Leonard

by William Shatner

  And shortly before that day, she was arrested for drunk driving—with my daughter in the car. The wedding was canceled, then it was just postponed, then we set a date six months in the future. And once again, several weeks before that day, she was arrested again for driving drunk. When I told her I couldn’t marry her as long as she was drinking, her response was, “Don’t do this to me, Bill.”

  Don’t do this to me, Bill. And I accepted that guilt. I spent years asking myself why. The answer, of course, is that there is no good answer. We each stumble through life doing the best we can. I loved Nerine. I was as addicted to her as Leonard once was to alcohol and cigarettes, and as she too was addicted to alcohol. But he was my friend, so when I married Nerine in Pasadena, he stood tall for me, dressed impeccably as always in a tuxedo, as my best man.

  When it fell apart, as Leonard undoubtedly knew it would, he was there to support me. Nerine’s drinking escalated. I tried everything; I tried rehab, I tried threatening a divorce, I tried to love her more intensely; but the monster had her in its grip and would not let go. I came home one night and found her lifeless body in the deep end of the swimming pool.

  At times of tragedy, people instinctively turn to family and friends for support. And I got it. I got it from my children and from the people around me, especially Leonard. He enveloped me in his arms as his brother, and we cried together. He was always there, kind and loving and available. He tried to help me answer those questions that plagued me: What could I have done differently? How could I have changed the outcome? Why couldn’t I save her?

  The answer I got from Leonard was that there was no easy answer; as much as I wanted things to be different, there was little I could have done about it. There is only one person who can reach an addict, he told me over and over, and that is that addict. Until, and unless, the addict reaches the point, as Leonard did, that he or she wants to take control of his or her life, there is little anybody else can do.

  Friendships are not made at times like that, but they are tested. More than ever before, I had looked to Leonard. We had already been through so many wonderful experiences together, and now we had been through a true tragedy.

  Unfortunately, this was not unique for him. He had been dealing with a similar situation in his own family, a situation that fortunately reached a much better conclusion. As his son, Adam, has admitted and written about in his own compelling memoir, My Incredibly Wonderful Miserable Life, for thirty years he was addicted to alcohol and marijuana. His addiction was so strong it cost him his marriage and, for many years, his relationship with his father. It’s impossible to write about Leonard without this being part of the story.

  I can’t imagine how difficult it is being the child of an actor, much less a celebrated actor. Acting is a career defined by both emotional and professional insecurity. As an actor, you live with the never-ending quest for the next role, and when you finally get that role, you live with the fear you’re not good enough in it. That takes a great toll on family life. A question that never goes away, even after you’ve enjoyed tremendous success, is, how am I going to pay the rent next month? And even that eventually becomes, how am I going to pay the rent next year? That insecurity can be expressed in many ways, but it impacts your family. Adam once said that when Leonard first started going to state fairs, for example, long before the conventions were organized and run so professionally, he would come home with an envelope full of cash. “He loved that,” Adam told me. “Big fat envelopes filled with cash. It was what he always called ‘an income stream.’ He was very big on these income streams. That cash meant a lot to him. Before Star Trek, he had lived with a real sense of desperation to succeed and survive.”

  I have lived with those insecurities my whole life. Success doesn’t make them go away. Early in your career, they shape your thinking, and it doesn’t change very much. The second reality of the profession that impacts raising a family is simply the amount of time it becomes necessary to spend working. The hours spent on the set are very long, and then you have to go home and learn lines for the next day. There isn’t much downtime to enjoy with your family. You feel fortunate to have the work and determined to give a performance so wonderful it will lead to the next job.

  And finally there are the pressures of celebrity. It can be great fun being famous. Fame offers all kinds of advantages and opportunities that are unique and enjoyable. But there also is that dark side celebrities perhaps too often complain about. It’s part of the deal. When you are out in public, the public believes you belong to them. And often, as in Leonard’s case, it wasn’t Leonard fans wanted to meet; it was Mr. Spock. Some fans of Star Trek, some Trekkies, believed that we have all shared a wonderful adventure and want nothing more than to talk about it—sometimes episode by episode. Or they want to demonstrate their own mastery of the Vulcan salute. The result is that Leonard was always being pulled away from his family. There was no such thing as a simple dinner in a restaurant. As a result, Adam says, growing up, he and his father were not as close as he would have liked. And, as he adds, Leonard’s alcoholism certainly didn’t help. And even more than that, children of celebrities can have a really difficult time establishing their own identities. They grow up being so-and-so’s son or daughter, they get used to people trying to get to their father or mother through them, or talking about them, and they know people are always wondering how big a role their parent played in whatever success they enjoy. Rather than being known and judged as Adam Nimoy, for example, he never escaped being Leonard Nimoy’s son. I think Adam defined that well when he wrote, “The crowd started to grow until kids and their parents were swarming around him and I was being pushed away … There I was, standing in the shadows, watching this from outside, out in the dark.” The range of emotions that raises is really difficult for a young person to deal with.

  I was so fortunate with my own three girls. For whatever reasons, and certainly I credit their mother, they were accepting of my life and didn’t let it cause damage in their own lives. It was different with Leonard, maybe because Adam was a man, I don’t know, but it was different. As Adam has explained, for many years, he and Leonard had great difficulty communicating with each other. Maybe even more than the generational gap between them, the childhoods that shaped them could not have been more different. As the children of immigrants, Leonard developed a specific set of values; Adam remembers that while his family had struggled when he was younger, Spock had changed that, and as he grew up, he says, “Money just wasn’t a concern for me. We always had it. I think that annoyed my father, but we had very different lifestyles growing up. He was raised in a Boston tenement neighborhood; I was raised in sunny California.”

  Adam started smoking pot when he was seventeen and didn’t stop for almost thirty years. As a kid, he paid for it with cash he took out of those envelopes his father kept in a show closet. At some point, he began drinking too. The result was inevitable. His career and his marriage suffered and faltered. He transitioned from being an entertainment attorney to becoming a successful television director. Leonard got him his first real break. When the popular 1960s show The Outer Limits was revived in the 1990s, he told Adam to meet with the producers and tell them he would agree to star in a remake of an episode he’d done in 1962 if Adam directed it. That episode turned out well and enabled Adam to get an agent, and he began working regularly in television. There were nice moments like that, Adam remembered, but they were the exception.

  Adam described his relationship with his father as distant for a long time. For a while, they rarely spoke to each other. “There were just a lot of conflicts, a lot of distance and resentments that we both held on to.” Those conversations they did have rarely ended well. As Adam explained, “I’ve never had much luck arguing with him. Have you ever argued with a pop-culture icon? Have you ever argued with a guy who can cause a frenzy among thousands at a convention hall simply by performing a Vulcan hand salute?”

  Later he wrote, “Sometimes I would get so
frustrated trying to get through to him, trying to explain that I’m not built like him.” When Adam’s eighteen-year-long marriage ended in 2004 and he moved out, leaving his kids, he didn’t even bother to tell his father. Just contrast that to the fear and shame Leonard felt about telling his parents when his own marriage to Adam’s mother ended. Times change. Finally, though, that same year, Adam decided to take control of his own life. His controlled anger had ruined his directing career. “I was not fun to be with on the set, I had a difficult time controlling my temper and attitude.” He began attending twelve-step meetings.

  While part of what he learned was to let go of resentments, he just couldn’t do it. It was easier not to deal with them. By 2006, Leonard and Adam were barely talking. Adam would call his father on Father’s Day and on his birthday, but they never saw each other.

  At that time, Leonard had been sober almost a decade. Their relationship—or lack of a relationship—was painful for Leonard, as it would be for any parent. Learning about this much later, I wondered how it must have been eating at him. We never talked about it; in that way more than any other, Leonard put on his “Spock-bag,” as we referred to it so many years earlier when making the original series. Everything about Leonard was slightly restrained, from the way he dressed to the sense of calm and control he conveyed. But I knew there was something wrong. It was as much a feeling as knowing the details, and I did not want to intrude.

  Finally, though, Leonard did something still so much in character for him. He confronted the situation. He reached out. He sat down and wrote a long and painfully honest six-page letter to his son. Adam said, “That letter contained his list of complaints through the last twenty years. In it, he expressed his disappointment, his resentment, and his anger. It was not necessarily all about me; it was all those things he was holding on to that made him furious at me. It was really unpleasant to have to read it in print. He wasn’t very sensitive. Some of it, frankly, was perfectly valid.”

  For Leonard, writing this letter must have been very difficult. While it listed his grievances with Adam, it must have made him at least wonder about his relationship with his own parents. And at any time of life, that never is an easy task. They had remained in Boston while he built his life in California. He didn’t see them very often. And they never really understood why he had become an actor.

  But writing this letter to Adam was, in many ways, typical. Leonard was never a man to back away from a confrontation. He never sought them out, he tried to defuse them, but he did not hold his grievances inside. When he had something to say, even to people with the power to affect his career, he said it to them. But writing this letter to his son about their failed relationship must have been terribly, terribly difficult. Adam responded, he says, as he often did to that type of challenge: he didn’t respond. He followed the AA guidelines as he understood them, “Don’t just do something, sit there,” and practiced “restraint of pen and tongue.”

  He resisted responding, letting his anger brew, boil, and then dissipate. He waited several months and finally decided it was something he needed to do for his own sobriety. At that time, he was writing his book and wanted some sense of clarity. As he noted, the ninth step in twelve-step program is making amends. He called Leonard and agreed that they would go through the letter point by point. They would confront their broken relationship. This might well have been the first time in their adult lives both of them were sober. For an actor, a writer, or a director, it was a situation ripe for the stage. For a father, and for a son, it was an emotional summit. As they went through the letter, Adam wrote, he apologized for those things he had done wrong, for all the times he’d hurt his father. It bothered him that Leonard did not apologize. When they were done, Adam asked his father if there was anything he could do for him as a way of making amends. “He gave me a puzzled look,” Adam remembered, “and he told me he had everything, that he was very happy with his life, that he had made it financially when he was in his thirties, and that his second marriage saved his life. He repeated that he was very happy with his life.”

  That meeting marked the beginning of a new relationship between them. In fact, later on, Leonard and Adam would go together to twelve-step meetings. It was, Adam recalled, a tremendous bonding experience. “He finally made himself available to me.” And he perceived that this effort to be supportive was Leonard’s way of making amends. At one of those meetings, they did what is known as a double-share; meaning they went to a meeting together and each spoke, one after the other, for about ten minutes, and then the rest of the group joined the conversation. Leonard had decided to change the focus of his life, placing a stronger emphasis on his family. His relationship with his son, as Leonard probably wouldn’t really say, prospered. For so long, he admitted that he majored in career and minored in family, and there came a time when he decided to turn that around. I noticed that; I noticed that when we spoke, the subjects of our conversations had changed, and rather than talking about our frustration with the studio and the changing business, we would find ourselves talking about kids and our grandkids.

  I don’t know that any of us ever come to grips completely with the complexities of familial relationships. The entanglement of deep love, needs and desires, guilt and joy, all compressed by the pressures of the world, makes relationships with our parents and our children, our husbands and wives, very difficult to ever completely understand. I know Leonard never felt contented about his relationship with his parents. I think he tried very hard to understand them, perhaps as a means to figure out himself. He made a very meaningful trip in 1988. He always had been intrigued with the idea of tracing his own roots, discovering his own Jewish heritage. In the early 1970s, while he was directing his vampire episode for Night Gallery, Henry Kissinger had visited the set with his son, who desperately wanted to meet Spock and get his autograph, and the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States, the powerful Anatoly Dobrynin. Making conversation, Leonard told the ambassador that his parents had emigrated from Russia. Dobrynin suggested he come to the Soviet Union with his parents.

  Leonard liked to describe his parents’ reaction when he told them about it. They were horrified; they thought he was crazy. Both of them had risked their lives sneaking out of the country; they had absolutely no desire to go back. “They thought they’d get caught and thrown in jail,” he said. There was nothing for them to visit: their village in Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans during World War II, and many people they had known had been killed. They waved their hands at him. Forget it; we’re not going.

  But after we’d made Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which we had saved the humpback whales for the future, the World Wildlife Fund invited him to Moscow to celebrate the fact that the Russians had declared a moratorium on whale hunting. While it was still the Communist USSR, the Soviet Union, our Cold War enemy, relations were warming. Leonard agreed to go—on the condition that he be permitted to visit the Ukrainian village from which his parents had come.

  His parents had saved a single letter from distant relatives still living in that area. That was their connection to their childhoods. The International Red Cross was able to find members of the Nimoy family living in the city of Khmelnytskyi, about a two-hour drive from Zaslav, his parents’ village. Literally hours after he had completed shooting Three Men and a Baby, he and Susan were on a plane flying back into his heritage. They spent several days in Moscow, where Star Trek IV was screened three times. During this period, there was tremendous competition between our countries, and the Russians were well known for claiming they had invented … well, pretty much everything. It was considered a matter of personal pride. So Leonard wasn’t really surprised that after the film had been screened at the Russian director’s union, he was told, “Very nice, but is not your story. It was told by great director Boris Thomashefsky in 1970. A very wonderful film called The Whales of the Red Tide.” Leonard smiled politely, perhaps wondering if next the Russians would claim to have invented C
omrade Spock.

  Eventually, they traveled across Ukraine by train to Khmelnytskyi, arriving late at night. The train platform was completely deserted. They stood there, waiting. Finally, a tour guide arrived and took them to their hotel. Early the next morning, someone knocked heavily on the door. A man in a suit introduced himself in Yiddish, “My name is Boris Nimoy. I am your cousin.” He took them to Zaslav, a small farming village with a river flowing through it. Wagons pulled by horses moved leisurely over cobblestone streets. A dozen people were waiting outside a modest home to greet them. But rather than greeting their relative from America warmly, they were polite but distant. As he learned later, they had been informed by authorities that someone important from the United States was coming to visit them. That made no sense to them, of course; why in the world would an important person from America be coming all the way to the Soviet Union to visit the Nimoys of Zaslav? They knew from long experience that any involvement with the government usually brought problems.

  A modest lunch was served, with vodka. They began conversing in Yiddish. And after a few minutes one of the men handed Leonard an envelope. He immediately recognized his mother’s handwriting. It contained several photographs of children, and Leonard was asked if he knew who they were. He identified his by then adult cousins. These pictures were at least twenty years old and, as he described them, “treasured objects from another world.” The walls came down, and together, they grew the family tree. They told Leonard stories of his relatives—“Your grandfather was so-and-so, and he met your grandmother this way.” They talked about the three-and-a-half-year German occupation, who lived and who died, who served in the Russian army. He had brought a battery-operated tape recorder and had them record messages for his parents. Then they took him to the local cemetery and showed him his maternal grandfather’s tombstone. His grandfather’s photograph was on his headstone, the same picture Leonard’s mother kept proudly in a family album. Connections were made. I’m sure Leonard must have wondered what might have happened if his parents had not fled to America. This might have been his life. We had just made a film about traveling back in time, and this is exactly what he was doing. I imagine the distance from these cobblestoned streets to stardom in Hollywood might somehow be like the distance Kirk and Spock had traveled to save the whales.