was a man of many passions. Among those things that fascinated him was the artist Vincent van Gogh. He wrote and starred in a one-man show, Vincent, based on the letters between Vincent and his brother Theo. Actor Jean-Michel Richaud, who followed Leonard in the role and actually brought it to France, spent considerable time with Leonard talking about Van Gogh. As Richaud told me, Leonard “was intrigued by Van Gogh’s uncompromising attitude toward the work. In Van Gogh’s day, people equated art with commerce, and very much it mirrors what we see today. We talked about that struggle between art and commerce. Leonard embraced his success, and used it to support the arts.

“But we also talked at length about how Vincent believed ‘there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.’ The bottom line of this play was about love; it wasn’t about the crazy person that everybody thinks Vincent was. It was about love for art, love for his brother, love for the truth. To me, that was the common point between Vincent and Leonard, both of them were seekers of truth in art.”

Van Gogh also said of friendship, “Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.”

My own life has moved constantly at such a rapid pace and is usually filled with so many people that I rarely take the time to wonder why I have had so many wonderful acquaintances but so very few real friends. It must be some quirk in my own character. But I was somewhat painfully reminded of that early in 2015 when I participated in an eight-day cross-country motorcycle ride from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was a difficult trip through some extraordinary heat; I fainted twice. Among the riders were two sets of brothers. Carl and Kevin were among the organizers of this trip; they were four years apart in age. Kevin had asked his brother to ride with us because it would give them at least a little time to spend together that they rarely had. About halfway through the trip, Carl had to leave to fulfill other commitments. As he left, they hugged each other and wept. Grown men in their fifties weeping at losing the chance to spend more time together. I was struck by their love for each other.

The other set of brothers, another Kevin and his brother, Brian, were thirteen months apart. They rode side by side, loving each other, backing each other, each describing his brother as his best friend. They also had fights, one night they described choking each other, but the next morning, whatever caused that was gone. They love each other, and they are each other’s best friend. That is something that is very rare, very enviable, and, to me, something that must be cherished when achieved. And for a time, I had that with Leonard, and I lost it.

We certainly didn’t start our journey as close friends. Rather, like the other members of our cast, we were colleagues, feeling each other out, learning our professional strengths and weaknesses and trying to bring our A game to the show. The friendships that developed initially were in the scripts: the relationship between Kirk and Spock held the show together. The two of us were on-screen in almost every scene. Leonard described the relationship between these two characters as a “great sense of brotherhood. Spock was tremendously loyal and had a great appreciation for the talent and the leadership abilities of Kirk. He was totally devoted to seeing to it that whatever Kirk needed to be done got done.”

Conversely, Kirk relied on Spock unfailingly for his advice, knowing it would never be encumbered by any thoughts of personal gain or tempered by emotional constraints. But he also depended on him to share the burdens of command. With the exception of Dee Kelley’s McCoy, Kirk had to maintain the distance of command from the rest of the crew. That can be a lonely place if there is no outlet, and Spock provided that outlet for Kirk.

It was clear to me from the first scene we did together that Leonard was a fine actor and that he was completely invested in the part. He gave us a living, breathing character to work with, rather than forcing us to play against a comic-book cliché. The fact that he took this pointed-eared alien so seriously forced the rest of us to do so with our characters as well.

That sense of professionalism also was true of pretty much everyone else in the cast. Gene Roddenberry had put together a talented, experienced company. Everyone showed up on time in the morning, well prepared, and we got our work done, then went our separate ways at the end of the day. While there was the usual camaraderie at first, there weren’t any friendships developing. That’s the nature of our business.

Even after we had completed the pilot and had gotten picked up, there was no guarantee of success. The majority of television programs fail quickly. Actors live forever on the edge of failure: every play will close, every show will go off the air. At least that’s what we all believed. Failure on some level will come; it is only a question of how long it can be delayed.

Dorothy Fontana remembers the very first hint she got that the show was going to be successful. At 9:00 A.M. the morning after our first episode, her phone rang. A recognizable voice explained, “This is Leslie Nielsen.” Leslie Nielsen had starred in the classic science-fiction film Forbidden Planet. When Fontana explained that Gene Roddenberry hadn’t arrived yet, Nielsen said, “I just wanted to let him know that I saw the show last night, and I think it has a great future.” Then the mail started arriving. The first week there was one bag of mail. People were writing that they loved the show and asked for autographed pictures. That was encouraging. The second week we got three bags of mail. That was interesting. And then the deluge started, and in fact, it still hasn’t ended. We had not the slightest idea what we were creating; we were always fighting to stay on the air one more season, one more week.

Gene Roddenberry had not been satisfied with the first episode. In fact, he liked to tell people that after that first show aired, his father had gone up and down the block in his neighborhood apologizing for it. But a week later, Roddenberry was having lunch in a restaurant near the studio when he overheard people excitedly discussing the previous night’s episode. That was the first time he’d ever heard people talking about one of his shows, so he thought, This might be something special.

What was surprising to me was that rather than Captain James T. Kirk, the character who received the most attention, and the most fan mail, was Mr. Spock. This was long before Leonard and I became friends, and honestly, I hadn’t expected it, and I was not especially thrilled about it. I was being paid the largest salary, I was out front for the publicity, I had the most lines, my character’s fate carried the storyline, my character got the girl and saved the ship. The natural flow of events should have been that Kirk would receive the most attention, not some alien with strange-looking ears. But the spectacular performance Leonard gave occupied all that attention in the beginning. Mr. Spock fan clubs were formed. Newspapers and magazines ran features on this extraordinary new character. Roddenberry got a memo from the network suggesting that Spock be featured in every story. My future was on the line, and that line seemed to be getting shaky. And so, for a few weeks, I was quite jealous. It bothered me so much that I went to Roddenberry’s office to discuss it with him. Gene was the voice of good reason in this case. “Don’t be afraid of having other popular and talented people around you,” he said. “They can only enhance your performance. The more you work with these people, the better the show is going to be.” In other words, the more popular Spock became, the better it was for everyone, including me, and I settled down to that lovely fact.

Spock continued to evolve as Leonard explored all the possibilities of the character. It was a considerably more complex task than usual because there were no recognizable hallmarks. This was a brand-new character in American culture; he was carving out the path. There was no traditional right or wrong; the audience would tell him what was true. So Leonard took great care to protect Spock. “Characters have to depend on the kindness of actors,” he once explained. “I felt particularly that way with Spock because I think Spock could easily become cartoonish or silly. Liberties could be taken, and I had to prevent that.”

Bringing Spock to life probably was the most difficult role of his career. And he admitted to having some concern that he wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actor. At first, he was worried that the whole show was a foolish enterprise, and he would be known forever for wearing devilish ears and playing an alien on a spaceship. He was right about that, and in less competent hands, it could have become a very campy show and been embarrassing for all of us.

But that never happened, and certainly part of the reason was that we all approached it seriously. We knew our audience would take the show only as seriously as we did. To get to the core Spock, as he once explained to an interviewer, “I went through the process of gradually internalizing more and more and more. There were times that I had to remind myself of that because that wasn’t my nature. On the contrary, my training as an actor was to use my emotions, to use gesture, to use color in my speech, to use tonalities to be interesting. And to be passionate. I always enjoyed playing passionate characters, so this was quite a shift for me. It wasn’t me at all. It became me.”

Perhaps Roddenberry had known more than we suspected when he cast me in the role of Kirk, because it turned out that our differing approaches to our parts resulted in perfect harmony. Leonard explained it better than I would: “Shatner was energy personified. A ball of energy, constantly looking, digging, searching, which gave me a place to exist as Spock. Much more so, with all due respect, to Jeff Hunter. Jeff Hunter played Captain Pike as a thoughtful, more introverted person. My tendency, when I was in a scene with him, was to try to be more energetic around him. Bill Shatner provided all the energy you needed in the scene, allowing me to be more reflective and more reactive. The fact that Shatner came on the way he did, I think it helped me a lot in developing the Spock character.”

As the weeks passed and Leonard became more comfortable in the role, he became very protective of Spock. Next to playing Spock, writing his part had to be the most difficult. The crux of great drama is the expression of emotion; just imagine how difficult it was for the writers to bring to life a character whose most identifiable character trait was that he did not express emotion. “We couldn’t let him show emotion,” remembered Dorothy Fontana, or D. C. Fontana as she became known. While she personally wrote several episodes, she also worked with the other writers the entire run of the show and knew how hard it was to write for that character. “Since he was half-human, there were moments when we had to let him show something. We had to let something leak through.” One device the writers used several times was creating some sort of mind control that the enemy used to force Spock to display an emotion—once it even was love. As long as the script was logical, Leonard clearly enjoyed the opportunity to explore his character. And while Leonard remembered being a pain in the neck for the writers with all his script notes, claiming he was very often highly critical, no one I’ve spoken with actually remembers that to be true. Dorothy Fontana doesn’t recall that, and I can’t remember a situation until much, much later, when we were making the movies, that he became overly protective of Spock.

Only once during the original series was there a real issue. The head writer for the show was Gene Coon. It was Gene Coon who created the Klingons, an irrational race of warriors who believed in nothing but conquest and would destroy anything and anyone that got in their way. The Klingons were the perfect enemy. During that first season, we were given a script in which Spock did something he hadn’t done before; I don’t remember what it was, but Leonard felt it was completely inconsistent with what he had been developing for the character. As he had been throughout his career, he focused on small details that others might have overlooked. So he went to Coon’s office to discuss it.

Coon was in the middle of the next script. The last thing he needed was an actor fussing over a detail that no one would notice. Leonard explained to him why the scene didn’t work. Apparently, Coon listened carefully, then suggested, “Just do it.”

“I can’t,” Leonard told him, an actor being protective of his character.

“This conversation’s over,” Coon snapped.

By the time Leonard returned to the set, his agent was on the phone telling him he was being suspended. As he remembered the incident, “I knew it couldn’t possibly lead to them telling me not to come to work anymore, because this was a machine, and if you pull a cog out, the machine stops. So in my arrogance, I said to my agent, ‘Ask them do I have to finish the day, or can I leave now?’”

The next call came from Roddenberry, who quickly dismissed the suspension and brought everybody into his office. Leonard had great respect for Coon—we all did—but protecting Spock was far more important to him. Coon made the requested changes, and Leonard went back to work.

Leonard remained adamant that the mythology we were creating had to be consistent and accurate throughout all our explorations. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, for example, included a scene in which Kirk and Spock were having dinner with the Klingons. In writer and director Nick Meyer’s script, Spock had a line that stated the Federation and the Klingons had been at war for a period of time. He wasn’t sure that was accurate and checked with our resident expert Richard Arnold, who confirmed that there had not been a war in that timeframe, and the line was changed to reflect that. Details mattered to Leonard. Once, when he was working on the western series The Tall Man, just before they started filming he took off his wedding ring and put it in a locked valuables box. When asked about that, he explained that men didn’t wear wedding rings during that period. Who would know that? Who would take the time to find out? Leonard, that’s who. He invested completely in the creation of a character, and all the work he had done all those years finally paid off when he got the opportunity to truly create a character.

He explained that to me once, “No one else is going to provide that consistency and continuity. If the writers gave me the line, ‘Let’s make hay under the Vulcan moon,’ it was up to me to remind them that three episodes earlier Spock had mentioned that Vulcan had no moons.”

Most of the hallmarks that became associated with Spock, in particular the Vulcan neck pinch and the Vulcan salute, were entirely his creation. In one of our first episodes, Kirk’s personality was split into good and evil, and evil Kirk was about to kill good Kirk. In the script, Spock was supposed to sneak up behind evil Kirk and knock him out by hitting him over the head with the butt of his phaser. It was the kind of bad-guy move that Leonard had been doing for a long time. But while our scripts regularly required me to always be punching, rolling, jumping, swinging, butting heads, and getting hit in the face, this was the first time Spock actually participated in a physically violent action. Leonard wasn’t comfortable with that; brawling, banging someone in the head somehow seemed below Spock’s evolved personality. It was too twentieth century. So he suggested to the director that Spock had a special capability that allowed him to put enemies out of action without little physical exertion. The director was open to the concept. Leonard and I sat down, and he told me what he had in mind: he would pinch my trapezius muscle, and I would collapse in a heap. I have no idea where that concept came from, but I was a professional actor; I knew how to fall down. Of course, it fit Spock perfectly: an advanced civilization would know where the vital nerves are located and have the physical strength to take advantage of that knowledge to incapacitate their enemy. We did the scene: Spock came up behind evil Kirk and pinched his trapezius, I dropped to the floor, and the Vulcan nerve pinch was born.

For those people counting at home, fans of the show saw the Vulcan nerve pinch being used thirty-four different times. I wonder how many kids since then have had to suffer through the real pain of a Vulcan neck pinch.

The Vulcan salute has become recognized literally throughout the world. In this salute, the right hand is held up with the pinkie and ring finger touching, but separated from the middle finger and forefinger, which also are touching, in a modified V-for-victory salute. It was created for the first episode of our second season, by which time Leonard had a strong understanding of Spock. In this episode, Spock has to return to Vulcan to fulfill a marriage betrothal that was arranged when he was a child. If he doesn’t return, he will die. This episode was written by the great science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. This is the first time we have seen Spock on Vulcan, among the people of his race. In the script, he is greeted by the woman who is to conduct the marriage ceremony. Leonard suggested to the director that there needed to be some type of Vulcan greeting that would be appropriate. It would be the Vulcan version of a handshake, a kiss, a nod or bow, or a military salute. When the director agreed, Leonard had to create it. It was not an especially easy thing to envision. It needed to be unlike any traditional greeting, but it couldn’t be at all comical. As he often did, Leonard drew on his own life to find it.

There is a gesture he had first seen when he was eight years old, when he went with his grandfather, father, and brother to the North Russell Street shul, an Orthodox synagogue, and he had never forgotten it. In Jewish Orthodox tradition, during the benediction the Shechinah, which very roughly means the feminine counterpart to God, enters the sanctuary to bless the congregation. The Shechinah is so powerful that simply looking at it could cause serious or even fatal injury. So worshipers use this gesture, in which their fingers form the shape of the Hebrew letter shin, to hide their eyes. “I wasn’t supposed to look,” he remembered, “but I knew something major was happening. So I peeked.” The gesture always intrigued him. “I didn’t know what it meant for a long time,” he said. “But it seemed magical to me, and I learned how to do it. There was no reason for me to learn it, but it looked like fun.” Not only did he use it as the basis for the traditional Vulcan greeting in the episode, many years later he published a controversial book of naked glamorous women wearing religious symbols, entitled Shekhina.

The gesture immediately caught on. Fans of the show started greeting him with it on the street—without realizing they were blessing each other. Giving this greeting requires a certain dexterity. Not everybody can do it. Some of our actors had problems with it, and they had to use their other hand to put their fingers in place, then hold up their hand for the camera. Aside from me, another actor who had difficulty giving this gesture was Zachary Quinto, who years later played young Spock for the first time in the 2009 motion picture. While promoting the new film, he admitted to Leonard, “I spent a little time actually training my hands to be able to do the salute. That wasn’t something that came particularly easy, so I would rubber band my ring finger and my pinkie finger together while I was driving around Los Angeles and do little exercises for months leading up to the shooting.”

While Leonard was creating these elements, our writers were smart enough to recognize them as integral parts of the character and incorporate them into future scripts. I’ve often said that no one could do more with a raised eyebrow than Spock, but of course Spock had the strangest eyebrows. Leonard apparently had a habit of raising an eyebrow to emphasize his concern or his questioning of a statement or an action. It isn’t that unusual. Maybe he had used this gesture on-screen before, but before, he didn’t have such prominent eyebrows, and he wasn’t getting full-face close-ups. So he did it naturally in one scene, and the following week, a script direction read: Spock lifts an eyebrow. That became another character trait; the writers loved it and had him raising an eyebrow in just about every episode until he insisted they stop.

Several of Spock’s phrases also have become part of the general culture, but none of them are as widely known as the four words said when giving the Vulcan salute that have come to have such deep meaning: “Live long and prosper.” They were written by Theodore Sturgeon for the same episode and are now known by the abbreviation LLAP—which was the way Leonard ended all his own tweets.

Spock also was associated with a unique, four-syllable pronunciation of the word, “fascinating,” which often was reinforced by an arched eyebrow. It wasn’t simply the word; it was the way he drew it out that gave it such meaning. It also was a good window into his talent as an actor. It’s a simple word, we all know what it means, and there may be a thousand different ways of pronouncing it. But finding the one way to say it that reinforces the subtext of the character can be extremely difficult.

That word was used, he explained, to describe something unexpected, usually something that he had not seen before. It actually was a wonderful word to describe exploration into new worlds that didn’t always adhere to the rules of science or, where Spock was concerned, logic. He always credited Spock’s pronunciation to a director. In one of our early episodes, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” we were all on the bridge gathered around a computer screen. Spock’s reaction to what we were looking at was that one word, “Fascinating,” but it was kind of flat. It didn’t carry with it the awe that the director, Joe Sargent, wanted. So he told Leonard, “Be different. Be the scientist. See it as something that’s a curiosity rather than a threat.” He tried it several different ways until he got it just right, spoken in a detached tone of appreciation for something that exceeded his knowledge or expectations. As he said later about that moment, “A big chunk of the character was born right there.”

It actually took me some time to fully understand Leonard’s total commitment to Spock, and that led to our first real fight. Not our only fight, just our first one. This took place during our first season, and we were all sort of feeling our way along. By then, the cast was complete: in addition to Leonard, Majel Barrett, and me, DeForest Kelley had come aboard to play Dr. “Bones” McCoy, James Doohan’s chief engineer “Scotty” kept the ship running, our communications officer was Nichelle Nichols’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, our helmsman was Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu as created by George Takei, and Walter Koenig was our bow to the Cold War then raging, the Russian-accented navigator Pavel Chekov. We were learning more about each other, and how to work together, each week. While we were being molded into a cast, we were all actors trying to further our own careers, so there was the usual competition. “A constant struggle to inject yourself,” was how Leonard described it, “to try to find ways of making more of a contribution.” It was no different from any other cast. “A family,” he said, “in which everybody’s looking for their position. How come he gets all the good food, and I get the leftovers … how come she’s got the good potatoes, mine are cold.”

While I was becoming comfortable with the popularity of Spock, in those first few months, Leonard and I kept a respectful distance. We were always friendly, always polite, and absolutely always professional, but it wouldn’t be accurate to write that a friendship was developing. We had a good professional, respectful relationship. One of the early episodes we did was called “The Devil in the Dark.” For many people it remains one of their favorite episodes. The story began when the Enterprise visited a planet on which miners were being killed by a strange creature, which lived deep underground, known as a Horta. The Horta had no means of communicating with humans, so to understand its motives, Spock had to “mind meld” with it, a technique that allowed a Vulcan to merge his or her mind what that of another living being. This was known to be a difficult, dangerous, and very painful process in which the Vulcan actually feels the intense pain of the mind-melding counterpart. Spock endured that pain to discover that this otherwise harmless creature was the last of its race and simply was protecting its eggs from the miners’ intrusion. With that knowledge, Kirk was able to forge a peaceful working relationship between the humans and the Horta.

It was a wonderful script, but it included no instruction about how to mind meld, which left it up to Leonard to create the action. I figured the mind meld would be something like a radio signal, in which invisible waves traveled between two people. But when I asked him how he intended to do it, I can vividly remember him placing his forefinger and thumb on my forehead and explaining, “Here’s how we would do it.” It was more like cable than wireless, a physical rather than a mental connection.

We were filming that episode when I was informed that my father had died suddenly of a massive heart attack while playing golf in Florida. I was utterly and totally devastated; I was shaken to the core of my soul both physically and emotionally. I had to go to Florida as quickly as I could get there, but there was no flight for several hours. We were in the middle of a scene, and I decided it was important to continue working. The only way I knew to escape the pain I was feeling was to become someone else, and so I slipped into the guise of James T. Kirk. I owed that to my fellow actors.

Those were the most difficult moments I’ve ever spent on a soundstage. I tried to blank out everything except the persona of my character but had only limited success. When we’d rehearsed in the morning, I’d known my lines, I was a professional, and I was always prepared; but when we resumed work in the afternoon, I stumbled and had great difficulty remembering those lines. Years later, when Leonard and I discussed it, I recalled being stoic, but his memory was different. He told me I continued to repeat, as if in a daze, “Promises not kept. Promises not kept. Things that he wanted to do.”

While I was in the midst of true emotional pain, Leonard was enacting the pain caused by mind melding. He got on his hands and knees, placed his hands on the Horta, and cried, “Pain, pain, pain…” It’s a tricky scene for an actor to pull off without looking very silly, but Leonard had created an aura of believability around Spock, and he was able to make it work.

In that scene, Kirk has to react to Spock’s pain. I returned to the set several days later, after burying my father. The first thing we shot were close-ups of my reaction. The entire cast had been truly sympathetic about my loss, and it was a hard day for all of us. There was a lot of tension on the set, and I wanted to find a way of showing everyone that I was okay. While preparing to do my scenes, I’d looked at the footage of Spock mind melding with the Horta, and Leonard graciously offered to work with me. “Show me what you did,” I said.

“Well, I went over here and put my hands on her and cried, ‘Pain, pain, pain.’”

Having watched the footage, I knew it was far more emotional than that. I asked him to show me exactly what he did.

Leonard got down on his hands and knees, closed his eyes, and reenacted the scene to give me something to react to. He didn’t simply rush through it, he felt the emotion. He screamed out from the depths of his soul, “Pain … pain … pain…”

Rather than respecting his commitment to the work, I went for the cheap joke. I called out, “Can somebody get this guy an aspirin?” I waited for a laugh that never came. Leonard was furious, absolutely furious. I could see the anger in his face. He thought I’d set him up for ridicule, then betrayed him for the amusement of everyone else on the set. This was still early in our relationship; we were learning about each other. It was long before I’d built up the kind of reservoir of goodwill that allowed me to make this kind of silly mistake. Leonard stalked angrily off the set. He confronted me later, telling me he wanted nothing to do with me, that he thought I was a real son of a bitch. My apology seemed hollow. He didn’t say a word to me that wasn’t in the script for at least a week.

But by the time we filmed that episode, Leonard had established his character’s character. In the last scene of that particular episode, after we had secured peace on that world, Kirk told Spock that he was becoming more human all the time. Spock considered that, rolling it over in his mind and testing the concept, then responded, perfectly, “Captain, there’s no reason for me to stand here and be insulted!”

Spock eventually became a lasting archetype for an unemotional person. Even decades later, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wanted to make the point that President Obama was dispassionate and distant, she referred to him as Spock. Spock’s lack of emotion became a central theme of the show. In fact, a lot of the humor in the show came from the constant sparring between the very human Bones McCoy and Spock. In one episode, for example, Spock comments, “He reminds me of someone I knew in my youth.”

To which the surprised Bones responds, “Why, Spock, I didn’t know you had one.”

In another episode, McCoy explains to Spock, “Medical men are trained in logic.”

And the wry Spock feigns surprise as he suggests, “Trained? Judging from you, I would have guessed it was trial and error.”

One of the most poignant moments in the original series took place at the end of the first-season episode “This Side of Paradise.” After being exposed to aphrodisiacal spores, Spock is able to express his love to Leila Kalomi, a woman he had known a few years earlier on Earth. But when the effect of the spores wears off, he is left once again without the ability to feel emotions. “I am what I am, Leila,” he explains to her logically. “And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”

And as she wipes away her tears, Leila asks, knowing the answer, “Do you mind if I say I still love you?”

At the conclusion of the episode, the Enterprise has once again restored order on the planet, and the crew is making preparations to depart that galaxy. Spock has been unusually quiet, so Kirk finally points out, “We haven’t heard much from you about Omicron Ceti Three, Mr. Spock.”

In response, Spock says evenly, “I have little to say about it, Captain, except that for the first time in my life I was happy.”

It is difficult for people who aren’t actors to appreciate the talent it took to create a character that has become a part of American cultural history, the enigmatic Jay Gatsby of the twenty-third century, destined to be played and interpreted by other actors. In less capable hands, it could have been a very one-dimensional role, but he was able to create a dynamic inner life for his character. Of course, the real test for an actor is the way an audience relates to his or her character. Do they empathize with that character? Root for that character? Fear that character? Or do they laugh at that character and not care at all about his or her fate? It actually was surprising how many people found things in their own lives to relate to a thin, dour man with funny-looking ears, rather than the heroic captain, clearly a man of sterling virtue! While I certainly don’t know, I suspect the fact that Spock didn’t easily fit in with the crew was a feeling many people recognized. I remember during our first season, a young girl wrote to Spock through a fan magazine: “I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed.… The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them, the white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like them either. I guess I’ll never have any friends.”

Now, truthfully, I will never know for certain if Leonard actually wrote the response or if someone in the network’s publicity department did, but as I read this, I could hear Leonard’s calming voice, and knowing him as well as I did and watching his concern for other people over the many years, I strongly believe this response was his. While answering her, he filled in some of the blanks about Spock’s backstory and the childhood that shaped the being. Growing up on Vulcan of mixed races, he wrote, Spock

was very lonely and no one understood him. And Spock was heartbroken because he wasn’t popular. But it was only the need for popularity that was ruining his happiness.… It takes a great deal of courage to turn your back on popularity and go out on your own.…

Now, there’s a little voice inside each of us that tells us when we’re not being true to ourselves. We should listen to that voice.… Spock learned he could save himself from letting prejudice get him down. He could do this by really understanding himself and knowing his own value as a person. He found he was equal to anyone who might try to put him down—equal in his own unique way.

You can do this too, if you realize the difference between popularity and true greatness.… Spock said to himself: ‘OK, I’m not a Vulcan, so the Vulcans don’t want me. My blood isn’t pure Earth red blood. It’s green. And my ears—well, it’s obvious I’m not pure human. So they won’t want me either. I must do for myself and not worry about what others think of me who really don’t know me.’

Spock decided he would live up to his own personal value and uniqueness. He’d do whatever made him feel best about himself.… He said to himself:… ‘I will develop myself to such a point of excellence, intelligence and brilliance that I can see through any problems and deal with any crisis. I will become such a master of my own abilities and career that there will always be a place for me.’ … And that’s what he did.