Leonard

by William Shatner

  Leonard campaigned for McGovern anywhere people would listen to him, from large rallies in arenas to talking to a few committed young people in a college dorm. As always, his message was one of compassion. He was supporting Senator McGovern, he told 350 people in Toledo, Ohio, because he had promised to end the war in Vietnam, and the millions of dollars that would be saved could be spent “to build homes and hospitals and finance ecology programs.”

  Leonard’s passionate support made absolutely no difference. Nixon won forty-nine of the fifty states in a landslide. In appreciation of Leonard’s support, however, McGovern read several of his poems into the Congressional Record.

  At a rally sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, he was introduced to Dr. Benjamin Spock, the legendary author of Baby and Child Care, whose involvement in the anti–Vietnam War movement had led to him being arrested several times for interfering with draft board activities. This was the only time the two most famous Spocks in the world ever met, and while the two men were never mistaken for each other, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock had on occasion been referred to as Dr. Spock. When the two men met, Leonard said, “How do you do? My name is Leonard Nimoy, and I play a character called Mr. Spock on television.”

  Dr. Spock looked at him, smiled, and replied, “I know. Have you been indicted yet?”

  Leonard’s active involvement in causes in which he believed never waned. We both knew the publicity value of Kirk and Spock appearing together, so we used it judiciously to benefit those organizations in which we truly believed. If I needed him to show up at one of my charity events, I’d make the call, knowing that he would do exactly the same thing. Except for scheduling conflicts, I don’t think either one of us ever turned down a request—but because we both knew we didn’t really have a choice, we limited the number of requests.

  Star Trek provided his fame, but the first substantial money he earned came from Mission: Impossible. Everybody knows the Mission: Impossible setup: To save the world or rescue an extremely important person or prevent a coup, the MI team has to create an unbelievably clever deception to make someone do something they don’t want to do, usually without them knowing they’re doing it: Paris poses as an amnesia victim to retrieve the stolen isotope that could make atomic weapons affordable to every country in the world; Paris plays a mystic who plans to abuse his powerful influence over a duchess to ascend to the throne; Paris impersonates an American mobster in order to infiltrate the Syndicate’s Mediterranean branch, obtain the list of their opium suppliers, and prevent the branch’s terminally ill boss from perpetuating his empire.

  Leonard was paid $7,500 a week, a substantial salary in 1969. In addition to that salary, for the first time he began earning residuals. With a hit show like that certain to run for a long time in syndication, that was like putting money in the bank. Mission: Impossible was a success when he joined the cast and continued to be successful after he left two years later. I think he joined the show for several different reasons; like all of us, I know he worried about being so typecast that he would find it difficult to get other roles. Maybe just as importantly, this role offered him the opportunity to join a strong cast that was not dependent on him. And the fact that in the role of ex-magician, master of disguises Andrew “the Great” Paris he would get to play a variety of different characters I’m sure appealed to his description of himself as a character actor.

  In his first episode, he got to put on a beret and a beard, smoke a big cigar, and play a Che Guevara–type character. That certainly was a departure from three seasons of life in space, as I don’t recall Spock wearing a beard or smoking a cigar—although undoubtedly he would have found the cigar “fascinating.” Initially, Leonard enjoyed doing the show; it allowed him more freedom to play than he’d had in a while. But that didn’t last long. After two years, he found himself doing it mostly for the salary. Unlike Spock, whose life story emerged slowly as the series continued, Paris just existed. He had no backstory. It didn’t matter where he came from, what issues he faced in his life, or how he would deal with them. For an actor in love with his craft, it was like playing a cardboard box. There was no sense of continuity in the role, no internal life, no emotional core from which everything could flow. All he had to do was show up, put on the disguise of the week, and convince the bad guys he was whoever he had become in that episode. And then he found himself playing the same shallow roles more than once. He was the Latin American dictator, he was the very old man, he was blind, he was Japanese, he was an old blind Japanese dictator. It was “throw on the makeup and read the lines.”

  After two seasons, he decided it was time to leave. His reason, he explained, was that he had reached “professional menopause.” It was time for an artistic change of life …

  “It was a great job. They treated me great, paid me a lot of money, and the hours were easy. But I’d done five steady years of television. I thought, that’s enough for a while. I made enough money to last me a long time. I’ll have good residuals coming in for several years, and I might as well go out and act in other areas now …

  “If I could get a play somewhere, I should go out and do it and just start getting back to being an actor again.”

  Fame changes people. It does—it can’t be helped. I’ve seen it so many times in my career. I’ve seen people use it as a ladder to better roles; I’ve seen careers destroyed by it. I don’t think people really can predict how they will react if they catch that particular gold ring. Leonard never loved being famous, although he enjoyed the accoutrements that came with success. At times, as we all do, he found the constant attention overwhelming; he never liked the fact that he simply couldn’t sit in a restaurant with his family or some friends without being interrupted. Generally, he was good about it, though; he gave autographs and posed for pictures, but he was wary of the stalkers, the people who found out when his plane was arriving at an airport and followed him.

  I think what kept Leonard from ever fully embracing his fame was the fact that he considered himself a working actor and considered that about the best thing in the world anybody could be. He’d set out to make a living at it, never expecting to become a star. But even after he did, his passion for the profession of acting never diminished. He loved talking about it, thinking about it, teaching it, and doing it. He loved taking this unformed lump of written lines and converting it into a vehicle capable of evoking great emotion. I just think he was always curious to see the result of the creative process. He explained the process this way: “My job is to be part of the magical illusion created equally by the play, the players, and the audience. When all those elements meet in the right way, the truth takes place between us and within us, and it’s an experience like no other I know.”

  Nowhere is an actor more alive than on stage, when he or she is receiving an immediate and direct response from the audience. Making movies or TV shows is a different process; it’s working in pieces and most often not in any kind of order. There are times when it makes sense to film the dramatic conclusion at the very beginning. But the theater … it’s different.

  After leaving M:I, Leonard became a gypsy actor, touring the country in several different plays. His name always packed the theater, and he played roles as varied as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof to the controversial businessman Goldman in The Man in the Glass Booth. Tevye the singing milkman in Fiddler hardly is the first role you’d associate with Leonard—but it was a part he really wanted to play. While people had become accustomed to seeing large, bold, loud men like Zero Mostel in the role of the milkman whose family is forced to leave their ancestral village, it actually fit Leonard well. He easily related his own family background to Tevye; this story was his heritage, and he embraced it. The strength in his performance was his ability to channel his own experience into Tevye’s, and what his singing voice may have lacked in quality was infused with his passion and understanding. I tell a joke during a one-man show I do about a record company named Golden Throat who took every actor who
thought he or she could sing and put all those songs into an album entitled Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off. In addition to Leonard and me, some of the other performers included Andy Griffith, Jim Nabors, Mae West, and Jack Webb. While to many people Mae West’s version of “Twist and Shout” is a highlight, the only two performers with more than one cut on the record were Leonard and I. Leonard performed “If I Had a Hammer” and “Proud Mary” while I did my rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” In fact, Leonard actually could carry a tune while I could carry the guitar case.

  At one point, he did Fiddler at the Wilbur Theater in downtown Boston, which finally allowed his parents to see him on stage. He used to laugh about the fact that his mother and father never quite understood Star Trek and certainly didn’t understand Spock—but at least he was working. And he was kind enough not to remind his father that he had never taken an accordion lesson. His parents knew something special was going on; apparently, young kids would come into his father’s barbershop and ask for a haircut like Spock’s. What his parents did understand was that he had married a nice Jewish girl and was earning a living at the acting. But Tevye? Tevye they understood.

  It was an odd juxtaposition indeed moving from Fiddler to Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth. This was a highly controversial, provocative drama dealing with Jewish guilt. Oy. There’s a difficult subject. Based very loosely on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, it’s the story of a concentration camp survivor who becomes a very successful New York businessman and then somehow convinces the Israelis to put him on trial as a war criminal. At the conclusion of the trial, he locks himself into the glass booth meant to protect him in the courtroom and has a long monologue about the meaning of Hitler to the Germans. It’s an extraordinarily chilling moment of theater, “People of Israel,” he begins. “People of Israel. If he had chosen you … if he had chosen you … you also would have followed where he led.” When the play was done on Broadway starring Donald Pleasence, at its conclusion each night, some people in the audience literally would throw things at the stage.

  Leonard did it first at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego soon after finishing shooting M:I. His pay was $300 a week, which was not sufficient to cover his expenses. But as he said, “What made it worthwhile was that this was a case of knowing what I was doing and why I was doing it.” While the theater sold out and Leonard received a standing ovation every night, there were some people in the San Diego Jewish community who believed the play was anti-Semitic. Leonard actually organized a seminar at a local temple to discuss the play, and I absolutely know Leonard must have been in heaven about that. This was the kind of response to theater, to acting, that made him love this world.

  One of the complaints that came up during the meeting was that the portrayal of the central character as a Jew who had succeeded through real estate and financial manipulation was based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Leonard described the exchange of ideas at that meeting as “lively.” I can just imagine what went on, but I know for certain he was in the middle of it, sparking ideas, questions, and challenges.

  It actually is somewhat unusual for the theater to break the fourth wall and respond to the action on the stage. It happened to Leonard on another occasion, when he was playing the title role, another immortal character, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s national tour of Sherlock Holmes. He actually was physically perfect for the role, angular and lean, somewhat darkish in nature, equipped with inquisitive eyes and a somber voice. Years earlier, Roddenberry had briefly pursued a couple of Holmes projects for him, but it never developed. An afternoon matinee in Detroit’s Fisher Theatre was filled with Trekkies who had come to see the sleuth at work. Laugh-In’s Alan Sues played Holmes’s mortal enemy, the evil Moriarty. In the somewhat stirring conclusion, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Leonard’s Holmes makes a brilliant deduction and arrests Moriarty. As he is being dragged offstage to the hoosegow, Moriarty turned and screamed his warning at Holmes, “Wherever you go, I will be there, and when I fall, you’ll fall with me!”

  At that, a woman sitting near the front stood up and—to great cheers—responded, “Oh no you won’t! Because you’re a crook, and you’ll make a mistake!”

  Leonard’s performance in Fiddler led him to be cast in several other touring musicals; he played Fagin in Oliver, King Arthur in Camelot, and even Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Both Leonard and I always had an initial hurdle to overcome when we did live theater: a sizeable number of people in the audience had come to see Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in the flesh. They had to lay aside all their preconceptions to accept either of us in a different role. We knew we had been successful when people walked out of the theater admitting that for a few minutes, at least, they forgot it was really Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock up there. And that was a great victory.

  One of those people who was convinced Leonard could shed his ears was the great movie director Otto Preminger, who saw him as King Arthur and cast him into the Broadway play he was producing in 1973 entitled Full Circle. This was Leonard’s debut on Broadway, a dream come true. It was based on a film cowritten by pacifist Erich Maria Remarque, who was famous for the World War I saga All Quiet on the Western Front, entitled The Last Ten Days, and it was adapted for the American stage by Peter Stone. It was essentially an antiwar play, which obviously was perfect for Leonard. It was a one act costarring Swedish actress Bibi Andersson and took place in a small room in Berlin at the end of World War II. Leonard played an escaped political prisoner who, while disguised as a Nazi, is captured by the Russians.

  Working with the famous, pompous Preminger was not an especially good experience. As a director, Leonard was very sympathetic to actors; Preminger was not. Leonard once said that Preminger’s entire directing technique consisted of yelling at the actors in his thick German accent, “Ze lines! You must learn ze lines!”

  After rehearsal one night, Leonard stopped into a bar to relax. The Spock mystique was at full attraction, and a woman began a conversation, which ended very quickly when she invited him back to her apartment. It just wasn’t something he wanted to do. But rather than hurting her feelings, he told her truthfully that he had to go back to his hotel room and learn his lines. The next few days’ rehearsals apparently did not go well, and Preminger started screaming. Leonard always was prepared; he always knew his lines. And he stood up to Preminger and told him the whole story. Preminger considered that, then decided, “For ze lines you learned, you shudda screwed her!”

  Full Circle ran twenty-eight performances and closed. The range of plays in which Leonard starred covered pretty much the whole spectrum of American theater, from serious dramas like The Man in the Glass Booth and Full Circle to many of the great exuberant musicals to light comedies like 6 Rms Riv Vu opposite Sandy Dennis and even the heartbreaking comedy One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the play that was most meaningful to him undoubtedly was the one he wrote, Vincent, the story of Van Gogh as told mostly through letters he had written to his beloved brother Theo.

  Nobody ever claimed Leonard chose to do the easy thing. For a time after Star Trek, he supplemented his income visiting college campuses to talk about the show. He was a big hit with students, and the money was good. After only a few years, though, he said, “I felt repetitive and, as is my nature, I began searching for a new challenge.” His plan was to develop a one-person show that he could tour with that both satisfied his curiosity and allowed him to continue acting. After being part of an ensemble like the crew of the starship Enterprise, he wanted to find a vehicle that would allow him to be on stage, alone. And, of course, one that continued to pay well.

  After speaking at a college in upstate New York, he accepted a dinner invitation from members of the faculty. During the discussion that night, he asked about other lecturers they’d had. Earlier that year, he learned, an actor had performed a one-man show called Van Gogh written by Phillip Stevens. It was the story of Vincent van Gogh as told by his
brother Theo, who loved and supported him emotionally and financially.

  It’s not difficult to figure out what attracted Leonard to this story. As he once told an interviewer while promoting it, “Vincent struggled for twenty years to find himself. And then he found his art.” In essence, it was a story of unbridled artistic passion. “I have a tremendous identification with Vincent,” he admitted before another performance. “Like him, I really believe I have something to offer, and that I really want to give it.”

  Leonard bought the rights to the play from Stevens and began slowly rewriting it. During his research, he discovered a letter Theo had written to his infirm mother after Vincent’s death, describing his funeral. Vincent and Theo had written more than five hundred letters over a ten-year period, and these letters told a wonderful story, describing in detail Vincent’s struggles to create and his small victories. Leonard understood that through these letters it was possible to tell a story of artistic creation that anyone with their own passion might understand and relate to. “If a poet touches your soul,” read one of the letters, “he gives you a sense of universal connection with the rest of the universe.