Leonard (11 page)

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.'