Everyone attached to the production in that initial stage had his or her own concerns. The only person concerned solely about my part was me. It was my complete focus. It becomes the bone the dog is guarding, and the longer it goes, the more ferocious the dog guarding it becomes. That led me into a tunneled point of view on the creation of Kirk.
It took me a while to take what Leonard and later DeForest Kelley were doing with their characters and amplify it through James T. Kirk.
I have no memory of meeting Leonard on the set. I’m sure we were polite. I suspect we shook hands firmly. One of us might have even made a little joke about the adventure on which we were about to embark. But both of us—all of the actors—had done so much television by this time that we had been through the meeting and greeting numerous times. On occasion, there would be an actor whom we’d worked with before and we’d spend a few minutes catching up, but in this case, I didn’t know anyone in the cast. I doubt either Leonard or I even realized we’d worked together previously in U.N.C.L.E. That’s just the nature of our profession.
There actually was probably more pressure on me than anyone else when we started. The first pilot had failed. Roddenberry was being given a second—and last—chance to create the future. I had starred on Broadway. I had starred in movies. I had been the lead in a previous television series. I was asked to do the role of Captain Kirk. I didn’t audition like everyone else did, so ostensibly, I was the star of Star Trek. I got top billing, and if the show failed, the message would be Shatner can’t carry a show.
I don’t know what was going on in Leonard’s mind. I think what goes through the actor’s mind is simply, I’ve got a good role here, it looks like the show is going to go, and I’ve got to play this role as best I can. At this point in his career, Leonard was an experienced professional actor, although he hadn’t played leading roles. He had always been a supporting actor, often playing a bad guy or an ethnic character. At the beginning, I suspect the concept of wearing pointed ears and a blunt haircut might have seemed a bit bizarre to him. If it had been me, I know I would have been thinking, I’d like to get rid of these ears and appear more normal.
As the actor who spent considerable time looking directly at Spock, believe me, those ears were noticeable. Eventually, time—and Leonard’s commitment to the part—made them seem somewhat normal.
Leonard did tell me years later one of his goals for this part: in all his other roles, his name had been written on his dressing room door—when he did have his own dressing room—in chalk. Just once he wanted to see his name painted on the dressing room door.
The second pilot episode was entitled “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Basically, the plot involves the Enterprise and her crew being threatened by crew members who develop malevolent psychic powers after the ship passes through an invisible barrier.
The very first scene we shot took place on the Enterprise’s bridge. As George Takei remembered it, “Leonard and Bill, Jimmy Doohan were there, Paul Fix, playing our doctor, and I came on board. Nichelle Nichols was not in this episode, but Sally Kellerman was. In that first scene, we were all trying to work with this new set. People were figuring out how to move, how to touch, how to sit, and Leonard was very calculated in everything that he did. He was trying to figure out how a being of superintelligence and logic would move or touch the buttons. He was finding out how he would relate to his console, how he would move from the console down the steps to the lower deck, to the captain’s chair and navigation console. He didn’t just move; he planned every step in character.
“Then we began to discuss the scene. What I found fascinating about Leonard was that, while the other actors had our lines memorized and were just going to go through it, he wanted to question and discuss everything before the scene began. He asked endless questions. He was a very thoughtful and analytical actor. He needed to understand why he was doing what he was doing. It took tremendous preparation to make what he did seem so natural.
“I was impressed by that, and I did the same thing. I made every button specific for me.”
From the very beginning, Leonard and I worked together easily. I approached a scene very differently from the way he did. When the scene began, I was where the director needed me to be, and if the director was any good, he’d let the actors feel it out. While Leonard would plan the entire scene, I just let things happen, delivering my lines in a manner that would be commensurate with what people were doing. If Leonard stayed at his station, for example, because he felt that was where Spock was most comfortable, then Kirk would go to him. I would move over to him or either sit or stand in response to what he was doing. He had to play unemotional, so for me, that was a great part of the challenge, playing against someone who wasn’t showing any emotion.
Leonard had to learn how to work with me too. He told me once, “There was a significant difference between my playing against Jeffrey Hunter and playing against you. One of the reasons for the shift in Spock’s character was that you came on board. Jeffrey Hunter was a very internalized actor. A fine actor, an intelligent man. This was the way he worked: he was very internalized, very thoughtful. There’s an old joke about two actors trying to play a scene. One asks the other, ‘What are you going to play in this scene?’
“And that actor says, ‘I’m playing nothing.’
“Then the first actor says, ‘No, no, no. You can’t play nothing. I’m playing nothing!’ So with Jeffrey Hunter I felt the need to help drive the action. Otherwise, we’re both playing nothing. When you came on board with your energy, and a sense of humor, and a twinkle in the eye, I was able to become the core Spock.” Then he added, “And I never smiled again.”
From the very beginning, Leonard fought to bring a real sense of dignity to Spock. While other actors might have chosen to play the character with the type of whimsy normally associated with Spock’s pointed-ear appearance, he took everything Spock did absolutely seriously. Nothing was silly or frivolous. While we’ve seen others bring characters like this to life since then, especially with franchises like Star Wars, Leonard proved it could be done.
It wasn’t always easy. Several weeks before the show went on the air, NBC had us doing promotion. It was a typical publicity event: groups of reporters moved from one character to the next, asking the same questions over and over. They asked questions like: What’s the show about? What can you tell us about the character you play? What planet is he from? Does he really have pointed ears?
“We’re doing real stories,” Leonard responded. “We’re doing stories about overpopulation. We’re doing stories about racial issues. We’re doing stories about ecology, about loyalty and brotherhood.” Spock, he explained, was a fascinating character. He was very intelligent, and he had great dignity. Spock was a scientist, he continued, emphasizing the fact that this was not your typical alien character, and any preconceptions the media had based on all the science-fiction stories that had come before really didn’t apply.
The next day, the reporters were invited onto the soundstage to watch us film a scene. It was an opportunity for Leonard to demonstrate his commitment to the integrity of the character. Unfortunately, this particular scene took place in the sick bay. Spock had been seriously wounded in a fight. As Kirk rushes in, Spock is lying on a bed, bright-green blood dripping from his foot. “What happened, Spock?” Kirk demands.
“Captain,” he responds with as much dignity as he can muster, “a monster attacked me!”
Obviously, I didn’t have to fight the same battles for dignity, because Kirk actually was fighting battles. As it quickly developed, Spock was the mind of the show; DeForest Kelley, who joined the cast as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy was the heart; and I was the action hero. Captain Kirk was the classic warrior, leading his men into battle against great odds to emerge battered and bruised but victorious.
And then we went on the air.
FOUR
Unlike the enigmatic Spock, Leonard was a man of many passions. Among those thin
gs that fascinated him was the artist Vincent van Gogh. He wrote and starred in a one-man show, Vincent, based on the letters between Vincent and his brother Theo. Actor Jean-Michel Richaud, who followed Leonard in the role and actually brought it to France, spent considerable time with Leonard talking about Van Gogh. As Richaud told me, Leonard “was intrigued by Van Gogh’s uncompromising attitude toward the work. In Van Gogh’s day, people equated art with commerce, and very much it mirrors what we see today. We talked about that struggle between art and commerce. Leonard embraced his success, and used it to support the arts.
“But we also talked at length about how Vincent believed ‘there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.’ The bottom line of this play was about love; it wasn’t about the crazy person that everybody thinks Vincent was. It was about love for art, love for his brother, love for the truth. To me, that was the common point between Vincent and Leonard, both of them were seekers of truth in art.”
Van Gogh also said of friendship, “Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.”
My own life has moved constantly at such a rapid pace and is usually filled with so many people that I rarely take the time to wonder why I have had so many wonderful acquaintances but so very few real friends. It must be some quirk in my own character. But I was somewhat painfully reminded of that early in 2015 when I participated in an eight-day cross-country motorcycle ride from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was a difficult trip through some extraordinary heat; I fainted twice. Among the riders were two sets of brothers. Carl and Kevin were among the organizers of this trip; they were four years apart in age. Kevin had asked his brother to ride with us because it would give them at least a little time to spend together that they rarely had. About halfway through the trip, Carl had to leave to fulfill other commitments. As he left, they hugged each other and wept. Grown men in their fifties weeping at losing the chance to spend more time together. I was struck by their love for each other.
The other set of brothers, another Kevin and his brother, Brian, were thirteen months apart. They rode side by side, loving each other, backing each other, each describing his brother as his best friend. They also had fights, one night they described choking each other, but the next morning, whatever caused that was gone. They love each other, and they are each other’s best friend. That is something that is very rare, very enviable, and, to me, something that must be cherished when achieved. And for a time, I had that with Leonard, and I lost it.
We certainly didn’t start our journey as close friends. Rather, like the other members of our cast, we were colleagues, feeling each other out, learning our professional strengths and weaknesses and trying to bring our A game to the show. The friendships that developed initially were in the scripts: the relationship between Kirk and Spock held the show together. The two of us were on-screen in almost every scene. Leonard described the relationship between these two characters as a “great sense of brotherhood. Spock was tremendously loyal and had a great appreciation for the talent and the leadership abilities of Kirk. He was totally devoted to seeing to it that whatever Kirk needed to be done got done.”
Conversely, Kirk relied on Spock unfailingly for his advice, knowing it would never be encumbered by any thoughts of personal gain or tempered by emotional constraints. But he also depended on him to share the burdens of command. With the exception of Dee Kelley’s McCoy, Kirk had to maintain the distance of command from the rest of the crew. That can be a lonely place if there is no outlet, and Spock provided that outlet for Kirk.
It was clear to me from the first scene we did together that Leonard was a fine actor and that he was completely invested in the part. He gave us a living, breathing character to work with, rather than forcing us to play against a comic-book cliché. The fact that he took this pointed-eared alien so seriously forced the rest of us to do so with our characters as well.
That sense of professionalism also was true of pretty much everyone else in the cast. Gene Roddenberry had put together a talented, experienced company. Everyone showed up on time in the morning, well prepared, and we got our work done, then went our separate ways at the end of the day. While there was the usual camaraderie at first, there weren’t any friendships developing. That’s the nature of our business.
Even after we had completed the pilot and had gotten picked up, there was no guarantee of success. The majority of television programs fail quickly. Actors live forever on the edge of failure: every play will close, every show will go off the air. At least that’s what we all believed. Failure on some level will come; it is only a question of how long it can be delayed.
Dorothy Fontana remembers the very first hint she got that the show was going to be successful. At 9:00 A.M. the morning after our first episode, her phone rang. A recognizable voice explained, “This is Leslie Nielsen.” Leslie Nielsen had starred in the classic science-fiction film Forbidden Planet. When Fontana explained that Gene Roddenberry hadn’t arrived yet, Nielsen said, “I just wanted to let him know that I saw the show last night, and I think it has a great future.” Then the mail started arriving. The first week there was one bag of mail. People were writing that they loved the show and asked for autographed pictures. That was encouraging. The second week we got three bags of mail. That was interesting. And then the deluge started, and in fact, it still hasn’t ended. We had not the slightest idea what we were creating; we were always fighting to stay on the air one more season, one more week.
Gene Roddenberry had not been satisfied with the first episode. In fact, he liked to tell people that after that first show aired, his father had gone up and down the block in his neighborhood apologizing for it. But a week later, Roddenberry was having lunch in a restaurant near the studio when he overheard people excitedly discussing the previous night’s episode. That was the first time he’d ever heard people talking about one of his shows, so he thought, This might be something special.
What was surprising to me was that rather than Captain James T. Kirk, the character who received the most attention, and the most fan mail, was Mr. Spock. This was long before Leonard and I became friends, and honestly, I hadn’t expected it, and I was not especially thrilled about it. I was being paid the largest salary, I was out front for the publicity, I had the most lines, my character’s fate carried the storyline, my character got the girl and saved the ship. The natural flow of events should have been that Kirk would receive the most attention, not some alien with strange-looking ears. But the spectacular performance Leonard gave occupied all that attention in the beginning. Mr. Spock fan clubs were formed. Newspapers and magazines ran features on this extraordinary new character. Roddenberry got a memo from the network suggesting that Spock be featured in every story. My future was on the line, and that line seemed to be getting shaky. And so, for a few weeks, I was quite jealous. It bothered me so much that I went to Roddenberry’s office to discuss it with him. Gene was the voice of good reason in this case. “Don’t be afraid of having other popular and talented people around you,” he said. “They can only enhance your performance. The more you work with these people, the better the show is going to be.” In other words, the more popular Spock became, the better it was for everyone, including me, and I settled down to that lovely fact.
Spock continued to evolve as Leonard explored all the possibilities of the character. It was a considerably more complex task than usual because there were no recognizable hallmarks. This was a brand-new character in American culture; he was carving out the path. There was no traditional right or wrong; the audience would tell him what was true. So Leonard took great care to protect Spock. “Characters have to depend on the kindness of actors,” he once explained. “I felt particularly that way with Spock because I think Spock could easily become cartoonish or silly. Liberties could be taken, and I had to preve
nt that.”
Bringing Spock to life probably was the most difficult role of his career. And he admitted to having some concern that he wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actor. At first, he was worried that the whole show was a foolish enterprise, and he would be known forever for wearing devilish ears and playing an alien on a spaceship. He was right about that, and in less competent hands, it could have become a very campy show and been embarrassing for all of us.
But that never happened, and certainly part of the reason was that we all approached it seriously. We knew our audience would take the show only as seriously as we did. To get to the core Spock, as he once explained to an interviewer, “I went through the process of gradually internalizing more and more and more. There were times that I had to remind myself of that because that wasn’t my nature. On the contrary, my training as an actor was to use my emotions, to use gesture, to use color in my speech, to use tonalities to be interesting. And to be passionate. I always enjoyed playing passionate characters, so this was quite a shift for me. It wasn’t me at all. It became me.”
Perhaps Roddenberry had known more than we suspected when he cast me in the role of Kirk, because it turned out that our differing approaches to our parts resulted in perfect harmony. Leonard explained it better than I would: “Shatner was energy personified. A ball of energy, constantly looking, digging, searching, which gave me a place to exist as Spock. Much more so, with all due respect, to Jeff Hunter. Jeff Hunter played Captain Pike as a thoughtful, more introverted person. My tendency, when I was in a scene with him, was to try to be more energetic around him. Bill Shatner provided all the energy you needed in the scene, allowing me to be more reflective and more reactive. The fact that Shatner came on the way he did, I think it helped me a lot in developing the Spock character.”
As the weeks passed and Leonard became more comfortable in the role, he became very protective of Spock. Next to playing Spock, writing his part had to be the most difficult. The crux of great drama is the expression of emotion; just imagine how difficult it was for the writers to bring to life a character whose most identifiable character trait was that he did not express emotion. “We couldn’t let him show emotion,” remembered Dorothy Fontana, or D. C. Fontana as she became known. While she personally wrote several episodes, she also worked with the other writers the entire run of the show and knew how hard it was to write for that character. “Since he was half-human, there were moments when we had to let him show something. We had to let something leak through.” One device the writers used several times was creating some sort of mind control that the enemy used to force Spock to display an emotion—once it even was love. As long as the script was logical, Leonard clearly enjoyed the opportunity to explore his character. And while Leonard remembered being a pain in the neck for the writers with all his script notes, claiming he was very often highly critical, no one I’ve spoken with actually remembers that to be true. Dorothy Fontana doesn’t recall that, and I can’t remember a situation until much, much later, when we were making the movies, that he became overly protective of Spock.
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