I don’t know why, although I suspect, I learned as a Jewish boy in Christian Montreal that it was emotionally safer to keep some distance between myself and other people. Have I missed something by not having that level of friendship? I think perhaps so. I remember watching wistfully as the two brothers on our motorcycle trip separated; one of them had to go back to work. They told me they really loved each other, although there were times they didn’t like each other. But their bonds were so strong that when one of them left they embraced and cried. I had never had a relationship quite like that.
I had to accept the reality that the most meaningful friendship I had ever had was over. If I were to live my life again I would be far more approachable; I would be more open. I know I put up walls to keep people from getting too close emotionally; I didn’t approach people and obviously did not give off the scent that they should approach me. I could have changed that, but I don’t think I was fully aware of it. Because of that I have had very few deep and meaningful relationships beyond my family. Looking back on that, I think it is probable I’ve missed an extra sweetener of life. I should have been more open, but truthfully I didn’t know how to be.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I have always been able to form deep relationships with my dogs and horses. Anyone who doubts that the feelings you invest in animals and the rewards you receive in return are not as meaningful as those we give and receive from people must never have had a pet. And just as with a person, relationships have to be made. Every relationship I have had with an animal has been different. I have become much closer with some animals than others. Here’s what I learned about relationships from my animals: Forming any relationship begins with communication. I believe any attempt to communicate with another living being is an act of love. You wish to discover. You wish to learn more about them. You wish to impart to that entity your own availability. The end result is, no matter how adept you become at your mutual language, by striving to communicate you have formed the basis of a relationship. The more successful you are in establishing any form of communication the deeper the relationship will be. When my first marriage was ending and I was living in the back of my van, my only companion was my dog. I came to depend on his presence much the same way, I suppose, he depended on me for sustenance. Without that animal my loneliness would have been unbearable.
I learned different ways to communicate through my animals. I go through life now looking for nonverbal ways to communicate with my grandchildren and my animals. I find that my dogs and horses understand when I’m talking to them, even if they have no idea what my words mean. We are communicating in a different language. That language can be physical; a simple touch can convey extraordinary meaning. Sometimes, for example, I will put my forehead against my dog’s forehead and we’ll stay that way for a time. Maybe I’m transferring thoughts; I don’t know. But on some level we are making a connection. The same thing is true with my horses. There are places on a horse that when touched send a message: Move away. Come close. I love you. You’re my friend.
I did not have any pets as a child; my memory is that my mother believed they made the house too dirty. But as soon as I was on my own and in a position to take care of an animal I did so. One of the most painful moments during my first marriage came over a dog. Our marriage was already shaky when she told me, “I can’t take the clicking of the dog’s nails on the linoleum floor.” It became such an issue that I had to get rid of my dog. It was incredibly difficult. I gave him to a loving veterinarian. I would visit the dog every so often, and I sobbed each time I left. That was the last dog I ever gave up.
Any doubt I had about the ability of a person and an animal to form a relationship ended for me one rainy night in New York City. I was walking my Doberman—long ago I fell in love with that breed, so all my dogs have been Dobermans—one rainy night in New York City. I made the mistake of taking him off the leash briefly to allow him to do his business. For some reason he got spooked and ran between two parked cars. A cab almost hit him, but the driver slammed on the brakes and barely touched him. The dog panicked, he ran back to the building, and, when he couldn’t get inside, took off down Lexington Avenue. I ran after him but couldn’t keep up. I got into a cab and we went hunting for him. I was desperate. All I could think about was this frightened animal alone in New York. And it was my fault.
We couldn’t find the dog. We went from 73rd Street to about 50th Street. I got out of the cab to continue my search on foot. As I walked along shouting his name I noticed a bar directly across the street, but you had to walk down steps to go inside. I went down those stairs; don’t ask me why. I looked around the bar and obviously my dog was not there. But I asked the bartender if he had seen a big dog. I was stunned when he nodded and told me, “A dog just ran in here and is cowering in the back room.” There he was. My dog, shivering from fear. There was no reason for me to have gone into that bar—or perhaps there was.
I learned so much about relationships from my animals, my horses as well as my dogs. Training an animal is far more simplistic than raising a child—but there are similarities. Stop! I am not in any way comparing children and animals, but your actions can shape both, just as my parents molded me. In both instances the application of love will make the difference. With that come trust and responsibility and pride and almost an endless array of emotions. But the end result will be a relationship from which you can draw great pleasure.
My children’s mother and I divorced when they were still young. I became a weekend father. It occurred to me then that in some ways I was repeating the behavior I had learned from my own father. I was the provider, going out to fight the dragon and bringing home food for them, but I was emotionally distant. I was so tired from working to support them that I had little time to be with them. I tried to change that; I tried to take them somewhere every weekend, whether it was riding ponies or on a trip, whatever I could do to amuse and amaze them.
It must have worked to some degree, because they learned to take me for granted. I’m not sure that I accepted it at the time, but that was a very good thing. They knew I was going to be there for them, even if I wasn’t living at home with them. What made it difficult for me was that I had all of this wisdom I wanted to share with them; I had knowledge and experiences that I wanted to impart to them; they were far more interested in playing with their friends. I had to learn how to hold myself back; I wanted to say to them, “Listen to me. I’ve got something important to tell you,” but instead I learned how to parcel it out. You have to do it slowly, meal by meal, whether it is a banquet or fast food. You have to take advantage of every opportunity and not force it on anyone. While to me my experience may seem like the most important piece of advice anyone has ever given, to a young person it probably is less important than the last text from a friend about who’s hanging at the mall. I had to learn not to take myself, or my profound wisdom, too seriously.
As I have now become certain from both my own experience and those of so many other people, there is no magic formula for raising children beyond doing the best you can and making sure they know you love them. And don’t beat yourself up if it isn’t perfect. It isn’t going to be perfect. Just as every person is unique, so every relationship is unique. Whatever I did, whatever their mother did, it worked, and even with the tension between their mother and myself I have managed to maintain a loving relationship with my daughters.
Even better, having finally learned how to open myself, at least partially, to relationships, I have established loving relationships with my grandchildren. I am now convinced that the most wonderful thing a grandparent can do is hold his grandchild tightly, then hand the child back to his or her parents and tell them, “Here, it’s yours.” Then go to a movie.
Grandparents frequently have more time available to spend with their grandchildren than they did with their children. It’s just a reality of life. And with that time hopefully comes a depth of understanding from both parties. It’s never deep enough or often
enough for me, but I accept what I can get.
For someone who once couldn’t wait to get out of my house to escape into the world, I have come to do as much as I can to bring my family close together. In 2016, I had bracelets made for all fourteen members of my family. These bracelets have the Maori love signs and inside is written “Love is forever.” I wear mine all the time. I noticed one day that my granddaughter Natasha wasn’t wearing hers and I asked her where it was; she said, “It is the most precious thing that I have, so I put it away. I don’t want to lose it.”
“You have to wear it,” I told her. My family has become my buffer not only against the world but also against my own demons.
In the entire range of relationships, my experience has been that the most difficult of all is living with someone, whether you are married to that person or not. It is fascinating; that kind of close relationship is what living things most crave, someone to be with. I remember walking into my yard one day and seeing two snails out of their shells, shivering from passion as they entwined themselves. Snails. And yet actually sharing your life with someone is fraught with problems.
On occasion I have had young people ask for my advice about marriage; my advice is even more emphatic about that than most other things. My advice is pay no attention to my advice. But what I do know about it may well be the secret to any kind of successful relationship: To form a meaningful relationship with another person you really have to understand him or her—but even more importantly you have to understand yourself.
Understand yourself. Be honest with yourself. Why did I do that? What need was I trying to satisfy? What didn’t I understand or comprehend? That is among the hardest things any of us can do. We all have our guises that we present to the world, telling people, This is me. But most of the time it isn’t; it’s the person you want the world to believe you are. Getting naked in front of another person physically can be difficult; exposing your emotions is far more difficult. But for a marriage or that type of committed relationship to work it is an absolute necessity.
When I look back on my life I realize how protective of my emotions I tried to be. And how that made it difficult for me to have close relationships of any type. At my age I know, I absolutely know, I am a better actor than I have ever been in my life. I know I ride a horse as well as or better than I ever have. And I also know I am far more capable at eighty-seven years old of being part of good relationships than ever before.
Elizabeth, obviously, has contributed greatly to my understanding and acceptance of that. Perhaps I simply was ready for someone like her to come into my life, having been through so much drama in my earlier marriages, but both Elizabeth and I were able to accept each other for who we are, with all we brought to the marriage. The result has been a deeply satisfying relationship on all the important levels.
Oddly enough, it was David Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest people in the world, who once said quite accurately, “I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one’s life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.”
This was a lesson I have spent my entire life learning.
9. My Principal Beliefs
IN MY CAREER I have played several unusual philosophers: Captain James T. Kirk was continually confronted by the mechanisms of the endlessly fascinating universe gone awry, forcing him to put things right—without imposing Earth’s moral code on other civilizations; Police Sergeant T. J. Hooker had seen the dark side of mankind and harbored few illusions about appealing to man’s better angels; instead he took the world as it hit him in the face and responded to it bluntly and immediately; Denny Crane was continuously amazed to discover the world did not exist to satisfy his needs, although he did everything possible to correct that error.
I have found that it’s easy to have a philosophy of life when you have good writers. But figuring out for yourself the moral principles on which to live your life is a lot more difficult. The basics appear to be easy: Try to do good deeds. Try not to hurt other people. Be honest. Who could disagree with nice things like that? For me, life has always been a work in progress. It continues to surprise me that at my age things continue to surprise me. I like to believe that at this point I might be able to predict with certainty my own behavior in a situation, and while that is true in most instances I am not always right. It has been my experience that, depending on the situation, I may end up compromising on my most deeply held principles.
We all tend to believe the adage, often misattributed to Alexander Hamilton, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So we follow some often vague set of principles, a morality that we have picked up from those people who most influence us. Eventually we become invested in those beliefs, and feel they are the only moral ones, and have difficulty understanding why someone might believe the opposite of what we do.
The difficulty throughout my life, I’ve found, is that other people’s principles, needs, desires, and reality often conflict with my own beliefs. Sometimes it can’t be helped; I try very hard to go through life without hurting other people. But at times when I was working on a series I was handed a less than acceptable script. Being honest means hurting the writer, maybe even costing him the job. On Star Trek it meant fighting with the producer. Whatever decision I make means violating one of my principles. Like most people, I try to leave a lot more good in my wake than bad.
Like everyone else, I have not always been successful. There are people who have felt wounded by my actions. I think it might be close to impossible to make your way through the world for eighty-seven years without causing some anger and bitterness. There are times when my needs conflicted with the needs of other people. My first wife, for example, remained angry at me for slights real and imagined for decades. And, honestly, I have held on to my own anger. Several members of the Star Trek cast have never forgiven me for things I didn’t even know I had done. I understand and accept the fact that people can see the same actions and reach very different conclusions about their meaning. But I can’t remember a time when I set out to hurt someone, when my objective was to cause harm to someone. I can state without hesitation that I have always been true to my principles, whatever they were at the time.
One of the more interesting aspects of my profession is that for a brief time I have had the opportunity to test a great variety of different moral structures. Many actors believe playing a role requires you to become that character for a period of time. I don’t think I ever inhabited a character that completely, but when creating a life on film or onstage I did have to think through all the moral implications of that person. I had to make certain there was a moral consistency to make the character come to life; bad guys didn’t have to wear black hats.
It has not been quite as simple in my own life. Obviously, I have respected and followed the basic moral principles of our society. One of my grandchildren was caught stealing a minor item. It wasn’t its value that bothered us, rather the act of stealing. This is the basic right and wrong. Although her parents handled it, I happened to get involved. I told her, “Lying and stealing is going to destroy you.”
Essentially what I was saying to her is that this is what I believe, based on my own experiences: On the one hand, you may become Bernie Madoff and be the best thief we have seen; on the other hand, Bernie Madoff is in jail and perhaps wishes he were dead. Don’t lie; don’t cheat; don’t steal. Try to do good things, don’t hurt living beings; other than that, the rest is up to you.
One thing I know to be true about my life is that I am a very different person today than I have been at various times of my life. Those things that once seemed essential no longer are very important. Many of my beliefs have changed; even some of my principles have changed. Whether out of choice or necessity, I have embraced change, and my life has been the better for it.
It seems to me that many
of us fight an endless battle between ethics and principles. I have heard many people say that they live by their principles and those principles are unchangeable. There is right and there is wrong and they know the difference. They know who they are, what they believe, and these are the guiding stars of their life. They sometimes refer to it as honor; living by their principles is a matter of honor. I understand that. Before a show opens on Broadway there is extensive rehearsal. Every line, every moment, is practiced. Whether you hang your coat on the back of a chair or toss it on a couch is determined by the director, and whatever the direction, it can’t change every night. One slight change might throw the entire performance out of whack. In theory that show is going to be exactly the same every performance as it was on opening night. But the reality is quite different. Live theater is not a movie; in subtle ways every performance is different. If, for example, you put down a glass of water three inches to the right of where it is supposed to be, over time that three inches will become a foot. Tiny things change and accumulate and eventually the change becomes massive. Or you change slightly the inflection of a line and a question becomes a statement and suddenly the audience doesn’t understand the important information the playwright wanted them to have. Every actor on that stage has to be cognizant of every small change, so either you correct it or all your fellow actors are forced to adjust to it. I’ve found that life is like that.
On the one hand, if you “freeze your life” you have maintained your principles: “This is what I believe under all conditions.” On the other hand, you haven’t adjusted to all the changes taking place around you. This is where principles and compromise conflict.
At times all of us have heard people say, “These are my principles,” with an upraised index finger emphasizing their authoritarian demeanor. Classically we romanticize the person who sticks to his or her principles and refuses to compromise. Of course, as Sir Thomas More learned, the result of that might be that they cut off your head. Thomas More made his point, but so did Henry VIII, although the king made his a bit more emphatically.
Live Long and . . . Page 13