Up Till Now: The Autobiography

kind of visual joke, so when a national magazine wanted to do a photo story about his makeup process, featuring Freddy, he agreed. But nobody told me about it.
    We began filming every morning at 8 A.M. Leonard reported to makeup at about 6:30, but I got there about forty-five minutes later. One morning I came to work and found the photographer in the makeup room snapping away. I didn’t like that at all; I was concernedall of my little makeup secrets were going to be revealed. And no, I can’t tell you what they are. That’s why they’re secrets. So I asked someone, justifiably, I thought, “What’s this photographer doing in the makeup room?”
    The photographer quietly left the room. Leonard and Freddy waited for him to return but he never came back. Eventually Leonard was told that at my insistence an assistant director had forced the photographer to leave. Leonard was furious. He immediately came to my trailer to confront me. “Did you order the photographer out?” he demanded.
    “Yes,” I admitted, explaining, “I didn’t want him there.” Leonard recalls this conversation much better than I do. As he remembers, he told me, “It was approved by Roddenberry. It was approved by the head of the studio. It was approved by publicity.”
    To which I apparently replied, “Well, it wasn’t approved by me!” Why I responded this way I certainly don’t remember. But I’m certain my envy must have had something to do with it.
    “You mean to tell me that I’ve got to get approval from you to have my picture taken?”
    This probably was the moment that impolite language was used. Leonard angrily returned to his own trailer and refused to go to work until Gene Roddenberry arrived and settled this argument. On a TV production schedule this is an expensive crisis. Roddenberry was able to calm the situation down and eventually Leonard and I made peace.
    Generally the bonding that takes place on a set is enormous. A group of disparate people come together for a prolonged period of time, usually working under tremendous time, financial, and career pressures, and become a single unit. Almost a family. And when the production ends you promise each other that you’re going to keep in touch, that your friendship is extremely important and you just can’t wait to see them again. Two weeks later you’re working with your new family on another set.
    But on the Star Trek set Leonard remained aloof. Certainly part of the reason for that was to maintain the integrity of his character.Spock was an outsider and Leonard worried that if he got too friendly with the rest of the cast he might unconsciously close that distance. He also felt very comfortable playing that role. “I was totally at home in that character,” he told me. “I’d felt so alienated as a Jewish kid growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Boston. So I learned how to stay within my own framework. To stay out of harm’s way, out of direct confrontations because generally they didn’t work out well for me. I had a physical fear of being beaten up, or hurt, or emotionally injured in some way. So I learned how to cope with being different, with being the other. And that was the same challenge faced by Spock. I knew that feeling so very well.
    “Playing that character ten hours a day, five days a week, made it very difficult for me to turn it on and turn it off. I just couldn’t step out of the character between takes.”
    The perfect word to describe that is alienation.
    Leonard was extremely protective of Spock. As any actor who has worked in a television series understands, the producers, directors, writers, and members of the crew often change for each episode, only the characters remain consistent. “The actor is the caretaker of the character,” is the way he explained it. “Nobody else can be counted on. You have to be able to say to the writer, ‘You can’t have me say, “Let’s make hay under the Vulcan moon,” because three episodes ago we said that Vulcan has no moon.’ So my energy went into providing that consistency and continuity.”
    And perhaps the other reason that Leonard remained aloof is that he was an alcoholic. Truthfully, I didn’t know it at the time. But certainly I was aware of the fact that he maintained a cool distance from the rest of the cast. As he admits, “I was in bad shape when we were making Star Trek . My marriage had fallen apart and at times I was very despondent. So I would go home every day and