Up Till Now: The Autobiography

produce children with her, they transformed her into various types trying to figure out what would attract him. Psychologically it was very interesting. But it was much more than interesting. It was original.
    It’s very difficult all these years later, after Star Wars and Close Encounters and all the other space stories, to appreciate how extraordinarily innovative it was. The genius of Roddenberry’s Star Trek was that its characters were normal people—even the alien Spock— who had normal relationship problems—when they weren’t busy saving the universe. After watching the pilot I told Roddenberry that I thought the characters took themselves much too seriously.They made everything they did seem so monumental. Something as simple as “Turn left,” became: We are about to execute an extremely difficult maneuver that we have been carefully trained to do but accomplishing this incredibly risky task will require every bit of our ability and intelligence and we have no way of knowing what the impact of this attempt will be upon the universe. These guys have been on this voyage for years, I told him. Sometimes a left turn is simply a left turn. It’s just another workday until something dramatic changes it. I see it having more humor, more fun.
    “Okay,” he agreed. “I go along with that.”
    Roddenberry changed the name of the captain from Pike to James T. Kirk—after considering other names like Hannibal, Timber, Boone, Flagg, and Raintree. I tried to provide Kirk with the sense of awe and wonder that had been missing in the pilot. Kirk was a man who marveled and greatly appreciated the endless surprises presented to him by the universe after making that left turn. He didn’t take things for granted and, more than anything else, respected life in every one of its weird weekly adventure forms.
    And if every once in a while he could slip a whoopee cushion under the behind of the supreme commander of the Evil forces, figuratively of course, that would be okay too.
    In the second pilot Captain Kirk and Spock immediately developed the chemistry that had been missing in the pilot. Mr. Spock was half-Vulcan, an alien struggling to suppress his human emotions—his choices and decisions were all based on logic. If his commander also was serious and somber, as it had been originally written, Leonard had nothing to play against. As he remembers, “The writers couldn’t get a handle on the difference between Pike and Spock, so Spock came off as this weird kind of colorless character who was little more than a competent first officer.”
    But when Kirk was rewritten as a man with very human emotions, as well as a sense of humor, the character of Spock emerged. The broad range of emotions displayed by Kirk was a perfect contrast to Spock’s lack of emotion. We expected that viewers would find Spock strange and interesting, while at the same time Spockwas finding human beings—Kirk in particular—strange and interesting. He was always curious about why Kirk did things that were not logical. This was probably the first time that viewers could look at themselves through an alien’s eyes.
    One of the reasons the relationship worked is that Leonard’s acting style and mine were as opposite as Kirk and Spock. As Leonard explained, “Bill has always been a very externalized actor, he just opens his arms completely to the audience. By the time this show began I’d been a working actor for seventeen years, I’d been teaching acting for five years, and my style was much more internalized, each action I took and every word I spoke seemed considered, thought out.
    “The best thing that Gene Roddenberry gave to me when he offered me the part was to tell me that this character would have an internal struggle. That part of the Vulcan dynamic would be the need to find logic in often illogical situations.”
    When we began filming I didn’t know any of the other actors. The only member of the cast I’d worked with previously was Leonard Nimoy, although I was unaware of that for many years; we’d both appeared in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We may have appeared in a crowd scene together, but we had no dialogue and we definitely did not get to know each other. In addition to Leonard, DeForest Kelley played Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, James Doohan was our Scottish chief engineer Scotty, George Takei was our Asian helmsman and weapons officer Sulu, and Nichelle Nichols was our African-American female officer