Leonard

by William Shatner

  In Roddenberry’s original outline, Spock was an alien member of the crew of the spaceship USS Yorktown, serving under Captain Robert April, as it traveled throughout the universe trying to offer assistance to civilizations in need. While Roddenberry always described it as the successful western series Wagon Train in space, for me it was more like the novelistic adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower in space. There certainly wasn’t anything quite like it at the time. The audience loved westerns and detective shows; the only science fiction was being done on episodes of anthology series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

  Richard Arnold, the acknowledged expert of Star Trek who worked on several of the movies and TV shows, as well as organizing conventions, knew Roddenberry well. “Star Trek was a chance for him to tell the kind of stories he desperately wanted to tell. The timing was perfect because we were in the middle of the Cold War and the nuclear scare. He got his chance to do it in a science-fiction series because it went right over the heads of the censors. They didn’t get it. He’d distracted their attention with a female character looking too sexy while telling stories about Vietnam, about sexual equality and racial issues, subjects you were not allowed to touch. Normally the censors would cross that all out, but because Gene used to say it all took place on purple planets with polka-dot people, they simply didn’t get it. The role of Spock was pivotal; he was to be the representative of an intelligent society.” In fact, in later interviews, Roddenberry described him as “the conscience of Star Trek.”

  There had never been a character quite like Mr. Spock. In most movie or TV portrayals, aliens from other planets were monsters either in being or deed, but whatever they were doing, it turned out to be bad for Earth. Spock was unique. Gene Roddenberry was creating a truly interracial and interspecies crew for the Enterprise. And Spock was half-human and half-alien, meaning he wasn’t completely comfortable in two worlds. He actually wasn’t identified as a Vulcan until the fifth or sixth episode. But the real function of Spock was to serve as an observer of human behavior and to comment on human variables, tendencies, habits, and beliefs. He was to be unfettered by normal human emotions.

  Leonard learned he was being considered for a leading role in some new space show from his agent, who told him Roddenberry had liked his work on The Lieutenant and had him in mind for a character on a science-fiction series in development. I have no doubt how Leonard reacted; this was the kind of call agents make to clients to reassure them they are out there pounding the pavement on their behalf. While he must have been flattered, as apparently this was the first time he was considered for a leading role in a network series, he probably didn’t take it very seriously. Calls like this one, and today e-mails, happen quite often in the life of a working actor. No one gets excited about them. It wasn’t as if Leonard realized that this was going to be his big break and so fought to get the job. Sometimes these calls go a few steps further, but only rarely do they even progress to an audition, much less being cast in the role. I’m sure Leonard dismissed it before even hanging up the phone: a producer who was developing a pilot that might never get shot had him in mind for a role he might never get. Even if he got the role and the pilot was made, it had only a small chance of being picked up by the network.

  But several weeks later, Brewis informed him that Roddenberry wanted to see other work he’d done to get a sense of his range. Leonard sent him an episode of Dr. Kildare in which he’d played a shy, sensitive character who befriended a blind girl and read poetry to her. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the brash producer he’d played on The Lieutenant. It turned out Roddenberry actually had seen that episode of Kildare but hadn’t realized that was Leonard. Impressed, he invited Leonard to a meeting. “I went to that meeting expecting to audition for him,” Leonard remembered. “Instead, he suggested we take a walk. We went to the scenic design department, and he showed me the sets and introduced me to the designers. We walked over to the prop department, and I saw some of the props being made. We went to wardrobe, and I began to realize this is interesting; it’s like he’s selling me on doing this job. I thought, you know what, if I keep my mouth shut, I might have a job here.”

  Roddenberry hadn’t yet fully developed Spock in his own mind. As Leonard explained, “The best thing Gene Roddenberry gave to me when he offered me the part was to tell me that this character would have an internal struggle.” The one thing that Roddenberry was adamant about was that the crew of this gigantic spaceship roaming through the universe would be an example of diversity. At a time when television was pretty much lily-white and all-American, Gene created a crew consisting of both men and women, people of color, different ethnic groups, and even a Russian to suggest the Cold War had ended. So he insisted Spock be obviously extraterrestrial; he wanted to make it clear that Spock came from another world and that these voyages were taking place far in the future, when interplanetary travel was common. That was the importance of the large, pointed ears.

  What Leonard did not know until many years later was that Roddenberry already had decided that he wanted him to create the role of Mr. Spock. Dorothy C. Fontana, who had written the episode of The Tall Man in which Leonard appeared, was working as Roddenberry’s production assistant. As she recalled, “I asked Gene, ‘Who plays Spock?’ And in response he slid a picture of Leonard across his desk at me.”

  The question was, who was going to play Captain Christopher Pike opposite him? Lloyd Bridges, James Coburn, Patrick O’Neal, and Jeffrey Hunter were all considered, but Hunter, who had appeared in numerous television series and movies—although he had played Jesus Christ in the movie King of Kings—got the part. In the first pilot episode, entitled “The Cage,” Captain Pike is lured to a planet by a society with an amazing ability to, as Dr. Boyce, who would be replaced by Bones, explains, “create illusions out of a person’s own thoughts, memories, and experiences, even out of a person’s own desires—illusions just as real and solid as this tabletop and just as impossible to ignore.” Their intent is to mate him to and produce children with a deformed human female who had crash-landed there. To make it incredibly difficult for Pike to resist, they transform this survivor into the women of his deepest desires.

  Even in that initial voyage of the Enterprise, Roddenberry was using futuristic societies to tell relevant stories. In the pilot, one of the aliens lays out the simple rule that would govern many of the planets the crew would visit, as well as the communist nations then existing on Earth: “Wrong thinking is punishable; right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You will find it an effective combination.”

  It was the most expensive pilot NBC had ever produced, and the network didn’t like it. Basically, it was too intellectual, and there was not enough action. But the executives still liked Roddenberry’s concept and made the almost unheard-of decision to make a second pilot. This is where I came in. I’ve been told that Jeffrey Hunter’s wife started making extraordinary demands, and as a result, Roddenberry fired him. The first choice to replace him was Jack Lord, who asked for 50 percent ownership of the show. That’s when Roddenberry called me. I’ve never known why he offered the role to me. Perhaps it was because I’d played leading roles in several major TV series. I’d played major roles in several motion pictures, including Judgment at Nuremberg and Incubus, the first motion picture made entirely in the universal language of Esperanto.

  Or, it also might have been that he was getting desperate, I was available, and I was the right type. Leonard was dark and brooding; I was blond and bright-eyed. Leonard displayed little emotion; I was a walking mood ring. As I have often explained to audiences at Star Trek conventions, I suspect Roddenberry felt I was the perfect choice for the lead role in a show because I wasn’t too intelligent for the audience and he didn’t have to pay me a lot of money.

  I was in a New York hotel room when he called. I had just finished doing a legal series called For the People. He explained that he’d made a pilot for a science-fiction show called Star Trek, and NB
C hadn’t bought it, but they liked the project enough to make a second pilot with a different cast.

  He asked me to come to Los Angeles to see it, with the idea of playing the captain. I don’t remember his precise words, but I presume he’d said something like, “It’s the leading man. He gets the girl. He fights the villains. He runs, and he jumps. And he gets first billing.” However, I am quite certain during that first conversation he did not mention that I would be playing against a half-man, half-alien with, as Leonard later described them, “Dumbo ears.”

  I thought the pilot was magical, and even with all its problems, the potential was obvious. These many years later, after all the amazing space movies and special effects that have made us all feel as if we are in space, it’s absolutely impossible to accurately convey how innovative this concept was at that time. These were normal people hundreds of years in the future, and when they weren’t otherwise occupied saving the universe and their own lives, they were dealing with the same issues and relationship problems the audience dealt with every day. But after viewing that pilot, I told Roddenberry I thought the characters were taking themselves much too seriously. Every line seemed meaningful. There was no sense of fun or playfulness. The characters seemed to be talking at each other rather than relating to each other. Ironically, just about the only person who smiled in the entire episode was Spock.

  Roddenberry agreed with me and offered me the role of James Tiberius Kirk.

  A lot of changes were made before the second pilot was shot. As Variety reported on November 5, 1965, the only two members of the original cast to be retained, Majel Barrett and Leonard Nimoy, had been signed for the pilot of “an hourlong color science fiction adventure series to be produced by Desilu for NBC.” That brief item actually was wrong—the series was shot in black and white. When that item appeared, Leonard was doing exactly what an actor should be doing—working. He was costarring with the beautiful Juliet Prowse in a Valley Musical Theater production of the show Irma la Douce.

  In addition to a new script in which Barrett’s role was reduced and replaced by a relationship between Spock and Kirk, fundamental changes were made to the character of Mr. Spock. Spock was the result of all the work Leonard had done in his career. While he made Spock so realistic, it was easy to believe he was based on a living being; in fact, he started from very little. Because Leonard did such a remarkable job bringing Spock to life, I’m not sure he ever got all the credit he deserved for the creation of this iconic character. As Joe D’Agosta remembered, “Spock was not on that page. The whole character, other than the physicality that was described by Gene, was created by Leonard. He embodied that character with its essence.”

  But initially, at least, Leonard hadn’t gotten a good hold on the character; he was experimenting to see what fit. After that first pilot, Spock never smiled again. “I knew it was a mistake after the fact,” Leonard told me. “When I saw it, I thought it destroyed the mystique. It destroyed the design of this person. This person smiling is not appropriate. This person is not necessarily a negative or dour person, but this person is not a frivolous person. This person must be played as a scientist and a student of what’s going on.”

  The appearance of Spock also continued to evolve. Initially, when the show was going to be in color, Fred Phillips, who did his makeup, tinted his skin a reddish color. It was supposed to suggest a Martian heritage. But when it was tested on black-and-white sets, it just looked black. The character was not a black person. So Fred substituted a Max Factor makeup called “Chinese Yellow,” which gave Spock’s skin a slightly yellowish tone. It was enough to emphasize that he wasn’t Caucasian, but much better than the Martian red.

  Leonard initially thought Spock should have a crude look, with a jagged haircut and bushy eyebrows. He had his eyebrows shaved and then drawn in. But Spock’s quite-famous ears always were an issue. Roddenberry wanted him to have pointed ears, which instantly would inform viewers that he was from another planet. Leonard had some trepidation about those ears, wondering if they looked too comical. But Roddenberry insisted on it. The studio contracted a company to produce the original prosthetic ear pieces, and they were terrible. “Grotesque and funny,” Leonard called them. It took some time and a lot of effort before he was satisfied.

  There continued to be considerable debate about Spock’s appearance. After we shot the second pilot and NBC picked it up, the publicity department began promoting it. One afternoon, Leonard got a copy of the brochure announcing the show in the mail. It was taking place in the twenty-third century, would go where no man had gone before, blah, blah, blah. It included photographs of members of the cast. But when Leonard looked at Spock, something seemed not quite right. As he looked closely, he realized that the photo had been altered; Spock’s curved eyebrows had been straightened, and the pointed tips at the ends of his ears had been removed. Leonard’s reaction was to feel threatened. He wondered if these changes meant they weren’t satisfied with the character. As he said, this was going to be the first steady acting job he’d ever had, the first time a job had lasted more than two weeks. He called Roddenberry, who admitted he was getting pushback about the character from the sales department. They were concerned about a number of issues but primarily that the ears looked devilish, which they believed would make it difficult to sell the show in the Bible Belt. They didn’t believe those people would welcome a character that reminded them of the devil into their homes each week. Roddenberry reassured him that Spock was an essential element of the show. Those ears, which took hours to put on each morning, eventually became the most defining feature of the character. Leonard loved to tell a story about the night he attended a promotion party on the Paramount lot; he was sitting in his chair when suddenly he felt two large hands squeezing his shoulders from behind, and then he heard the instantly identifiable voice of John Wayne whispering in his real ear, “I recognize you. You had your ears fixed!”

  The second script added more dimension to the character, and it was gradually becoming clear that Spock would be more intellectual than reactive. That he would be controlled and logical rather than emotional. The precedent for that character was created by Michael Rennie in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Rennie played an alien who came to Earth to warn against moving forward into the atomic age. The character was extremely intelligent and totally detached, rational, cool, and peaceful.

  To better understand the core of that character, as Leonard had been trained to do, he looked into his own life. Spock wasn’t simply an alien—he was alienated; the product of two very different civilizations, he didn’t fit comfortably anywhere. Leonard drew on his own experience growing up in Boston, explaining, “I knew what it meant to be a member of a minority, in some instances an outcast minority. I understood that aspect of the character well enough to play it. Coming from my background, growing up in a neighborhood of immigrants trying to assimilate into modern American society, believe me, I understood that deep sense of not really belonging anywhere.”

  Leonard liked to tell people that he had been born in Boston, his parents had come to America as immigrants, aliens, and then he went to Hollywood to become an alien.

  If there was a character that he drew on to create the sense of alienation he needed, it probably came from one of his favorite movies, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the great Charles Laughton created the unforgettable Quasimodo. Quasimodo was the essential outsider, and Leonard had so much empathy for him that he wanted to cry when he saw that movie. He wanted the audience to empathize with Spock, who was caught in an internal struggle between his human side and his Vulcan side, which resulted in a continuous struggle between logic and emotion. “I knew that we weren’t playing a man with no emotions,” he once said, “but rather a man who had great pride, who had learned to control his emotions, and who would deny what those emotions were.

  “In spite of being an outcast, being mixed up, looking different, he maintains his point of view. He can’t be bullied or p
ut on. He’s freaky with dignity. There are very few characters who have that kind of pride, cool, and ability to lay it out and walk away.”

  Spock was the result of seventeen years of being kicked around but remaining dedicated and respectful to the craft.

  Ironically, a lot of the character’s movements also came from an unlikely source. In the 1950s, Leonard went to the Greek Theatre, a famed Los Angeles amphitheater, to see the great Harry Belafonte perform. The stage was dark. A single spotlight suddenly focused on Belafonte standing alone, his hands on his thighs, slightly hunched. He received a big ovation, which he did not acknowledge, then began singing. When the sound ended again, there was huge applause. Belafonte still didn’t respond; he simply began singing his second song. “He must have been on stage for ten or fifteen minutes before making a gesture,” Leonard recalled. “And then, in the middle of a song, he simply raised his arm. It was gigantic because it came from a very minimal place. The theater exploded with a roar in response. The whole place shook. Wow, what a lesson that was. If you are minimal, then even a small gesture becomes a big deal. I learned a lot from that.”

  James T. Kirk was considerably easier to develop because it was a familiar character in American culture. He was the square-jawed hero running into the abyss to save the damsel in distress. In fact, joining the cast so late in development, I had to rely at least somewhat on the lines that I was given to define my character. I was so concerned with learning my lines, getting them out, becoming comfortable with the set, and my relationship with the other members of my crew that I didn’t have the opportunity to look deep in Jim Kirk’s psyche. For the first few weeks, at least, I was feasting on my own narcissism, as actors will do, because I was mostly fighting for survival.