by Edward Gross
HERBERT F. SOLOW (executive in charge of production, Star Trek)
The last thing we wanted was to have the network, the sponsors, or the television audience feel that it was not a wonderful, marvelous family on Star Trek. We didn’t want anybody to see a crack in this dam that we built; we wanted everybody to see that everyone loved each other and got along, and that Bill was the star and Leonard was the second, but it happened on the stages, in the offices, and we knew there was friction. If you know actors, they count their fan mail, and if one has ten and the other has eight, and the one who has ten happens to slip it into the conversation, that’s the way it works. Actors are very competitive people, and when you get a man who is the star of the show and he’s contracted, paid, and billed as the star of the show, and then you get a second guy who gets a quarter of his money, who doesn’t get star billing but becomes the most popular actor on the show, there’s always going to be friction. Happily, the guys kept it under control, so internally there was some friction but as far as the outside world was concerned, we all did our best, including the actors, to play the game and not upset NBC, the sponsors, or the fans.
WALTER KOENIG
Shatner was a lot of fun. You’d blow a line and he’d laugh. There was a lot of joy and enthusiasm and ebullience on the set, but I did notice that every shot was ultimately set up so everyone who was in a scene with Bill was behind him. But he was fun. I really didn’t know about all this acrimony and the counting of the pages, which I had validated by Harlan when Bill came up to his house and showed him a script and how in “City” Spock had more lines than he did. I shudder at that. That’s something that actors don’t do.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Bill was very upset when Leonard came on particularly strong at the beginning [of the series] because he said, “Am I not the captain? How come [the writers] don’t appreciate that?” It was a very natural reaction. I said to Shatner, “If we had an Eskimo as a second character, you could be sure the Eskimo would get the most delightful lines because of what he is.” I advised him not to worry about Spock because all that reflected on Shatner. Particularly if Shatner continued to treat Spock properly in the show. I suggested they should show each other a lot of friendship in the show and it would eventually right itself.
NORMAN SPINRAD
Bill Shatner’s problem is that he just wasn’t given as interesting a character to play as Nimoy was. He was the lead character—supposedly the most important—but he couldn’t be most interesting. It was not a reflection on him as an actor, because I remember him as a very good actor before that, but he didn’t have the part even though the contract said he did. That led to all the line stealing and all that kind of crazy lunatic stuff in any number of scripts where the captain went crazy, because somebody was trying to take away his ship. In a funny kind of way, this gave the character of Kirk more depth. It gave Kirk a little edge somewhere that was really Shatner, which is a good way to use it. Another thing to consider is that if this cast has been together for this long, then the actors have got to become a part of the character which can give them more depth … if people know what they’re doing.
GEORGE TAKEI
There is a difference between working with Leonard and working with Bill. Leonard has an iron core, that determination to get what he wants, but at the same time you get from Leonard a principled position, and there is sincerity in what he says. With Bill, you always suspect a second agenda; that he’s got his reason for wanting whatever he wants. If you don’t agree with Leonard, you can have an honest, straightforward discussion of issues, whereas Bill would try to cover it up with a jokey camaraderie, an anecdote, or some flattery, but you don’t trust Bill. With Leonard, I usually see what he’s driving at, and if you don’t he will sincerely be open to listening to you, taking what you see and either accepting it on its merits, or if he has differences, you discuss them until you arrive at a genuinely mutual position, whereas Bill has a more vivaciously suspect attitude.
WALTER KOENIG
Bill had an enormous sense of responsibility for the show. He was the star, he was going to make it work, and he was the guy who was getting paid the big bucks, so he wanted to make sure the vision that he saw that represented the show’s success was consistently there in every episode. But he was also very self-involved and was concerned primarily about his character, but he was fun and charming.
YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)
I didn’t want him to touch me, he’s an awful man. Part of it is the fact that he just has no social skills. As long as I was painted green, he was trying to grab me behind flats on the sets. He invited me to his dressing room to have lunch the first day and it was the strangest lunch I ever had. We didn’t talk, we ate lunch, and he told me that he raised Doberman pinschers. He didn’t grab me or anything, it was just weird, and after that, when he wasn’t after me he’s giving me all this background about my character and telling me where he wants me to stand so that his best side is showing. It was just horrible.
ROGER C. CARMEL (actor, “Harry Mudd”)
Bill Shatner, that very dignified captain, is really at heart a very crazy kind of comic. He’s a giggler and loves to laugh. A couple of years after Star Trek folded, I was doing a charade game show called Stump the Stars. It was all charades. We laughed so much on that show. I was on the home team and we would challenge all the newcomers. Bill Shatner was a guest and we always wanted him to come back because he had such a good time. He couldn’t really let out that comic spirit on Star Trek, he had to be the responsible leader so he didn’t have much of a chance to let out on-screen that comic devil inside him. He sure did let it out on the Star Trek set, though! We had a hell of a good time!
WALTER KOENIG
Leonard was so Spock that I truly never got to meet him. “This is a wrap for today, do you want to have a beer?” Nothing like that, never happened. Never got to know who this man was. He was Spock always. It certainly enhanced the character. There are thousands of actors that could have played the roles that we played, but there was only one actor who could’ve played Spock.
The gentleman who plays it in the new Star Trek movies is great, but he’s acting. Leonard was Spock. He was always the character. I didn’t get to know him or any sense of him until Star Trek VI and I came off camera and Leonard and Bill are talking about familial problems that Leonard was having, but that was a guy I never met. That was the difference between the two guys.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, “Return to Tomorrow”)
Leonard was a very dear guy, he was the one I’d go out and have a drink with afterward, and we would talk about the old days. He had a wife and then he changed wives, but he couldn’t have been a sweeter guy, but I felt no tension of any kind. It was a very different show, we were learning our lines on the set because they were being written overnight, and I just noticed the genius of the people around; the cameraman was brilliant and the directors were terrific, everyone was an “old pro.”
YVONNE CRAIG
I adored Leonard Nimoy, he just had the most droll sense of humor. The first time I went into makeup I had my eyes closed, and when I got home I realized they had shaved my eyebrows. They could just as easily covered them with mortician’s wax and I was furious. I said, “If my eyebrows don’t grow back, I swear to God I will sue them,” so Leonard said, “Yvonne, I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying and I just wanted to say when I started the show I went to a dermatologist and he assured me that anyone who can grow a beard can grow their eyebrows back” and with that he turned and left. So I’m standing there saying, “Grow a beard?” He was so funny. He has a great sense of humor.
NICHELLE NICHOLS (actress, “Nyota Uhura”)
Initially, Star Trek the series and Star Trek the films were designed for an ensemble of stars who would each be given equal time. But at some point, the decision was made to separate Bill and Leonard from the rest of us, and I’m not happy with that situation. I don’t mind Bi
ll and Leonard being the stars, but in light of the fact that we were totally typecast through Star Trek, I felt the least they could have done was not totally defuse our characters.
WILLIAM SHATNER
If the original concept of the show was still in effect and the series was still going today, the situation would be exactly the same. There are people whose names and parts are above the title and people who aren’t. That’s the nature of the business and that’s the way these stories are told.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
Bill has a big, fat head. Bill thinks of Bill, whereas Leonard thinks of the show first and thinks of himself second. Bill doesn’t like anyone to do good acting around him. I can remember De [DeForest Kelley] complaining about that when we were doing the series. The scripts would come in with De having major parts and somebody talked them out of it. And there were parts where I was favored during the second year that were all cut out. I’d end up with six lines.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Certain people and certain characters lose sight of the overall larger issues and are totally involved in their own world. That’s good for an actor because he takes care of his own business. Traditionally actors are totally self-involved. There’s no reason for them to see “Where does this scene fit in?” and “Where does the character fit in?” Take the actor who comes in during the last five minutes of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, who plays the doctor, who has the last five lines of the play. When asked what the play was about, he answered, “It’s a play about a doctor who comes in.” That’s okay. That syndrome has always been part of an actor’s makeup. I can’t fault Jimmy Doohan for thinking what he does.
WALTER KOENIG
I was more aware about cast members losing lines and close-ups to Bill on the features. I was pretty much grateful for whatever I got in the TV show, because I was the new kid on the block and it was such a novelty to be getting a paycheck every week. Yes, I was aware of it, but it’s old news. It’s interesting, because I think appearing on the TV series Babylon 5 gave me an insight into Bill Shatner, because there was a point when I was trying to reconcile how somebody could be diametrically opposite in terms of his behavior from one situation to another, and the immediate solution that you grab for is one behavior is false; that he’s pretending when he’s being charming or funny, that it’s all a ruse.
That seems to be the only way to justify such contradictory behavior. But while exploring the character of Bester on Babylon 5, I realized from appearance to appearance, there are very specific changes or the introduction of new elements to the character, and I had to justify on the one hand killing people with my mind, and on the other hand feeling great passion for a love that I had.
In exploring the character, I began to realize a very obvious truth about Bill, which is that we’re all complex beings. It’s not a matter of hypocrisy or chicanery, that Shatner, like everybody else, is capable of a vast variety of attitudes and emotions. It’s just that he’s in the spotlight and his behavior is so magnified that he’s given certain license to express all of this. Whereas the rest of us learn to restrain ourselves on behalf of socialization and a sensitivity toward our fellow beings, Bill being the star and constantly heralded as the star, how do you not get seduced by all that? He thought that he had license to behave exactly how he felt. Not to say that we don’t feel the same way, it’s just that we don’t have that same license.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It’s coming from a couple of people. I don’t understand that. I’m not even aware of it, quite frankly. Occasionally, I’ll hear something from an ardent fan of mine who’ll say, “So and so said this about you” and it bewilders me because I have had no trouble with them. Nothing certainly bad, nothing particularly good either. We have done our job and gone on and I have never had bad words with anyone. I don’t know what vitriol is spilling out.
HERBERT F. SOLOW
When you’re dealing with a film editor, you turn out one show a week, and back then we didn’t have the advantage of working with computer-generated editing machines. You worked on a Moviola and cut each piece separately, and therefore there wasn’t that much time to properly finish each show. When there was any confusion, the famous line in the movie business is “Cut to the star.” The star is the money, and even though there is a big difference between what Bill did and what Leonard did, the bottom line is, the star of the show was always Bill. The action stemmed from Bill. He drove the action, he was the one who was there at beginning saying, “Start the engines,” and at the end saying, “Close down the engines.”
It was always Bill who was the stereotypical captain of the ship. What happened with Leonard is that he was such a different character, and he handled his role so well—and became a pain in the neck after a while, demanding certain things for his character, but those demands were not for Leonard, his only interest was making sure that his character was properly portrayed week after week. Although I think Leonard was brilliant at what he did, he was never the star of the show. However, if push came to shove, and we had to recast both characters, it would have been easier to recast Bill’s part than Leonard’s, so you tell me: Who’s the star of the show?
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
I don’t think Bill has any mean bones in him. I just think he didn’t realize that perhaps he was trampling on other people’s prerogatives. It just never occurred to him in his determination to do as good a job as he could do, and his knowledge that he was the star. Well, we sometimes—and I’ve been guilty of it, too—bruise other people’s egos in our quest for excellence, and we don’t realize that we’ve done that. We would probably be horrified to discover that we had done it and feel very guilty, so I don’t think Bill was ever aware of it. Bill is Bill, and he’s a particular kind of person.
DIANA MULDAUR
Bill could be a pain, he would ruin a take deliberately, just for fun. He did it to DeForest one day, and we had to shut down shooting because DeForest had one of the nine-hundred-page speeches to make and by the time he got through two-thirds of it and was interrupted, as a joke, he couldn’t remember anything anymore. He was totally in the zone and lost it, and we went home. We went back in the morning and he started with that and he knocked it off right away. I felt so sorry for DeForest, it’s not what you want to watch happen to someone who is totally capable and wonderful. It was always practical-joke time.
WALTER KOENIG
I think Bill’s difficult. He’s the epitome of the star in many of the negative ways. He’s totally preoccupied with himself and his career and his work on the show. I want it understood that I respond to the working relationship, not the man. He can be congenial and enormously seductive. It’s very difficult to dislike him if he decides he wants you to like him. He has incredible charm. In fact, I have to keep slapping myself.
Problems with the cast—particularly Shatner and Nimoy—finally came to a head insofar as Gene Roddenberry was concerned on August 17, 1967, when he issued an ultimatum written to the two of them, with DeForest Kelley thrown in for good measure.
Of this famed letter, David Gerrold wrote in The World of Star Trek, “There was a deterioration of morale. And Gene Roddenberry felt that much of the grumbling was unwarranted. He was very aware of the problems and was working to solve some of them. So he wrote the letter. It was a very confidential piece, sent only to the cast, only the regulars. No one, not even Gene Coon, saw copies of it. In this letter, Gene Roddenberry—the silver-tongued bird of the galaxy himself—took his actors to task and gave them all a proper bawling out. What was said to each is unimportant—what is important is that it worked. Afterward, things settled down. Somewhat.
“Toss these pages in the air if you like, stomp off and be angry, it doesn’t mean that much since you’ve driven me to the edge of not giving a damn,” Roddenberry wrote in part in that letter, which is excerpted for the first time in this volume. “Gene Coon is ill and leaving, due to emotional fatig
ue for which you bear some share of the blame; Robert Justman came by last night asking to get out; I’m discussing with my agent now the pros and cons of turning the series over to the tender mercies of Paramount and their Gulf [&] Western accountants.”
“No, William,” Roddenberry stated, “I’m not really writing this to Leonard and just including you as a matter of psychology. I’m talking to you directly and with an angry honesty you haven’t heard before. And Leonard, you’d be very wrong if you think I’m really teeing off at Shatner and only pretending to include you. The same letter to both; you’ve pretty well divided up the market on selfishness and egocentricity. Of the three, it goes to DeForest to a lesser extent, but even you have shown signs lately of wanting to join our Child Star Club. I want you to know exactly where you’re all taking yourselves, your professional reputation, the show, and the investment you’ve all made in it.
“… Star Trek began as one of the TV productions in town where actors, as fellow professionals, were not only listened to but actually invited to bring their script and series comments to the production office. When small problems and pettiness begins to happen, as it happens on all shows, I instructed our people that it should be overlooked where possible because we should all understand the enormous physical and emotional task of your job. Think back, Gentlemen, on the staggering list of efforts made to understand, to fix, to set right. You and I agreed that a company of mature professionals should be treated as mature professionals, thus we’d have no insoluble problems. Well, it hasn’t worked.… The result of Gene Roddenberry’s policy of happy partnership? Star Trek is going down the drain.”
