Leonard (22 page)

But he'd met a wonderful woman, Susan Bay, had fallen in love, and, on New Year's Day 1989, married her. She had come along at a good time in his life. Through the years, I got to know Susan quite well. She was a very beautiful, very capable woman. She organized things, whether it was a marriage, a party, or a career. She was a superb cook, a gracious hostess, a wonderful partner to him, and maybe most important, she made us laugh. Susan was his equal in everything, his intellect and his passions. She brought a great love to Leonard, the kind of love, loyalty, and support that every man dreams of finding one day.

It's sometimes difficult for men to retain a close friendship when women enter their lives. There are women who become competitive and push friends away. But in this case it didn't happen. Susan became my friend too, and I also adored her. We did not live far apart, and my second wife, Marcy, and I had many dinners at their home. Sometimes we ordered in, sometimes they cooked, but we would sit in the kitchen and eat. There was a lot of love attached to those dinners.

My own marriage lasted seventeen years, although it was over earlier. “Life took us apart,” she once told a reporter. “It was time to move on.” When my marriage to Marcy ended, Leonard and Susan continued to welcome me into their home and, at first, shared my happiness when I told them about this wonderful woman I'd met named Nerine. Like many alcoholics—like Leonard, in fact—she was practiced at hiding it well. At times, I would see she was drinking too much and worry about it, but there always was an excuse, and I was more than willing to accept it. I knew almost nothing about alcoholism. I'd played a drunk in several shows and TV movies, but I had absolutely no concept of what it meant to be an alcoholic. None at all.

One night, though, Nerine and I had been at a dinner party with Leonard and Susan, and she was, as Leonard described it when he called me the next day, “erratic in her behavior.” That was a nice way of describing it. While those times she drank too much were happening more frequently, I was in complete denial. I loved her. If she had a problem, I would fix it. True love is stronger than a few drinks. Right?

“Bill,” he continued, “you know she's an alcoholic.”

“Yes,” I said, but I didn't, not in the sense that he meant. “But I love her.”

He was blunt. “Then you're in for a rough ride.”

Leonard valued our friendship enough to be there when I needed him without trying to lecture me. In situations like that, it often is the messenger that suffers the consequences. I continued to deal with Nerine's drinking, even as it got worse, convincing myself that she, that we, could find a way to change reality. Leonard had done it; he was quite open about his appreciation for AA. He helped as much as it was possible without intruding. He would sit with her and talk about it, just the two of them, two alcoholics discussing their addiction. He took her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sat by her side in what I know was a very difficult situation for her. Finally, against all the evidence, I decided that the way to cure Nerine was to marry her. Marriage would provide the security she needed; it would prove she was loved and didn't need the crutch of alcohol.

Yeah, I did believe that.

Leonard continued to be supportive. Although we had grown close through the years, the intimacy of sharing this problem brought us even closer. Both of us knew how to walk that tightrope between our personal lives and our careers, knowing how strongly each of them might impact the other. Leonard was among the few people outside my children that I could really trust with this truth. And he respected that in every way. We would talk too, and while he never tried to talk me out of the relationship, he wanted me to see clearly what I was getting into by marrying her. I appreciated his efforts—that's what friends do when they think someone they care about it making a terrible mistake—but I paid little attention to him. Instead, I asked him to be my best man at our wedding. While certainly he must have known how little chance there was that this would work out, he agreed. Nerine and I set a date and planned to start our life together.

And shortly before that day, she was arrested for drunk driving—with my daughter in the car. The wedding was canceled, then it was just postponed, then we set a date six months in the future. And once again, several weeks before that day, she was arrested again for driving drunk. When I told her I couldn't marry her as long as she was drinking, her response was, “Don't do this to me, Bill.”

Don't do this to me, Bill. And I accepted that guilt. I spent years asking myself why. The answer, of course, is that there is no good answer. We each stumble through life doing the best we can. I loved Nerine. I was as addicted to her as Leonard once was to alcohol and cigarettes, and as she too was addicted to alcohol. But he was my friend, so when I married Nerine in Pasadena, he stood tall for me, dressed impeccably as always in a tuxedo, as my best man.

When it fell apart, as Leonard undoubtedly knew it would, he was there to support me. Nerine's drinking escalated. I tried everything; I tried rehab, I tried threatening a divorce, I tried to love her more intensely; but the monster had her in its grip and would not let go. I came home one night and found her lifeless body in the deep end of the swimming pool.

At times of tragedy, people instinctively turn to family and friends for support. And I got it. I got it from my children and from the people around me, especially Leonard. He enveloped me in his arms as his brother, and we cried together. He was always there, kind and loving and available. He tried to help me answer those questions that plagued me: What could I have done differently? How could I have changed the outcome? Why couldn't I save her?

The answer I got from Leonard was that there was no easy answer; as much as I wanted things to be different, there was little I could have done about it. There is only one person who can reach an addict, he told me over and over, and that is that addict. Until, and unless, the addict reaches the point, as Leonard did, that he or she wants to take control of his or her life, there is little anybody else can do.

Friendships are not made at times like that, but they are tested. More than ever before, I had looked to Leonard. We had already been through so many wonderful experiences together, and now we had been through a true tragedy.

Unfortunately, this was not unique for him. He had been dealing with a similar situation in his own family, a situation that fortunately reached a much better conclusion. As his son, Adam, has admitted and written about in his own compelling memoir,
My Incredibly Wonderful Miserable Life,
for thirty years he was addicted to alcohol and marijuana. His addiction was so strong it cost him his marriage and, for many years, his relationship with his father. It's impossible to write about Leonard without this being part of the story.

I can't imagine how difficult it is being the child of an actor, much less a celebrated actor. Acting is a career defined by both emotional and professional insecurity. As an actor, you live with the never-ending quest for the next role, and when you finally get that role, you live with the fear you're not good enough in it. That takes a great toll on family life. A question that never goes away, even after you've enjoyed tremendous success, is, how am I going to pay the rent next month? And even that eventually becomes, how am I going to pay the rent next year? That insecurity can be expressed in many ways, but it impacts your family. Adam once said that when Leonard first started going to state fairs, for example, long before the conventions were organized and run so professionally, he would come home with an envelope full of cash. “He loved that,” Adam told me. “Big fat envelopes filled with cash. It was what he always called ‘an income stream.' He was very big on these income streams. That cash meant a lot to him. Before
Star Trek,
he had lived with a real sense of desperation to succeed and survive.”

I have lived with those insecurities my whole life. Success doesn't make them go away. Early in your career, they shape your thinking, and it doesn't change very much. The second reality of the profession that impacts raising a family is simply the amount of time it becomes necessary to spend working. The hours spent on the set are very long, and then you have to go home and learn lines for the next day. There isn't much downtime to enjoy with your family. You feel fortunate to have the work and determined to give a performance so wonderful it will lead to the next job.

And finally there are the pressures of celebrity. It can be great fun being famous. Fame offers all kinds of advantages and opportunities that are unique and enjoyable. But there also is that dark side celebrities perhaps too often complain about. It's part of the deal. When you are out in public, the public believes you belong to them. And often, as in Leonard's case, it wasn't Leonard fans wanted to meet; it was Mr. Spock. Some fans of
Star Trek,
some Trekkies, believed that we have all shared a wonderful adventure and want nothing more than to talk about it—sometimes episode by episode. Or they want to demonstrate their own mastery of the Vulcan salute. The result is that Leonard was always being pulled away from his family. There was no such thing as a simple dinner in a restaurant. As a result, Adam says, growing up, he and his father were not as close as he would have liked. And, as he adds, Leonard's alcoholism certainly didn't help. And even more than that, children of celebrities can have a really difficult time establishing their own identities. They grow up being so-and-so's son or daughter, they get used to people trying to get to their father or mother through them, or talking about them, and they know people are always wondering how big a role their parent played in whatever success they enjoy. Rather than being known and judged as Adam Nimoy, for example, he never escaped being Leonard Nimoy's son. I think Adam defined that well when he wrote, “The crowd started to grow until kids and their parents were swarming around him and I was being pushed away … There I was, standing in the shadows, watching this from outside, out in the dark.” The range of emotions that raises is really difficult for a young person to deal with.

I was so fortunate with my own three girls. For whatever reasons, and certainly I credit their mother, they were accepting of my life and didn't let it cause damage in their own lives. It was different with Leonard, maybe because Adam was a man, I don't know, but it was different. As Adam has explained, for many years, he and Leonard had great difficulty communicating with each other. Maybe even more than the generational gap between them, the childhoods that shaped them could not have been more different. As the children of immigrants, Leonard developed a specific set of values; Adam remembers that while his family had struggled when he was younger, Spock had changed that, and as he grew up, he says, “Money just wasn't a concern for me. We always had it. I think that annoyed my father, but we had very different lifestyles growing up. He was raised in a Boston tenement neighborhood; I was raised in sunny California.”

Adam started smoking pot when he was seventeen and didn't stop for almost thirty years. As a kid, he paid for it with cash he took out of those envelopes his father kept in a show closet. At some point, he began drinking too. The result was inevitable. His career and his marriage suffered and faltered. He transitioned from being an entertainment attorney to becoming a successful television director. Leonard got him his first real break. When the popular 1960s show
The Outer Limits
was revived in the 1990s, he told Adam to meet with the producers and tell them he would agree to star in a remake of an episode he'd done in 1962 if Adam directed it. That episode turned out well and enabled Adam to get an agent, and he began working regularly in television. There were nice moments like that, Adam remembered, but they were the exception.

Adam described his relationship with his father as distant for a long time. For a while, they rarely spoke to each other. “There were just a lot of conflicts, a lot of distance and resentments that we both held on to.” Those conversations they did have rarely ended well. As Adam explained, “I've never had much luck arguing with him. Have you ever argued with a pop-culture icon? Have you ever argued with a guy who can cause a frenzy among thousands at a convention hall simply by performing a Vulcan hand salute?”

Later he wrote, “Sometimes I would get so frustrated trying to get through to him, trying to explain that I'm not built like him.” When Adam's eighteen-year-long marriage ended in 2004 and he moved out, leaving his kids, he didn't even bother to tell his father. Just contrast that to the fear and shame Leonard felt about telling his parents when his own marriage to Adam's mother ended. Times change. Finally, though, that same year, Adam decided to take control of his own life. His controlled anger had ruined his directing career. “I was not fun to be with on the set, I had a difficult time controlling my temper and attitude.” He began attending twelve-step meetings.

While part of what he learned was to let go of resentments, he just couldn't do it. It was easier not to deal with them. By 2006, Leonard and Adam were barely talking. Adam would call his father on Father's Day and on his birthday, but they never saw each other.

At that time, Leonard had been sober almost a decade. Their relationship—or lack of a relationship—was painful for Leonard, as it would be for any parent. Learning about this much later, I wondered how it must have been eating at him. We never talked about it; in that way more than any other, Leonard put on his “Spock-bag,” as we referred to it so many years earlier when making the original series. Everything about Leonard was slightly restrained, from the way he dressed to the sense of calm and control he conveyed. But I knew there was something wrong. It was as much a feeling as knowing the details, and I did not want to intrude.

Finally, though, Leonard did something still so much in character for him. He confronted the situation. He reached out. He sat down and wrote a long and painfully honest six-page letter to his son. Adam said, “That letter contained his list of complaints through the last twenty years. In it, he expressed his disappointment, his resentment, and his anger. It was not necessarily all about me; it was all those things he was holding on to that made him furious at me. It was really unpleasant to have to read it in print. He wasn't very sensitive. Some of it, frankly, was perfectly valid.”