Up Till Now: The Autobiography

forever. So I persevered. I worked. When we’d rehearsed this scene in the morning I’d known all my lines, but when we filmed in the afternoon I just couldn’t remember them. I remember being stoic, while Leonard remembers me saying over and over,“Promises not kept, promises not kept. Things that he wanted to do...”
    That night I flew to Miami to pick up my father’s body and bring him home to Montreal.
    The result of that was the last serious argument Leonard and I have ever had. In this episode workers on a mining planet were being killed by a creature who lived in their caves. The creature, called a Horta, was a strange-looking beast operated by a guy inside the suit crawling on the floor. As Spock discovered during a painful mind-meld with the Horta, it was the last of its race and was simply protecting its eggs. It was saving the species. Eventually I was able to forge a peace between the miners and the Horta, which agreed to tunnel for the miners, who in return agreed to protect its offspring.
    While I was gone Leonard had a scene in which he performed a mind-meld with the wounded Horta. The danger of a mind-meld is that Spock literally felt the intense pain being felt by the Horta. So in this scene he had to get down and put his hands on it and cried in pain. Pain...pain... pain. It’s a difficult scene for an actor to make believable.
    When I returned from my father’s funeral the set was very somber. People were being very sympathetic, which I appreciated, but I wanted everyone to know that I was dealing with it and I was fine. I wanted to relieve some of the tension on the set. The first thing I had to do was figure out how to react to Leonard’s mind-meld. I looked at the footage and then told him, “Show me what you did.”
    He explained, “Well, I went over here and I put my hands on her and I said, ‘pain, pain, pain.’ “
    I shook my head. “It was bigger than that. Can you show me exactly what you did?”
    This had been a difficult scene for an actor, but as a favor to me Leonard got back into position and did the scene. He didn’t just go through the motions, he felt the emotion. He screamed out, “Pain. Pain. Pain.”
    And I said glibly, “Can somebody get this guy an aspirin?” Ithought everybody would have a good laugh and we would go back to normal.
    Leonard did not think it was funny. He was furious. He thought I’d set him up and then betrayed him for the amusement of everyone else on the set. I had toyed with his commitment to his character and the show. For a laugh at his expense. An actor had betrayed an actor, the worst thing you could do. He told me later that he was done with me, that he thought I was a real son of a bitch. He didn’t say a word to me for more than a week.
    Many Star Trek plots revolved around beautiful women, although often we discovered these women were actually alien life forms or computer-generated mind images intended to make us compliant. The ole man-trap strategy. But during an episode in the third season entitled “Elaan of Troyius,” which guest-starred France Nuyen as an arrogant princess, I told Spock, “Mr. Spock, the women on your planet are logical. That’s the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim.” In many ways I think that summed up the difficulties that I had understanding women.
    Admittedly, I wasn’t good at being married. I didn’t know how to make a real commitment to another person. On some level I believed that because I was paying the bills, I should make all the decisions. Holding the purse strings meant having the power. So my marriage to Gloria became very lopsided. I know now that when you take away someone’s self-worth their whole entity is lessened. The person you fell in love with slowly disappears, replaced by...by frustration, anger, disenchantment, and tremendous resentment. And then you get angry with them for no longer being the person you married. It’s considerably more volatile when two actors marry but only one has a successful career.
    I was working so hard to support my family and resented Gloria because I was getting so little joy out of my marriage. She resented me for...for probably many reasons. So Gloria stayed home with our girls and it seemed like each week new and beautiful—and seemingly available—women showed up on the set. We had separatedemotionally years earlier, but while we were making Star Trek I physically moved out of the house. Eventually she filed for