Up Till Now (16 page)

“This went on for many years, the entire time I believed I was in control. I can handle this. If necessary for professional reasons I could go a week without a drink. But eventually I started waking up in the morning thinking, why do I want to live today? And that’s when I first became concerned.

“I married my wife, Susan, in 1989. I was still drinking, but I was deliriously happy with her. And one day I was talking to her about how different my life was with her and how happy I felt, and she asked me, ‘Then why do you drink so much?’

“And I thought, you know, she’s right. I don’t have to do this anymore. So she called a friend and within hours, on a Sunday night,
someone was here from Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember he said to me, ‘You cannot drink a little.’ We talked for two hours and the next night I went to my first AA meeting, which was a thrill. I haven’t had a drink since we had that conversation that night.”

Years later Leonard’s alcoholism, about which I knew nothing while we were making
Star Trek
, would come to play a central role in my life. And it would bond us together in a way that I never could have imagined—particularly when he was getting all that attention. Not that I minded the character with the weird ears taking the attention away from the noble Captain Kirk, of course.

Wooden? I barely even remember sitting at the kitchen table on a rainy morning, eating three slightly undercooked eggs over easy, reading that review while Gloria, who was dressed in a pale green cotton top, got the girls ready for school. As a professional actor, those things don’t bother me. And that particular review has continued to not bother me for more than four decades.

A series begins to work when the personalities of the characters, and the relationships between those characters, become clearly defined to the viewers. So you don’t need an explanation about the meaning of each line or gesture. Leonard always pointed to the end of an episode entitled “The Devil in the Dark” as the moment that perfectly captured the relationship between Kirk and Spock. After we’d successfully saved a creature named the Horta, who seemed to be attracted to Spock, I told him that he was becoming more human all the time. He considered that, then responded, “Captain, there’s no reason for me to stand here and be insulted.” Then walked off the bridge of the
Enterprise.

Certainly no television show in history has been so thoroughly chronicled and analyzed as
Star Trek
. There are people, Trekkies, who can quote entire shows, entire seasons, people who know these characters better than their own families. University courses have been taught about the show. Books have been written about the philosophy and ethics of our plots. But when we were making the show all we were concerned about was being renewed for the next season. Another season meant twenty-six weeks of regular paychecks. Our
ratings were never tremendous, but our audience was extremely loyal. I think we realized the show was successful when key phrases we used began seeping into the general culture. I’d walk through an airport and people would recognize me and say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” or “Live long and prosper.” On other shows comedians were promising to “Boldly go where no man has gone before,” and traveling at “warp speed,” and issuing their own “prime directives,” while kids were talking about our futuristic props; our gunlike phasers— which could be put on stun rather than simply killing our enemies, and flip-up communicators which looked precisely like the flip-phones that would be invented almost four decades later, as if they were real.

The general consensus among respected philosophers is that
Star Trek
was successful and has endured because our stories focused on universal themes—which of necessity took place elsewhere in the universe because they were about subjects that couldn’t easily be tackled by traditional programming. Gene Roddenberry once said that the real mission of the
Enterprise
was to search for intelligent life on the other side of the television set. While the grand theme of our five-year mission was always good versus evil, we also did stories about racism, sexism, authoritarianism, class warfare, imperialism, human and parahuman and alien rights, and the insanity of war. Nichelle Nichols and I shared the first interracial kiss on American television—which several Southern stations refused to broadcast— although we were compelled to kiss by space aliens controlling our minds. Which was certainly one of the most creative excuses to kiss a beautiful woman I’d ever heard.

Before our first show was broadcast the cast met with the media. When Leonard was asked about the character of Spock, he responded that we were doing something very different than the typical science-fiction story. “This is an intelligent character, a scientist, a being with great dignity.” As the same reporters watched the next day, we filmed a scene in which Spock was lying in a bed in sick bay, green blood dripping from his head. I rushed in and asked urgently,
“What happened, Spock?” to which he replied, “Captain, the monster attacked me!”

Gene Roddenberry never referred to himself as
Star Trek
’s producer, rather he was...the creator. And ironically it was Gene who brought Leonard and me closer together. Roddenberry was a quirky guy whose greatest invention was the character of Spock. After the first thirteen episodes writer/producer Gene Coon was brought in and Roddenberry became the executive producer, meaning he was more of a supervisor than working on the show day-to-day. After that his primary job seemed to be exploiting
Star Trek
in every possible way.

After we had been on the air for a couple of months an agent called Leonard and offered him two thousand dollars to make a personal appearance somewhere in Massachusetts on a Saturday afternoon. From that amount the agent would take his ten percent fee. At that time Leonard was earning $1,250 a week so this was very exciting. His problem was that in order to get there in time for the lecture on Saturday he had to be on the 6 P.M. flight Friday afternoon out of Los Angeles. That meant leaving the set an hour and eighteen minutes before we finished. Technically that wasn’t a problem. With enough notice we could easily film around him. So he asked the producers for permission to leave early that Friday. “Two or three days went by,” he remembers, “and I hadn’t heard anything. The agent wanted me to make a commitment. Finally I was told that Gene Roddenberry wanted to see me. I went up to his office. ‘I understand you want to get out early?’ he said.

“I told him that was true, ‘I’ve got a job offer on Saturday for two thousand dollars.’

“Then he said to me, ‘I’ve just started a company called Lincoln Enterprises. We’re going to do some merchandising of
Star Trek
memorabilia, but we also want to represent actors for personal appearances. I’d like to represent you for this appearance. And the fee is twenty percent.’

“I shook my head, then told him that I was already paying an
agent ten percent and that I didn’t understand why I had to pay him too.

“He looked at me and said, ‘The difference between your agent and me is that your agent can’t get you out of here at five o’clock on Friday and I can. And all it’ll cost you is twenty percent.’

“ ‘Gene, I can’t do that to this agent,’ I said. ‘He got me the job.’ “And then he said, and I will never forget his exact words, ‘Well, you’re just going to have to learn how to bow down and say master.’

“I told him, ‘You got the wrong guy,’ and walked out of his office. Eventually he backed down and I made that plane, but while we worked together for years afterward that was the end of any semblance of a friendship between Gene Roddenberry and myself.”

The relationship between Leonard and the producers got so bad during the first season that they actually sent him a memo informing him that he was not permitted to use the studio’s pens and pencils.

Gene and I had a similar argument about a small medal of honor he wanted me to award to a member of the crew on the show. It had absolutely nothing to do with the plot—and everything to do with the fact that this medal was going to be sold by Lincoln Enterprises. The actors’ contracts called for a minimal participation in merchandise revenue and this was just a clever way to get around that. I refused to have anything to do with the pin—so then they began working on Leonard to wear it, finally pressuring him into doing it.

Roddenberry sold everything. To check the lighting of each scene the cinematographer would shoot what was known as a light strip. It was usually about ten frames times the number of scenes we’d shoot in a day. Maybe a hundred frames a day. Most people threw them out. Not Roddenberry. He cut out the individual frames and sold them as a piece of
Star Trek
. He was selling our images.

Each Christmas the editors would put together a gag reel to be shown at our Christmas party. It’s ten minutes of jokes and bloopers, some of them intentional, many of them not; it was actors at play and actors making mistakes, and it was never, ever meant for anyone except the cast and crew to see. For example, we had one scene that showed Spock shooting an arrow—immediately followed by a scene
showing Kirk being carried into a cave by members of the
Enterprise
crew, with an arrow sticking out of my crotch. Several years later I was in Mammoth and someone asked me if I’d seen the
Star Trek
gag reel being shown at a local pub—Roddenberry had spliced together two or three of these private reels and sold them.

The battles both Leonard and I fought against the studio actually pushed us together. Eventually we were able to negotiate contracts that included a “most favored nation” clause, which basically meant that whatever perk or payment or privilege either one of us got, the other one would be entitled to the same treatment. Leonard and I became friendly, although certainly not best friends. In fact, I actually believed the entire cast got along quite well. Many years later I discovered that we weren’t getting along at all and that apparently I was the cause of it.

After we’d shot about half the shows for our second season we began hearing strong rumors that the five-year voyage of discovery was about to come to an early and abrupt ending. NBC was preparing to cancel the show. To prevent that from happening two very loyal fans and friends of Roddenberry, Bjo and John Trimble, initiated a letter-writing campaign. Bjo obtained mailing lists from the World Science Fiction Convention and from notable science-fiction bookstores, as well as fan letters written to the cast. “I just got a call from Gene Roddenberry,” she wrote. “[T]here has been no word on renewing the show for next season, and in fact, it is highly likely
Star Trek
will die if something isn’t done . . .

“If thousands of fans just sit around moaning about the death of
Star Trek,
they will get exactly what they deserve:
Gomer Pyle
!... So pass the word and write some letters, people.” Some letters? As a result of this campaign NBC received—trumpets blare here—more than one million letters urging the network not to cancel the show. NBC announced, “
Star Trek
will continue to be seen...”

A very logical decision, Captain.

Perhaps more important, the people who wrote these letters suddenly had an emotional attachment to a television program unlike any viewers ever before. They had actually influenced a network’s
programming decision. They had ownership;
Star Trek
really had become their show. This marked the beginning of the most unusual relationship between viewers and a TV series in history.

NBC scheduled the show for Monday nights at 7:30, the perfect time slot for us because our audience consisted primarily of teenagers, college students, and young adults, science-fiction fans who would be home at that hour. But when George Schlatter, the producer of NBC’s top-rated
Laugh-In
—which would have to be moved a half-hour from its 8 P.M. starting time—objected, the network moved us to Friday nights at 10 P.M.

It was no
Bonanza
—for
Star Trek
this was the worst possible time slot. No one in our universe was going to stay home Friday night to watch television. Our audience was out on Friday nights. Not home,
no esta en la casa,
gone, away. Those people who would be at home weren’t going to be watching science fiction. Even then NBC reduced our budget, paying $15,000 less per episode than it had during our first season. That meant that we could no longer film on location, we couldn’t pay guest stars, and one of every four shows had to be done entirely on the
Enterprise.

Our first show that third season might have been a tribute to the NBC executives who so mishandled this show: it was about a society in desperate need of a brain. It was entitled “Spock’s Brain” and took place on Stardate 5431.4. I don’t know what day of the week that would have been—but I can assure you it was not a Friday night at ten o’clock. Because even aliens are busy Friday nights at ten o’clock. In this story a beautiful alien woman beams aboard the
Enterprise
and steals Spock’s brain, turning him into a zombie, and causing Bones to have to utter one of the worst lines of all seventy-nine episodes, “Jim. His brain is gone!” We had twenty-four hours to find Spock’s brain somewhere in the entire universe, then reinsert it in his head. Naturally Spock comes along with us, showing all the emotion of... Spock. Eventually we discover a race that needs his brain to control its planet’s life-supporting power systems. McCoy operates to reinsert Spock’s brain—during which Spock awakens and instructs him how the parts should be properly connected. In
the dramatic highlight of the episode we are all standing by the operating table, waiting anxiously to see if Spock will survive this operation. Suddenly, Spock opens his eyes, looks at me and blinks several times, and then says in absolute astonishment, “Friday night at ten o’clock?”

Perhaps he didn’t. But it was true, of course. The show was canceled after three seasons on the air. In January 1969, we filmed the final episode. It had been a good job, a good cast, but it was over. During the three years I’d worked on the show my life had changed completely. Gloria and I had finally separated and, early one afternoon in 1967, as we were filming an episode called “Devil in the Dark,” I received a phone call telling me my father had died of a heart attack while playing golf in Florida.