Up Till Now (17 page)

There is no way to prepare for the death of a parent. It is a knot in time into which all the emotions you’ve ever felt about that relationship come racing together. It is the ultimate unfinished symphony, with the loose ends of life and loves to somehow be bound together. Well, all of that hit me—and I had work to do. We were in the middle of a scene and it had to be finished. I owed it to my fellow actors. The first plane to Florida didn’t leave for several hours, so rather than wait in an airport I decided to work, hoping the familiarity of my work would provide me with at least a few moments of peace.

Working that day was very difficult. I’d spent my career masking the reality of my own feelings, and instead presenting to the camera the emotional life of the character I was playing. As an actor you learn to do that, to blank out everything except the persona of the character you’re playing, and that’s what I tried to do because that’s what I had always done. I also knew that if I faltered it would be on camera as long as film lasted. Sooner or later the pain I was feeling would go away—but the impact of it on my performance would be recorded on film forever. So I persevered. I worked. When we’d rehearsed this scene in the morning I’d known all my lines, but when we filmed in the afternoon I just couldn’t remember them. I remember being stoic, while Leonard remembers me saying over and over,
“Promises not kept, promises not kept. Things that he wanted to do...”

That night I flew to Miami to pick up my father’s body and bring him home to Montreal.

The result of that was the last serious argument Leonard and I have ever had. In this episode workers on a mining planet were being killed by a creature who lived in their caves. The creature, called a Horta, was a strange-looking beast operated by a guy inside the suit crawling on the floor. As Spock discovered during a painful mind-meld with the Horta, it was the last of its race and was simply protecting its eggs. It was saving the species. Eventually I was able to forge a peace between the miners and the Horta, which agreed to tunnel for the miners, who in return agreed to protect its offspring.

While I was gone Leonard had a scene in which he performed a mind-meld with the wounded Horta. The danger of a mind-meld is that Spock literally felt the intense pain being felt by the Horta. So in this scene he had to get down and put his hands on it and cried in pain. Pain...pain... pain. It’s a difficult scene for an actor to make believable.

When I returned from my father’s funeral the set was very somber. People were being very sympathetic, which I appreciated, but I wanted everyone to know that I was dealing with it and I was fine. I wanted to relieve some of the tension on the set. The first thing I had to do was figure out how to react to Leonard’s mind-meld. I looked at the footage and then told him, “Show me what you did.”

He explained, “Well, I went over here and I put my hands on her and I said, ‘pain, pain, pain.’ “

I shook my head. “It was bigger than that. Can you show me exactly what you did?”

This had been a difficult scene for an actor, but as a favor to me Leonard got back into position and did the scene. He didn’t just go through the motions, he felt the emotion. He screamed out, “Pain. Pain. Pain.”

And I said glibly, “Can somebody get this guy an aspirin?” I
thought everybody would have a good laugh and we would go back to normal.

Leonard did not think it was funny. He was furious. He thought I’d set him up and then betrayed him for the amusement of everyone else on the set. I had toyed with his commitment to his character and the show. For a laugh at his expense. An actor had betrayed an actor, the worst thing you could do. He told me later that he was done with me, that he thought I was a real son of a bitch. He didn’t say a word to me for more than a week.

Many
Star Trek
plots revolved around beautiful women, although often we discovered these women were actually alien life forms or computer-generated mind images intended to make us compliant. The ole man-trap strategy. But during an episode in the third season entitled “Elaan of Troyius,” which guest-starred France Nuyen as an arrogant princess, I told Spock, “Mr. Spock, the women on your planet are logical. That’s the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim.” In many ways I think that summed up the difficulties that I had understanding women.

Admittedly, I wasn’t good at being married. I didn’t know how to make a real commitment to another person. On some level I believed that because I was paying the bills, I should make all the decisions. Holding the purse strings meant having the power. So my marriage to Gloria became very lopsided. I know now that when you take away someone’s self-worth their whole entity is lessened. The person you fell in love with slowly disappears, replaced by...by frustration, anger, disenchantment, and tremendous resentment. And then you get angry with them for no longer being the person you married. It’s considerably more volatile when two actors marry but only one has a successful career.

I was working so hard to support my family and resented Gloria because I was getting so little joy out of my marriage. She resented me for...for probably many reasons. So Gloria stayed home with our girls and it seemed like each week new and beautiful—and seemingly available—women showed up on the set. We had separated
emotionally years earlier, but while we were making
Star Trek
I physically moved out of the house. Eventually she filed for divorce.

Divorce is simply modern society’s version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers. My marriage to Gloria didn’t simply end, it was ripped apart. It left only sharp edges. And poverty.

When the show was canceled the three anchors that had bound me to responsibility had been cut loose. My job was done. My marriage was done. And my father had died. I was floating free. I had no firm direction, no emotional compass. I was just drifting with the currents. I took affection anywhere I could find it. It seemed like there was always someone around who had her own needs to be fulfilled, so lust and romance and passion all began playing a more important role in my life.

I had assumed that the day we finished shooting
Star Trek
was the end of my association with Captain Kirk and the
Enterprise
—and its crew—forever. When a Broadway show ends its run it’s done forever; the producers burn the scenery and there is no recorded copy of the show. It exists only in memories. But television shows are different; television shows are syndicated, sold to local TV stations, which broadcast them over and over.

Paramount had no concept of
Star Trek
’s true value. It was just another failed series. To try to recoup some of its cost they sold it very inexpensively to local stations, who bought it because it was inexpensive and had a proven, loyal audience. The syndication market was just beginning to expand and
Star Trek
was the perfect product. In cities all around the country stations began showing it when the core audience was home. Old fans didn’t want to miss an episode and they brought new fans with them to the living room. The ratings were terrific, especially for the price Paramount was asking, so more local stations bought it. And then television stations in other countries began buying it. In our second season we did a wonderful
episode entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Tribbles are adorable balls of fur that rapidly reproduce reproduce reproduce reproduce. They reproduce faster than a renegade copy machine; and once they start there is no stopping them them them them.

That’s what happened to
Star Trek
. No program in television history had ever tribbled like this. It just kept tribbling and tribbling and tribbling. Leonard realized it long before I did. He was touring the country starring in the one-man show he’d written,
Vincent
, the life of Vincent van Gogh as seen through the five hundred letters he’d written to his brother. And he found that no matter where he went—Billings, Montana; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Rapid City, South Dakota—wherever he went the only thing the local media wanted to talk about was
Star Trek
. “It was just all over the place,” he remembers. “I was becoming very aware that it was invasive—and pervasive—in the culture. The media started writing about the success of the show in syndication, which encouraged even more local stations to buy it. In some cities it was running six nights a week. Stations were running marathon
Star Trek
weekends. We were hearing stories about colleges changing course schedules in the afternoon to eliminate a conflict with
Star Trek
reruns.”

It was impossible to truly grasp what was happening, because nothing like it had ever happened before. A failed television show was becoming a cultural phenomenon. While we were making the series I had often been recognized, but suddenly it started happening all the time and in strange places. People would come up to me in airports and recite ten pages of dialogue word-for-word from a specific episode they loved—and I would have absolutely no concept of what they were doing. I remember in the early 1970s I was working on a television show and got hurt. They rushed me to the hospital to take X-rays. Fortunately, my most serious injuries were some very bad bruises. But just to be certain the doctor asked for a urine specimen. He wanted to make sure there was no blood in my urine, no internal bleeding. I was lying in bed and he handed me a bottle and asked me to fill it. I was too sore to move, so he pulled the oval curtain around the bed to give me some privacy. And just as I started
peeing into the bottle a nurse opened the curtain to see what was going on. She looked at me peeing into the bottle, then her face just lit up with joy and she said, without pausing, “I’m your biggest fan.”

And to which part of me are you addressing that compliment, madam?

While I was very pleased that
Star Trek
was finally getting the attention it deserved, financially it wasn’t doing me any good at all. The actors received only a small royalty for the first few reruns, but nothing after that. There had been some benefits, of course. For example, it was while
Star Trek
was on the air that I had launched my renowned singing career. Until that moment my singing career had been limited to auditioning once for a Broadway musical and being told by the director to focus on acting. But in 1968 Decca Records asked me if I was interested in doing an album. I hesitated, I wasn’t a singer—but then it was pointed out to me that the first note of the musical scale is do.

During appearances on several talk shows I had spoken the lyrics of several popular songs without causing any permanent damage. But on my
first
album I wanted to do more than that, I wanted to explore the unique relationship between classic literature and popular song lyrics. I wanted to emphasize the poetry of language, in both its written and musical forms, used to express the extraordinary range of human emotion. That was my concept for this album.

What I decided to do was find a selection of beautiful writing and use that as a lead-in to a song that complemented it. Or at least served as a corollary. For example, I would use a selection from
Cyrano de Bergerac
ending, “I can climb to no great heights, but I will climb alone,” to segue into Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which had been interpreted to be Dylan’s allusion to his experiences with LSD— and I would perform it as a song sung by an addict bemoaning the fact that he is incapable of surviving without his drugs. In much the same way Hamlet’s classic speech, “To be, or not to be,” led directly into “It Was a Very Good Year,” made famous by Sinatra.

It all made perfect sense to me. But apparently it was a bit obtuse for some other people. Okay, for many other people. All right, for most people.

The album was called
The Transformed Man
and Johnny Carson invited me on
The Tonight Show
to promote it. I decided to do the Cyrano-Tambourine Man cut on the show. It went very well in rehearsal, but it was six minutes long. Producer Freddy de Cordova told me I had to cut it down to three minutes. “Just choose the literature or the song,” he told me. Hmm, I decided I would talk the song, which would be more commercial and certainly more popular.

Here, let me talk a few lines for you: “Hey. Mister. Tam. Bour. Ine. Man. Take me for a trip. Upon your magic swirling ship. My senses, have been stripped. My hands can’t feel to grip. My toes too numb to step...”

As I finished this song I glanced over at Johnny Carson, who had a look of astonishment on his face vaguely similar to the look on Spock’s face when his brain was missing. Without the literary lead-in, I was singing the song as a drug addict looking for a fix. Hey, where are you, Tambourine Man? I need you, I’ll follow you anywhere.

The song was inexplicable to the audience. What the hell is that guy doing? The reviews were very mixed; while some critics wrote that it was the worst album ever produced, others felt just as strongly that there had never been an album like it ever before.

I didn’t mind. I’d pushed the envelope, perhaps I’d pushed a little too far, but I’d tried. I’d taken a creative risk. I’d tried to do something unique, something very different. And I’d learned very early in my acting career that you can’t improve without taking risks, and sometimes that means making mistakes. The good news was that now I knew for certain that I had a lot of room to improve. I mean, a lot of room.

Years later, decades later, my debut album
The Transformed Man
would lead directly to one of the most successful commercial ventures of my career—and another album! But the only reason I was permitted to... let’s call it singing... sing on television was because of
Star Trek
’s loyal fan base.

The end of the initial run of
Star Trek
’s seventy-nine episodes was actually the beginning of an entirely new phenomenon. For me,
Star
Trek
was done. The only thing I expected were a few pitiful checks for the first few reruns. At that time there was no such thing as residual payments. Two or three years later the Screen Actors Guild was able to forge an agreement with producers that actors would be paid each time a show was broadcast. So none of the actors on
Star Trek
ever received a residual check.