Leonard (25 page)

He did, however, made one contract demand. He was quite firm about it. When he arrived at the studio, there had to be a pint of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream in his dressing room.

For Leonard, perhaps more than any other time in his career, after all those years, his own life and Spock's life came together. As he said, “I found myself extremely comfortable doing it. I found myself very close to the character. I think that in a fun kind of way, in a wonderful kind of way, my own life has come to a point where I feel more—probably as Spock would at that point in his life—comfortable in his own shoes. The Spock that we've showed all through the years always had some kind of turmoil going, there was always some inner conflict. I think I have arrived in my own life as Spock [has in his life] with more of a serenity, and I felt very comfortable playing that.”

Spock's appearance in the film was a well-kept secret. In fact, in several interviews, Leonard denied the rumors that he was going to be in the film. When asked by reporters after the movie opened how he managed to keep that secret, he admitted, “Did I say I wasn't in it? Maybe I was confused. Of course, speaking, if you'll pardon me, logically, I wouldn't know if I was in the movie until I saw the movie.”

I had quite a different response to the movie in which I did not appear. I took J. J. Abrams out for the very best sushi he has ever eaten, which I know is something he will never forget. And if he should, I will remind him. I have great respect for J. J. Abrams. He is an extraordinarily talented filmmaker. The fact is there are all kinds of emotions entangled in
Star Trek
for all of us, and J. J. was placed in a difficult position of being respectful to the roots while growing a $140 million tree.

It is possible I felt a bit slighted. Just after the film was announced, Leonard and I were together at Comic-Con in San Diego. We were talking about the film, and I happened to mention, just happened to mention, that I hadn't been asked to be in the film. Finally, Leonard said, “Bill. Bill.”

“What?”

“Do you remember
Star Trek: Generations
?”

Admittedly, it all fades together for me. “No,” I said. “Which one was that?”

He smiled. “The one you were in and I wasn't.” Ohhhh.

Leonard actually was given the right to approve the actor cast in the role of young Spock, Zachary Quinto. While preparing for the film, he got to know Quinto well; Quinto was in an even more difficult situation than Abrams, knowing he would be measured against a legendary character. In this situation, Leonard's generosity to another actor was really noteworthy. Rather than being protective of his creation, he offered Quinto friendship, guidance, and praise. Whatever his feelings about Spock, Leonard's support for another actor gave Quinto the freedom to do his own best work. Rather than imitating Leonard's Spock, with Leonard's complete permission, he reinterpreted the character. As Quinto told
Time
magazine, “Initially, I was coming at it all from a strictly creative standpoint. I wanted to know that I had his support and that I could utilize him as a resource and guide through the journey of discovering who this character is for me. But what I never imagined was how close we would become, and what a father figure he would be to me.”

They had one scene together, a scene that Leonard described almost as a father talking to his son. But the real purpose of the scene was to allow Leonard to give his approval to his successor. “We bookend the Spock character,” he explained to
LA Times
reporter Geoff Boucher. “He's playing a Spock still looking for a balance between logic and his emotion and my Spock, well, he's gone through many years of life and arrived at a condition very much like the position I am here in my own life. I'm very comfortable with my life, my choices and my instincts. I was pretty much playing who I am today. I didn't have to search very hard to find the character I play in this movie. And I think that was the end.”

Pure Leonard, of course. After all those years, still exploring his character. And it wasn't exactly the end of it. Leonard made a cameo appearance as Spock in the 2013 film,
Star Trek Into Darkness
. The reason he did it, he said, was that J. J. Abrams asked, “Would you come in for a couple of days and do me a favor.” It was that simple. But personally I suspect he just couldn't resist visiting with a dear friend that one last time.

It was the last film he made.

In addition to our friendship, our memories, and the financial security, Leonard and I took one more thing with us from
Star Trek
. We were making an episode entitled “Arena” in which Kirk had to fight to the death a monstrously strong reptilian known as Gorn. Early in the episode, they had beamed down to a planet and were attacked by the Metrons. During that attack, Spock and Kirk had to evade several explosions. Unfortunately, they got too close to one of them. As a result, both Leonard and I had ringing in our ears, me in my left ear, Leonard in his right. Unfortunately, it never really went away. The condition is called tinnitus; it affects as many as forty million Americans, and in severe cases it can be debilitating. Although the irony that Leonard suffered an injury to his ear could not be ignored, my tinnitus was considerably worse than Leonard's. For me, the sound was like radio static playing continuously in my ear, a radio I couldn't turn off. While Leonard adjusted and his mind learned how to mostly ignore it, I searched for help. At the worst moments, I thought that I couldn't live with it. But finally I went through something known as tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT), which taught my brain to ignore the sound. Long after the series ended, though, we carried that reminder with us.

The series and movies were not the only time we worked together on film, however. The relationship between Nimoy and Shatner was almost as well known as that of Spock and Kirk. While we didn't have action figures created of the two of us, as our characters did, people understood that we had a loving but sometimes competitive relationship. “Look, everybody knows that we have become very, very good friends,” Leonard said. “But we've always been like two competitive siblings.” And that, of course, made a great backdrop for a series of commercials we did together for Priceline and later Volkswagen.

There were three Priceline commercials, all of them based on that competitive aspect of our friendship. The concept was a simple one, and it was explained in the first spot: Priceline had decided to replace me as its spokesperson. In this mythical spot, they told me that I was being replaced because “the new” Priceline was offering fixed low fares in addition to the established name-your-own-price opportunities. I was stunned, naturally, and asked, “Who could possibly replace me?”

Then the door opened, and Leonard walked in.

In the second spot, I came up with a great idea. He was sitting comfortably behind a large desk as I excitedly explained to him that we could each represent a segment of the company. Leonard thought about it, then said, “No.”

In the third commercial, he literally closed a hotel door in my face. Good fun, it was all in good fun. I mean, certainly we were competitive, but it never leaked over into real life. I mean, a little maybe, but we both knew it was all in fun. At least I knew it was in fun.

In 2014, we worked together for the last time. We did a Volkswagen commercial—for German television. It was a simple concept to introduce its new electric car. In recognition of the international appeal of
Star Trek,
a young German boy recognizes me. As the theme plays in the background, he runs into his room, which is filled from floor to ceiling with
Star Trek
memorabilia. Then, as the
Star Trek
theme plays, a garage door slowly lifts open to reveal—the new Volkswagen—with me driving. As the two of us drive along, we suddenly stop next to a futuristic concept car—with Leonard driving. He looks at us, looks at the car, and says the one word that so defined Spock: “Fascinating.”

It's hard to believe that was the last time I saw him, but it was.

 

THIRTEEN

It took that terrible disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, to slow him down. There is no one I've known who found it more difficult to simply do nothing than Leonard. His was a life spent in motion; his mind was always racing ahead to the next project. At the height of his fame, for example, he decided it was time to finally get a college degree. While touring the country with various shows, he earned a degree from Antioch College. “I chewed up the whole elephant,” he said proudly, and he later was awarded an honorary doctorate. I mean, just think about this: his professional success was assured, he had sufficient money in the bank, he was realizing his childhood dreams by performing great theater in front of filled houses—and yet he had a need to fulfill his intellectual curiosity.

Adam Nimoy once said to me, as we wondered about Leonard's inability to just be still, “Artists do these things because they have to; it's not even a conscious choice. They just have to stay busy and challenge themselves to create.” Van Gogh averaged two paintings a week for almost a decade, Adam pointed out, which might well have been the source of Leonard's fascination with his life. “Van Gogh was so focused and driven, and my dad was that way too. Both of them had a passion to create, to express themselves through their art. That's what really turned my dad on.”

For Leonard, that art was photography. In addition to the economic freedom that
Star Trek
provided, it allowed Leonard creative freedom. As he told a reporter while rehearsing for the play
Sherlock Holmes,
“I've got nothing to prove to anybody anymore.” For a long time, I didn't know about his passion for photography. When we were doing the show and he initially appeared with a camera in his hand, I thought,
Oh, that's nice, Leonard is going to take some pictures.
But I didn't have the slightest idea how passionate he was about it, or that he was an artist and this was his medium. In our many conversations during those years, he rarely mentioned photography, or if he did, it was in passing, nothing more than “I just bought a new camera.”

“Great. I'm looking for one too.”

But he must have had this interest that I knew nothing about for a long time. My wife, Liz, and I have some wonderful art in our home, but if I had to divest myself of everything extraneous in my life, except one thing other than my house and my family, I would get rid of the art and go with my horses. For me, horses are great art, and I can participate in the creation of that artistry by raising, showing, and riding them.

Unlike me, Leonard would have sacrificed anything other than those obvious things for his art, for his photography. My relationship to photography was simple: essentially, I enjoyed looking at nice pictures. Photographs, for me, captured memories. But for Leonard, the camera was something very different. And his deep passion for that art actually surprised me over the years. Steve Guttenberg remembers walking with Leonard outside a hotel, where a group of fans were waiting patiently. As those people started taking pictures, Leonard quietly cautioned Steve, “The camera takes your soul. Be careful of that.”

While Steve took it as a metaphor for the business, I suspect Leonard was stating simply the potential of a photograph to convey so much more than a captured image.

He had become fascinated by photography when he was thirteen years old, when his uncle gave him the bellows Kodak autographic camera that had been bought for him on the day he was born—a camera, by the way, that he kept for his entire life—and he learned from a young friend how to develop his own film. “I thought it was marvelous to be able to shoot a roll of film, go immediately into a darkroom—in our case, the family bathroom—develop the film, and make a print. I could buy a package of chemicals from Kodak for fifteen cents, and I loved the idea of being able to capture an image that way.” It was a form that expression that obviously intrigued him his whole life. In the early 1970s, for example, he began studying photography seriously, taking classes at UCLA and, for a time, considered pursuing it rather than continuing to act.

When talking about his photography, Leonard liked to quote his instructor at UCLA, Robert Heinecken, who at that time was championing photography as an art form rather than a technique to capture an instant. The difference, Heinecken said, was how you reacted if you happened to be walking down a street with your camera in your hand and you saw someone falling through space from a tall building: if you shot pictures of it because it was an event in progress, that was photojournalism, but the artist wouldn't shoot that picture unless the theme he or she was working on had to do with the effects of space on the human figure.

Leonard got that. While for most people photography is visual, for Leonard it eventually became conceptual. “At the most primitive level … you've got to be able to capture something that speaks to the audience immediately. Photography works on two levels, one emotional and one technical. The emotional impact has to do with looking for something dramatic happening … something that reaches out and touches somebody in some way. The technical is having to do with composition and framing—light and dark, light and shadow.

“For many years I carried cameras wherever I went and photographed whatever was of interest,” he explained. “That's changed. I no longer carry a camera looking for someone to take a picture of. I get an idea about a subject, then I get my cameras and explore that idea visually, to find a way to express it in photographs.”

Later he added, “While in film the story can unfold, in photography the story has to be captured in total in one moment. I've learned to use cameras to explore thematic ideas.”

While a lot of his work focused on the female form, in the 1980s, he did a whole series called
Hands,
a series of portraits of, obviously, hands. When you look at these black-and-white photos, some showing age, others elegance, or symbolism, it really does make you pause and think about hands. And then it brings your attention to other people's hands. After looking at his photographs, it's almost impossible not to simply look at other people's hands in a new way, with a new appreciation. Years later, his representative in the fine-arts world described his work as “very sensual. But the other thing about Leonard's work is that he is always interested in the backstory, why something was what it is.” That's interesting, because as an actor, the backstory of a character is what we are always searching for and too often don't find in the script. I'm not a photo critic, I know what I like, but when I look at his pictures I find myself pausing and thinking about that backstory. Whose hands are these? What do they say about that person?