فصل 05

FIVE

The relationship between Kirk and Spock remained considerably warmer than that of Shatner and Nimoy, but they had better writers. Throughout that first season, Leonard and I remained respectful, polite, and professional, but I don’t remember ever even having a conversation about our personal lives. It was odd; we had a tremendous amount in common, but we hadn’t found a reason to explore it. It wasn’t just me; this was the first time in Leonard’s career that he really was a star, his name was painted on his dressing room door, and it was clear that he was enjoying success after seventeen years of being what’s-his-name, that dark-and-gloomy-looking guy.

Generally, we went our own ways, meeting on the set. But whatever I was feeling, it all came to a head very early one morning. Spock’s ears had become a popular story, and our makeup artist, Freddy Phillips, who had used his own money to get the second set of ears made, was receiving a lot of well-deserved attention. So when TV Guide wanted to do a photo story about making up Spock, Leonard agreed. But no one bothered to tell me about it.

It took as long as three hours to apply Leonard’s makeup, while mine took about fifteen minutes, so he was always in makeup hours before I was. I arrived at work one morning, and as I sat in my chair, reviewing my lines, making my usual wonderfully clever remarks, getting ready for the day, I noticed a photographer snapping pictures. I had no idea who he was or how he had gotten permission to invade this actor’s sanctuary. I believe I had approval of still photographs taken on the set. I wasn’t especially excited about the possibility that candid shots might be published. So I asked who he was and what he was doing there. In my memory, I asked politely. There may be another side to that story. When I found out, I called the producers to complain. Soon, someone came down and asked the photographer to leave. There, situation settled.

Except it wasn’t. This was an important opportunity for Leonard. After seventeen years of working in obscurity, one of the most popular magazines in America was featuring him in a story. Leonard decided he wasn’t going to continue being made up until the photographer returned. When that didn’t happen, he got up and confronted me in my trailer.

“Did you order the photographer out?” he asked.

“Order” seemed like a harsh word, but not an inaccurate one. “I did,” I admitted. “I didn’t want him there.”

Years later, Leonard remembered this conversation very clearly. He told me, “It was approved by Roddenberry. It was approved by the head of the studio. It was approved by publicity.”

To which he remembers me responding, “Well, it wasn’t approved by me.” Harsh words, and I must have been a lot more envious than I remember being at the time. But in my defense, actors can be very defensive when they believe they are protecting their careers. That’s not much of a defense, but it’s the best I’ve got. And years later, if I really remembered saying this, I certainly would have regretted it.

Leonard stood his ground, saying, “You mean to tell me that I’ve got to get approval from you to have my picture taken?” I do see the question mark at the end of that last sentence, but I suspect Leonard did not intend it to be a question. George Takei described Leonard’s demeanor as “cold rage.” He went to his dressing room, the one with his name painted on the door.

Several executives came down from wherever executives come down from and met privately with Leonard. Then this group came to my dressing room. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast, all in costume and ready to go to work, instead went to the commissary for breakfast. When they returned, the set was still dark. The executives were shuttling back and forth trying to establish a détente. The cast filled the morning doing nothing, until someone suggested that they take an early lunch. So they went back to the commissary. With the tight production schedule we were forced to maintain because of our limited budget, this constituted an expensive crisis. Roddenberry finally came down and negotiated a peace—I have no idea what it was—but we all went back to work.

Looking back on that particular event, I don’t think I truly understood the source of his anger until many years later. And I should have. Just being in this profession I should have. An actor is the most dominated person in show business. Producers hire and fire based on who knows what. Writers put words in the actor’s mouth. Directors tell them where to move. Critics put the responsibility for the end product entirely on the actor, whose performance may be the result of bad writers working with a poor director. So just imagine what can happen when an actor finally gets in a position of power. There are some people in this profession who take out the frustrations that have built up on other people. That wasn’t Leonard. But Leonard had spent seventeen years going from job to job, like we all do, wondering: What am I going to do next? How am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to pay for my children’s education? What do I do when I get older? Will I be able to age into character parts? And then Leonard found a home in Star Trek. He found a place to excel. Finally, he had a job that was going to get him attention, a job that inevitably would lead to other jobs. And then this guy Shatner gets in the way of all that for his own reasons.

No wonder Leonard was upset. Had I been cognizant of any of this, I would have been different; I don’t know how, but I would have been much more there, I would have been understanding and supportive, but who considers all those things when they are in the middle of an unpleasant confrontation?

It did not help matters that Leonard remained aloof between takes. He certainly didn’t join in the casual camaraderie usually found on a set. Generally, an actor puts on his or her character when the camera starts rolling. We’re wearing the costumes, we’ve got the makeup on, and we ease into the voice and mannerisms for the scene. When the scene is over, we’re ourselves in costume; in those days, it meant having a cigarette and a cup of coffee, a little friendly conversation, what’d you do over the weekend, how was your son’s football game, and then back to work. At the end of the day, it’s back to real life.

But that didn’t work for Leonard. It took such an enormous emotional investment in being Spock that he didn’t escape it, even when the bright lights were dimmed. There’s very little downtime when making a TV show; you finish one scene and move right on to the next one. It’s wham-bam for twelve hours; you have ten pages to get done that day, you’re on-screen, you’re offscreen. Next, c’mon, let’s go, great, next. Either Leonard or I, or both of us, were pretty much in every scene. Leonard didn’t have the time to put on Spock and take him off, so between scenes, he stayed very much in character, which meant keeping a distance from the rest of us who were relaxing. We all would be sitting around, and I would be entertaining my fellow actors with jokes about two actors arguing—“I’m playing nothing, so you can’t”—and everyone would laugh with recognition—except Leonard. He would sit staring at me and rolling the joke over in his mind, analyzing the humor, parsing the language, digesting the deeper meaning. “I found it very difficult to turn it off and on,” he told me. “So stepping out of the set, sitting in a chair waiting for the next setup, I couldn’t shift out of the character.”

It wasn’t just during the workday, he explained, “I was in that character more hours during the week than I was in my own. I spent more time as Spock than as Nimoy, twelve hours a day five days a week. That’s most of your waking life.”

That was beyond my understanding. Maybe that was because our approach to the work was so different; at the end of the day, I was able to shed Kirk or T. J. Hooker or Denny Crane or any of the many other characters I became and resume my adventures as Bill Shatner.

In fact, an odd thing happened: Leonard began adapting some of Spock’s characteristics into his own life. He became very comfortable with Spock’s clear, precisely punctuated speech pattern, his thoughtful pauses before responding, and his broadly accepting rather than judgmental social attitudes. “I found them comforting,” he said, “and by osmosis they became part of me.” Decades after the show ended, he told a journalist, “My personality changed. I became more rational. I became more logical. I became more thoughtful. I became less emotional.… I could feel it especially on the weekends.”

It probably was not a huge transition. As long as I knew Leonard, he always was somewhat restrained in behavior and emotion. He wasn’t someone who had great, loud bursts of unrestrained exuberance. He was thoughtful, calm, and maybe even a little contained. I don’t think anyone ever described Leonard Nimoy as boisterous. There is a photograph that his son, Adam, found while producing and directing a documentary about his father. It was a picture of Leonard with his close friend, writer Don Siegel. Siegel is whispering in Leonard’s ear, and whatever he has said, Leonard’s head is thrown back, and he is laughing hysterically. “It was very infrequent to see my dad cut loose like that,” Adam said. “It’s not even a very good photo, but it’s so interesting to capture that moment because we just didn’t see a lot of that from him, that kind of joy, unbridled and unchecked. He was very much like his parents, who were very reserved, who held things in check. They were very unemotive, very even-keeled, and Dad was that way as well.”

Now that doesn’t mean Leonard didn’t have a sense of humor, but he didn’t tell jokes as much as make astute humorous comments. He was fascinated by technology, although not especially knowledgeable about cutting-edge advances. He certainly did not have any of Spock’s expertise, but scientists loved to show their work to him. At one point, for example, he was visiting Caltech, and several brilliant young scientists were thrilled to explain their projects to him. I suspect Leonard had some vague idea what they were talking about, but he certainly didn’t understand the intricacies. Leonard liked to tell the story, “They would look at me and ask, ‘What do you think?’”

Leonard nodded thoughtfully, then very quietly and very sagely replied, “You’re on the right track.”

He also loved being involved in pranks and practical jokes, whether he was the pranker or the prankee! Actors often play pranks on each other as a means of dealing with the boredom on a set between takes. Once, I remember, our target was Dee Kelley. Everybody loved Dee Kelley. He was a large and compassionate human being, as well as a fine actor. But one night while we were shooting, he had made the mistake of confiding in me that he was somewhat concerned that his memory was slipping. Naturally, I was supportive and compassionate; naturally. In the commissary the next morning, I enlisted Leonard’s assistance. When DeForest put a bagel in the toaster, I whispered to Leonard, “Occupy Dee’s attention.” Leonard began singing a song from Man of La Mancha, and Dee turned to watch him. I unloaded the toaster, putting the bagel away. After a moment or two, DeForest walked over the toaster, the toaster popped up—and there was nothing in it.

Hmm. He thought about it a second, then sliced a second bagel and put it in the toaster. This time Leonard called over to him and asked him how he liked this song, then sang a song from Fiddler on the Roof. I pushed up the toaster and shoved the bagel in my mouth. A minute later, Dee came back, popped up the toaster again—and took a deep breath. He stared at the toaster, trying to reconcile the facts as he remembered them. Naturally, he didn’t want to say anything to anyone, but it appeared his greatest fear was coming true. He glanced around furtively, hoping no one would notice his distress. And then his eyes settled on me, and he saw me choking on a bagel, trying desperately to keep myself from laughing—and shook his head in acknowledgment that he’d been fooled.

Arguably my greatest prank involved Mr. Nimoy. By the end of our first season, we had forged our own bonds. We had become united—mostly against the production company and the network. Leonard and I had worked out our differences, and while we hadn’t yet become friends, we certainly were getting along. So it was a ripe time for me to instigate. The soundstage on which we worked was quite a distance from the studio commissary. As we only got a half-hour break for lunch, when it was time, we all raced to get there as rapidly as possible. Often, there was a long line being served lunch, a line that moved slowly, so if you were on the end of that line, there was a chance you would go hungry that day.

I had been on the track team in school. I was pretty fast, especially for an actor. Leonard was less athletic than I was, and although he had long legs, he did not move nearly as fast. Perhaps those ears caught the wind and held him back. But the result was that I got my lunch every day, and sometimes Leonard did not. But Leonard was a very resourceful man; he figured things out. One day, lunch was called, and I dashed outside and started running—and seconds later Leonard came speeding past me on a bicycle, leaving me far behind. When I got to the commissary, he was already being served—and my memory is that he looked at me triumphantly. He later described it as “the logical thing to do.” But it was a victory that could not be allowed to stand.

I felt he had showed a disregard for the unspoken rules of fair play by employing mechanical means. His bike was easy to find; he had written his name on it in large letters. With the assistance of other members of the cast and crew, who also did not like to be outsmarted or outsprinted, we tied a rope to his bike and hoisted it into the rafters. Two electricians trained spotlights on it. At lunchtime, he dashed outside—to discover his bike was gone. When he complained, I suggested, “Come back inside and turn your head to the heavens. Look to the stars!” And so he looked up and saw his bike in the flies of the stage. Everybody was laughing. Well, okay, not quite everybody.

I wanted to make sure such a terrible thing like that never happened again to an esteemed member of our cast. To make certain of that, I brought a good lock and chained and secured his bicycle to a fire hydrant. When he came outside and saw it, he demanded, “Who did that?” I stood right up and shrugged. “I don’t know. I was wondering that myself.”

The next day he came to work with bolt cutters. Now, I am a lover of animals; I ride horses and love dogs, especially Dobermans. Wonderful dogs, big, wonderful dogs. In fact, on occasion, I would bring one of my Dobermans with me to the studio, and keep the dog in my dressing room. So when I came outside later that day and saw Leonard’s bike there unattended, I worried that someone might take it, so to help my friend Leonard, I put it in my dressing room for security purposes only. When they called lunch and Leonard went outside and discovered his bike was missing, once again he demanded to know what had happened to it. I pressed my palm earnestly to my chest and told him about my fears and directed him to my dressing room. “Door’s open,” I suspect I told him. I may have added that the best way to stop a Doberman in midair is to reach in and grab its tongue. Then I went to lunch.

Leonard claimed later that he had employed the Vulcan nerve pinch, but it didn’t work. “Those dogs are meaner than you,” were his actual words, “and that’s not easy.” I gave him back his bicycle, believing my point had been made. Apparently, it hadn’t. The next day Leonard drove his car, a large Buick, onto the lot, parked it directly outside the soundstage, put his bicycle in the backseat, and locked the car.

I did not personally tow that car away. But I did feel it might be a hazard, so I arranged for it to be done. I believe that was when Leonard finally agreed that he would be running to the commissary.

Whatever attributes the audience attributed to Spock, and probably Leonard, the character resonated with them. Kids began wearing Spock ears, and Leonard received piles and piles of fan mail, far more than any of the other cast members. When he was out in public, people would greet him with a raised hand or wish him, “Live long and prosper.” Ironically, many of them came from women who, according to pop psychologists, were attracted by his alienation. On a different level, I experienced the same thing. People began addressing me as “Captain” or “Kirk.” That was a new experience for me. I’d had professional success, I’d played a role in some major movies, people recognized me, but I had never before been called by my character’s name. It was odd, and in some ways, it made me uncomfortable. I’m not quite sure why, but it did. I wondered, What is that all about? It’s crazy. So often I didn’t acknowledge it, or I disparaged it.

If I was feeling that confusion, that ambivalence, I can’t imagine what Leonard must have been going through. Other actors had become famous because of the characters they played. Jim Arness was Gunsmoke’s Marshall Matt Dillon. Robert Stack gained recognition as Eliot Ness on The Untouchables. Edd Brynes was a teen idol as Kookie in 77 Sunset Strip. But none of those characters achieved the historic popularity of Spock. Fans of those shows were thrilled to meet Jim Arness, Robert Stack, or Edd Byrnes—but our fans wanted to meet Mr. Spock.

Perhaps the strangest thing was that eventually Leonard became somewhat ambivalent about his relationship with Spock. Spock made Leonard’s career. In each of the three years the show was on the air, Leonard was nominated for an Emmy as best supporting actor. TV Guide named Spock one of the fifty greatest characters in TV history. Leonard became well known and in demand because of the original series. But the new fear, replacing “I will never work again,” was that he was so strongly identified as Spock that he could never escape him. For someone who proudly described himself as a character actor, being so strongly typecast he could not play other roles was a terrifying possibility. His first autobiography, published in 1975, was titled I Am Not Spock. The title, he explained, came from a meeting in an airport, in which a woman introduced him to her daughter as Spock—although the child was never convinced. It also came from the publisher’s desire to profit from the popularity of Spock as well as create a little controversy. It was not, Leonard always insisted, meant to be a statement about his feelings about Spock, and he said if he ever had the opportunity to portray any fictional character, without hesitation he would choose Spock. And several years later, when he did write a second autobiography, it was titled I Am Spock.

He had come full circle.

While Star Trek initially became incredibly popular among a core audience, it didn’t achieve the kind of success the network had envisioned. Leonard always believed they didn’t really understand the show. They expected an action show with monsters, futuristic weapons, and great battles in space; that wasn’t the show Roddenberry wanted to produce. So we never got the full promotional push from the network. Scheduling always was a problem. They moved us around, making it almost impossible for us to build an audience. We would come to work each week secretly harboring the fear that we had been canceled. The first season the show was broadcast at 7:30 Thursday nights, which was early enough for us to attract our target, high school and college kids, young professionals, and young married couples. The second season we were on a little later, and our audience got smaller. Our third year, we originally were moved to Monday nights at 7:30, the perfect spot for us. But doing that required moving the top-rated live comedy show Laugh-In back a half hour; when that show’s producer, George Schlatter, objected, NBC moved Star Trek to Friday 10:00 P.M. That was the worst possible time slot for us; our young audience wasn’t home watching television on a Friday night. And those people who were home were in a different universe.

The show just never had the support of the network. We worked on an extremely tight budget, which meant we had a difficult six-day shooting schedule—and for the third season, they even reduced that budget by $15,000 an episode. If we went over budget, we weren’t permitted to beam down to another planet in the next episode; instead we did what was referred to as a “bottle episode”—the entire episode had to be shot on the existing Enterprise sets. To ensure there was no overtime, we ended every day at precisely 6:18. Even if we were in the middle of a scene, we stopped at 6:18 so the crew could clean up, put everything away, and be done by 6:30. The CBS show Mission: Impossible was filming on the adjoining soundstages and had an eight- or sometimes nine-day schedule—and then an extra day to shoot inserts, the clever little devices they used to stop the weekly revolution in an unnamed Eastern European country. They needed that time—that was a visual show—whereas of necessity, we were a verbal show. Star Trek depended on the interplay between the cast; MI depended more on what the camera showed the audience. It was amazing how much we accomplished with so little money. Our special effects truly were minimal. Our doors, which seemed to open magically, were manually operated. All the sound effects, essentially whooshing when the doors were operated and occasional death rays, were added in postproduction. For a show supposedly taking place three centuries in the future, we relied on rudimentary, inexpensive technology.

What made the show work, in addition to the relationships between the members of the crew, were the stories we told each week. Star Trek was a tribute to the great tradition of science fiction, in which future civilizations were used to tell contemporary morality tales, tales about subjects that couldn’t be addressed for various reasons at the time. Leonard was a serious man; he always cared about the issues that affected people’s lives. I like to believe I’ve lived my life the same way. While both of us had found ways to do meaningful work, Leonard in plays like Deathwatch and Yiddish theater, me in great movies like Judgment at Nuremburg, we also had done a lot of shoot-’em-ups and cop stories—the cotton candy of the entertainment industry. So when we got our scripts each week, we always were interested in seeing which controversial topics our writers were attacking that week and how they had cleverly managed to get away with it. “That’s what made Star Trek meaningful for me,” Leonard explained to journalist Paul Fischer in 2009. “We tackled some very interesting issues through the years: racial issues, economic issues, ecological issues. Writers were given an opportunity in Star Trek to tell stories about issues that they could not tackle in other television shows.” On different episodes, we explored grand issues like authoritarianism, class warfare, imperialism, human and alien rights, and, always, the insanity of war. Maybe the most controversial thing we did get away with was the first interracial kiss ever shown on American television. It actually caused that particular episode to be banned on several Southern affiliate stations. Leonard and I, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Walker Koenig, Jimmy Doohan, Majel Barrett, and Nichelle Nichols were doing work we were proud of doing. And every once in a while, we’d get confirmation what we were doing was important.

After the first season, both Leonard and Nichelle Nichols began getting the types of offers they’d been working for their entire careers. Nichelle had been brought up in the musical theater, and her dream was to appear on Broadway. She told Roddenberry she had decided to leave the show and move to New York. He asked her to think about it for a few days and, coincidently, the following night she went to an NAACP fundraiser in Beverly Hills. During the party, one of the hosts asked her to meet a man who described himself as her greatest fan. Another Trekkie, she thought, one of the growing legion of fans of the show. And then she turned around to greet Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I am your greatest fan,” he told her. “I’m that Trekkie.” Nichelle told him how much she regretted not being out there marching with him. “No, no, no,” he said. “No, you don’t understand. We don’t need you to march. You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for.”

Nichelle told him how incredibly flattered she was, then admitted that she was leaving the show, that she’d told Gene Roddenberry the day before. He shook his head and said, “You cannot do that. Don’t you understand what this man has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen. This is the only show that my wife, Coretta, and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch.”

Apparently, Whoopi Goldberg told Nichelle a similar story, remembering turning on the show when she was nine years old and seeing Nichelle, which caused her to run through her apartment screaming, “Come quick! Come quick! There’s a black lady on TV, and she ain’t no maid!”

While perhaps not exactly typical, it was the kind of reaction we were getting. Roddenberry’s objective had been achieved—and no character was more important to that than Leonard’s Mr. Spock. It was those loyal fans, and Gene Roddenberry, that kept us on the air for three seasons. While we were still shooting second-season episodes, we began hearing rumors that NBC was planning to cancel the show. In response, Roddenberry very quietly orchestrated a massive letter-writing campaign through fan clubs. “If thousands of fans just sit around moaning about the death of Star Trek,” Bjo Trimble, a friend of Roddenberry, wrote, “they will get exactly what they deserve: Gomer Pyle!” The threat worked. Either because those people loved our show or were terrified of Gomer Pyle, the network received more than one million letters pleading with the executives not to cancel the show. It probably was the greatest display of fan loyalty in television history, and NBC respected that loyalty and canceled the planned cancelation. That marked the beginning of the most unusual relationship between a show and its audience in television history and perhaps in all the annals of entertainment.