Leonard (19 page)

At one point, he did
Fiddler
at the Wilbur Theater in downtown Boston, which finally allowed his parents to see him on stage. He used to laugh about the fact that his mother and father never quite understood
Star Trek
and certainly didn't understand Spock—but at least he was working. And he was kind enough not to remind his father that he had never taken an accordion lesson. His parents knew something special was going on; apparently, young kids would come into his father's barbershop and ask for a haircut like Spock's. What his parents did understand was that he had married a nice Jewish girl and was earning a living at the acting. But Tevye? Tevye they understood.

It was an odd juxtaposition indeed moving from
Fiddler
to Robert Shaw's
The Man in the Glass Booth
. This was a highly controversial, provocative drama dealing with Jewish guilt. Oy. There's a difficult subject. Based very loosely on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, it's the story of a concentration camp survivor who becomes a very successful New York businessman and then somehow convinces the Israelis to put him on trial as a war criminal. At the conclusion of the trial, he locks himself into the glass booth meant to protect him in the courtroom and has a long monologue about the meaning of Hitler to the Germans. It's an extraordinarily chilling moment of theater, “People of Israel,” he begins. “People of Israel. If he had chosen you … if he had chosen you … you also would have followed where he led.” When the play was done on Broadway starring Donald Pleasence, at its conclusion each night, some people in the audience literally would throw things at the stage.

Leonard did it first at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego soon after finishing shooting
M:I
. His pay was $300 a week, which was not sufficient to cover his expenses. But as he said, “What made it worthwhile was that this was a case of knowing what I was doing and why I was doing it.” While the theater sold out and Leonard received a standing ovation every night, there were some people in the San Diego Jewish community who believed the play was anti-Semitic. Leonard actually organized a seminar at a local temple to discuss the play, and I absolutely know Leonard must have been in heaven about that. This was the kind of response to theater, to acting, that made him love this world.

One of the complaints that came up during the meeting was that the portrayal of the central character as a Jew who had succeeded through real estate and financial manipulation was based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Leonard described the exchange of ideas at that meeting as “lively.” I can just imagine what went on, but I know for certain he was in the middle of it, sparking ideas, questions, and challenges.

It actually is somewhat unusual for the theater to break the fourth wall and respond to the action on the stage. It happened to Leonard on another occasion, when he was playing the title role, another immortal character, in the Royal Shakespeare Company's national tour of
Sherlock Holmes
. He actually was physically perfect for the role, angular and lean, somewhat darkish in nature, equipped with inquisitive eyes and a somber voice. Years earlier, Roddenberry had briefly pursued a couple of Holmes projects for him, but it never developed. An afternoon matinee in Detroit's Fisher Theatre was filled with Trekkies who had come to see the sleuth at work.
Laugh-In
's Alan Sues played Holmes's mortal enemy, the evil Moriarty. In the somewhat stirring conclusion, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Leonard's Holmes makes a brilliant deduction and arrests Moriarty. As he is being dragged offstage to the hoosegow, Moriarty turned and screamed his warning at Holmes, “Wherever you go, I will be there, and when I fall, you'll fall with me!”

At that, a woman sitting near the front stood up and—to great cheers—responded, “Oh no you won't! Because you're a crook, and you'll make a mistake!”

Leonard's performance in
Fiddler
led him to be cast in several other touring musicals; he played Fagin in
Oliver,
King Arthur in
Camelot,
and even Professor Henry Higgins in
My Fair Lady
. Both Leonard and I always had an initial hurdle to overcome when we did live theater: a sizeable number of people in the audience had come to see Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in the flesh. They had to lay aside all their preconceptions to accept either of us in a different role. We knew we had been successful when people walked out of the theater admitting that for a few minutes, at least, they forgot it was really Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock up there. And that was a great victory.

One of those people who was convinced Leonard could shed his ears was the great movie director Otto Preminger, who saw him as King Arthur and cast him into the Broadway play he was producing in 1973 entitled
Full Circle
. This was Leonard's debut on Broadway, a dream come true. It was based on a film cowritten by pacifist Erich Maria Remarque, who was famous for the World War I saga
All Quiet on the Western Front,
entitled
The Last Ten Days,
and it was adapted for the American stage by Peter Stone. It was essentially an antiwar play, which obviously was perfect for Leonard. It was a one act costarring Swedish actress Bibi Andersson and took place in a small room in Berlin at the end of World War II. Leonard played an escaped political prisoner who, while disguised as a Nazi, is captured by the Russians.

Working with the famous, pompous Preminger was not an especially good experience. As a director, Leonard was very sympathetic to actors; Preminger was not. Leonard once said that Preminger's entire directing technique consisted of yelling at the actors in his thick German accent, “Ze lines! You must learn ze lines!”

After rehearsal one night, Leonard stopped into a bar to relax. The Spock mystique was at full attraction, and a woman began a conversation, which ended very quickly when she invited him back to her apartment. It just wasn't something he wanted to do. But rather than hurting her feelings, he told her truthfully that he had to go back to his hotel room and learn his lines. The next few days' rehearsals apparently did not go well, and Preminger started screaming. Leonard always was prepared; he always knew his lines. And he stood up to Preminger and told him the whole story. Preminger considered that, then decided, “For ze lines you learned, you shudda screwed her!”

Full Circle
ran twenty-eight performances and closed. The range of plays in which Leonard starred covered pretty much the whole spectrum of American theater, from serious dramas like
The Man in the Glass Booth
and
Full Circle
to many of the great exuberant musicals to light comedies like
6 Rms Riv Vu
opposite Sandy Dennis and even the heartbreaking comedy
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But the play that was most meaningful to him undoubtedly was the one he wrote,
Vincent,
the story of Van Gogh as told mostly through letters he had written to his beloved brother Theo.

Nobody ever claimed Leonard chose to do the easy thing. For a time after
Star Trek,
he supplemented his income visiting college campuses to talk about the show. He was a big hit with students, and the money was good. After only a few years, though, he said, “I felt repetitive and, as is my nature, I began searching for a new challenge.” His plan was to develop a one-person show that he could tour with that both satisfied his curiosity and allowed him to continue acting. After being part of an ensemble like the crew of the starship
Enterprise,
he wanted to find a vehicle that would allow him to be on stage, alone. And, of course, one that continued to pay well.

After speaking at a college in upstate New York, he accepted a dinner invitation from members of the faculty. During the discussion that night, he asked about other lecturers they'd had. Earlier that year, he learned, an actor had performed a one-man show called
Van Gogh
written by Phillip Stevens. It was the story of Vincent van Gogh as told by his brother Theo, who loved and supported him emotionally and financially.

It's not difficult to figure out what attracted Leonard to this story. As he once told an interviewer while promoting it, “Vincent struggled for twenty years to find himself. And then he found his art.” In essence, it was a story of unbridled artistic passion. “I have a tremendous identification with Vincent,” he admitted before another performance. “Like him, I really believe I have something to offer, and that I really want to give it.”

Leonard bought the rights to the play from Stevens and began slowly rewriting it. During his research, he discovered a letter Theo had written to his infirm mother after Vincent's death, describing his funeral. Vincent and Theo had written more than five hundred letters over a ten-year period, and these letters told a wonderful story, describing in detail Vincent's struggles to create and his small victories. Leonard understood that through these letters it was possible to tell a story of artistic creation that anyone with their own passion might understand and relate to. “If a poet touches your soul,” read one of the letters, “he gives you a sense of universal connection with the rest of the universe.

“Must he have proper table manners as well?”

The structure is a simple one. The play takes place a week after Vincent's death, and Theo has invited several of his friends to hear him make his own statement about his seemingly misunderstood brother, which he does by reading from their correspondence. And moment near the end of the first segment probably makes the statement Leonard wanted to make with this show: “Vincent, love your whore, love nature, love life, love that bastard Gauguin, but for God's sake, Vincent, learn to love yourself!”

After several tryouts in Sacramento in 1978, Leonard did the show for the first time at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, a prestigious regional theater in Minneapolis. The reviews for
Vincent
were terrific, and Leonard presented the show hundreds of times in cities all across America. While the show was written to use locally available props to make it easy to transport, it grew to be a two thousand–pound set that Leonard would pack up and store in his garage in Bel Air. The show eventually became his actor's security blanket. No matter how successful an actor might be, at some point, in the dark of the night, way back in the recesses of his or her mind, he or she wonders and fears that it's all going to fall apart. Very few actors are immune to that. So what some actors do is find a vehicle, a one-man show that they can always go on tour with and make a few bucks. Hal Holbrook's
Mark Twain Tonight!
James Whitmore's
Will Rogers' USA
. Tony Lo Bianco as Fiorello LaGuardia in
The Little Flower.

French actor Jean-Michel Richaud discovered the play in 2011 and wanted to play the role. He and Leonard became friends, and as Jean-Michel remembers, “When we would talk about it, he would go to the edge of the seat and move forward. He would become very animated and, for sure, there was a twinkle in his eye. He would tell me that the play was pulling at him. Many times he would put it to rest, and from time to time, he would hear the furniture set in his garage calling to him.”

Leonard actually found a clever way to support his research into Van Gogh's life. In 1976, producer Alan Landsburg had hired him to narrate his series entitled
In Search Of …
which investigated mysterious phenomena. Landsburg successfully made several documentaries, including
In Search of Ancient Astronauts
and
In Search of Ancient Mysteries,
which had been narrated by Rod Serling. After Serling's death in 1975, Landsburg needed someone to replace him, and Leonard's great popularity with science-fiction fans made him the perfect choice. It almost didn't happen. Leonard had done the pilot episode for a somewhat similar show entitled
The Unexplained
. In that episode, Leonard interviewed a young man who claimed to have been abducted by aliens—the perfect show for Spock. But when that show was not bought, Landsburg hired him immediately.

This was the kind of job every actor loves. Almost all the work is done by other people, and you just show up for a day or two to tape voiceovers or do an entrance and exit. It's often possible to film several shows in one day. It allows an actor to earn a good salary while still having time to work on those projects that really interest him. During one period, for example, Leonard was starring in
Equus
on Broadway. Every few weeks, Landsburg would send a film crew to New York; and on the day the show was dark, they would race around the city finding appropriate backgrounds for Leonard do his intros and exits. They filmed in graveyards, in old brownstones; they did the introduction to a show about Native American faith in the National Museum of the American Indian. The next morning, he'd go into a recording studio and do the narrations.

The good news for Leonard was that this was an interesting show, often investigating subjects that probably intrigued him, including the Abominable Snowman, ghosts, voodoo, the Shroud of Turin, mummies, the disappearance of bandleader Glenn Miller, and life before birth, although it also treated some questionable subjects, like killer bees, alien abductions, and the Amityville Horror, with equal respect. Leonard was particularly curious about those things that seemed just a little bit beyond our knowledge, things like ESP, hypnosis, and supernatural phenomena. While Leonard was writing
Vincent,
he was able to convince Landsburg to send him to Europe to research and write an episode for the show … “In Search of Vincent van Gogh
.
”

During his research, Leonard was able to visit those places Van Gogh had lived and painted in France and Holland. In fact, while digging into Van Gogh's life, he actually discovered some hospital records that indicated the painter had suffered from epilepsy rather than being insane.