Leonard (10 page)

Dorothy Fontana remembers the very first hint she got that the show was going to be successful. At 9:00
A.M.
the morning after our first episode, her phone rang. A recognizable voice explained, “This is Leslie Nielsen.” Leslie Nielsen had starred in the classic science-fiction film
Forbidden Planet
. When Fontana explained that Gene Roddenberry hadn't arrived yet, Nielsen said, “I just wanted to let him know that I saw the show last night, and I think it has a great future.” Then the mail started arriving. The first week there was one bag of mail. People were writing that they loved the show and asked for autographed pictures. That was encouraging. The second week we got three bags of mail. That was interesting. And then the deluge started, and in fact, it still hasn't ended. We had not the slightest idea what we were creating; we were always fighting to stay on the air one more season, one more week.

Gene Roddenberry had not been satisfied with the first episode. In fact, he liked to tell people that after that first show aired, his father had gone up and down the block in his neighborhood apologizing for it. But a week later, Roddenberry was having lunch in a restaurant near the studio when he overheard people excitedly discussing the previous night's episode. That was the first time he'd ever heard people talking about one of his shows, so he thought,
This might be something special.

What was surprising to me was that rather than Captain James T. Kirk, the character who received the most attention, and the most fan mail, was Mr. Spock. This was long before Leonard and I became friends, and honestly, I hadn't expected it, and I was not especially thrilled about it. I was being paid the largest salary, I was out front for the publicity, I had the most lines, my character's fate carried the storyline, my character got the girl and saved the ship. The natural flow of events should have been that Kirk would receive the most attention, not some alien with strange-looking ears. But the spectacular performance Leonard gave occupied all that attention in the beginning. Mr. Spock fan clubs were formed. Newspapers and magazines ran features on this extraordinary new character. Roddenberry got a memo from the network suggesting that Spock be featured in every story. My future was on the line, and that line seemed to be getting shaky. And so, for a few weeks, I was quite jealous. It bothered me so much that I went to Roddenberry's office to discuss it with him. Gene was the voice of good reason in this case. “Don't be afraid of having other popular and talented people around you,” he said. “They can only enhance your performance. The more you work with these people, the better the show is going to be.” In other words, the more popular Spock became, the better it was for everyone, including me, and I settled down to that lovely fact.

Spock continued to evolve as Leonard explored all the possibilities of the character. It was a considerably more complex task than usual because there were no recognizable hallmarks. This was a brand-new character in American culture; he was carving out the path. There was no traditional right or wrong; the audience would tell him what was true. So Leonard took great care to protect Spock. “Characters have to depend on the kindness of actors,” he once explained. “I felt particularly that way with Spock because I think Spock could easily become cartoonish or silly. Liberties could be taken, and I had to prevent that.”

Bringing Spock to life probably was the most difficult role of his career. And he admitted to having some concern that he wouldn't be taken seriously as an actor. At first, he was worried that the whole show was a foolish enterprise, and he would be known forever for wearing devilish ears and playing an alien on a spaceship. He was right about that, and in less competent hands, it could have become a very campy show and been embarrassing for all of us.

But that never happened, and certainly part of the reason was that we all approached it seriously. We knew our audience would take the show only as seriously as we did. To get to the core Spock, as he once explained to an interviewer, “I went through the process of gradually internalizing more and more and more. There were times that I had to remind myself of that because that wasn't my nature. On the contrary, my training as an actor was to use my emotions, to use gesture, to use color in my speech, to use tonalities to be interesting. And to be passionate. I always enjoyed playing passionate characters, so this was quite a shift for me. It wasn't me at all. It became me.”

Perhaps Roddenberry had known more than we suspected when he cast me in the role of Kirk, because it turned out that our differing approaches to our parts resulted in perfect harmony. Leonard explained it better than I would: “Shatner was energy personified. A ball of energy, constantly looking, digging, searching, which gave me a place to exist as Spock. Much more so, with all due respect, to Jeff Hunter. Jeff Hunter played Captain Pike as a thoughtful, more introverted person. My tendency, when I was in a scene with him, was to try to be more energetic around him. Bill Shatner provided all the energy you needed in the scene, allowing me to be more reflective and more reactive. The fact that Shatner came on the way he did, I think it helped me a lot in developing the Spock character.”

As the weeks passed and Leonard became more comfortable in the role, he became very protective of Spock. Next to playing Spock, writing his part had to be the most difficult. The crux of great drama is the expression of emotion; just imagine how difficult it was for the writers to bring to life a character whose most identifiable character trait was that he did not express emotion. “We couldn't let him show emotion,” remembered Dorothy Fontana, or D. C. Fontana as she became known. While she personally wrote several episodes, she also worked with the other writers the entire run of the show and knew how hard it was to write for that character. “Since he was half-human, there were moments when we had to let him show something. We had to let something leak through.” One device the writers used several times was creating some sort of mind control that the enemy used to force Spock to display an emotion—once it even was love. As long as the script was logical, Leonard clearly enjoyed the opportunity to explore his character. And while Leonard remembered being a pain in the neck for the writers with all his script notes, claiming he was very often highly critical, no one I've spoken with actually remembers that to be true. Dorothy Fontana doesn't recall that, and I can't remember a situation until much, much later, when we were making the movies, that he became overly protective of Spock.

Only once during the original series was there a real issue. The head writer for the show was Gene Coon. It was Gene Coon who created the Klingons, an irrational race of warriors who believed in nothing but conquest and would destroy anything and anyone that got in their way. The Klingons were the perfect enemy. During that first season, we were given a script in which Spock did something he hadn't done before; I don't remember what it was, but Leonard felt it was completely inconsistent with what he had been developing for the character. As he had been throughout his career, he focused on small details that others might have overlooked. So he went to Coon's office to discuss it.

Coon was in the middle of the next script. The last thing he needed was an actor fussing over a detail that no one would notice. Leonard explained to him why the scene didn't work. Apparently, Coon listened carefully, then suggested, “Just do it.”

“I can't,” Leonard told him, an actor being protective of his character.

“This conversation's over,” Coon snapped.

By the time Leonard returned to the set, his agent was on the phone telling him he was being suspended. As he remembered the incident, “I knew it couldn't possibly lead to them telling me not to come to work anymore, because this was a machine, and if you pull a cog out, the machine stops. So in my arrogance, I said to my agent, ‘Ask them do I have to finish the day, or can I leave now?'”

The next call came from Roddenberry, who quickly dismissed the suspension and brought everybody into his office. Leonard had great respect for Coon—we all did—but protecting Spock was far more important to him. Coon made the requested changes, and Leonard went back to work.

Leonard remained adamant that the mythology we were creating had to be consistent and accurate throughout all our explorations.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,
for example, included a scene in which Kirk and Spock were having dinner with the Klingons. In writer and director Nick Meyer's script, Spock had a line that stated the Federation and the Klingons had been at war for a period of time. He wasn't sure that was accurate and checked with our resident expert Richard Arnold, who confirmed that there had not been a war in that timeframe, and the line was changed to reflect that. Details mattered to Leonard. Once, when he was working on the western series
The Tall Man,
just before they started filming he took off his wedding ring and put it in a locked valuables box. When asked about that, he explained that men didn't wear wedding rings during that period. Who would know that? Who would take the time to find out? Leonard, that's who. He invested completely in the creation of a character, and all the work he had done all those years finally paid off when he got the opportunity to truly create a character.

He explained that to me once, “No one else is going to provide that consistency and continuity. If the writers gave me the line, ‘Let's make hay under the Vulcan moon,' it was up to me to remind them that three episodes earlier Spock had mentioned that Vulcan had no moons.”

Most of the hallmarks that became associated with Spock, in particular the Vulcan neck pinch and the Vulcan salute, were entirely his creation. In one of our first episodes, Kirk's personality was split into good and evil, and evil Kirk was about to kill good Kirk. In the script, Spock was supposed to sneak up behind evil Kirk and knock him out by hitting him over the head with the butt of his phaser. It was the kind of bad-guy move that Leonard had been doing for a long time. But while our scripts regularly required me to always be punching, rolling, jumping, swinging, butting heads, and getting hit in the face, this was the first time Spock actually participated in a physically violent action. Leonard wasn't comfortable with that; brawling, banging someone in the head somehow seemed below Spock's evolved personality. It was too twentieth century. So he suggested to the director that Spock had a special capability that allowed him to put enemies out of action without little physical exertion. The director was open to the concept. Leonard and I sat down, and he told me what he had in mind: he would pinch my trapezius muscle, and I would collapse in a heap. I have no idea where that concept came from, but I was a professional actor; I knew how to fall down. Of course, it fit Spock perfectly: an advanced civilization would know where the vital nerves are located and have the physical strength to take advantage of that knowledge to incapacitate their enemy. We did the scene: Spock came up behind evil Kirk and pinched his trapezius, I dropped to the floor, and the Vulcan nerve pinch was born.

For those people counting at home, fans of the show saw the Vulcan nerve pinch being used thirty-four different times. I wonder how many kids since then have had to suffer through the real pain of a Vulcan neck pinch.

The Vulcan salute has become recognized literally throughout the world. In this salute, the right hand is held up with the pinkie and ring finger touching, but separated from the middle finger and forefinger, which also are touching, in a modified V-for-victory salute. It was created for the first episode of our second season, by which time Leonard had a strong understanding of Spock. In this episode, Spock has to return to Vulcan to fulfill a marriage betrothal that was arranged when he was a child. If he doesn't return, he will die. This episode was written by the great science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. This is the first time we have seen Spock on Vulcan, among the people of his race. In the script, he is greeted by the woman who is to conduct the marriage ceremony. Leonard suggested to the director that there needed to be some type of Vulcan greeting that would be appropriate. It would be the Vulcan version of a handshake, a kiss, a nod or bow, or a military salute. When the director agreed, Leonard had to create it. It was not an especially easy thing to envision. It needed to be unlike any traditional greeting, but it couldn't be at all comical. As he often did, Leonard drew on his own life to find it.

There is a gesture he had first seen when he was eight years old, when he went with his grandfather, father, and brother to the North Russell Street shul, an Orthodox synagogue, and he had never forgotten it. In Jewish Orthodox tradition, during the benediction the Shechinah, which very roughly means the feminine counterpart to God, enters the sanctuary to bless the congregation. The Shechinah is so powerful that simply looking at it could cause serious or even fatal injury. So worshipers use this gesture, in which their fingers form the shape of the Hebrew letter
shin,
to hide their eyes. “I wasn't supposed to look,” he remembered, “but I knew something major was happening. So I peeked.” The gesture always intrigued him. “I didn't know what it meant for a long time,” he said. “But it seemed magical to me, and I learned how to do it. There was no reason for me to learn it, but it looked like fun.” Not only did he use it as the basis for the traditional Vulcan greeting in the episode, many years later he published a controversial book of naked glamorous women wearing religious symbols, entitled
Shekhina
.

The gesture immediately caught on. Fans of the show started greeting him with it on the street—without realizing they were blessing each other. Giving this greeting requires a certain dexterity. Not everybody can do it. Some of our actors had problems with it, and they had to use their other hand to put their fingers in place, then hold up their hand for the camera. Aside from me, another actor who had difficulty giving this gesture was Zachary Quinto, who years later played young Spock for the first time in the 2009 motion picture. While promoting the new film, he admitted to Leonard, “I spent a little time actually training my hands to be able to do the salute. That wasn't something that came particularly easy, so I would rubber band my ring finger and my pinkie finger together while I was driving around Los Angeles and do little exercises for months leading up to the shooting.”