Leonard (27 page)

He published seven books of his poetry over two decades, and you could draw a straight line from the first book through the final book and it would become obvious how little he changed over that period. Trying to understand poets through their poetry requires higher degrees than I have, but it is obvious reading his work that from the beginning to the end Leonard was intent on emotionally defining grand themes like love, compassion, loss, and the endless search for roots. For the man who became famous playing the ultimate dispassionate character, his poems successfully bring out the range of important emotions.

While some reviewers of Leonard's photography wrote that he had found his voice through his art, in fact he actually found his voice through his voice. Making a living as an actor is in some ways a hustle. You don't let opportunities pass by. Leonard had a melodic baritone. Close your eyes and just listen; your memory will hear him for you. That voice was an important part of his actor's instrument, and even after he had mostly stopped performing, he continued to act with his voice.

There are singers who fight their whole lives for that single break; for Leonard and me, singing success came easily. I know it was not something I had ever seriously considered, and I can't imagine Leonard harbored secret dreams about one day becoming a British singing star. I mean, the rock-star look in the '60s was the Beatles mop-top and various versions of long hair. Spock's hair was exactly the opposite, more of a scraping-brush top. While we were doing the original series, a Paramount executive told Leonard, “There's a gentleman in New York who's producing an album of music from
Star Trek
. Your picture as Spock is going to be on the cover. Would you like to be involved in the making of the album?”

That was the appeal of Spock. Put his picture on the album cover and it was going to sell—and Leonard wasn't going to earn a penny from it. He just inhabited Spock; he didn't own his rights. Six of the twelve tracks featured on
Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space
already had been recorded. Leonard agreed to speak-sing the remaining six—as Spock. Leonard cowrote several of the songs on the album, which include “Music to Watch Space Girls By,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth
,
” and, of course, “Highly Illogical.” One more recent Amazon ‘reviewer,' while enjoying Leonard's mostly spoken-word renditions, did describe a song that appeared on several later albums called “Amphibious Assault” as something “George Patton would have written on LSD.”

While Leonard took almost everything he did seriously, which was our work ethic, he did not pretend to be a classic performer, admitting, “I'm an actor who records. I'd be terribly surprised if this singing career turned into anything big. I'm not passing judgment on my capabilities, but I'm thirty-seven years old and I've been an actor for seventeen years. I'm just getting off the ground as a singer.”

Dot Records promoted the album heavily. When Leonard showed up at record stores to promote it, he usually was greeted by hundreds of screaming—and record-buying—kids. Although when he appeared in Cambridge, it was his mother who showed up, telling a reporter, “He looks tired. He's such a tired boy.” About an hour earlier, she'd been with him at a television appearance—and as that reporter noted, she'd brought a bowl of kreplach for him. And as for his singing career, “He did have a certain ability for public speaking. He behaves himself very nice.”

Mr. Spock's Music
was so successful that Dot, which was a division of Paramount, signed Leonard to a contract for several more albums—as himself. Several of the tracks were released as singles, and Leonard appeared on several of the most popular variety and talk shows to promote them. During his musical career he released five albums; his most successful albums were in kind of a folk-rock style. In 1997 music publishers released a compilation of both of our “biggest hits.”
Spaced Out,
it was called, and one reviewer described it as including “surreal soliloquies, mad monologues and peculiar parlance!”

But the one song that has attracted the most attention and remains the … the highlight of his musical career, brought together two iconic worlds,
Star Trek
and
Lord of the Rings
. Talk about when worlds collide. Leonard was a big fan of
The Hobbit,
so it was not at all surprising that he decided to record “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” It was on his second album, and he performed it on several TV shows, including
American Bandstand
and a short-lived variety show hosted by Ricky Nelson called
Malibu U
. When asked about it, Leonard described it as a delightful kids' song but said it fell under the “be-careful-what-you-do heading, because it lasts a long time.” A video of him lip-synching on the variety show has gotten more than three million hits on YouTube—and when he made a commercial with Zachary Quinto for Audi of America that was the song he was happily singing.

Without question, one of the projects that Leonard had the most fun with was called Alien Voices; the “aliens” being Leonard and John de Lancie, who created the omnipresent
Star Trek
character Q. In the early 1990s, some of Leonard's friends were doing a revival of what is arguably the greatest radio broadcast in history, Howard Koch's adaptation of
Orson Welles's War of the Worlds;
the story of the 1938 broadcast that was done so convincingly that listeners in several parts of the country actually believed the earth was being invaded by Martians. Fittingly, it was the nation's first great alien-invasion story. The revival was to be directed by John de Lancie. Leonard was asked to do the Welles role. One of the benefits of being an aging actor of some repute is you can afford to do things just for fun. Leonard and I were both brought up on radio, in which great stories come alive in your mind, colored by your own experiences. Radio dramas are a lost medium, so naturally Leonard couldn't turn it down.

Apparently, it was as much fun as it sounds like it would be. In fact, Leonard and John enjoyed it so much that they decided to form a company to record more of these classic stories as audio dramas. As John explained, “I told Leonard, ‘Look, you're an alien, I'm an alien. We'll call it Alien Voices and do adaptations of classic science-fiction stories.”

Leonard apparently got it right away, telling John, “I've been looking for something that would allow me that type of creativity.”

It really was the perfect concept. As John described it, “We all love radio because sound is a pathway straight to the imagination. In an age of dazzling visual effects, the mind still has the power to conjure the best scenery, the fastest space ships, and the prettiest women.” They could bring some of the greatest adventure stories ever written to life for another generation.

The first two projects, which were recorded in a studio and released as audiobooks, were Jules Verne's
Journey to the Center of the Earth
and H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
. There was, however, an unexpected technical problem: Leonard loved chocolate. Leonard's love for sweets was well known, but especially for chocolate. Apparently, there was a large bowl of chocolate kisses in the studio, and Leonard dug into it. The sound engineer finally told John that he had to tell Leonard to stop; the chocolate was gumming up the works. Chocolate apparently sticks in your throat and slightly changes your voice. Not wanting to upset Leonard, John figured out a diplomatic solution: he suggested to Leonard, “Hey! Why don't you have a delicious apple?” Apparently, apples clear your throat.

Leonard burst out laughing and had some more chocolate. But the engineer saved the recording, devising an algorithm that successfully filtered out the chocolate. “The Leonard filter,” as it became known, was employed for the next several years.

After the success of the first two productions, they decided to go a step further, producing a theatrical experience in which actors would read their roles from the script in front of a live audience. That's when I got involved. They had decided to do a stage reading of H. G. Wells's
The First Men in the Moon,
complete with an orchestra and sound effects. John approached the Syfy channel and was told, essentially, “If we can get Nimoy in any configuration, we'll do it!” The performance was taped in front of 1,700 people in the historic Variety Arts Theatre. Most of the cast had appeared in one of the many versions of
Star Trek
. I was absolutely delighted to be part of this, although I was billed as “the surprise guest.” I was cast as the Grand Lunar, King of the Moon! When I walked on stage several minutes into the story, I received a very nice welcome from the audience. I took my place in front of the microphone, held up my script, and said, in a hesitant falsetto voice, “Welcome to the moon.” Leonard and John had to fight to keep straight faces. As an actor, there are few things funnier than being in the midst of a performance watching your fellow actors fighting desperately to remain in character and not break out in laughter. Because once they lose it, it stays lost. They inhale, they suck their cheeks in, they use every possible strategy not to laugh. Leonard and John managed to do it. The audience, however, did not.

The concept was so appealing that Leonard and John took it to Disney with the thought of adapting
The First Men in the Moon
into a feature film. Disney loved the concept but required two changes: first, they wanted an eighteen-year-old female character added to the story. And second, they did not want to do it as a period piece. When John pointed out that it would be difficult to call a contemporary story
The First Men in the Moon
, because it was well known we have already had men on the moon, the executive thought about it for a moment and then suggested, “Well, go to Mars!”

Rather than doing H. G. Wells's
The First Men and an Eighteen-Year-Old-Girl in Mars,
Leonard and John agreed to return to their original concept. They staged Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Lost World: A Halloween Trilogy
featuring stories by Poe, Kipling, and Wilde, and Wells's
The Invisible Man,
which of course was perfect for an audio production.

What appealed to Leonard about this format was the emphasis on the story. “When you go back to the roots,” he explained to writer Paul Simpson in the magazine
Dreamwatch
, “you discover what these authors were really thinking about, and what the social context is of some of these projects, which perhaps has been lost over the years when people have done derivative versions.”

Leonard and John also did an original script that they performed mostly at conventions.
Spock vs. Q,
in which they debated the fate of earthkind as their legendary characters, proved so popular that they did a second version. Eventually, they began receiving requests from schools and universities for copies of their scripts so they could put on their own performances. It was a perfect concept for students; it didn't require costumes or sets, and the lines didn't have to be memorized. Making it easy for kids to act obviously appealed to Leonard, and he and John created another play expressly for students,
The Wright Brothers' First Flight
. While staging that play, they created an instructional video that included “important lessons and techniques … including the creation of special effects, sound, and original music.”

Alien Voices was a solid success, lasting four years, and the audio stories remain available.

I don't think any actor ever really retires; rather I think they remain waiting for that one part that intrigues them, or captures their imagination, or, in some cases, just pays a lot. In the later part of his life, while he was always being offered things, Leonard was able to choose to do only those things that appealed to him.

He did a lot of voiceover work, which, for an actor, is comparatively easy. Easy only in terms of the physical aspect—no makeup! I suspect that was especially appealing to him. His voice appeared in two
Transformers
films; in 1986's
The Movie,
he created the memorable character Galvatron, who blasted his fellow villain Starscream, and in 2011 he gave voice to the lunar-stranded robotic warrior Sentinel Prime in
The Dark of the Moon
. In the Hanna-Barbera daytime Emmy Award–winning version of Ray Bradbury's
The Halloween Tree,
he served as the children's guide, Mr. Moundshroud. He did voiceovers in the mostly animated 1994 film
The Pagemaster
and the 2001 animated film
Atlantis: The Lost Empire;
he also narrated the video games
Star Trek Online
and
Civilization IV
and even appeared in two episodes of
The Simpsons.
The result, he once said, was that he successfully spanned generations of fans. “It's very satisfying,” he said. “Many years ago, people used to say to me, ‘My kids are crazy about you!' Now I have kids saying, ‘My grandparents are crazy about you!'”

He finally reprised Spock one final time in an episode of
The Big Bang Theory
. In that top-rated show, the ultimate geek comedy, Spock, as portrayed with a toy figure and Leonard's voice, visits star Jim Parsons in a dream sequence. But if there ever was a doubt of the respect Leonard earned from the great geek community, and the esteem in which he was held, it was answered forever in a 2008 episode of that show in which Parsons's Sheldon Cooper receives the greatest gift of his lifetime—an autographed cloth napkin that Leonard supposedly used to wipe his mouth at a restaurant. As the shocked and thrilled and perhaps diabolical scientist Parsons explains, “I possess the DNA of Leonard Nimoy … Do you know what this means?… I can grow my own Leonard Nimoy!”