Leonard (14 page)

“I didn't get an answer from the producers for a few days, and the agent wanted me to make the commitment,” Leonard explained. “Finally, I was told Gene Roddenberry wanted to see me. I went to his office, and we spoke for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘I understand you want to get out early Friday.'” That was true, Leonard said, then told Roddenberry about the $2,000 offer.

As he told me this story, he shook his head in disbelief. He was truly stunned when Roddenberry replied, “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. The fee is twenty percent.” Leonard told Roddenberry that he already was paying an agent 10 percent and didn't understand why he should be forced to pay him too. Roddenberry looked at him and said coldly, “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.”

Leonard's response was consistent with the way he led his life. “I can't do that to this agent,” he said. “He got me the job.”

Roddenberry's reply accurately described the thought process of the suits about actors. “I will never forget his exact words,” Leonard said. “‘Well, you're just going to have to bow down and say
master
.'”

“You got the wrong guy,” Leonard snapped, then walked angrily out of his office. In that instance Roddenberry relented, and Leonard made his flight. “But while we worked together for years afterward, that was the end of any semblance of friendship between Gene Roddenberry and myself.”

As the popularity of Spock continued to rise, Leonard's relationship with the producers continued to get worse. It got so nasty that the producers sent him a memo informing him that he was not allowed to use the studio's pens and pencils.

The result was predictable. Until this time in his career, Leonard had been powerless; like most actors, he was always a whim away from being fired or not getting the job. Now that he finally had actual power, those seventeen years of slights, seventeen years of being easily dismissed as a working character actor, it gave him the backbone to stand up for not only his rights but the rights of every member of the cast. Several years later, Filmation obtained the rights to produce an animated version of the show. They hired Leonard and me, and they hired Jimmy Doohan to play Scotty and do all the other male voices and Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel and the other female voices. Their explanation for not hiring the other actors was that they were working on a limited budget and couldn't afford them. When Leonard learned about that, he said he wouldn't do the show. “This isn't
Star Trek,
” he told them. “
Star Trek
is about diversity, and the two people who most represent that are George Takei and Nichelle Nichols, and if they're not going to be part of it, then I'm not interested.” The company had no choice; without Leonard or me, there was no
Star Trek
. This was long before the
Star Trek
franchise was generating small mountains of revenue, so the salary offered to Leonard made a difference. He had learned how to use his power. They hired those actors.

At the same time, I was having my own problems with Gene Roddenberry. He had created a quasi-military medal that Lincoln Enterprises was marketing. To promote sales of this award, he wanted to use it on the show; I was supposed to pin it on a crew member. This awards ceremony had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, and I refused to get involved. They prevailed upon Leonard and somehow convinced him to do it.

Both Leonard and I had a complicated relationship with Gene Roddenberry. He had many talents, but often tact wasn't among them. While he had the vision to create this amazing world, he also could waste time focusing on petty ways to generate insignificant dollars. And he was not easily swayed; when he believed in something, he didn't easily relent, whether he was dealing with actors or the network. It was Gene who convinced Leonard to put on those ears, and it was also Gene who mounted the fan-based letter-writing campaign that kept us on the air. Leonard once described his relationship with Roddenberry “like a father-son relationship; sometimes it was great, and sometimes it was really bad.” Obviously that was the reason Leonard at times was so bitterly disappointed by Gene's actions. I never felt that way. Gene certainly could be paternalistic, but I don't think I had a need for approval at that point in my career. Whatever the sometimes difficult dynamics of their relationship, without question, Roddenberry and Leonard both lived long and prospered because of it. They needed each other—we all needed each other—and looking back, it is far more important to focus on Gene's creative genius than the family fights we endured.

After we'd shot our first thirteen episodes, writer/producer Gene Coon became the producer while Roddenberry was elevated to executive producer. His main function seemed to be figuring out how to squeeze every penny out of this show before it ran dry. He sold everything imaginable. Cinematographers shoot what is known as a light strip before each scene to check the lighting. It's usually ten or so frames, only enough frames to make sure the set is properly lit. These frames usually get thrown away. Roddenberry sold each one of them.

Most shows produce some kind of gag reel; it's just a few minutes of actual bloopers combined with jokes we set up. It is made for the entertainment of the cast and crew. There often are a lot of inside jokes. We did one, for example, that began with Spock shooting an arrow—followed by a scene is which Kirk is being rushed into a cave with an arrow sticking high out of his crotch. It was a joke with many levels of meaning, and it was not intended for the public to see it. Roddenberry spliced together highlights from these reels and sold them. I first heard about it when someone told me a friend of his had seen it in a bar.

It took some time, but Leonard and I began to understand that we had far more power working together than working individually. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, but at just about the same time as Kirk and Spock were gaining popularity, two of the greatest pitchers in baseball, future Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, had changed tradition by negotiating their annual contracts with the Dodgers together. The story was in the headlines of the papers for several weeks. Their holdout forced the Dodgers to give each of them a larger raise than they would have received individually. I don't remember if that originally influenced Leonard and me or not, but we made the decision to negotiate together. We didn't make any kind of agreement beyond the fact that we'd talk to each other whenever there was a problem or an opportunity. At times, we brought that power to bear on script changes, on contractual clauses, and certainly where money was concerned. And later, as
Star Trek
grew into a multibillion-dollar franchise, our power to affect that was enormous. We also were offered many other commercial opportunities to exploit our roles, in addition to appearances at the conventions, which forced us into a continuing relationship. It took a couple of years, but the more time we spent together, the more we began to discover how much we liked being with each other. Unlike any other show or movie on which I've worked, where the end of the shoot invariably marked the end of many friendships, the end of the series after three seasons was just the beginning of a friendship that was to last a lifetime.

Leonard was not an easy person to get close to; he seemed comfortable keeping a respectful distance between himself and the rest of the cast. As I later learned, it was a lot more than sustaining the alienation of Spock that kept him apart from the rest of the cast. While we were filming the show, Leonard was keeping a secret; at that time, he was a functioning alcoholic.

I only knew about this later, when Leonard was comfortable enough to talk about it publicly. Like so many other things in his life, this was an important lesson he had learned, and he wanted to share it. He wanted to save people the pain that he had endured. Unfortunately for me, when I needed to listen to him most, I refused to accept his advice.

He had started drinking regularly sometime during our second or third season, he told me on film while we were filming our documentary,
Mind Meld
. “Until then,” he said, “no problem. I'd have a glass of wine or a drink after work, maybe two, it was no problem. But the ritual became so important to me, so ingrained, because I looked forward to that release at the end of the pressure of the day.

“My secretary was in the habit of bringing me a drink in a paper cup. The minute we finished the last shot, I would drink. And then it became a series of drinks. Little by little, before I knew it, I was drinking more and more because my addictive personality was taking over. As many alcoholics can do, I hid it at work. I never allowed it to affect my work. As long as I never drank while I was working, I had this illusion of control. I lied to myself a lot: I don't work drunk; I don't drink at all in connection to my work. I can wait.”

I never saw it. I never saw Leonard drunk. I never saw him miss a moment of work or be less than completely professional. The fact is that I had no understanding of alcoholism. I thought everybody was like me—when there was something I needed to do, I did it. Leonard and I both smoked heavily when we were making the original series, for example. I smoked so much that when I kissed any of my three little girls, they would scrunch up their faces and tell me, “Daddy, you smell.” I didn't like my kids turning away from me because I reeked of smoke, so I became determined to give it up.

It wasn't easy. I quit cold turkey; I just put down the pack of cigarettes and never picked it up again. I went through some tough times fighting it. Leonard liked to remind me of the day I walked off the set as we finished shooting a scene and kept walking through the soundstage and out the door, finally stopping and shouting in desperation, “I want a cigarette!” Somehow I managed to break that habit. Leonard smoked too, and he knew I was fighting my demon as he was fighting his. The difference between us was something psychologists understand; I do not have an addictive personality. It's possible Leonard did. For a long time, I believed it was a matter of will; if you wanted to do it, you could. I was wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.

Leonard tried to stop both smoking and drinking at about the same time, an almost impossible task. “I thought maybe I could smoke a little bit,” he told me when we discussed this. “But I can't do that. If I smoked a little, I ended up smoking a lot. If I drank a little, I ended up drinking a lot. And within a matter of a year or two, I developed a major problem with alcohol. It reached the point where I could no longer control how much I was drinking.

“I would make myself promises I couldn't keep. That's how I started losing my self-respect. I'd be drinking midday on a Saturday or Sunday and then passing out. I'd go to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon and sleep through the next day, missing a party in my own home. People would come in, and I'd be out. I would promise myself, this weekend that's not going to happen. This weekend I'm not going to have more than a beer or two on Saturday and not before two o'clock. By 11:00, I'd have a beer, by 3:00 or 4:00, I'd pass out again. Eventually, I realized I had become an alcoholic.”

There is no single, logical explanation for why some people become alcoholics. I'm sure there are complex emotional and physical reasons. I've had to deal with it in my own life; against Leonard's advice, I married an alcoholic. Although both Leonard and I tried desperately to help her, we could never reach the source of her pain. The situation never got better, and she died in a terrible accident, drowning in our pool after drinking heavily. So yes, I do know about alcoholics; I know how they become experts at fooling the people around them, I know the pain they inflict on other people, and I know that they can't help it. Who knows why Leonard began drinking? We never got to the why.

But I suspect one contributing factor was that the reality of success disappointed him greatly. As he said, “I had this fantasy that with
Star Trek
I had found a home as an actor. Suddenly I had a parking space with a permanent sign, a dressing room with my name painted on it that was going to be there for a few months at least. That was extraordinary for me. I thought I'd found a family. The writers and producers were the father figures, and the actors and actresses were my brothers and sisters. I looked forward to coming to work with my creative, artistic family every day. And then I began to discover that the studio was not necessarily my friend, or my parent, that they were contract people.

“Rather than supporting me, they were asking, ‘How much are we paying him? If he asks for more, tell him we'll get somebody else to wear the ears. He wants a phone in his dressing room? Is it in his contract? No phone, no. He wants to get off on Friday—no, he has to work until 6:15.' There was no give, no viewing in a familial way. It made me very confused and very angry. It caused me to go into therapy.”

In most professions, people get to release much of the tension from their jobs when they get home. Filming a TV series is so all life-consuming that after-hours outlets often don't exist. In fact, sometimes the tensions caused by the work serve to magnify existing problems at home. There is no place to turn for relief. When you're filming, there is no time for anything else, including your family. My family life suffered tremendously when we were making
Star Trek,
and it certainly contributed to my divorce. For Leonard, the series seemed like a life preserver. “I'd caught a wave, and I didn't know how long it would last,” he told me. “I was obsessed by getting the most out of it I possibly could. Any opportunity I had to grab, I had to suck away protection money, security for the future in case I had to go back to what I was before.” The result was that his marriage suffered, and his relationship with his children was strained. As he once described it, “I minored in family and majored in career.”