Leonard

by William Shatner

  Only once during the original series was there a real issue. The head writer for the show was Gene Coon. It was Gene Coon who created the Klingons, an irrational race of warriors who believed in nothing but conquest and would destroy anything and anyone that got in their way. The Klingons were the perfect enemy. During that first season, we were given a script in which Spock did something he hadn’t done before; I don’t remember what it was, but Leonard felt it was completely inconsistent with what he had been developing for the character. As he had been throughout his career, he focused on small details that others might have overlooked. So he went to Coon’s office to discuss it.

  Coon was in the middle of the next script. The last thing he needed was an actor fussing over a detail that no one would notice. Leonard explained to him why the scene didn’t work. Apparently, Coon listened carefully, then suggested, “Just do it.”

  “I can’t,” Leonard told him, an actor being protective of his character.

  “This conversation’s over,” Coon snapped.

  By the time Leonard returned to the set, his agent was on the phone telling him he was being suspended. As he remembered the incident, “I knew it couldn’t possibly lead to them telling me not to come to work anymore, because this was a machine, and if you pull a cog out, the machine stops. So in my arrogance, I said to my agent, ‘Ask them do I have to finish the day, or can I leave now?’”

  The next call came from Roddenberry, who quickly dismissed the suspension and brought everybody into his office. Leonard had great respect for Coon—we all did—but protecting Spock was far more important to him. Coon made the requested changes, and Leonard went back to work.

  Leonard remained adamant that the mythology we were creating had to be consistent and accurate throughout all our explorations. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, for example, included a scene in which Kirk and Spock were having dinner with the Klingons. In writer and director Nick Meyer’s script, Spock had a line that stated the Federation and the Klingons had been at war for a period of time. He wasn’t sure that was accurate and checked with our resident expert Richard Arnold, who confirmed that there had not been a war in that timeframe, and the line was changed to reflect that. Details mattered to Leonard. Once, when he was working on the western series The Tall Man, just before they started filming he took off his wedding ring and put it in a locked valuables box. When asked about that, he explained that men didn’t wear wedding rings during that period. Who would know that? Who would take the time to find out? Leonard, that’s who. He invested completely in the creation of a character, and all the work he had done all those years finally paid off when he got the opportunity to truly create a character.

  He explained that to me once, “No one else is going to provide that consistency and continuity. If the writers gave me the line, ‘Let’s make hay under the Vulcan moon,’ it was up to me to remind them that three episodes earlier Spock had mentioned that Vulcan had no moons.”

  Most of the hallmarks that became associated with Spock, in particular the Vulcan neck pinch and the Vulcan salute, were entirely his creation. In one of our first episodes, Kirk’s personality was split into good and evil, and evil Kirk was about to kill good Kirk. In the script, Spock was supposed to sneak up behind evil Kirk and knock him out by hitting him over the head with the butt of his phaser. It was the kind of bad-guy move that Leonard had been doing for a long time. But while our scripts regularly required me to always be punching, rolling, jumping, swinging, butting heads, and getting hit in the face, this was the first time Spock actually participated in a physically violent action. Leonard wasn’t comfortable with that; brawling, banging someone in the head somehow seemed below Spock’s evolved personality. It was too twentieth century. So he suggested to the director that Spock had a special capability that allowed him to put enemies out of action without little physical exertion. The director was open to the concept. Leonard and I sat down, and he told me what he had in mind: he would pinch my trapezius muscle, and I would collapse in a heap. I have no idea where that concept came from, but I was a professional actor; I knew how to fall down. Of course, it fit Spock perfectly: an advanced civilization would know where the vital nerves are located and have the physical strength to take advantage of that knowledge to incapacitate their enemy. We did the scene: Spock came up behind evil Kirk and pinched his trapezius, I dropped to the floor, and the Vulcan nerve pinch was born.

  For those people counting at home, fans of the show saw the Vulcan nerve pinch being used thirty-four different times. I wonder how many kids since then have had to suffer through the real pain of a Vulcan neck pinch.

  The Vulcan salute has become recognized literally throughout the world. In this salute, the right hand is held up with the pinkie and ring finger touching, but separated from the middle finger and forefinger, which also are touching, in a modified V-for-victory salute. It was created for the first episode of our second season, by which time Leonard had a strong understanding of Spock. In this episode, Spock has to return to Vulcan to fulfill a marriage betrothal that was arranged when he was a child. If he doesn’t return, he will die. This episode was written by the great science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. This is the first time we have seen Spock on Vulcan, among the people of his race. In the script, he is greeted by the woman who is to conduct the marriage ceremony. Leonard suggested to the director that there needed to be some type of Vulcan greeting that would be appropriate. It would be the Vulcan version of a handshake, a kiss, a nod or bow, or a military salute. When the director agreed, Leonard had to create it. It was not an especially easy thing to envision. It needed to be unlike any traditional greeting, but it couldn’t be at all comical. As he often did, Leonard drew on his own life to find it.

  There is a gesture he had first seen when he was eight years old, when he went with his grandfather, father, and brother to the North Russell Street shul, an Orthodox synagogue, and he had never forgotten it. In Jewish Orthodox tradition, during the benediction the Shechinah, which very roughly means the feminine counterpart to God, enters the sanctuary to bless the congregation. The Shechinah is so powerful that simply looking at it could cause serious or even fatal injury. So worshipers use this gesture, in which their fingers form the shape of the Hebrew letter shin, to hide their eyes. “I wasn’t supposed to look,” he remembered, “but I knew something major was happening. So I peeked.” The gesture always intrigued him. “I didn’t know what it meant for a long time,” he said. “But it seemed magical to me, and I learned how to do it. There was no reason for me to learn it, but it looked like fun.” Not only did he use it as the basis for the traditional Vulcan greeting in the episode, many years later he published a controversial book of naked glamorous women wearing religious symbols, entitled Shekhina.

  The gesture immediately caught on. Fans of the show started greeting him with it on the street—without realizing they were blessing each other. Giving this greeting requires a certain dexterity. Not everybody can do it. Some of our actors had problems with it, and they had to use their other hand to put their fingers in place, then hold up their hand for the camera. Aside from me, another actor who had difficulty giving this gesture was Zachary Quinto, who years later played young Spock for the first time in the 2009 motion picture. While promoting the new film, he admitted to Leonard, “I spent a little time actually training my hands to be able to do the salute. That wasn’t something that came particularly easy, so I would rubber band my ring finger and my pinkie finger together while I was driving around Los Angeles and do little exercises for months leading up to the shooting.”

  While Leonard was creating these elements, our writers were smart enough to recognize them as integral parts of the character and incorporate them into future scripts. I’ve often said that no one could do more with a raised eyebrow than Spock, but of course Spock had the strangest eyebrows. Leonard apparently had a habit of raising an eyebrow to emphasize his concern or his questioning of a statement or an action. It isn’t t
hat unusual. Maybe he had used this gesture on-screen before, but before, he didn’t have such prominent eyebrows, and he wasn’t getting full-face close-ups. So he did it naturally in one scene, and the following week, a script direction read: Spock lifts an eyebrow. That became another character trait; the writers loved it and had him raising an eyebrow in just about every episode until he insisted they stop.

  Several of Spock’s phrases also have become part of the general culture, but none of them are as widely known as the four words said when giving the Vulcan salute that have come to have such deep meaning: “Live long and prosper.” They were written by Theodore Sturgeon for the same episode and are now known by the abbreviation LLAP—which was the way Leonard ended all his own tweets.

  Spock also was associated with a unique, four-syllable pronunciation of the word, “fascinating,” which often was reinforced by an arched eyebrow. It wasn’t simply the word; it was the way he drew it out that gave it such meaning. It also was a good window into his talent as an actor. It’s a simple word, we all know what it means, and there may be a thousand different ways of pronouncing it. But finding the one way to say it that reinforces the subtext of the character can be extremely difficult.

  That word was used, he explained, to describe something unexpected, usually something that he had not seen before. It actually was a wonderful word to describe exploration into new worlds that didn’t always adhere to the rules of science or, where Spock was concerned, logic. He always credited Spock’s pronunciation to a director. In one of our early episodes, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” we were all on the bridge gathered around a computer screen. Spock’s reaction to what we were looking at was that one word, “Fascinating,” but it was kind of flat. It didn’t carry with it the awe that the director, Joe Sargent, wanted. So he told Leonard, “Be different. Be the scientist. See it as something that’s a curiosity rather than a threat.” He tried it several different ways until he got it just right, spoken in a detached tone of appreciation for something that exceeded his knowledge or expectations. As he said later about that moment, “A big chunk of the character was born right there.”

  It actually took me some time to fully understand Leonard’s total commitment to Spock, and that led to our first real fight. Not our only fight, just our first one. This took place during our first season, and we were all sort of feeling our way along. By then, the cast was complete: in addition to Leonard, Majel Barrett, and me, DeForest Kelley had come aboard to play Dr. “Bones” McCoy, James Doohan’s chief engineer “Scotty” kept the ship running, our communications officer was Nichelle Nichols’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, our helmsman was Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu as created by George Takei, and Walter Koenig was our bow to the Cold War then raging, the Russian-accented navigator Pavel Chekov. We were learning more about each other, and how to work together, each week. While we were being molded into a cast, we were all actors trying to further our own careers, so there was the usual competition. “A constant struggle to inject yourself,” was how Leonard described it, “to try to find ways of making more of a contribution.” It was no different from any other cast. “A family,” he said, “in which everybody’s looking for their position. How come he gets all the good food, and I get the leftovers … how come she’s got the good potatoes, mine are cold.”

  While I was becoming comfortable with the popularity of Spock, in those first few months, Leonard and I kept a respectful distance. We were always friendly, always polite, and absolutely always professional, but it wouldn’t be accurate to write that a friendship was developing. We had a good professional, respectful relationship. One of the early episodes we did was called “The Devil in the Dark.” For many people it remains one of their favorite episodes. The story began when the Enterprise visited a planet on which miners were being killed by a strange creature, which lived deep underground, known as a Horta. The Horta had no means of communicating with humans, so to understand its motives, Spock had to “mind meld” with it, a technique that allowed a Vulcan to merge his or her mind what that of another living being. This was known to be a difficult, dangerous, and very painful process in which the Vulcan actually feels the intense pain of the mind-melding counterpart. Spock endured that pain to discover that this otherwise harmless creature was the last of its race and simply was protecting its eggs from the miners’ intrusion. With that knowledge, Kirk was able to forge a peaceful working relationship between the humans and the Horta.

  It was a wonderful script, but it included no instruction about how to mind meld, which left it up to Leonard to create the action. I figured the mind meld would be something like a radio signal, in which invisible waves traveled between two people. But when I asked him how he intended to do it, I can vividly remember him placing his forefinger and thumb on my forehead and explaining, “Here’s how we would do it.” It was more like cable than wireless, a physical rather than a mental connection.

  We were filming that episode when I was informed that my father had died suddenly of a massive heart attack while playing golf in Florida. I was utterly and totally devastated; I was shaken to the core of my soul both physically and emotionally. I had to go to Florida as quickly as I could get there, but there was no flight for several hours. We were in the middle of a scene, and I decided it was important to continue working. The only way I knew to escape the pain I was feeling was to become someone else, and so I slipped into the guise of James T. Kirk. I owed that to my fellow actors.

  Those were the most difficult moments I’ve ever spent on a soundstage. I tried to blank out everything except the persona of my character but had only limited success. When we’d rehearsed in the morning, I’d known my lines, I was a professional, and I was always prepared; but when we resumed work in the afternoon, I stumbled and had great difficulty remembering those lines. Years later, when Leonard and I discussed it, I recalled being stoic, but his memory was different. He told me I continued to repeat, as if in a daze, “Promises not kept. Promises not kept. Things that he wanted to do.”

  While I was in the midst of true emotional pain, Leonard was enacting the pain caused by mind melding. He got on his hands and knees, placed his hands on the Horta, and cried, “Pain, pain, pain…” It’s a tricky scene for an actor to pull off without looking very silly, but Leonard had created an aura of believability around Spock, and he was able to make it work.

  In that scene, Kirk has to react to Spock’s pain. I returned to the set several days later, after burying my father. The first thing we shot were close-ups of my reaction. The entire cast had been truly sympathetic about my loss, and it was a hard day for all of us. There was a lot of tension on the set, and I wanted to find a way of showing everyone that I was okay. While preparing to do my scenes, I’d looked at the footage of Spock mind melding with the Horta, and Leonard graciously offered to work with me. “Show me what you did,” I said.

  “Well, I went over here and put my hands on her and cried, ‘Pain, pain, pain.’”

  Having watched the footage, I knew it was far more emotional than that. I asked him to show me exactly what he did.

  Leonard got down on his hands and knees, closed his eyes, and reenacted the scene to give me something to react to. He didn’t simply rush through it, he felt the emotion. He screamed out from the depths of his soul, “Pain … pain … pain…”

  Rather than respecting his commitment to the work, I went for the cheap joke. I called out, “Can somebody get this guy an aspirin?” I waited for a laugh that never came. Leonard was furious, absolutely furious. I could see the anger in his face. He thought I’d set him up for ridicule, then betrayed him for the amusement of everyone else on the set. This was still early in our relationship; we were learning about each other. It was long before I’d built up the kind of reservoir of goodwill that allowed me to make this kind of silly mistake. Leonard stalked angrily off the set. He confronted me later, telling me he wanted nothing to do with me, that he thought I was a real son of a bitch. My apology seemed hollow. He didn’t
say a word to me that wasn’t in the script for at least a week.

  But by the time we filmed that episode, Leonard had established his character’s character. In the last scene of that particular episode, after we had secured peace on that world, Kirk told Spock that he was becoming more human all the time. Spock considered that, rolling it over in his mind and testing the concept, then responded, perfectly, “Captain, there’s no reason for me to stand here and be insulted!”

  Spock eventually became a lasting archetype for an unemotional person. Even decades later, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wanted to make the point that President Obama was dispassionate and distant, she referred to him as Spock. Spock’s lack of emotion became a central theme of the show. In fact, a lot of the humor in the show came from the constant sparring between the very human Bones McCoy and Spock. In one episode, for example, Spock comments, “He reminds me of someone I knew in my youth.”