Leonard (23 page)

For Leonard, writing this letter must have been very difficult. While it listed his grievances with Adam, it must have made him at least wonder about his relationship with his own parents. And at any time of life, that never is an easy task. They had remained in Boston while he built his life in California. He didn't see them very often. And they never really understood why he had become an actor.

But writing this letter to Adam was, in many ways, typical. Leonard was never a man to back away from a confrontation. He never sought them out, he tried to defuse them, but he did not hold his grievances inside. When he had something to say, even to people with the power to affect his career, he said it to them. But writing this letter to his son about their failed relationship must have been terribly, terribly difficult. Adam responded, he says, as he often did to that type of challenge: he didn't respond. He followed the AA guidelines as he understood them, “Don't just do something, sit there,” and practiced “restraint of pen and tongue.”

He resisted responding, letting his anger brew, boil, and then dissipate. He waited several months and finally decided it was something he needed to do for his own sobriety. At that time, he was writing his book and wanted some sense of clarity. As he noted, the ninth step in twelve-step program is making amends. He called Leonard and agreed that they would go through the letter point by point. They would confront their broken relationship. This might well have been the first time in their adult lives both of them were sober. For an actor, a writer, or a director, it was a situation ripe for the stage. For a father, and for a son, it was an emotional summit. As they went through the letter, Adam wrote, he apologized for those things he had done wrong, for all the times he'd hurt his father. It bothered him that Leonard did not apologize. When they were done, Adam asked his father if there was anything he could do for him as a way of making amends. “He gave me a puzzled look,” Adam remembered, “and he told me he had everything, that he was very happy with his life, that he had made it financially when he was in his thirties, and that his second marriage saved his life. He repeated that he was very happy with his life.”

That meeting marked the beginning of a new relationship between them. In fact, later on, Leonard and Adam would go together to twelve-step meetings. It was, Adam recalled, a tremendous bonding experience. “He finally made himself available to me.” And he perceived that this effort to be supportive was Leonard's way of making amends. At one of those meetings, they did what is known as a double-share; meaning they went to a meeting together and each spoke, one after the other, for about ten minutes, and then the rest of the group joined the conversation. Leonard had decided to change the focus of his life, placing a stronger emphasis on his family. His relationship with his son, as Leonard probably wouldn't really say, prospered. For so long, he admitted that he majored in career and minored in family, and there came a time when he decided to turn that around. I noticed that; I noticed that when we spoke, the subjects of our conversations had changed, and rather than talking about our frustration with the studio and the changing business, we would find ourselves talking about kids and our grandkids.

I don't know that any of us ever come to grips completely with the complexities of familial relationships. The entanglement of deep love, needs and desires, guilt and joy, all compressed by the pressures of the world, makes relationships with our parents and our children, our husbands and wives, very difficult to ever completely understand. I know Leonard never felt contented about his relationship with his parents. I think he tried very hard to understand them, perhaps as a means to figure out himself. He made a very meaningful trip in 1988. He always had been intrigued with the idea of tracing his own roots, discovering his own Jewish heritage. In the early 1970s, while he was directing his vampire episode for
Night Gallery,
Henry Kissinger had visited the set with his son, who desperately wanted to meet Spock and get his autograph, and the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United States, the powerful Anatoly Dobrynin. Making conversation, Leonard told the ambassador that his parents had emigrated from Russia. Dobrynin suggested he come to the Soviet Union with his parents.

Leonard liked to describe his parents' reaction when he told them about it. They were horrified; they thought he was crazy. Both of them had risked their lives sneaking out of the country; they had absolutely no desire to go back. “They thought they'd get caught and thrown in jail,” he said. There was nothing for them to visit: their village in Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans during World War II, and many people they had known had been killed. They waved their hands at him.
Forget it; we're not going.

But after we'd made
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,
in which we had saved the humpback whales for the future, the World Wildlife Fund invited him to Moscow to celebrate the fact that the Russians had declared a moratorium on whale hunting. While it was still the Communist USSR, the Soviet Union, our Cold War enemy, relations were warming. Leonard agreed to go—on the condition that he be permitted to visit the Ukrainian village from which his parents had come.

His parents had saved a single letter from distant relatives still living in that area. That was their connection to their childhoods. The International Red Cross was able to find members of the Nimoy family living in the city of Khmelnytskyi, about a two-hour drive from Zaslav, his parents' village. Literally hours after he had completed shooting
Three Men and a Baby,
he and Susan were on a plane flying back into his heritage. They spent several days in Moscow, where
Star Trek IV
was screened three times. During this period, there was tremendous competition between our countries, and the Russians were well known for claiming they had invented … well, pretty much everything. It was considered a matter of personal pride. So Leonard wasn't really surprised that after the film had been screened at the Russian director's union, he was told, “Very nice, but is not your story. It was told by great director Boris Thomashefsky in 1970. A very wonderful film called
The Whales of the Red Tide
.” Leonard smiled politely, perhaps wondering if next the Russians would claim to have invented Comrade Spock.

Eventually, they traveled across Ukraine by train to Khmelnytskyi, arriving late at night. The train platform was completely deserted. They stood there, waiting. Finally, a tour guide arrived and took them to their hotel. Early the next morning, someone knocked heavily on the door. A man in a suit introduced himself in Yiddish, “My name is Boris Nimoy. I am your cousin.” He took them to Zaslav, a small farming village with a river flowing through it. Wagons pulled by horses moved leisurely over cobblestone streets. A dozen people were waiting outside a modest home to greet them. But rather than greeting their relative from America warmly, they were polite but distant. As he learned later, they had been informed by authorities that someone important from the United States was coming to visit them. That made no sense to them, of course; why in the world would an important person from America be coming all the way to the Soviet Union to visit the Nimoys of Zaslav? They knew from long experience that any involvement with the government usually brought problems.

A modest lunch was served, with vodka. They began conversing in Yiddish. And after a few minutes one of the men handed Leonard an envelope. He immediately recognized his mother's handwriting. It contained several photographs of children, and Leonard was asked if he knew who they were. He identified his by then adult cousins. These pictures were at least twenty years old and, as he described them, “treasured objects from another world.” The walls came down, and together, they grew the family tree. They told Leonard stories of his relatives—“Your grandfather was so-and-so, and he met your grandmother this way.” They talked about the three-and-a-half-year German occupation, who lived and who died, who served in the Russian army. He had brought a battery-operated tape recorder and had them record messages for his parents. Then they took him to the local cemetery and showed him his maternal grandfather's tombstone. His grandfather's photograph was on his headstone, the same picture Leonard's mother kept proudly in a family album. Connections were made. I'm sure Leonard must have wondered what might have happened if his parents had not fled to America. This might have been his life. We had just made a film about traveling back in time, and this is exactly what he was doing. I imagine the distance from these cobblestoned streets to stardom in Hollywood might somehow be like the distance Kirk and Spock had traveled to save the whales.

Ironically, when Leonard and Susan returned to Paris, he learned his father was in a hospital, dying. By the time they got there, Leonard's father was on morphine, barely conscious. Leonard played one of the recorded messages for him but never knew if he heard them before he died. Several weeks later, he showed the photographs he'd taken to his mother. One of them was a lovely, pastoral picture of a horse drinking from the river. His mother looked at it and said sadly, “Oh, this used to be so beautiful. Look, look. It's not even clean anymore.”

Leonard was quite taken with the reality that her memory of it was more beautiful than the obvious beauty he saw in his photograph.

All of the challenges we faced in our lives took place against the background music of
Star Trek
. The three years we had spent making the original shows had been stretched, for reasons that have long been debated, into the rest of our lives. We'd thought we were making a TV show; instead, we had flown boldly into legend. It truly was inescapable. I remember reading a story that Leonard had told to a reporter. He was stopped at a traffic light, he explained, and he took out his Motorola StarTAC cell phone, flipped it open, and made a call. As he was speaking, he glanced into the car sitting next to him and noted that the several people in that car were pointing at him and laughing. It took him a few seconds for the reason to click in: his phone was an almost exact replica of our “communicators.” With that realization, he started laughing.

As I read that story, I started laughing—because I actually believed that had happened to me. In fact, I was quite sure of it. Except, maybe it hadn't. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if Nichelle and George and the other members of our cast had told the same story.
Star Trek
had never ended for any of us. It was always there in some form, always.

 

TWELVE

After the first four movies had established that the franchise would fly successfully into the next generation of viewers, the studio decided it was time to revive the series. Leonard actually was editing the fourth movie when Frank Mancuso, then running Paramount, told him they intended to produce a new series and asked if he would be interested in producing it. It was a great show of respect for Leonard's abilities, but he had no interest in doing that. At that point, he probably still believed he eventually would escape the tractor beam that held us so tightly to the franchise. Neither Leonard nor I had any great confidence that the new series, which they titled
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
would succeed. There was a bit of ego, of course; Kirk and Spock were the core of the stories, and we didn't see how it could be successful without them. Especially because, as I heard, Roddenberry had decided the series would take place a century after our voyages ended. The crew would be flying the fifth
Enterprise,
and it would take place in a world in which people have grown out of conflict. When the writers wondered how they could dramatize a world without emotional problems, he supposedly told them, “That's your problem.”

As it turned out, Leonard and I were absolutely incorrect, as Patrick Stewart, who brought Captain Jean-Luc Picard to life, was happy to remind us when we would meet at the conventions.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
was quite successful without us, although because Vulcans are long-lived, Spock was able to make an appearance on that show. For those members of the staff that Roddenberry brought back, this was a very lucrative voyage. Contractual terms in the industry had changed, and this time the actors, writers, directors, and producers were entitled to residuals in perpetuity, and as I have been told, nice green envelopes from the various talent unions arrived at their homes every three months.

The critical success of the new series combined with the financial success of Leonard's movie
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
led to the making of my
Star Trek V
film,
The Final Frontier
. These films were mini-reunions for all of us, and certainly we enjoyed being back together. There was a great comfort level, although we also were well aware of the expectations of our Trekkie base. On the original series, it had just been a job, but because of that acclaim, it had practically become elevated to a calling. There was a sense that we weren't simply making a $30 million movie, we were adding to the legend! As director, I was given the freedom to make absolutely any movie I wanted to make; first the studio told me what movie I wanted to make, and then I made it. As long as I made it cheaply. My original concept was that the crew of the
Enterprise
meet God and the devil. Roddenberry turned that down. There is no God in the
Star Trek
universe, he explained; we didn't want to alienate anyone. We finally settled on a concept in which we are forced to confront an alien who believes he is the devil.

It still could work, I believed. As we developed the story, I would meet with Leonard to go over my concepts. And I remember excitedly explaining to him how Kirk and Spock would have to go down into hell and …

“Spock wouldn't do that,” Leonard said.