by George Takei
We were again engaged in a hot war in Asia. Vietnam was raging. Every night on the six o’clock news, we saw the enemy—deadly, black-pajama-clad threats in the jungle. It was kill or be killed. These cunning foes had to be destroyed. Bomb them! Burn them! Napalm them! They had to be wiped out. These enemies in black pajamas . . . looked like me!
But every night, a little bit after the six o’clock news, the STAR TREK reruns came on. There on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, we saw our heroes, the good guys. And there at the helm console we saw Lieutenant Sulu, a crack professional, a dashing swashbuckler, one of our good guys—one of us. And he was Asian; his face looked like that of those wearing the black pajamas on the six o’clock news. For the first time in the history of the American media at a time of war in Asia, there was a regularly visible counterbalance to the pervasive image of Asians as evil, of Asians as nemeses. That counterbalance underscored the complexity of this conflict. Sulu was on “our side,” he was one of our heroes. And his face was mine.
When STAR TREK was born, I had been pursuing my own career ambitions. I wasn’t seeking an emblematic image. Fate and Gene Roddenberry had conspired to make me that symbolic visage. But I was proud to be able to play the role. As an Asian in the craft of images, I knew the attendant responsibilities that came with my career choice. I was always mindful of the fact that, when I was seen on stage or screen, I represented more than just myself individually.
I had, however, my own statements to make on the course of events in our country. To do that, I couldn’t remain behind the guise of my fictional character. I had to step away from the studio lights and become politically engaged. The memory of my father from almost thirty years ago was always with me. He had been pursuing his own goals in the early forties, but when the course of events and the forces of the times changed around him, he threw himself into the work of the community. He took on public responsibilities for the greater good. I had to become engaged with the challenges of my time.
There was a loosely organized group of antiwar activists in Hollywood called the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice, or EIPJ for short, of which I was a member. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were among the most active members of the organization.
In the Asian American community, I had been discussing the issues of the war in Vietnam with many friends and knew there were strong emotions about it. But the voices that were audible from the community came primarily from the youth. Among the rest there was an uneasy quiescence that did not represent their distinct feelings of opposition to the war. There were reasons for this reticence. They had stinging shrapnel fragments from history still embedded in their minds, memory scars from persecutions past that were prickly and sharp. These people, for understandable reasons, were reluctant to identify themselves with controversy.
This concerned me. The lesson that my father had taught me kept coming to mind. “A participatory democracy is dependent on participation. Without it, democracy fails.” We had to find a comfortable way for Asian Americans still bearing the scars of history to be able to express themselves and be a participatory voice in the process.
I began working with three friends—art dealer Marj Shinno, civil servant Toshiko Yoshida, and law student Mike Murase—to put together events that would be easy and reassuring for the community but also become part of the effort to bring an end to the war. We organized theater parties to attend plays, like The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, that were about the antiwar movement but presented at the establishment downtown cultural center of the Mark Taper Forum. These events were a great success.
But we felt the visibility of Asian Americans was somewhat diluted in a big theater mixed with others. We now felt we wanted to make a purely Asian American statement. And we wanted to make it big—a strong, clear voice for the Asian American community. But these people would not come out to demonstrations or a rallies, which were usually too strident. Yet a rally was the best way to make the statement. How could we stage one that would be comfortable to the greater Asian American community? That was our challenge.
After much discussion, we decided on a rally held in the elegant Biltmore Bowl, the largest ballroom of the dignified downtown Biltmore Hotel. We would have Asian actors like France Nuyen, who had appeared in STAR TREK as Elaan of Troyius, participate by reading poetry. We would have Asian professors talk about the history of our involvement in the war. We gave the event a soft, uplifting name, “Peace Sunday.” And we decided to make it free, not wanting cost to be an inhibitor to peace.
Now, our challenge was to finance this big, costly event. We were all willing to make some contributions to the cause, but they weren’t enough to cover the great expense of this production. I went to Jane Fonda for help. I explained to her the importance of a big statement against this war in Asia coming from the Asian community. I explained the history and unique sensitivities of Asian Americans. I found however, that explanations weren’t necessary with Jane. She understood immediately and quickly wrote out a very generous check that assured the financing of “Peace Sunday.”
We use the word “extraordinary” too loosely. Especially in Hollywood. That Jane Fonda is an extraordinary actress has been amply affirmed. But too often, I have found extraordinary actors to be rather common, uninteresting people. Jane Fonda is an exception and an extraordinary human being. On the surface, her biography reads like a fairy tale about a princess touched by the magical wand of Hollywood. Daughter of a legendary superstar, blessed with wealth, talent, beauty, and opportunities, she seemed to have everything one could want in life.
Yet, I consider her a self-made woman. Instead of a having blessed existence, Jane began life as a deprived child with an emotionally troubled mother and an absent father. In spite of that, with a questing, active mind, the turmoil of the times engaged her intellect and her energies. And as a public figure, she spoke and conducted herself with courage and integrity, for which she received denunciations as well as applause. Undaunted by either, she remained a seeker—inquiring, learning, and constantly reinventing herself. Jane Fonda is a person who has lived through adversity, maintaining an insatiable appetite for life and emerging smarter and more supple, stronger and more sensitive.
Jane is also a kindred soul. I continued working with her in the political arena on issues such as the farm workers and the environment. Later, when she called to announce to me that her then-husband, Tom Hayden, was declaring his candidacy for the California state legislature, I threw myself into the campaign. He was elected, then reelected to the California Assembly.
Jane is a person of extraordinary substance. That she is a brilliant artist is abundantly clear. How extraordinary she is as a person continues to amaze me.
* * *
My city councilman, Tom Bradley, had been the first black man elected from a mostly white district. Now he was the first black politician to run for Mayor of the City of Los Angeles. After the anguish of the Watts riot that ripped the fabric of our city, Tom Bradley would be a conciliating force, a healer of our civic wounds. He would be important for our city. I headed up the Japanese Americans for Tom Bradley committee. Marj Shinno and Toshiko Yoshida from the “Peace Sunday” project were again with me on this effort. The campaign was hard fought, but it was dirty. Even in 1969, racism was a factor. Tom Bradley lost a very close race.
Undaunted, I next threw myself into a larger political arena, the statewide race for the seat of U.S. Senator. Congressman George Brown of California was the first member of Congress to vote against the Vietnam war appropriations. Now he was throwing his hat into the ring for the Democratic Party’s nomination for a seat in the U.S. Senate. I wanted to help him in this quest. Working in the Brown campaign headquarters one day I encountered a familiar face, Leslie Parrish, who had been a guest on one of our STAR TREK episodes, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
I became the chair of the Asian Americans for George Brown committee. Brown’s opponent was John Tunney, the son of heavyweight champion
Gene Tunney. He was youthful with movie-star good looks, and he was a friend of Senator Teddy Kennedy. It was a formidable combination. When the last vote was counted, Tunney took the Democratic nomination and then, in the general election, the U.S. Senate seat from California.
Every candidate that I had supported, from Adlai Stevenson for President back in 1960 to George Brown in this most recent race, had gone down to defeat. I was starting to feel that I was a curse on any political aspirant who should be so unfortunate as to have my support. Maybe I should start working for the opponent of the candidate I actually supported to help mine get elected; maybe I should look for political enemies.
* * *
Actually, it was to old friends that I returned. Josie Dotson, Jack Jackson, Elaine Kashiki, and Jeanne Joe had been building while I’d been losing elections. The Inner City Cultural Center was not only presenting production after production on the stage of a resurrected movie palace on West Washington Boulevard, but was offering classes in all areas of performing in a nearby building as well. Their dream of a multicultural performing arts center had become an exciting reality. But to keep it going, to continue feeding its ravenous appetite for cash, meant the constant pursuit of grants and the raising of funds. I wanted to support this project, but with more than money. I became a volunteer teacher at the center two nights a week. In a way, I was fulfilling my father’s old hope that I would, at some point in my life, teach. I discovered again how his dreams for me and my own choices eventually crossed. I found teaching to be enormously satisfying.
I taught American Theater History from a minority vantage point. My students were black, Hispanic, and Asian, as well as white. Their general attitude toward the subject of history was that it was something past—remote and irrelevant. All they wanted to hear was Mr. Sulu talking about STAR TREK. I seized this as a wonderful opening—to go from the teeming pluralistic universe of Gene Roddenberry’s future back to the mystery of our own multicultural past. I made the exploration of our history more like a probe into the dark unknowns of space. Did they know that there was a great black Shakespearean actor named Ira Aldredge, back in the nineteenth century? This was a fantastic discovery for them, opening up possibilities that they hadn’t considered.
I was broadening horizons and options, but my job, at the same time, was to make them aware of the challenges they faced. The great Ira Aldridge had to go to England to win his greatest acclaim. Another black actor, Paul Robeson, of our century, also had to go to Europe to shine as Othello.
But in the future society of STAR TREK, we, too, had to confront beings who couldn’t see the substance beyond the surface and were deprived of richness as a result. Our challenge was to act, to do something about it, to change things so that in our own times we contribute to building a better world. That’s our great adventure. That’s the enterprise of the Inner City Cultural Center. The kids loved it. The STAR TREK metaphor always seemed to work.
The primary enterprise of the Inner City Cultural Center was the main stage productions. I acted in a thriller, Monkey’s Paw, playing an old seafarer, and in Shakespeare’s Macbeth I played Ross, who appears only in the first act. After the glory of storming onstage in my heavy, flowing cape and my scene of alarm, came the tedium of the long wait downstairs in the green room until the curtain call. But I loved it. This was my first opportunity to play Shakespeare before a paying audience. I would peek out at the audience from a crack in the heavy velvet curtain and survey the house every night. It looked good. We were getting the pluralistic audience that Josie had talked so wistfully about. Now we were making it happen.
One night, I spotted Henry and June out there. I guessed that Scotty was being baby-sat by his doting Grandpa and Grandma. But I was surprised to see June; she was heavy with her second baby. In fact, she now claims that the birth of their second child and first daughter was induced that night by the bloodcurdling screeching of the three witches as they incanted their dire predictions to the warrior king. My niece, Akemi, was born two days after Henry and June came to see Macbeth.
* * *
The blood from the fury of Vietnam was spattering all over—not only across the burning jungles and fields of that Asian land but here on college campuses from Kent State to Berkeley, on city sidewalks from Boston to Los Angeles.
From the outlands far beyond the sound and fury—the plain state of South Dakota—came an unexpected standard-bearer of opposition to the war, a straight-speaking senator, George McGovern. He was running for President, and the political animal in me was again aroused. But rather than work once again as a campaign volunteer, I decided to go a step farther to support the presidential candidacy of George McGovern. I decided to run for a seat on the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention. I would run as a delegate pledged to Senator McGovern.
The junior high school auditorium where the election of district delegates was to be held was a tumult of frenzied electioneering. Smiles flashed everywhere. Flesh was pressed with eager purposefulness. If there were babies to be kissed, we would have kissed them. We did everything we could, save the one thing forbidden. We couldn’t leaflet. Only the basic biographical information printed by the election board was allowed. My political credentials read: member of the Democratic State Central Committee for four years; volunteer in the Stevenson presidential campaign, 1960; chair of the Japanese American committee in the Tom Bradley mayoral campaign, 1969; chair of the Asian American committee in the George Brown senatorial campaign, 1970.
The most important part of the process was the speech each of the candidates would make. We had five minutes to give our qualifications, why we could best represent the district and the candidate we supported. It would be a long morning; there were at least two dozen candidates for only six seats. Among them were labor leaders, grizzled campaign war-horses, schoolteachers, and students. After the speeches and the hurrahs, after the voting and the long anxiety-filled wait, when the result was finally announced, one of the six delegates to the Democratic Nominating Convention was an actor. I was elected an official delegate who would play a role in the selection of a candidate for President of the United States.
* * *
I wasn’t the only actor in that vast convention hall in Miami Beach, Florida. Shirley MacLaine was there vigorously advocating women’s rights. Her little brother, Warren Beatty, was also there, a dashing figure involved in the behind-the-scenes machinations of the convention. He seemed perpetually to be in a huddle with the youthful McGovern campaign manager, Gary Hart.
This was a historic convention. There had never before been more women, minorities, youth, and nonpoliticans as delegates to a presidential nominating convention. The democratic process was slowly but ever so surely being opened up. It was becoming, as my father would have put it, “more participatory.”
And for this first-time participant, it was a heady experience. To rub shoulders with Senator Ted Kennedy on the convention floor one moment and in the next to hear his ringing voice from the stage remembering his assassinated brother; to shake the hand of the senator from Hawaii, Dan Inouye, the first Japanese American elected to the United States Senate, and to be offered his left hand because he had lost his right arm on a World War II battlefield in Europe as an American G.I.; to raise my own right hand in casting my vote for George McGovern as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, remembering that just three decades ago I was a boy on a train taking me to a barbed wire camp in the swamps of Arkansas. Experiences and memories tumbled in on each other in a kaleidoscope of emotions.
On the final night of the convention, to the deafening thunder of the delegates in the hall and a shower of balloons and confetti from overhead, our standard-bearer for President, George McGovern, took the stage to accept the nomination. “This land is my land, this land is your land. This land was made for you and me,” he quoted from the folk song. I looked around at the ecstatic faces that surrounded me. I saw snowy-haired seniors and dewy-skinned youths
, flinty-eyed politicos and beadwearing idealists. I saw black auto workers, Hispanic housewives, Native American attorneys, and Asian schoolteachers. I saw the faces of an America of infinite diversity in infinite combinations all looking up with hope glistening in their eyes to the senator from South Dakota. I felt a stirring in my heart and a pride beyond words. I returned to Los Angeles inspired and determined to elect our next president.
I organized an Asian American committee for George McGovern. We opened a storefront McGovern headquarters in Little Tokyo, and that popular Asian celebrity, Walter Koenig, helped us on its gala opening. I arranged for my niece, Akemi, dressed in a colorful kimono, to greet Mrs. Eleanor McGovern at the Little Tokyo headquarters. We organized a big fundraising dinner in Chinatown. We had small coffee klatches in people’s homes. We worked feverishly in the business of this participatory democracy. It was an exhilarating and exhausting campaign. But early on election night in November 1972, Richard Nixon claimed a massive landslide victory. The curse of George Takei had struck again.
* * *
Over the years, Councilman Tom Bradley had become a good friend. We crossed paths often on the political hustings. We worked together on many issues. I had come to admire his quiet, low-key consensus-building skills.
One day, he told me he was thinking of making another try for mayor of Los Angeles. Would I help him? My immediate response was, Of course. He had come so close to winning in 1969. Over the last four years, he had built up a lot of goodwill and respect. It was good timing. But I had to be frank with him about my sorry political record and the jinx I brought with me. Did he really want to stay in my not-so-exclusive club of Adlai Stevenson, George Brown, and now George McGovern?