That sounds a lot more confrontational than I remember. But without a doubt, there was some tension in the room. Perhaps even a lot of tension. The balance that we had reached in our friendship, which had worked so well, was being upset and then having to find some kind of new footing. I had some questions about the script, as most actors do, and a few suggestions. No one knew Captain Kirk better than I did, and, as Leonard always believed, I had an obligation to be kind to him. He certainly had been good to me. Leonard began the meeting by agreeing, “What’s good for you, Bill, is good for Star Trek. My intention is to make a damn good Star Trek movie, and to do that, I need you to come off well.” I probably didn’t realize at that moment, but he already was at work as the director, providing a comforting environment for his actor. We spent the next several hours going through the script page by page; Leonard and Harve listened respectfully and agreed to most of the changes I requested. This wasn’t that unusual for us; while making the first movie, we’d spent a lot of time together trying to improve that script. It was a good, long, productive discussion, and by the time we were done, I thought the script was much tighter and stronger.
The other members of the crew probably had the same trepidation I did. It wasn’t easy for Leonard to step out of the group and assume command, but he successfully found a way to deal with each of them. I also think they were watching warily to see how I reacted to taking orders from him. Early in the production, Leonard and I dealt with that. We were filming a very dramatic scene in which Kirk learned of his son’s death. Leonard and I started discussing it, and we had a somewhat different approach. Finally, as we were getting to shoot it, Leonard asked everyone else to leave the set. After they were gone, we looked at each other, and, without discussing it, we knew exactly what we were going to do. I slammed my fist down on the metal console, a sharp sound that everybody heard. “Damn it, Leonard!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “I don’t care what you think! That’s not the way Kirk would do it! I’m not going to do it your way!”
Director Nimoy stood his ground loudly. “The hell you’re not!” he yelled right back. “You’re just the actor, and you’re goddamn well going to do it the way I tell you! So go stand over there and shut up!”
“Oh yeah?” Bam! I smacked my hands together, the sound of flesh hitting flesh reverberated through the soundstage.
“Oh yeah!” Leonard raised his voice ever louder.
I was half expecting people to come running in to rip us apart, but neither one of us could hold it together any longer. One of us—I don’t remember if it was me or him—broke up, and the other one followed. Who knows if anyone even believed we actually were fighting—that line about “just the actor” probably gave it away—but they all got the point: we were the crew of the starship Enterprise, and we were going to have another good voyage.
Leonard handled what might have been a difficult situation very well. It helped, of course, that this was a group of talented, very professional actors. On the set, he was extremely diplomatic. After all our years together, he knew the temperament, the needs, and the size of the ego of each actor and was smart enough to understand what he could get from each of them and how far he could go to guide them. He was, as George Takei recalls, “extremely diplomatic. He worked in shorthand; his way of directing was ‘a little more of that’ or ‘a little less.’ If he thought we were going in the wrong direction, he would suggest, ‘Think of such and such.’”
He actually made a point of trying to find something special for each actor. His goal, I remember he said one day, “was to find a way of putting an actor in a position to use all of his tools.” One of the first days, we were shooting a scene in which Walter Koenig, our Russian navigator Ensign Chekov, found life signs in Spock’s living quarters, which had been sealed off. While I dismissed it brusquely, muttering something about the whole crew being obsessed with Spock, Chekov showed his readings to Scotty. His line was something like, “You see. I’m not crazy.” Just as they were about to shoot, Leonard told Walter, “I’d like you to deliver that line in Russian.” It was incredibly meaningful for Walter. His parents were Russian Jews who had emigrated from Lithuania. In the twenty years he had been playing a Russian, he’d never had a single line in that language. This was a tribute to his parents as well as his own heritage.
Steve Guttenberg remembers Leonard working very much the same way several years later when Leonard was directing him in Three Men and a Baby. “As a director, Leonard was always authentic, always sincere. He didn’t play games with the actors. He never lied; he never said anything that wasn’t true. He dealt with everybody as they needed to be dealt with, because everybody is different. And he was quite malleable, he listened, he discussed, and he let actors do their work.
“Once, I remember, we were getting ready to do a scene in which Tom Selleck and I were arguing with Ted Danson about his responsibility to keep the baby. Just before we started, Leonard passed me a folded piece of paper on which he’d written a note. ‘I want you to look at this every time you start the scene,’ he said. I opened it up, and it read, ‘I love you.’ I looked up at him and started to say something, but he put up his hand. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ he said. ‘Do the scene.’
“After we’d completed several takes, I asked him, ‘Leonard, what was that?’
“He said, ‘That is your subject.’ It was a hugely intelligent way to direct an actor. Reading that note just before I went into the scene filled me with great warmth. It made me feel special, and I took that feeling with me into the scene. Some directors are Machiavellian manipulators; he was a Mother Teresa manipulator.”
When we were working together, Leonard never gave me a lot of direction; but what he did do was put me in a position to do my best work. In a key scene in which Kirk was told his son had been killed by the Klingons, rather than suggesting a response, he told me to go with my instincts. That certainly was consistent with his belief that no one understood a character better than the actor who created it. “You have to decide how emotionally vulnerable Kirk is going to be that moment,” he said. “How much of the heroic veneer you want to strip away.” I didn’t know for certain how Kirk would react to that news. He positioned me near the captain’s chair, and as I stepped back, I simply collapsed. Leonard told me later that he thought I’d tripped. But he let me go. Then I struggled to my feet and said my line. After he cut, he came over to me and asked with concern, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “Think we can use that?”
The next day, he told me that Jeff Katzenberg had called him after looking at the rushes and said, “Leonard, I just saw that scene with Bill. Why have you been wasting your time acting all these years? You’re a director!” I’m not sure how much he appreciated his acting career being described as “wasting your time,” but I do know how much he liked that call.
There was one scene that I thought we never got quite right. It was a light, simple scene in which Kirk was sitting with a woman and trying to keep a secret, while she was trying to tease it out of him. It was a setup that had the potential to be very funny. But I just couldn’t get it. I’ve never seen it—I don’t watch my own performances—but I remember knowing I didn’t quite get what Leonard wanted. I didn’t have enough spontaneity. That was a time I could have used some additional guidance, but that wasn’t the way he worked. Or, perhaps, he was more satisfied with it than I was.
As a director, Leonard believed strongly that the most important element in the entire process was story, story, story. “It’s always the good story,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many ships you blow up, how many missiles you fire, how many fights or disasters or stunts you show. Is it a good story? Is it something you can take home with you and think about? Something that affects you or makes you feel you’re part of the human race.”
For art to resonate with an audience, he believed, it has to be accessible. And the best way to accomplish that is to begin by finding a personal connection to
the material. So when starting a project, he would pore over the script, searching for those elements that would allow the audience to become emotionally involved. If they weren’t there, he would try to find a way to make changes and include them.
When Leonard’s son, Adam, decided to give up his career as an attorney and set out to become a director, his father worked with him. “When I first started getting assignments, we would work together breaking down the script. He always emphasized the importance of the story over the technical aspects of filmmaking, which basically means moving the camera. ‘We’re just storytellers,’ he said. ‘We just happen to be telling these stories on film.’ While in his experience he’d found that most young directors are obsessed with the camera, ‘it’s always about the story. The object is to do it well, and the performances, the technical problems, will take care of themselves.’ We would go through it scene by scene, and I learned very quickly about figuring out the theme, the character arc, and most important, the meaning of the story, how to find my personal connection to that story.”
The commercial and critical success of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock marked the beginning of the next phase of Leonard’s career. Contractually, I was entitled to direct the next film, but my contractual obligation to T.J. Hooker made that impossible, so the studio hired Leonard to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In this script, we went back in time to San Francisco in the 1980s. While there had always been an undertone of humor in our scripts, we never really had gone for comedy. This was essentially a whale-out-of-time story—our mission was to capture two whales and bring them back to the future—and putting the ever-logical Spock in what was then the current time offered the irresistible potential for fun. At one point, for example, Kirk’s love interest asked Spock, “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”
After considering that, he asked, “Is there something wrong with the one I have?”
Leonard’s handling of the clever dialogue and humorous scenes led to producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, who had moved from Paramount to Disney, asking him to direct the American remake of a French comedy that was being called Three Men and a Baby. The woman who had directed the French film initially had been hired to do the American version. She wanted to do a line-for-line translation, which wouldn’t work for American audiences. The film was already in preproduction, and they needed a new director. Leonard stepped in and reworked the script. Just as with Star Trek, there were some actors who wondered if he was the right choice. Tom Selleck remembers thinking, “Well, there’s a good choice. You got a guy with no emotion who’s going to direct a comedy.” But Leonard’s professionalism and talent quickly won the respect of the cast. Years later, Selleck said, “Leonard was irreplaceable.”
That’s exactly right: Leonard was irreplaceable.
As far as I know, this film was the first time Leonard had directed a five-month-old. Actually, twin five-month-olds. There were some “creative differences.” There are some actors who can cry on cue; Leonard needed the baby to pee on cue. Obviously, that was going to be a problem, so they attached a tube to the baby that would produce the … the illusion. But when they filmed the scene, the device failed—but the baby worked. It was amazing; the baby peed on cue.
Thrilled by that, Leonard looked at the baby’s mother standing nearby and told her, “That’s what good actresses do!”
Three Men and a Baby was a huge hit, outperforming films like Fatal Attraction, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Good Morning, Vietnam to become the top-grossing film of the year with a total of $168 million. Star Trek IV had been the most successful film in the series, earning $109 million domestically and making Leonard one of the very few directors in the business at that time to have made two films that grossed more than $100 million.
Leonard never changed. While I’m certain the starving actor part of his personality was thrilled at the commercial success of those films, this is a business that judges talent by those numbers, and I’m certain that he was happy that other people finally were recognizing his artistic talents. Content isn’t the word; I’m not sure that Leonard ever was content with his career. He never stopped reaching, but I know he took great satisfaction in that recognition.
Obviously, a lot of people were surprised that Leonard Nimoy had directed this sweet comedy that had earned a small fortune for the studio. But some things really never change. When people learned about it, there was an almost universal response: I didn’t know Spock had become a director!
ELEVEN
While Leonard and I had been bound together by circumstance, by the time we were making the Star Trek movies, our professional relationship had become a close friendship. For a time, it had been the two of us—and to a lesser extent the rest of the cast, against the studio—and following that, it was simply two men of almost exactly the same age and background enjoying each other’s company. But it became something far more, something much deeper, when I fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Nerine Kidd.
Nerine was an alcoholic. More than anyone I knew, Leonard understood what that meant.
Something else Leonard and I shared beyond our careers was failed marriages. Of course, I beat him there; I had more than he did. He and Sandi had been married thirty-three years when he decided right around the time we were making Star Trek IV that the marriage had stopping working. There are always reasons when a relationship stops working—people change, the world changes, no one outside of it really knows what happens. “I don’t know why I had stayed in that marriage so long,” he once told me. “It was traditional, I guess. That’s what you did at that time. But it was not a happy ending.” Later he added, “It had to do with taking my own territory … I should not have been performing duties, fulfilling empty contracts for the sake of not making waves.”
But he’d met a wonderful woman, Susan Bay, had fallen in love, and, on New Year’s Day 1989, married her. She had come along at a good time in his life. Through the years, I got to know Susan quite well. She was a very beautiful, very capable woman. She organized things, whether it was a marriage, a party, or a career. She was a superb cook, a gracious hostess, a wonderful partner to him, and maybe most important, she made us laugh. Susan was his equal in everything, his intellect and his passions. She brought a great love to Leonard, the kind of love, loyalty, and support that every man dreams of finding one day.
It’s sometimes difficult for men to retain a close friendship when women enter their lives. There are women who become competitive and push friends away. But in this case it didn’t happen. Susan became my friend too, and I also adored her. We did not live far apart, and my second wife, Marcy, and I had many dinners at their home. Sometimes we ordered in, sometimes they cooked, but we would sit in the kitchen and eat. There was a lot of love attached to those dinners.
My own marriage lasted seventeen years, although it was over earlier. “Life took us apart,” she once told a reporter. “It was time to move on.” When my marriage to Marcy ended, Leonard and Susan continued to welcome me into their home and, at first, shared my happiness when I told them about this wonderful woman I’d met named Nerine. Like many alcoholics—like Leonard, in fact—she was practiced at hiding it well. At times, I would see she was drinking too much and worry about it, but there always was an excuse, and I was more than willing to accept it. I knew almost nothing about alcoholism. I’d played a drunk in several shows and TV movies, but I had absolutely no concept of what it meant to be an alcoholic. None at all.
One night, though, Nerine and I had been at a dinner party with Leonard and Susan, and she was, as Leonard described it when he called me the next day, “erratic in her behavior.” That was a nice way of describing it. While those times she drank too much were happening more frequently, I was in complete denial. I loved her. If she had a problem, I would fix it. True love is stronger than a few drinks. Right?
“Bill,” he continued, “you know she’s an alcoholic.”
“Yes,” I said, but I
didn’t, not in the sense that he meant. “But I love her.”
He was blunt. “Then you’re in for a rough ride.”
Leonard valued our friendship enough to be there when I needed him without trying to lecture me. In situations like that, it often is the messenger that suffers the consequences. I continued to deal with Nerine’s drinking, even as it got worse, convincing myself that she, that we, could find a way to change reality. Leonard had done it; he was quite open about his appreciation for AA. He helped as much as it was possible without intruding. He would sit with her and talk about it, just the two of them, two alcoholics discussing their addiction. He took her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sat by her side in what I know was a very difficult situation for her. Finally, against all the evidence, I decided that the way to cure Nerine was to marry her. Marriage would provide the security she needed; it would prove she was loved and didn’t need the crutch of alcohol.
Yeah, I did believe that.
Leonard continued to be supportive. Although we had grown close through the years, the intimacy of sharing this problem brought us even closer. Both of us knew how to walk that tightrope between our personal lives and our careers, knowing how strongly each of them might impact the other. Leonard was among the few people outside my children that I could really trust with this truth. And he respected that in every way. We would talk too, and while he never tried to talk me out of the relationship, he wanted me to see clearly what I was getting into by marrying her. I appreciated his efforts—that’s what friends do when they think someone they care about it making a terrible mistake—but I paid little attention to him. Instead, I asked him to be my best man at our wedding. While certainly he must have known how little chance there was that this would work out, he agreed. Nerine and I set a date and planned to start our life together.
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