I don’t believe living things are meant to go through life alone. That has been an important lesson for me, although admittedly at times I have struggled to form relationships. It’s not something at which I have been especially skilled. I think by nature we are programmed to both want and need the companionship of others, in a great variety of forms. I think living things are all connected in some incredible way. We are all little electrical stations, our bodies giving off electrical waves. We have the technology to communicate electronically with satellites at the end of our solar system, so it is difficult for me to believe that we don’t feel those electrical vibrations emanating from someone standing right next to us. Perhaps we simply lack the means of interpreting them.
There is evidence that some of us are able to connect on some level other than consciousness with others. People who live together find that they often have similar thoughts at the same time: “I knew you were going to say that.” Or we think about someone and that person calls us, saying, “I was just thinking about you.” I don’t think this is a coincidence, or an accident; I think our little radio stations are simply receiving each other. I have been working with my assistant, Kathleen Hays, for more than six years. After working together often more than twelve hours a day, week after week, we certainly have learned to anticipate each other. It also isn’t limited to human beings. On the most fundamental level, scientists have measured low-energy signals moving from tree to tree; they have evidence of trees displaying a response when trees around them are cut down.
I know I am able to communicate with my dogs. My dogs know what I am thinking, obviously in the most general terms, and respond to it. When I need them by me after a trying time they are there. They just are there. I don’t invite them, or call them; they sense somehow they are needed and they respond. Anyone who has had an animal knows that to be true, that animals have an innate ability to understand human needs and, in many cases, how to fulfill them.
We are all vibrating, I believe, sending out electrical signals to those other living things capable of receiving and deciphering them. Those signals are energy; I describe them as the energy of life. And I do believe that there are certain people, the people we call holy men, who simply are in tune with the rest of us. On the highest level that vibration, to me, is passion. But then something else takes over, love, friendship, appreciation, respect. And all of it connects us to the world; it connects us to other people.
We simply were not created to be alone. In the movie Cast Away, for example, Tom Hanks found it absolutely essential to form a relationship with a volleyball. People who have chosen or been forced to spend considerable time by themselves often end up creating invisible beings with whom they have a semblance of a relationship. Once, when I was with my family in Hawaii, I saw what appeared to be a body lying on the beach, roped off with yellow police crime scene tape. When I asked a policeman what had happened, he replied it was nothing, he was protecting a monk seal. While seals generally live in colonies, a monk seal stays by itself, hence the name. Once a year monk seals returned to this beach to breed and have their pups.
The following morning, just after dawn, I was swimming in the ocean by myself. It was too early for anyone else to be there. As I was treading water I suddenly felt something grab me from behind and hold on to me. I turned around and looked right into the face of a monk seal. I screamed; I was frightened to death. It had grabbed me with its flippers. The animal looked at me and disappeared; as far as I know it did not return to the beach. The young man putting out the chairs heard me screaming and saw the seal disappear. I told the story at breakfast that morning, but no one believed me. It is true, it happened, and in my mind that monk seal was so alone it craved contact with another living thing. It needed to feel like it wasn’t alone.
We are herd animals, most comfortable when we are involved in myriad relationships on all levels, from intimate to peripheral; these are the bonds that bring us together. You can see that by looking at nature. From whales and sharks to bees and ants, most species thrive as a community; in many instances their lives depend on their relationships. We live in the great matrix of relationships that are absolutely necessary for our physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.
It is our relationships that carry us through life. When discussing relationships, many people assume that the most important relationship is romantic love. That’s a nice assumption; it’s what we have been told our entire lives, but it isn’t necessarily true. And, in fact, it may even complicate things. The whole concept of romance and love has been invented. Romantic love didn’t exist for thousands of years. Some society, maybe the Greeks or the early Egyptians, created it. But before that the necessity of joining a group of men to hit a mammoth on its head, or wondering whether the saber-toothed tiger was going to steal it from you, then lighting a fire and cooking it, finally going to sleep in a darkened cave, didn’t allow for romance.
Nobody gave roses to another person—unless they were edible. When mankind was focused on survival and reproduction there was no time or need for romance. People bonded together and formed relationships because they were more powerful as a tribe.
Romantic love began when mankind had time to dress up and put on all the necessities to attract the other sex. The whole Knights of the Round Table idea, in which men pined and yearned and willingly undertook noble deeds to win the heart of a fair maiden, was a wonderful fairy tale. Fear of mammoths had been replaced by the need for companionship. Then Shakespeare wrote of unbridled romantic love. So it’s a comparatively recent invention.
But romance can be perishable. It often doesn’t last. We are conditioned by what we see on the stage, in movies, what we read and hear about: to endlessly pursue romance and to believe our life is at least partially barren when we are not involved in some type of romance. Much too often people believe they are incomplete if they are not involved romantically with another person. They go through life feeling empty, feeling like a failure, because they are not attached romantically.
What they fail to understand, what I have learned, is that there are other, maybe even healthier, forms of love and relationships. People generally don’t appreciate that because it’s not what they are seeing on television or being told on social media. We are constantly barraged with products to make ourselves more enticing to other people. We are continually being told that seemingly everybody else has found that special person and made to feel like failures if we haven’t “met cute.” But there are so many other types of love: There is friendship, love for animals, for charity, for God. And there are other levels of fulfilling relationships: There are people you work with on a daily basis, people you respect and rely on; there are your neighbors and other people you encounter on a regular basis who add a little enjoyment to your everyday life with their smile, whether it is a teacher or the woman who takes your ticket in the movie theater. We live in a world of relationships of every type and intensity, yet it has been my experience that people often fail to recognize it and they fail to appreciate the importance of all of these relationships. By “people,” I mean me too.
Appreciating and fostering relationships is a learned behavior. It doesn’t necessarily come naturally or even easily to many people. It’s difficult to do, and it took me most of my lifetime to figure that out. The first meaningful relationship in all of our lives is with our parents, and what we take from that relationship will affect us the rest of our lives. Relationships are learned behavior. There are different concepts on how to treat a crying baby. Some parents believe in allowing an infant to cry itself into exhaustion, while others will pick up and comfort the baby every time it makes its presence known. Some mothers are able to read their child’s needs and wants very accurately; others simply follow the prescribed tried-and-true manner.
I wasn’t swaddled. I don’t remember communicating very closely with my mother. My father was working and wasn’t present much of the time, so he became a figure of discipline and respect. As a res
ult, I did not have an especially loving bond with my mother. I hear grown men talking about “my mom,” or I see professional athletes thanking “Mom.” My mother was never a “mom.” I’ve thought about that; my mother came from an old-country background. My tendency is to think of those peasants who spent long hours working in the fields of Europe, which gave them less time for demonstrable love. I think that I’m a product of that. I think that shaped my life and my relationships.
Your parents’ relationships with each other and with their children set the template for how a loving relationship with another human being, even a marriage, is supposed to work. We know, for example, that children of a wife batterer may end up abusing their own spouses. Abusing someone has become their understanding of love: “He,” or “she,” “hits me because they love me.” Or, conversely, “I love her because I hit her.”
My parents were good, decent people who had admirable values, contributed to the world, had friends, and gave to others. My father worked so hard to bring his family to Canada, it was the most important thing to him, yet I don’t recall any great displays of great affection between him and his siblings. He worked incredibly hard to provide a better life for them, but interactions were subdued.
Now, my Auntie Pearl, that was a whole different story. I don’t quite know what I learned from her, but it must have been considerable because I have a very vivid memory and appreciation for her. Auntie Pearl came from the same background as my mother but was a totally different character. And she was a character; she had the flamboyance of Auntie Mame. Everything she did seemed exotic to me; she married a psychiatrist and moved to California. They had three children and divorced. My mother told me never to talk about that divorce because in those years it was considered shameful.
Auntie Pearlie was ostracized, which never made any sense to me. She was the member of the family with a sense of adventure. She was bright and full of fun and laughter. Both she and my mother had a love of life; the difference was my mother acted it out within her boundaries while Pearlie lived it.
Pearlie and I were both middle children. I grew up with a sister who was three years older than me, Joy, and my other sister Farla, who was eleven years younger than me. I think they got less attention than I did because I was the boy. No older sister wants a younger brother trailing after her, and Farla was so much younger than either of us that we were deeply involved in our adolescent adventures when she was born. Both of my sisters are lovely, nice people who married well. They continued to live in Montreal, and even though we love one another and speak relatively often there is a physical, emotional, and psychological separation from both of my sisters. They are my family, but they have never been intensely in my life.
There is no question in my mind that I took something from each of those relationships. It was as if I had a Chinese restaurant menu of relationships to choose from: my serious and somber hardworking father, my too-often outrageous mother, my flamboyant aunt, my older sister, and our younger sibling. Like Pearl, I left a very conservative, and safe, household, with a secure business I could have gone into, to venture into a world where failure is the norm. But I left home without learning how to form relationships. I had to figure that out through a long series of fumbles and misguided attempts.
One of the earliest relationships I formed was with a prostitute who became my friend. At the time it was not something I valued, but in a lifetime of exciting and unusual experiences, the following incident is one of the few I recall with clarity and shame. It happened almost sixty years ago and yet I remember it well and still feel my discomfort. This is another of the very few regrets I have in my life.
When I first moved from Montreal to Toronto at the very beginning of my career I was living in a fifth-floor walk-up, sleeping on that rope bed. I was looking desperately for any kind of work on television I could find, but it was difficult. There was a hotel nearby that had an attached cafeteria that offered all-you-can-eat meals for two dollars. Whole families, and I, would go there for the cheap food. The cafeteria would close at eight o’clock and after that a large bar opened. That bar became a hangout for prostitutes whose clients would “rent” a room in the hotel. I would eat my two-dollar dinner, then go into the bar and sit with these women. When they had a client they would leave the table for a period of time, then return to rejoin the conversation. I became friendly with several of them. One or two of them allowed me into their bed from time to time. Looking back now, I understand we all were trying to make real contact with another human being. They had their job, I had mine, but on some level we all were looking for companionship. Not sexual, that was the easy part, but rather something far more difficult to find. I was incredibly lonely and these women became my tribe; they helped me survive.
Eventually I had some success. I spent three years performing Shakespeare at Tyrone Guthrie’s Stratford Festival. The second year there I met Gloria, and by the end of that season I had asked her to marry me. Months later I was with her and her parents in Toronto. Gloria came from a very proper, successful family. As we came out of a movie theater, I saw one of my friends from the bar coming toward us. From her manner, the way she was dressed, her profession was obvious. I didn’t know what to do. Inside, I was panicking. The last thing I wanted was for Gloria’s parents to discover I knew this woman. She was a prostitute; what would they think of me? As she passed our eyes met; it was obvious she recognized me. She clearly sized up the situation and neither of us acknowledged the other. We glanced at each other once more, and then she was gone down the street. I took a deep breath, believing that was over, I had gotten away with something.
Over? I have carried my shame with me for the rest of my life. This had been an important relationship to me and I was so desperate for approval that I lacked the courage to admit that. At my age now I would have behaved differently, but I understood my actions as a young man. It was the only thing I was capable of doing. I should have rushed over and embraced her, which would have been very courageous, and maybe explained that I knew that lady several years ago and she helped me. I couldn’t; I was so emotionally bound: I was going to get married; I was going to have a real relationship, which meant I was no longer going to be alone. And this was going to be my family. I was so desperate for a relationship that I failed to recognize the importance in my life of that earlier relationship.
As I’ve written previously, once upon a time I believed deep passionate love was the most powerful type of relationship. That loving someone without conditions was the ultimate goal and that we all spend our lives seeking it. Then I met and married an alcoholic. Because I believed true love conquered everything I had no doubt my true love for Nerine would enable her to conquer her addiction.
I believed that. Boy, was I wrong.
When I look back at my life I am sometimes amazed at those things I did in search of love. But nothing compares to marrying an alcoholic. I went to Al-Anon, the organization for the families and friends of alcoholics, and they tried to teach me how to live with an alcoholic. I told them, “I don’t want to live with an alcoholic. I don’t have to deal with someone who is drunk. I want her to stop.” To me, this was like the movies; in the end my love would overcome everything and the orchestra would play beautiful music as we walked together in our future. It had always worked with my animals; why couldn’t it work with her?
I spent most of my life learning these lessons. Like everyone else, I had relationships that I didn’t appreciate enough; with Leonard Nimoy, for example. Leonard was the best friend I ever had, and without realizing it I must not have paid sufficient attention to that relationship, because at the end of his life he was no longer speaking to me. Many people refuse to believe this, but I never knew what I had done to cause that; I certainly had never done anything intentionally.
Nerine’s death devastated me, but at least I understood what had happened. Until the day I die, though, I will wonder what caused that rift with Leonard. After all the years we had spent toget
her, after the bond we had forged, what could I have done that was so irreparable that he couldn’t even talk to me about it?
Actors live transient lives. Unlike many people, we don’t go to an office or workplace every day and see the same people and, over time, form relationships. As an actor the more successful you are, the more shallow your roots, because the job involves so much traveling. I am now bound together forever in American cultural history with the cast of Star Trek. Often though, people mistake the relationships our characters had during that three-year-long journey for real life. The relationship between Spock and McCoy, the battle between intellect and emotion, for example, was idealized. In fact, we were a group of actors brought together by a producer. The only thing we had in common was that all of us were working actors who had played many different roles. When Star Trek was canceled we each continued our careers in different directions, and if we thought about it at all we knew we might bump into each other in completely different roles. It was only long afterward, after the show became a cult hit and then a franchise, that we were brought back together. But that was typical of the type of relationships I had with my fellow actors.
I have always believed that was at least part of the reason I never had any really close friends. By “close friends” I mean the type of relationship so beautifully depicted between Denny Crane and James Spader’s Alan Shore on Boston Legal. I have had, and do have, many people I like and respect and admire, whom I truly enjoy being with, but these are not the kind of deep friendships in which you can unburden yourself to the other person when necessary. Friends need to share many experiences over a span of time, not one or two seasons or on a movie set. You don’t go on a trip and return saying, “I made a good friend.” Perhaps you got friendly and talked about mutual interests and ideas and found an enjoyable common ground. I use the word “acquaintance” to describe that relationship. I have had a dearth of those deeper relationships in my lifetime.
Live Long and . . . Page 12