Star Trek Memories

CAPTAIN’S LOG

T

OGETHER AT

M

ANN

’

S

. (© 1993 P

ARAMOUNT

P

ICTURES

)

Stardate: August 10, 1991

Snoring, smiling broadly, I am secure in the warmth and comfort of a carefree, dreamless sleep, and then it hits.

Instantly, my peace is shattered by the brain-piercing electronic screeching that blares and buzzes from my evil digital alarm clock. Quickly I spring into action, tossing about heroically and finally employing the desperate maneuver known as the old pillow over the ears trick. Nothing works, and I come to realize that this is truly a no-win situation … in Trekker, an early-morning Kobayashi Maru. Slowly, painfully, my eyelids begin to slide upward, and my semiconscious senses begin to contemplate the orangy-red block-style numbers that glare and blink at me, just out of reach, mocking my early-morning helplessness. Their blurry taunts immediately tell me that my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and, upon squinting, that it’s also 5:15

A.M

. I’m late.

Now, as a pronounced series of bodily cracks and pops serenades me from deep within most of my moving parts, I make a supreme effort to overcome my blissful inertia. I rise from bed and start walking. Left foot … right foot, left foot, right. I repeatedly give this order to my brain, and after a short struggle, the gray matter grudgingly obeys. Still not quite conscious, I begin shuffling through the darkness, grunting and scratching in a sort of slumped-over posture. Basically, at this point I’m a Cro-Magnon in light blue pajamas.

Now I boldly go … into the bathroom, stumbling to the sink, where a sting of cold tile and a splash of cold water shock me at both extremities. The cobwebs finally begin to dissipate. I find my toothbrush, and in my nearly awakened state, I even manage to load it up. I now pause to admire my neatly symmetrical blob of tartar-control goo, lean in over the sink, look up into the mirror and come face to face with my own image, which scares me.

Here, by the dawn’s early and uncompromising light, my face provides ample documentation of my own mortality. I look tired. I look old. This starts me thinking, but surprisingly, I’m not conjuring up any morose thoughts about the aging process. Instead, I’m almost immediately flooded with fond reminiscences of what got me here. My wrinkles, I muse, have been well earned, and they provide visual evidence of a career crammed with wonderful memories, and a life that’s been extraordinarily rewarding, both personally and professionally.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve been unavoidably nostalgic of late, and this may account for my early-morning reminiscing. You see, today will mark the end of shooting on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It’s a film that’s been promoted as "the final voyage of the Starship Enterprise," and even though I’ve heard that said about all five of the previous big-screen adventures, I think this time the rumors may bear some credibility. Consequently, I’ve been savoring every long and hectic day on the set, reveling in the company of my castmates and marveling at the skills of our writers, producers and technical crew.

Strangely enough, the idea that this might actually be the last voyage has allowed me to broaden my perspective, and I’ve found myself looking at the whole Star Trek phenomenon in a new light. Somehow, only as it’s begun to slip away am I able to view it in the all-encompassing and appreciative light that it deserves. I mean, I must admit, I’ve never actually considered myself a Trekker, nor have I ever fully understood the enormous enthusiasm that the show has always seemed to generate among its most rabid fans. For me it has always been first and foremost a job, and somehow only now, when it may be ending, am I able to see past the work, past the day-to-day machinations and into the very reasoning behind what made it so great.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m at Paramount Studios, where I’m made up and dressed as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, perhaps for the last time. Our last day of shooting is quite simple, really; just a couple of brief scenes. However, sentimentality begins to slow us down, as all of us, the entire cast and a large portion of the crew, have come to realize that every moment of this production, and especially of this day, is to be cherished.

By the time midafternoon has arrived, we’ve wrapped. Champagne bottles are popping, cast and crew are hugging, kissing and smiling broadly. However, underneath the joy of having successfully completed our project, there is, really for the first time, a tangible undercurrent of sadness. I think it’s weighing heavily on all of us that this time our good-byes may really mean good-bye.

Flash forward four months. We’re closing in on Christmas and Star Trek VI has opened to critical acclaim and even greater box-office success. Paramount is pushing the film tremendously and in the middle of all this activity, we original cast members have been asked to gather once more, to place our hand- and footprints in the fabled wet cement outside of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

As I arrive, Nichelle and Walter are already working the crowd, smiling, waving and standing next to countless tourists as Instamatic flashbulbs glare. George Takei is there, too, and I swear to you this man thinks he’s a Vulcan. I mean, it’s either that or he’s had some sort of operation on his hands, because wherever he goes, he’s wearing an enormous smile, and displaying ambidextrous Vulcan hand signals for Live long and prosper. Jimmy Doohan, as usual, is toying with reporters, answering their every question with his standard three-word answer: Jimmy, do you think the studio means it this time when they say it’s the last movie? It’s a PLOY! yells Jimmy. "Jimmy, they say the next film may star the Next Generation cast. Is that true? It’s a PLOY! Jimmy, what’s the weather forecast for tomorrow? It’s a PLOY!!" And of course my good friend Leonard is there, too, smiling, playing it cool, and underneath it all, I’m sure he’s just as excited as I am.

I mean this is Mann’s Chinese Theater. This is something really special, and as I watch the masons preparing our wet-cement squares, I notice that all around our section are names like Wallace Beery, Norma Shearer and Buster Keaton. And it strikes me that these are legends, great stars of the silent screen. So of course I’m really impressed with myself.

But here’s how our squares ended up being divided: Squeezed up in the top left was my name, squeezed up in the top right was Leonard’s. And this was because smack in the middle of the squares, and taking up a good-sized chunk of all four, was the name DeForest Kelley. And nobody said anything resentful about it. We were all too well-mannered. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who looked askance and wondered, Why does DeForest Kelley get four whole squares? In fact, DeForest was so excited, and so impressed with himself, that if you look closely at the square, you’ll notice that he actually wrote D-E-F-O-R-O-T … in CEMENT! I swear the man forgot how to spell his own name! I mean in the past he’d certainly gone through that whole I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer schtick, but now he’d really proven it!

And so of course I got to spend the rest of the afternoon kidding him about losing his faculties and being too old to do any more movies. It was great.

Still, as I looked at my friends of the past quarter-century, I couldn’t begin to hold back all of the memories that burst forward. I couldn’t help thinking about the bigger picture and about the people whose lives have been changed and even shaped by Star Trek. Not just the cast, but our creators, our crew members, and above all else our fans. You’re the ones who made it all possible, and the ones who celebrated and fought for every bit of Star Trek’s existence. You’re the reason it’s endured, you’re the reason it was able to become so great.

Later, after we’d all made our speeches, posed for our publicity stills and squashed our extremities into the cold, clammy immortality that Mann’s had to offer, I got a chance to talk with my castmates. We shared laughs, hugs and lots of Star Trek stories that were known only among ourselves. Stories of good times and not-so-good times. Memories that even throughout the unparalleled documentation of the Star Trek universe have never before been told. It really struck me as odd, even unfair, that Star Trek supporters, who are indeed the world’s most knowledgeable fans, have never really been told the whole story. There are truckloads of information that you’ve never been allowed to see, warehouses full of stories you’ve never been told, and with all that in mind, it struck me that somebody should write a definitive Star Trek book.

H

MMM

, D-E-F-O-R-O-

UH-OH

. (© 1993 P

ARAMOUNT

P

ICTURES

)

So in true Jim Kirk style, I immediately mapped out a plan and put it into action. Now that it’s finished, I think that you’ll find throughout the ensuing inches of paper that this book about Star Trek is very different from those that have preceded it. It’s not going to run through detailed synopses of every episode (because quite frankly, you people already know them all by heart). It’s not going to provide exacting blueprints of the Enterprise or speculate on adventures that might have been or delve into things like the advanced tenets of the Vulcan philosophical mind-set. All of that’s been done, and to be brutally honest, I don’t know that I could write any of those books.

What I can tell you about, having spent more than a quarter-century mixed up in the middle of all this, is how Star Trek the series actually worked. I can tell you the tales of how Star Trek was created, produced, written, filmed, edited and polished by an army of technical wizards. I can also let you in on all of the onstage, sidestage and backstage goings-on that came together and became Star Trek. Above and beyond everything else, I’d like to tell you about the people who made Star Trek so great. They are the real story. They are the real heroes, and they deserve to be given their due.

With all that in mind, I’ll have to ask you to proceed, warp factor two … Sorry, sometimes I can’t help myself.

ORIGINS

The real story of Star Trek doesn’t start at a television network, or in a film studio. In fact, it doesn’t even start in Hollywood. It starts in a box. An ordinary cardboard box, 24 × 36 × 36". At one point a soap carton, this large corrugated rectangle, ragged and dusty, now sits in the sun-baked dirt backyard of a modest home, in the middle of El Paso, Texas, in the middle of the nineteen twenties. There is nothing at all special about the box itself; in fact, it’s a rather beaten-up grocery store castoff. However, if you were to look inside this box, you would find something rather unexpected … a small, sickly, rather handicapped little boy.

The kid’s got all kinds of problems. He has trouble breathing, and suffers frequent unexplained seizures. He squints because his eyes can’t adjust properly to sunlight. His legs are weak, spindly, uncoordinated and unsteady. As a result, and as you might expect, he is extremely self-conscious, embarrassed about his physical stature and withdrawn.

Here, however, within the comfortable confines of his own backyard, he can escape the limitations of a less than perfect body by diving into his beloved collection of books, becoming a part of the dream world they hold captive within their pages. It is a world far preferable to the one that lurks ominously outside the picket fence, a world in which he can, with the turn of a page, perform any task imaginable, and become any great character he wants to be.

With a book in his hand, he can instantly become a Zane Grey cowboy, or Robinson Crusoe, D’Artagnan, Hawkeye, Ishmael, Huck Finn, literally anyone he can imagine. Astounding Stories, a science fiction magazine of the era, is an absolute favorite and a revered complement to his stacks of more formal literature. Its pulp pages are filled each week with fascinating and exciting stories of incredible, impossible stuff such as space travel, visits to the moon and the like. The cheap nickel magazine holds tremendous value for this particular kid, and that brings us back to the box.

This box, you see, is not just a box. It’s a spaceship, at least as far as this boy is concerned. Its flimsy paperboard walls suggest the frame of a great and powerful vessel, and its tiny interior houses an entire crew of imaginary intergalactic heroes. At the helm, a bold and strong captain travels fearlessly about the universe discovering new worlds, societies and life forms, as well as routinely saving the cosmos from the ravaging advances of unfriendly space-traveling bad guys. The box, by now mis-shapen and rather tattered, serves an incredibly important purpose, in that it provides, on a regular basis, an outlet wherein this one sick child can completely forget about his physical shortcomings, his illnesses and the frightening impositions and realities of the real world. Inside the box, he’s healthy, he’s happy, he’s safe.

Flash forward across twenty years and this sickly kid has grown up and completely out of his illnesses. In fact, this undersized boy has grown up to become an extra-large man. Still, despite the sweeping physical changes, he’s retained his intrinsic shyness, his introspective nature and his raging fascination with literature. As a result, he exists now as a rather burly, gentle bear of a man, whose formidable exterior masks a quiet, rather delicate and extremely creative soul.

Today, however, this creative soul is sweating like a pig, as would any normal human being trapped in the middle of a Calcutta summer. The city is truly hellish, oppressively hot, extremely impoverished and teeming with sickness. The kid sits amid the nearly unbearable surroundings, alone in the shade of a grimy café umbrella. He’s fanning himself with one hand while shooing flies and writing with the other, jotting notes into a dog-eared notebook. He’s once again escaping into a literary dream world, only now he’s the master of his own fate, penciling his way through short stories, nonfiction pieces and the occasional science fiction theme. Mostly, however, he’s killing time.

He works as an airline pilot now, having recently signed on with Pan Am after completing a tour of duty as an army pilot during World War II. As low man on the Pan Am totem pole, he’s of course been assigned the airline’s least desirable route, drawing the godawful duty of piloting the company’s New York-Calcutta run. Once in Calcutta, his flight plans regularly entail a twenty-two-hour layover, which without diversion in this steaming, unpleasant environment would prove virtually intolerable. As a result, he writes profusely, honing his literary skills, and effectively shutting out the unpleasantness that his Calcutta layovers entail. In time, he manages to get some spot work writing technical articles for an aeronautical magazine, and a frequent pastime is to draw upon his memories of Astounding Stories, and toy with some rough ideas for science fiction. He finds that he thoroughly enjoys writing, especially within the science fiction genre, and that he seems to have a real ability to tell stories that are both intelligent and compelling. He continues to pursue his aeronautical career, but he also allows himself to begin dreaming. Hoping that someday he might see his stories told in print, or on television or even in the movies.

By now, you’ve probably realized that the child, the pilot and the aspiring writer all grew up to one day become the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, Gene Roddenberry. However, as you’ll find out in the following pages, Gene took what could euphemistically be described as the scenic route to success, struggling through a good number of lean years before Star Trek even entered his life.

By the time 1949 has arrived, Gene’s taken his first leap of faith, quitting his job with Pan Am and moving, with his wife and children in tow, to Los Angeles, where he hopes to find work as a writer in the embryonic but exploding industry of television. He is extremely talented, diligent in his job-hunting, but like almost all young and inexperienced writers, he is entirely unsuccessful in his efforts.

It’s a tough situation. Married, with kids to feed and bills to pay, Gene realizes the obvious, and decides that he’s going to have to find a steady job … any steady job, fast. He peruses the local want ads, pounds the pavement and eventually decides to become a police officer with the LAPD.

Gene is trained, tested, sworn in and assigned to motorcycle duty. In time he rises to the rank of sergeant, and begins writing speeches for Los Angeles police chief William Parker. He enjoys writing for Parker, who seems genuinely interested in bettering the police department, but at the same time, Gene’s determined to stop writing someone else’s speeches and start writing his own scripts. However, at this point in time, he’s had no luck at all in selling any of his own material, nor has he been able to secure an agent who’ll agree to represent him.

This is an important point, because without an agent, Gene’s scripts stand almost no chance of ever being read by anyone with the authority to hire him. It’s part of a real Catch-22 situation that every young writer must deal with, even today. Quite simply, if you’re a budding writer without much professional writing experience, most agents will refuse to represent you, due to their own perception that you’re an amateur, not likely to be very good, and not likely to get hired very often—it’s simply too much work for too little commission. With all that in mind, it becomes conceivable that even if Shakespeare himself were to rise from the dead, dig himself out of his grave and hop a transatlantic Concorde to L.A., showing up in the William Morris offices with TV spec script in hand, he’d most likely be turned away at the lobby. Babe, the agents would say, how can I sell you when you’ve never even written a sitcom? In short, when it comes to finding representation, agents are more interested in your resume than in your writing ability.

Compounding every young writer’s frustration is the fact that actually getting any professional experience as a writer on any large-scale production is almost impossible without the assistance of a competent and rather crafty agent. With all that in mind, Gene Roddenberry knew he’d have to resort to some incredibly unusual guerrilla tactics in securing professional representation. And that’s exactly what he did.

You see, during the period of time when Gene was serving in the Los Angeles Police Department as a motorcycle cop, he discovered that almost all of the most well-known, sought-after and respected agents in town hung out quite frequently at a gathering place … okay, bar … called the Cock and Bull. They’d spend their happy hours there, chatting and gossiping with one another, exchanging news of the trade, scarfing down platefuls of hors d’oeuvres from the complimentary buffet and of course guzzling down tumblerfuls of whatever was poured in front of them. First and foremost among these Hollywood agents was the fabled Irving Swifty Lazar.

Now what you’ve also got to understand before we can go any further is that most successful agents, and especially well-known players like Swifty, will run screaming for the hills at the first sight of a struggling young writer. It’s not because they’re insensitive or uncaring; it’s simply because they are pounced upon all day every day by a virtual parade of aspiring wordsmiths. Given half a chance, these guys will invariably corner said agents bearing scripts in hand, chatting them up and hoping to make an impression so … impressive that they’ll be signed on as a client.

It almost never works, because quite obviously these very successful Hollywood ten-percenters can’t possibly read all the scripts that are foisted upon them. There just isn’t time in the day. Due to the same time constraints, no single agent can possibly represent anything but the tiniest fraction of Hollywood’s most talented writers.

With that in mind, Gene formulates a plan, and as legend has it, Step One involves attiring himself in his full motorcycle cop’s uniform. Step Two finds Gene placing a freshly mimeographed copy of a sample Roddenberry script into a plain manila envelope. He then tucks the package inside his black leather policeman’s jacket, straps on his helmet and straddles his Hog. Then, with a mighty kickstart and some mechanical thunder, he smiles and roars off through the streets of L.A.

Step Three: With red lights flashing and sirens blaring, Gene pulls up in the doorway of the Cock and Bull, literally parking his huge policeman’s cycle in the restaurant foyer. The cycle’s lights are blinding, the sirens deafening, and with the restaurant doors thrown open and the setting sun lodged directly behind his helmet, Gene’s hulking silhouette looms ominously, almost Schwarzenegger-like, over the room.

And now great gaggles of Hollywood agents, who tend as a group to be especially wary of police, scurry about trying their best to blend into the wallpaper and at least look innocent. Roddenberry now flicks aside the diminutive maitre d’ and strides purposefully into the room.

At which point this hulking, helmeted, reflector-sunglassed policeman-from-hell yells out Irving Lazar, which one of you is Mr. Irving Lazar!

Oh, SHIT! whispers the now quaking, completely agitated Lazar, who sheepishly comes forward, prepared, I’m sure, to be hauled off to jail for some unknown indiscretion. Instead, Roddenberry just puts one large, leather-gloved hand upon Lazar’s comparatively puny shoulder, leans forward, pulls the script out from under his arm, holds it under Lazar’s nose and says, This is for you! I suggest you read it. He then lays the script on the bar, turns on his size-twelve boots and strides out the door.

And now, of course, even as Gene’s roaring back out into the night, Swifty’s tearing open this envelope with the unbridled gusto of a two-year-old on Christmas morning. The contents spill onto the bar, and Swifty realizes he’s been given a sample script to read, and that the cop was probably just another member of Hollywood’s aspiring-writer glut.

Swifty’s fellow agents now come scrambling back out of the woodwork to find out what all the commotion was about. They clamor around Lazar, asking, What the hell was that? and Who was that guy? To which Swifty replies, I don’t know, but whoever that son of a bitch is, he deserves to be read. I’ll kill the bastard, but he deserves to be read.

Swifty goes home, reads Roddenberry’s material and is so thoroughly impressed that within twenty-four hours, he’s signed him to a contract.

With Lazar now pulling the strings, Gene actually begins to make some limited progress in his writing career, selling an occasional script pseudonymously in order to beat the police department’s no moonlighting edict. Still, the economics of the situation dictate that Gene remain first and foremost a cop. However, as time passes, Gene’s talents begin to gain recognition. He finds himself in demand, writing steadily, and as his reputation for tight, solid and substantive teleplays begins to grow, he becomes extremely busy, churning out scripts for many of the era’s most popular shows. Within two years’ time, he’s earning far more as a writer than he is as a cop. Finally, when he simply becomes too busy to keep juggling both jobs, he says good-bye to the police force.

In the years that follow, Gene works very steadily, penning episodes for some of the best (Naked City, Highway Patrol, Dr. Kildare) and worst (The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Jane Wyman Theater, Boots and Saddles) programs on TV. In his now extremely limited spare time, he begins constantly squirreling away handwritten notes to himself. They’re full of creative ideas, roughed-out dramatic story lines and thoughts that might be helpful in writing future television shows. Among these random thoughts, Gene’s also begun to scribble some ideas that he hopes will someday prove useful in the writing of a science fiction series.

Gene continues to work very steadily as a writer throughout the next half-dozen years, most frequently on the show Have Gun Will Travel, where he becomes head writer. Still, as busy as Gene has become, he begins to grow professionally dissatisfied, disillusioned with the formulaic westerns and cop shows he’s most often hired to write.

Also, though Gene is earning a terrific amount of money throughout these years, he finds himself growing increasingly unhappy with the week-to-week uncertainty of life as a television writer, with the lack of creative control he is allowed over his work and with the puritanical mind-set of the network censors of the day.

At the same time, Gene is also growing dissatisfied on a personal level. He and his wife, Eileen, have become increasingly distant throughout the latter half of their almost twenty years of marriage, and by the early part of the sixties, they remain married, lovelessly, basically for the sake of their children. It is a difficult situation that becomes even more problematic when Gene meets and begins a relationship with the woman who will ultimately, after suffering through years of other woman status, become his second wife. Her name is Majel Lee Hudec, but she is far more recognizable to Star Trek fans by her stage name, Majel Barrett.

Having absolutely no idea about how the early Barrett/Roddenberry relationship was formed, and not wanting to simply speculate on such a personal matter, I thought it might be best to let Majel tell the story.

We weren’t lovers at the very beginning, that sort of developed after we’d become friends, but I had known Gene since 1961. He had two kids at the time, and of course he was married, but even though he told me about how unhappy he was, I knew that he wasn’t ready to leave them. You know, there’s the tired old story about how the married man will say, Ohhhh, my wife treats me terribly, she doesn’t understand me, okay, let’s have sex, but that wasn’t the way Gene was at all. He didn’t do that, and in the beginning he never gave me any real reason to think that he was interested in divorce.

Gene was not happy at home, but in his mind he had made a commitment, and this was a man who took commitment very seriously. When he made a promise, he kept it. It was very frustrating, though, in that up until Gene actually left his wife, I really couldn’t anticipate spending the rest of my life with him. I felt I would spend the rest of my life loving him, but not necessarily with him.

By 1962, Gene’s familial commitment, coupled with his own growing dissatisfaction in regard to a writer’s career instability and frustrating lack of creative control, has prompted him to begin actively working toward attaining more job security. Toward that end, he begins writing original pilots, having them produced and hoping to sell them as series. One of the first was called 333 Montgomery, and it starred a man whose own career as an actor would, over the course of the next thirty years, become inseparably paired with Roddenberry’s career as a writer and producer.

The star was DeForest Kelley.

Kelley would be playing the role of Jake Ehrlich, San Francisco’s most famous real-life criminal lawyer, and I asked De to tell me about his first meeting