Leonard (2 page)

Both of us grew up in the west end: my family lived in the west end of Montreal; his family lived in the Boston neighborhood known as the West End. My father was in the
schmatta
business, manufacturing inexpensive suits for the workingman who owned only that one suit. Leonard's father had the local barbershop. I grew up in a mostly Catholic neighborhood, while Boston's West End was the American melting pot, Italians and Jews and Poles and Irish, everybody who came from Europe, and even as Leonard described it, “A sprinkling of blacks.” In most immigrant communities, there was a great sense of equality; we all had nothing together. I can remember the pushcarts and the beggars, the ice man delivering hunks of ice to keep the small icebox cold, the singsong and the bells of the merchants as they drove slowly down the street. Leonard could recite the merchant's singsongs, singing out in Yiddish, “We have threads, we have needles, we have cloth, we have ribbons. What do you need? It's all here on my cart.”

While neither one of us actually came from poverty, growing up in the Depression, we both saw too much of it. Leonard always remembered the families who had been evicted from their apartment, sitting on the sidewalk with all their belongings, waiting for someone to come with a wagon and take them somewhere else, never to be heard from in the old neighborhood again.

I'm not sure why, but in retrospect, I actually knew quite a bit more about Leonard's childhood than he knew about mine. Leonard was a wonderful storyteller, and he would weave these vivid word portraits of the people and places of his childhood. His father's barbershop—haircuts twenty-five cents, shaves a dime—had three chairs, quite extravagant for that neighborhood, but a lot of life took place in the back room. Apparently, that was the local hangout. There was always a pinochle game going on, maybe some other gambling that nobody talked much about, and if someone was hard up and needed to borrow a few bucks, that was the place to go. Leonard's father was the treasurer of the Iziaslav Letter Society Credit Union, an organization the immigrants all chipped into to offer assistance when it was needed. Leonard remembers people coming into the Modern Barbershop, as it was named, once a week to give his father as much as a dollar.

Leonard and his older brother grew up in an apartment with their parents and grandparents. Like mine, it was a kosher home; maybe we didn't have any luxuries, but we always had three sets of dishes. A lot of Jewish immigrants in the West End, including his grandparents, spoke mostly Yiddish, so Leonard actually became quite fluent in Yiddish. Leonard loved the sound of that language; he used to repeat some of the wonderful expressions his grandmother used: “You should grow up like an onion, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air.” “Go bang your head against the wall when you say you're bored and got nothing to do.” By the time we became friends, he was concerned he was losing his facility for the language, so he actually found a Yiddish-speaking psychiatrist in Los Angeles and paid her hourly fee once a week just to sit and speak with him in Yiddish.

He was always proud to be a West Ender. He named his house in Lake Tahoe West End, and that also was the name painted on the back of his boat. People like us, who grew up in that kind of environment, carried the values we learned there with us wherever we went for the rest of our lives. For Leonard, that meant being a responsible citizen; respect other people, give back to the community by helping those people who needed help, work hard, and take responsibility for your actions.

Leonard described his parents as hardworking, extremely ethical, and constantly concerned about what might happen next. “Everything my parents did was colored by fear,” he said. “‘What could happen if you did this or did that? So, be safe, just be safe.'” In his family it was his grandfather Sam Spinner who was the real character. When his parents were telling him, “No, don't do it, it's not safe,” his grandfather was slipping him a dollar and telling him, “Here, go do something.”

It was his grandfather who continually pushed Leonard to go ahead, try it, do it. He was the adventurer in the family, the one who came to America first and then started bringing over the rest of his family one by one. It was my father, Joseph Shatner, who did the same thing for my family: he came here alone at fourteen and slowly and over many years helped bring each of his ten brothers and sisters to America.

My father cut fabric and made suits; Sam Spinner was a leather cutter. I remember Leonard telling me that when he went home after his first few years in Hollywood, his grandfather would reach down and feel the leather on his shoes to determine how well he was doing. If Leonard needed heels, his grandfather knew he wasn't doing well.

And, quite naturally at that time, both of us were exposed to anti-Semitism. I actually had to plan my strategy for getting to my Hebrew school; I'd walk past it on the far side of the street—then race across the street and inside. But I still got in my share of fights with the Catholic kids. I was a tough kid; that was my nickname—“Toughie.” Leonard's family called him
liebe,
which was the German word for love. The moment that had the most lasting impression on him took place one day during World War II when his father suddenly laid down his newspaper and said softly, “They're killing Jews.” Killing Jews meant the Jews of Europe, in many cases our distant family members. There was a real feeling among all the Jews: that could have been me. For kids the age of Leonard and me, that had a strong impact. There also were a lot of whispered conversations in Jewish homes about whether or not Franklin Roosevelt was good for the Jews. He received a lot of criticism in the Jewish community for not bombing the rail lines to the concentration camps; although some people explained that if he did that, there would be complaints that he was more worried about Jews than the war effort. But what it came down to was that Jews were on their own, they were different, and I suspect Leonard felt that at least as much as I did. It was part of our shared heritage.

And both Leonard and I got called all the nasty anti-Semitic names. Experiences like that create a sort of subtext, and as we got to know each other, those common experiences helped bind us together. It's almost an emotional shorthand.

We also learned the value of a dollar and inherited a work ethic. Later in life, Leonard would do a very funny impression of me in which he made fun of the fact that I can't stop working. “It's quarter of four,” he'd say in his best Shatner. “What's scheduled for four ten? If I'm done here by four thirty-two, can we book something at four forty?” But the reality was that for most of his life, Leonard really never slowed down too much either. It just was in our blood to be anxious about the next job, the next paycheck. In some fashion, we both worked all our lives.

Growing up, I worked as a suit packer in my father's factory; I take great pride in my ability to fold. I've often said if the acting thing hadn't worked out, I would have had a fine career in professional folding.

As a kid, Leonard took any job he could find. He sold newspapers, he worked in his cousin's card shop, he shined shoes, he set up chairs for the Boston Pops. Whatever somebody was paying to be done, he would do it. He even sold vacuums for the Ace Vacuum Company. The money made a big difference in the family finances. Leonard's biggest memory about the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, for example, was the fact that he sold all his copies of
The Boston Record
and couldn't get any more of them.

Neither one of us were especially good students. With so much out in the real world to learn, school just didn't hold our attention. But there was one skill at which both of us excelled: we could talk. My mother was an elocution teacher and never hesitated to correct my speech; Leonard once won a declamation contest at the neighborhood settlement house, the Elizabeth Peabody House, by memorizing and reciting the entire text of Longfellow's
The Song of Hiawatha.
If I close my eyes, I can hear his deep and somber voice, playing with Longfellow's words as he says with utter conviction:

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

At the doorway of his wigwam

In the pleasant Summer morning …

And when I do that, it's almost impossible not to smile.

It is, however, a little more difficult but considerably more fun to imagine the taciturn Mr. Spock reading that poem with both curiosity and a complete lack of emotion.

 

TWO

It was in our neighborhoods that both of us took our first steps into the future. Acting is such an odd profession. It's a profession in which you spend your life trying to convince people you are someone else. There isn't any single reason young people become actors. Obviously, it can be a lot of fun and play, but I think for most people who take it seriously, it fulfills some type of need. John de Lancie, who created the character Q for several
Star Trek
generations and worked closely with Leonard doing staged readings of great plays, explained he became an actor because “it was the first time in my life that anyone had responded well to anything that I'd done. I grabbed onto it like a life preserver. It gave me an identity.”

My mother enrolled me in the Dorothy Davis School for Actors when I was about eight years old. We met in somebody's basement. My mother was a frustrated actress. She would act out monologues at home for an audience of me. But I suspect she thought it would be a good activity for me; I didn't have any close friends. I suspect it hurt her to see me walking to school each morning all by myself.

Like me, Leonard found acting when he was eight years old. The settlement house was the center of most immigrant neighborhoods. As Leonard described it when he gave the 2012 commencement address at Boston University, “It was a community settlement house which was created to help immigrants find their way into the culture. They offered classes in language, cooking, shopping, kitchen sanitation, dental care and how to apply for a job. There was a gym and a sports program. And there was a small gem of a theater.” It was the place to hang out and learn how to be American. Immigrant families had neither the time nor money to spend on culture.

In Leonard's apartment, for example, there were no books. His family had a radio and an old record player and three or four Yiddish records. They would play the same record, a collection of songs sung by Yiddish theater star Seymour Rexite, over and over and over. The Elizabeth Peabody House had a 375-seat theater in which they presented programs for both adults and children. Leonard actually had a pleasant singing voice; he used to sing in his synagogue choir. In fact, his singing at his own bar mitzvah was so good that he was asked to perform the whole ceremony again a week later at another shul. He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good! Who else made a guest appearance at a bar mitvah?

Apparently, one afternoon when he was hanging out at the settlement house, they were casting a children's show. They brought him into a music room where a woman was sitting at a piano and asked him to sing. While he never remembered what song he sang, it was enough to earn him a leading role in a production of
Hansel and Gretel
.

Acting came easily to him. It was playing. He could memorize lines, he could sing, and he enjoyed performing. In those days, there were numerous local radio shows for children, and both of us worked on some of those programs. While I was performing heroic acts on
Saturday Morning Fairy Tales,
Leonard was doing Bible stories. Obviously, there was something symbolic about that. Many years later as Captain Kirk, I would be busy rescuing civilizations in distress on distant planets while Leonard's Mr. Spock would be examining the morality of man- and alienkind.

In the pursuit of most professions, there is some sort of loosely defined career path. There are educational requirements that have to be fulfilled or mechanical skills that have to be mastered or an apprentice program that has to be completed. There is no path leading to an acting career; no right way or wrong way, no tests to pass. Talent matters, of course, but it is not enough. I have known many wonderfully talented people who just never got the right opportunity. Often, it is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having some often undefined quality or desirable look; in many situations, it's as much marketability as acting ability. But every actor needs that first break. For Leonard, it was meeting Boris Sagal.

Sagal also had come from Ukraine. He was a Harvard law student with an interest in theater. The settlement house, which was only a ten-cent MTA ride across the Charles River from Harvard, let him stay in one of its guest rooms in exchange for directing plays. He was casting a production of the Clifford Odets play
Awake and Sing!
and put seventeen-year-old Leonard in a leading role. That was the first adult play Leonard had ever done, and it fit him perfectly. It was the story of three generations of a lower-middle-class immigrant Jewish family living together in an apartment in the Bronx. Leonard's character, Ralph Berger, is an idealistic young man who rejects materialism but needs money to buy his own freedom. When I interviewed Leonard on my TV show
Raw Nerve,
he told me about the impact that play had on his life.

“I thought, this is really interesting. This is about people like me … It's about our lives and the pressures and the loves and the hates and the angers and the frustrations, the fears.

“This kid I'm playing has the same concerns that I've got: what am I supposed to do with my life and who am I supposed to be … The show closes, and I go to the theater to pick up my wardrobe, the clothes that I was wearing in the play. They were my own clothes. The theater was four or five blocks away from my home in Boston. I pick them up, and I'm walking home through the streets of Boston … and I realized I was going in the wrong direction. I'm saying to myself, I'm more comfortable there than I am at home. I want to do what's there in the theater. I don't want to do what's happening in that house. There's nothing for me there. I've got to get out of there. That's when I realized I've got to get away.”