Up Till Now: The Autobiography

invited us to launches, and finally I decided to go to one of them. They treated me as space royalty, eventually allowing me to sit inside the LEM, the moon landing module, with an astronaut. I was lying in the hammocklike seats pretending to be flying this module, looking out of the small windows at the universe displayed around us just as the astronauts would see it. The astronaut, who was teaching me how to fly this craft, told me to look at a certain section of the star system—and as I did, flying beautifully across the entire horizon came the Starship Enterprise.
    As I climbed down from the LEM several thousand NASA engineers started applauding. Several of the brilliant men and women who actually had designed and built this craft that would soon land Americans on the moon came forward to present me with an intricate scale model of the Enterprise that they had spent hours putting together. As they told me how difficult it was to complete, the model broke into pieces. I looked at it, and when the laughter subsided I pointed out, “It isn’t rocket science, you know.”
    Perhaps the most memorable story I’ve heard about the impact of the show was told to me by a limo driver. He had picked me up at my home to take me to the airport and we’d driven only a short distance when he pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped. “I have to tell you a story,” he said.
    Oh man, I thought, what’s going to happen now? There are certain encounters all well-known people have with fans that are less than pleasant. Sometimes they are dangerous. My hope was that this was the usual, “I’ve written a screenplay that would be perfect foryou and I know you’ll want to hear all about it. That’s why we were brought together. Okay, page one, scene one. A beautiful day but storm clouds are gathering . . .” But this wasn’t one of those stories at all. “When I was a prisoner in Vietnam,” he began. He had spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. He told me the most terrible story about being chained in cages, tortured, beaten, and deprived of food and water. But one of the few things that kept him going, he explained, that kept them all going, was that they kept themselves alive mentally by playing the Star Trek game, in which they would play our roles. By constantly changing roles and doing different segments from memory, they kept their sanity and hope alive. Star Trek had enabled him to survive, he told me, and he just wanted to thank me.
    By the time he’d finished telling me that story both of us had tears running down our faces. And he hadn’t written a screenplay.
    It’s just astonishing that a television show would have that kind of power, that it could affect scientists and soldiers and be celebrated from the Smithsonian to Las Vegas. But there was just one more little thing that ensured Captain Kirk would survive the end of the voyages of the Enterprise . In the mid-1970s director John Carpenter was creating the character of Michael Myers for his horror film Halloween . After briefly debating using a clown mask, production designer Tommy Wallace bought a $1.98 Captain Kirk mask from Burt Wheeler’s Magic Shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Then he widened the eye holes and spray-painted the mask kind of a bluish-white. Michael Myers was born.
    I have often gone trick-or-treating with my children and later my grandchildren. The concept of going door-to-door collecting candy has always been appealing to me. One year I was visiting my daughter Leslie and wanted to go out trick-or-treating with my grandchildren—but I had no mask or costume to wear. Hmm, now what could I possibly do?
    It was absolutely perfect. I put on the William Shatner mask and disguised myself as myself. Everybody who opened their doors recognized me, but nobody knew who I was.
    I never forget how much I owe to Star Trek —the longevity of my career, so many wonderful experiences at conventions and other events, the checks that enabled me to finally get more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, and almost two very large bowls of really good Halloween candy.

SIX

    Let me tell you how death gave birth to an idea: after I brought my father’s body back with me to Montreal I had to pick out the coffin in which he would be buried. My father had come to Canada as an immigrant in the early years of the twentieth century. He’d struggled all his life to bring his entire family over from the old country. So he knew the