Leonard

by William Shatner

  Many times on the high holidays, my wife and I would go to services with Leonard and Susan at their synagogue. The two of us would sit next to each other and pray together. I’m a spiritual person more than a religious person. I’m probably more attached to the energies of various places on earth than with the singular God who wrote the Bible. Leonard retained a much closer relationship to his roots. So on the high holidays, he’d tell me he’d bought tickets for us so we’d go. In some ways, I guess, it was a way of strengthening our bonds of friendship. It was a renewal, a confirmation.

  But Leonard once admitted that his Judaism had “gone flat.” By that, I think he meant that while he continued to follow the broad rituals, his spiritual connection had dissipated. As he explained to Nadine Epstein in the magazine Moment in 2004, “A lot of my Judaism had to do with going through the motions. That meant going to the service, knowing when to stand up, knowing when to sit down … I’d come away thinking, did I really get what I was supposed to get out of that experience?… The answer was not always yes. I realized that a lot of the time I was going to these services because I should.”

  That was Leonard, always looking for the background story. The concept of the Shechinah, which is not especially well known among American Jews, fascinated him, and this project really allowed him to explore important issues in modern Judaism—as well as forcing other Jews to respond to his photographic statement. And I guess that’s as good a definition of art as any other.

  The photographs were published as a beautiful book, and the mixture of religion and sexuality was predictably combustible. When the book was announced, he was invited to speak by several Jewish organizations—but then those invitations were canceled. An Orthodox rabbi in Detroit threatened the Jewish center where he was scheduled to speak that if they allowed him to do so, he would take away the center’s kosher certification. When the Jewish Federation in Seattle disinvited him, a local temple asked him to speak—and about seven hundred people showed up. That’s the kind of response that I absolutely know thrilled Leonard. His photographs were forcing people to react.

  You have to remember, photography wasn’t his hobby; it had replaced acting as his profession. His photographs were shown in galleries and sold to collectors. I bought several, and they were hanging in my home. His series that I especially responded to was called The Full Body Project. I suspect it would have been better for me if I had seen these images before I got that call from Playboy. This project started for Leonard at a seminar where he was showing some of his work. Afterward, a very large woman, weighing at least three hundred pounds, approached and said, “I’m a different body type, and I’m a model. Would you be interested in working with me?”

  I can almost hear Leonard’s mind clicking into gear. “How do I shoot her?” he wondered. “Was I going to be reportorial? Was it going to be editorial? Was it going to be an art project? How should I light her? How should I present her? Should I present her full frontal nudity? Should I present her as sculpture—which is finally what I chose to do.” They arranged this model in classic poses and “her body took on shapes like marble sculpture.” When he included several of those photographs in an exhibition, they attracted by far the most attention. Leonard had found his theme. His original idea was to replicate famous images of fashion models instead using large women. As his point sharpened, he decided to explore the way American culture worships the thin body, especially our concepts of beauty. As he said, “I became fascinated with this idea.”

  Leonard had traveled light-years away from Spock.

  Fortunately, he found a burlesque group in San Francisco called the Fat-Bottom Revue in which all the performers were unabashedly and proudly large women. Some of them, in fact, are obese. The woman who formed the group, a trained anthropologist named Heather MacAllister, told Leonard that whenever a fat person stepped on the stage to perform, it wasn’t a joke; it was a political statement. That must have registered deeply with him and certainly was a spark that ignited his creativity. I think he set out to make that statement visually. They were delighted to pose completely nude for him, and the result is an astounding collection that almost forces people to pause and consider their own conceptions of the female form. In one classic photo, he has faithfully recreated the great Matisse painting The Dance using these large women.

  As a reviewer commented, “With this work Leonard Nimoy has boldly gone where no photographer has ever gone before.” Proving, of course, that there never was a way to escape Star Trek.

  And maybe that’s what Leonard saw when he mounted his last great project, which he called Secret Selves. It was based, he said, on a story he’d read about the Greek philosopher and playwright Aristophanes, who was searching for an explanation for human anxiety. He finally surmised that once humans had come into this world as double people, attached back-to-back with two heads, four arms, and four legs. Since the time the mighty Zeus had split them in half with his sword, people have felt part of themselves missing and have been searching for that lost aspect that makes them feel whole. His theme, he explained, was that “we all have aspects of ourselves that other people don’t necessarily know about or see,” and he wanted to provide an opportunity to finally show that person.

  Admittedly, my Playboy photographs did not have such a noble theme.

  I understood the point Leonard wanted to make, but in a very modern context. I was thinking about Leonard’s concept while I was having a wardrobe fitting for a show I was doing. The wardrobe lady brought a few pieces of clothing to my house, and we were testing several combinations to see what worked. As my character was supposed to be sharp and cool, she was dressing me to be sharp and cool. And as I looked in the mirror, I actually felt sharp and cool. I liked the feeling. In my life, I am not sharp and cool. No one who knows me well would use those words to describe me. But when I had dressed in this alter ego, I very much enjoyed the feeling and began wondering if we all wear the clothes that best fit who we are, or do we dress as the person we would like to be and then, in some way, become that person?

  Leonard always dressed cool. He always had the right man bag, while I was always stuffing things in my pockets. I wanted to look the way he looked. For the Secret Selves project, Leonard invited about one hundred people living in Northampton, Massachusetts, to come to his gallery there, the R. Michelson Galleries, dressed as the person they truly believe they are on the most profound level, their secret self. Over a two-day period, Leonard photographed and interviewed ninety-five people, most of them having dressed for the occasion. He also did a fascinating video of these interviews.

  His subjects ranged from the bizarre to the poignant, but each of them revealed something important of themselves to the camera. A painter who did portraits of people who had fought in wars fantasized about living a simpler life in the woods and came dressed as a tree. A woman who had lost her husband several years earlier and hadn’t disrobed for anyone since wanted to feel really beautiful once more and posed nude. An art critic harbored dreams of being “a mad scientist, but not completely mad,” and posed holding a “nuclear blue thing” that he’d made. An accountant whose fantasy was to be a rock star, playing in front of thousands of screaming teenaged girls stripped to his white jockey shorts and started pounding away on his guitar. A young woman who felt robbed of her childhood because her father was a traveling evangelical preacher came in wearing a homemade green hoodie with yellow dinosaur spikes down the back; for just a few moments, she wanted “to be the kid I didn’t get to be.”

  As actors, Leonard and I had spent great portions of our careers wearing the guise of other characters, so it is endlessly fascinating looking at these photographs. As with his other work, it’s impossible to look at these pictures without feeling the emotion of the subjects.

  When Leonard was asked why he had been so strongly attracted to creative photography, he explained, “I wanted to learn the philosophy of vision, to open my eyes to light and shadow and texture.” But his provocativ
e photographs also were the perfect accompaniment to the written word. When he first began taking studio pictures, he wondered what would be the best format to publish them and decided to produce a book of photographs and words. But rather than explanatory prose, which would have provided information about the pictures but not about the emotion, he decided to write poetry.

  His curiosity about poetry began when he was eight years old, he said. He had stopped by a fountain and read the inscription with curiosity: “Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days.” Taking that literally, he tossed pieces of bread into the fountain where they were quickly gobbled by pigeons. But he came back for several days, wondering exactly how many days constituted “many” and what to expect.

  I did not know those first few years we worked together that Leonard wrote poetry. Rather, I didn’t know that Leonard was a poet. That was a part of his soul that I hadn’t met yet. That part of the brain that I had become most familiar with was his straight-ahead intellect; he was very focused on the reality of his performance, on solving script problems and negotiating a fair deal. He lived very much in the world of traffic jams, bills to be paid at the end of the month, and the next job, always the next job. Poetry didn’t seem to be part of that world; it came from a very different place, and until his first book of poetry, You & I, was published he had never allowed me—or, as far as I know, anyone else from the show—access to it.

  I did know he had a love for the English language; that I saw from the way he worked on scripts. To the occasional dismay of our writers, he wasn’t an actor who settled where he thought there was a better way of doing something or saying something. From that came Spock’s precise use of the language. A lot of humor on the show came from the fact that Spock responded to the specific words that one of us used, rather than the nuance that was intended. Whatever they came from, Leonard’s poems were word pictures of emotion. Just as he did with his cameras, he tried to capture feelings with his words.

  I am an incurable romantic

  I believe in hope, dreams and decency

  I believe in love

  Tenderness and kindness.

  I believe in mankind

  That first book was intended to be a small printing, as he called it “an exploratory lifting of the mask on his inner thoughts,” but the desire at that time for all things Spock made the book far more successful. There were five printings and 50,000 hardcover books in print, and—as Leonard proudly pointed out—the first printing of the paperback was 250,000. What helped sell the book, of course, was the fact that Leonard was willing to promote it by doing bookstore signings. It may have been Leonard’s poetry—but fans were getting Spock’s autograph. There was one memorable evening, though, at a book signing in Oradell, New Jersey, that his competition was doing considerably better than he was. The same day he was signing, Linda Lovelace, who had become famous as the star of XXX-rated Deep Throat, was signing copies of her book. “I had a few people in front of me,” he said, laughing, “but her line was stretching around the block.” Leonard did, however, come up with a strong selling pitch; he told them that You & I made a wonderful gift book, then asked, “Would you give your mother Linda Lovelace’s book for Christmas?”

  He published seven books of his poetry over two decades, and you could draw a straight line from the first book through the final book and it would become obvious how little he changed over that period. Trying to understand poets through their poetry requires higher degrees than I have, but it is obvious reading his work that from the beginning to the end Leonard was intent on emotionally defining grand themes like love, compassion, loss, and the endless search for roots. For the man who became famous playing the ultimate dispassionate character, his poems successfully bring out the range of important emotions.

  While some reviewers of Leonard’s photography wrote that he had found his voice through his art, in fact he actually found his voice through his voice. Making a living as an actor is in some ways a hustle. You don’t let opportunities pass by. Leonard had a melodic baritone. Close your eyes and just listen; your memory will hear him for you. That voice was an important part of his actor’s instrument, and even after he had mostly stopped performing, he continued to act with his voice.

  There are singers who fight their whole lives for that single break; for Leonard and me, singing success came easily. I know it was not something I had ever seriously considered, and I can’t imagine Leonard harbored secret dreams about one day becoming a British singing star. I mean, the rock-star look in the ’60s was the Beatles mop-top and various versions of long hair. Spock’s hair was exactly the opposite, more of a scraping-brush top. While we were doing the original series, a Paramount executive told Leonard, “There’s a gentleman in New York who’s producing an album of music from Star Trek. Your picture as Spock is going to be on the cover. Would you like to be involved in the making of the album?”

  That was the appeal of Spock. Put his picture on the album cover and it was going to sell—and Leonard wasn’t going to earn a penny from it. He just inhabited Spock; he didn’t own his rights. Six of the twelve tracks featured on Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space already had been recorded. Leonard agreed to speak-sing the remaining six—as Spock. Leonard cowrote several of the songs on the album, which include “Music to Watch Space Girls By,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth,” and, of course, “Highly Illogical.” One more recent Amazon ‘reviewer,’ while enjoying Leonard’s mostly spoken-word renditions, did describe a song that appeared on several later albums called “Amphibious Assault” as something “George Patton would have written on LSD.”

  While Leonard took almost everything he did seriously, which was our work ethic, he did not pretend to be a classic performer, admitting, “I’m an actor who records. I’d be terribly surprised if this singing career turned into anything big. I’m not passing judgment on my capabilities, but I’m thirty-seven years old and I’ve been an actor for seventeen years. I’m just getting off the ground as a singer.”

  Dot Records promoted the album heavily. When Leonard showed up at record stores to promote it, he usually was greeted by hundreds of screaming—and record-buying—kids. Although when he appeared in Cambridge, it was his mother who showed up, telling a reporter, “He looks tired. He’s such a tired boy.” About an hour earlier, she’d been with him at a television appearance—and as that reporter noted, she’d brought a bowl of kreplach for him. And as for his singing career, “He did have a certain ability for public speaking. He behaves himself very nice.”

  Mr. Spock’s Music was so successful that Dot, which was a division of Paramount, signed Leonard to a contract for several more albums—as himself. Several of the tracks were released as singles, and Leonard appeared on several of the most popular variety and talk shows to promote them. During his musical career he released five albums; his most successful albums were in kind of a folk-rock style. In 1997 music publishers released a compilation of both of our “biggest hits.” Spaced Out, it was called, and one reviewer described it as including “surreal soliloquies, mad monologues and peculiar parlance!”

  But the one song that has attracted the most attention and remains the … the highlight of his musical career, brought together two iconic worlds, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings. Talk about when worlds collide. Leonard was a big fan of The Hobbit, so it was not at all surprising that he decided to record “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” It was on his second album, and he performed it on several TV shows, including American Bandstand and a short-lived variety show hosted by Ricky Nelson called Malibu U. When asked about it, Leonard described it as a delightful kids’ song but said it fell under the “be-careful-what-you-do heading, because it lasts a long time.” A video of him lip-synching on the variety show has gotten more than three million hits on YouTube—and when he made a commercial with Zachary Quinto for Audi of America that was the song he was happily singing.

  Without question, one of the projects that Leonard had th
e most fun with was called Alien Voices; the “aliens” being Leonard and John de Lancie, who created the omnipresent Star Trek character Q. In the early 1990s, some of Leonard’s friends were doing a revival of what is arguably the greatest radio broadcast in history, Howard Koch’s adaptation of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds; the story of the 1938 broadcast that was done so convincingly that listeners in several parts of the country actually believed the earth was being invaded by Martians. Fittingly, it was the nation’s first great alien-invasion story. The revival was to be directed by John de Lancie. Leonard was asked to do the Welles role. One of the benefits of being an aging actor of some repute is you can afford to do things just for fun. Leonard and I were both brought up on radio, in which great stories come alive in your mind, colored by your own experiences. Radio dramas are a lost medium, so naturally Leonard couldn’t turn it down.

  Apparently, it was as much fun as it sounds like it would be. In fact, Leonard and John enjoyed it so much that they decided to form a company to record more of these classic stories as audio dramas. As John explained, “I told Leonard, ‘Look, you’re an alien, I’m an alien. We’ll call it Alien Voices and do adaptations of classic science-fiction stories.”

  Leonard apparently got it right away, telling John, “I’ve been looking for something that would allow me that type of creativity.”

  It really was the perfect concept. As John described it, “We all love radio because sound is a pathway straight to the imagination. In an age of dazzling visual effects, the mind still has the power to conjure the best scenery, the fastest space ships, and the prettiest women.” They could bring some of the greatest adventure stories ever written to life for another generation.

  The first two projects, which were recorded in a studio and released as audiobooks, were Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. There was, however, an unexpected technical problem: Leonard loved chocolate. Leonard’s love for sweets was well known, but especially for chocolate. Apparently, there was a large bowl of chocolate kisses in the studio, and Leonard dug into it. The sound engineer finally told John that he had to tell Leonard to stop; the chocolate was gumming up the works. Chocolate apparently sticks in your throat and slightly changes your voice. Not wanting to upset Leonard, John figured out a diplomatic solution: he suggested to Leonard, “Hey! Why don’t you have a delicious apple?” Apparently, apples clear your throat.