Leonard

by William Shatner

  After we’d shot our first thirteen episodes, writer/producer Gene Coon became the producer while Roddenberry was elevated to executive producer. His main function seemed to be figuring out how to squeeze every penny out of this show before it ran dry. He sold everything imaginable. Cinematographers shoot what is known as a light strip before each scene to check the lighting. It’s usually ten or so frames, only enough frames to make sure the set is properly lit. These frames usually get thrown away. Roddenberry sold each one of them.

  Most shows produce some kind of gag reel; it’s just a few minutes of actual bloopers combined with jokes we set up. It is made for the entertainment of the cast and crew. There often are a lot of inside jokes. We did one, for example, that began with Spock shooting an arrow—followed by a scene is which Kirk is being rushed into a cave with an arrow sticking high out of his crotch. It was a joke with many levels of meaning, and it was not intended for the public to see it. Roddenberry spliced together highlights from these reels and sold them. I first heard about it when someone told me a friend of his had seen it in a bar.

  It took some time, but Leonard and I began to understand that we had far more power working together than working individually. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, but at just about the same time as Kirk and Spock were gaining popularity, two of the greatest pitchers in baseball, future Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, had changed tradition by negotiating their annual contracts with the Dodgers together. The story was in the headlines of the papers for several weeks. Their holdout forced the Dodgers to give each of them a larger raise than they would have received individually. I don’t remember if that originally influenced Leonard and me or not, but we made the decision to negotiate together. We didn’t make any kind of agreement beyond the fact that we’d talk to each other whenever there was a problem or an opportunity. At times, we brought that power to bear on script changes, on contractual clauses, and certainly where money was concerned. And later, as Star Trek grew into a multibillion-dollar franchise, our power to affect that was enormous. We also were offered many other commercial opportunities to exploit our roles, in addition to appearances at the conventions, which forced us into a continuing relationship. It took a couple of years, but the more time we spent together, the more we began to discover how much we liked being with each other. Unlike any other show or movie on which I’ve worked, where the end of the shoot invariably marked the end of many friendships, the end of the series after three seasons was just the beginning of a friendship that was to last a lifetime.

  Leonard was not an easy person to get close to; he seemed comfortable keeping a respectful distance between himself and the rest of the cast. As I later learned, it was a lot more than sustaining the alienation of Spock that kept him apart from the rest of the cast. While we were filming the show, Leonard was keeping a secret; at that time, he was a functioning alcoholic.

  I only knew about this later, when Leonard was comfortable enough to talk about it publicly. Like so many other things in his life, this was an important lesson he had learned, and he wanted to share it. He wanted to save people the pain that he had endured. Unfortunately for me, when I needed to listen to him most, I refused to accept his advice.

  He had started drinking regularly sometime during our second or third season, he told me on film while we were filming our documentary, Mind Meld. “Until then,” he said, “no problem. I’d have a glass of wine or a drink after work, maybe two, it was no problem. But the ritual became so important to me, so ingrained, because I looked forward to that release at the end of the pressure of the day.

  “My secretary was in the habit of bringing me a drink in a paper cup. The minute we finished the last shot, I would drink. And then it became a series of drinks. Little by little, before I knew it, I was drinking more and more because my addictive personality was taking over. As many alcoholics can do, I hid it at work. I never allowed it to affect my work. As long as I never drank while I was working, I had this illusion of control. I lied to myself a lot: I don’t work drunk; I don’t drink at all in connection to my work. I can wait.”

  I never saw it. I never saw Leonard drunk. I never saw him miss a moment of work or be less than completely professional. The fact is that I had no understanding of alcoholism. I thought everybody was like me—when there was something I needed to do, I did it. Leonard and I both smoked heavily when we were making the original series, for example. I smoked so much that when I kissed any of my three little girls, they would scrunch up their faces and tell me, “Daddy, you smell.” I didn’t like my kids turning away from me because I reeked of smoke, so I became determined to give it up.

  It wasn’t easy. I quit cold turkey; I just put down the pack of cigarettes and never picked it up again. I went through some tough times fighting it. Leonard liked to remind me of the day I walked off the set as we finished shooting a scene and kept walking through the soundstage and out the door, finally stopping and shouting in desperation, “I want a cigarette!” Somehow I managed to break that habit. Leonard smoked too, and he knew I was fighting my demon as he was fighting his. The difference between us was something psychologists understand; I do not have an addictive personality. It’s possible Leonard did. For a long time, I believed it was a matter of will; if you wanted to do it, you could. I was wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.

  Leonard tried to stop both smoking and drinking at about the same time, an almost impossible task. “I thought maybe I could smoke a little bit,” he told me when we discussed this. “But I can’t do that. If I smoked a little, I ended up smoking a lot. If I drank a little, I ended up drinking a lot. And within a matter of a year or two, I developed a major problem with alcohol. It reached the point where I could no longer control how much I was drinking.

  “I would make myself promises I couldn’t keep. That’s how I started losing my self-respect. I’d be drinking midday on a Saturday or Sunday and then passing out. I’d go to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon and sleep through the next day, missing a party in my own home. People would come in, and I’d be out. I would promise myself, this weekend that’s not going to happen. This weekend I’m not going to have more than a beer or two on Saturday and not before two o’clock. By 11:00, I’d have a beer, by 3:00 or 4:00, I’d pass out again. Eventually, I realized I had become an alcoholic.”

  There is no single, logical explanation for why some people become alcoholics. I’m sure there are complex emotional and physical reasons. I’ve had to deal with it in my own life; against Leonard’s advice, I married an alcoholic. Although both Leonard and I tried desperately to help her, we could never reach the source of her pain. The situation never got better, and she died in a terrible accident, drowning in our pool after drinking heavily. So yes, I do know about alcoholics; I know how they become experts at fooling the people around them, I know the pain they inflict on other people, and I know that they can’t help it. Who knows why Leonard began drinking? We never got to the why.

  But I suspect one contributing factor was that the reality of success disappointed him greatly. As he said, “I had this fantasy that with Star Trek I had found a home as an actor. Suddenly I had a parking space with a permanent sign, a dressing room with my name painted on it that was going to be there for a few months at least. That was extraordinary for me. I thought I’d found a family. The writers and producers were the father figures, and the actors and actresses were my brothers and sisters. I looked forward to coming to work with my creative, artistic family every day. And then I began to discover that the studio was not necessarily my friend, or my parent, that they were contract people.

  “Rather than supporting me, they were asking, ‘How much are we paying him? If he asks for more, tell him we’ll get somebody else to wear the ears. He wants a phone in his dressing room? Is it in his contract? No phone, no. He wants to get off on Friday—no, he has to work until 6:15.’ There was no give, no viewing in a familial way. It made me very confused and very angry. It caused me to go
into therapy.”

  In most professions, people get to release much of the tension from their jobs when they get home. Filming a TV series is so all life-consuming that after-hours outlets often don’t exist. In fact, sometimes the tensions caused by the work serve to magnify existing problems at home. There is no place to turn for relief. When you’re filming, there is no time for anything else, including your family. My family life suffered tremendously when we were making Star Trek, and it certainly contributed to my divorce. For Leonard, the series seemed like a life preserver. “I’d caught a wave, and I didn’t know how long it would last,” he told me. “I was obsessed by getting the most out of it I possibly could. Any opportunity I had to grab, I had to suck away protection money, security for the future in case I had to go back to what I was before.” The result was that his marriage suffered, and his relationship with his children was strained. As he once described it, “I minored in family and majored in career.”

  As his son, Adam, explained it, “He was so involved with his career that he was not connected to family issues. At the beginning, we loved Spock. When I watched him on stage before they even aired the show, looking at photographs he brought home of himself in his wardrobe, the whole family was into it. At the beginning, we loved the whole ride. But then things changed. It was difficult to get his attention. There was a lot of conflict. Eventually, I started to think, you know, enough of Spock. I mean, we’ve seen enough of Spock. Everybody loves Spock, but I wish Spock was more of a family guy.”

  Leonard’s wife, Sandi, was a force of her own. She was a participant in life, an activist in the cultural shifts of the 1960s. She apparently decorated their home in the big and bright images of the counterculture movement, wore the groovy clothes, and loved rock and roll. She and Leonard both participated in the movements of the time; they were involved in the antiwar demonstrations, strongly supported peace candidates like Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and even participated in “love-ins,” where young people expressed—sometimes really expressed—their sexual freedom. About that, he once recalled, “It wasn’t quite group sex—but there was a lot of embracing.”

  Leonard’s commitment to work inevitably forced Sandi to become more and more independent. Like so many working actors, he missed a lot of his children’s childhoods; Sandi became their role model, providing the unconditional parental love that they could not get from their father. I suspect that tore Leonard apart; he was finally able to provide some security for his family, but the cost was that he could not be with them.

  How much this contributed to his drinking I have no idea. But I am certain it didn’t help. The surprising thing to me is that at the time, I had no idea that this nice man, who put on the ears and went to work prepared every day, was fighting these monsters. We had not yet become close friends. I don’t remember ever going to his house. And he was able to control his drinking enough that it never interfered with his work. Spock didn’t drink, ever. Leonard was proud of that. Even on his worst days, Leonard took pride in his professionalism.

  Of course later, when it impacted my own life and he was there to help me, I began to understand the extraordinary lengths alcoholics go to in an effort to disguise their behavior.

  When the show ended, the entire cast made all the usual promises of long-lasting friendship, but with a few exceptions, we saw little of each other. This was during the time that our seventy-nine regular episodes went into syndication and over several years found a much larger audience. The syndication market was just beginning to become an important revenue source for television producers, and to recoup its investment, Paramount happily sold Star Trek inexpensively to any local station that would buy it. The local stations ran it and reran it then ran it again, often during the day and early evening when young people were home. The ratings for what had been perceived to be a mildly successful show at best were surprisingly strong, causing other local stations to buy the show. It was the most popular hour-long show in syndication for many, many years. The audience continued to grow. I had little hints of this, as more people recognized me after the show had gone off the network than while it was running. That’s odd, I thought at the time. But a new and incredibly loyal audience had found the Enterprise. Then in March 1969, a large group of Star Trek fans gathered in the public library in Newark, New Jersey, to show slides, listen to lectures, participate in panel discussions, and sing songs inspired by the show. This first, unofficial convention of Trekkies led to others. Trekkies? What an odd term. There were no Gunsmokers, Bonanzites, or Flintstoners—what in this world was a Trekkie? The first official convention was held in January 1972 at the Statler-Hilton in New York. These conventions brought members of the cast together regularly and marked the real beginning of my friendship with Leonard Nimoy.

  After the show ended, our careers had gone in different directions. I continued making guest appearances on many of the popular series and made several TV movies, while Leonard simply moved to the next soundstage and joined the Mission: Impossible cast as the character Paris, a master of disguise, while touring the country starring in the one-man show he had written, Vincent. But throughout it all, Leonard had continued drinking—and hiding it successfully. As he admitted during an interview, “When I was performing in a play my first drink would be when the curtain came down. But that drink had to be there. When I walked into my dressing room I wanted an ice-cold gin on the rocks waiting for me. When I directed the movie Star Trek III my secretary knew that as soon as I said, ‘Cut. That’s a wrap,’ I wanted a drink. And then I would drink constantly. Once I had that first drink I would not stop drinking until I passed out or fell asleep.”

  The fact that Leonard was continually able to function at an extremely high professional level, as well as bring his creative visions to fruition, is remarkable. I can only wonder how much more he might have accomplished if he had been sober through those years. Perhaps because there was no Internet, he also was able to keep it completely out of the media. Most of our fans would have been shocked to know that the restrained, occasionally acerbic, often wry beloved creator of Spock could be an unhappy, angry man. As he admitted, “When I was in need of a drink and it wasn’t there I could get very upset. I did a lot of college lectures, many of them in small towns. When I checked into the hotel in the afternoon one of the first things I asked was how late their bar was open. That way I knew what time I had to finish and get back there. Every once in a while I’d come back to the hotel and the bar would be locked. I wanted my drink. I’d go to the front desk and say, ‘You told me the bar would be open until ten o’clock. Open the fucking bar!’ When going out I would choose restaurants that I knew had a full bar. I loved going to the theater in London because they allowed you to drink before the show and during intermission.”

  Leonard continued drinking as the phenomenon of Star Trek evolved into other television series and feature films, and Spock and Kirk became iconic American characters. “It went on for many years,” Leonard admitted. “And the entire time I believed I was in control. But eventually I started waking up in the morning thinking, why do I want to live today? And that’s when I first became concerned.”

  He and Sandi finally divorced in 1986. It was neither easy nor amicable. Her anger and perhaps her bitterness were evident when she told a reporter, “He left me after thirty-three years of marriage. I didn’t marry a star. I married a struggling young actor right out of college. I spent the first fifteen years being the only one who believed in him and struggling with him. I believe I had a lot to do with where he is now.” Even at those worst moments in his personal life, his career intruded; during one hearing, the judge actually brought a photograph of himself with Leonard into the courtroom and asked for an autograph.

  Whatever the reasons for the divorce, the guilt Leonard was carrying must have been enormous. It was extremely difficult for him to tell his elderly parents about it, as they came from a time and a place in which divorce was shameful. Good people did not get divorced.
We were in preparation for a movie when he finally decided it was time to leave. One morning he packed some clothes, put them in his car, and drove away from that part of his life.

  Leonard was getting up the courage to tell his parents when he was informed his photograph was going to be on the cover of Newsweek that week. He remembered thinking, “Maybe I can bring that magazine with me, so I can tell my parents that my marriage is over, but soften the blow by showing them the magazine. Look, isn’t this nice, my picture’s on the cover of this important magazine.” He started driving around the city, stopping at magazine stands and stores, trying to find a copy of Newsweek. He was told over and over that it would arrive later that afternoon. He decided he couldn’t wait; if his divorce became public before he’d told his parents, they would have been mortified.

  He arrived at their apartment empty-handed. He screwed up all his courage and announced, “I’ve left my home.”

  His mother smiled. “Oh? You’re selling the house?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve left Sandi. I’ve taken some clothes and moved out.”

  His father finally decided, somehow, “This is all my fault.”

  His mother said sadly, “Oh. Oh.”

  It was a terrible blow to them, an admission of great failure. There was nothing Leonard could do to lessen their pain. But he had no choice. I know that feeling so well. He accepted the reality that he couldn’t live his life for them; he had to live it for himself. Of course, the alcohol probably made it easier.

  Not long afterward, he met an extraordinary woman named Susan Bay, whose cousin Michael Bay was the director of huge films. Susan was also divorced; she had previously been married to the actor John Schuck. From the very beginning, they seemed perfect for each other and would come to refer to themselves as each other’s “natural husband” and “natural wife.” Another cousin of Susan’s, Rabbi John Rosove, once said, “She brought him out of darkness. They just opened each other’s hearts and were really there for each other.”