Up Till Now. The Autobiography

drink. On weekends I would tell myself I’ll have a beer at ten o’clock. By two o’clock I was drinking hard liquor and by five o’clock I’d be passed out.
    “As many alcoholics can do, I hid it at work. I never allowed it to affect my work. And as long as I never drank while I was workingI had this illusion of control. I lied to myself a lot: I don’t work drunk, I don’t drink at all in connection to my work. I can wait. When I was performing in a play my first drink would be when the curtain came down. But that drink had to be there. When I walked into my dressing room I wanted an ice-cold gin on the rocks waiting for me. When I directed the movie Star Trek III my secretary knew that as soon as I said, ‘Cut. That’s a wrap,’ I wanted a drink. And then I would drink constantly. Once I had that first drink I would not stop drinking until I passed out or fell asleep.
    “I thought I was smart. I thought I was able to hide it successfully. But alcohol is smarter. When I was in need of a drink and it wasn’t there I could get very upset. I did a lot of college lectures, many of them in small towns. When I checked into the motel in the afternoon one of the first things I asked was how late their bar was open. That way I knew what time I had to finish and get back there. Well, in some of these towns if there’s nobody in the bar on a weeknight they’ll tell the bartender to lock up and go home. And every once in a while I’d come back to the hotel and the bar would be locked. I wanted my drink. I’d go to the front desk and say, ‘You told me the bar would be open until ten o’clock. Open the fucking bar!’ Because I’m in trouble was the unspoken subtext. And security would get me a bottle of scotch. When going out I would choose restaurants that I knew had a full bar. I loved going to the theater in London because they allowed you to drink before the show and during intermission.
    “This went on for many years, the entire time I believed I was in control. I can handle this. If necessary for professional reasons I could go a week without a drink. But eventually I started waking up in the morning thinking, why do I want to live today? And that’s when I first became concerned.
    “I married my wife, Susan, in 1989. I was still drinking, but I was deliriously happy with her. And one day I was talking to her about how different my life was with her and how happy I felt, and she asked me, ‘Then why do you drink so much?’
    “And I thought, you know, she’s right. I don’t have to do this anymore. So she called a friend and within hours, on a Sunday night,someone was here from Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember he said to me, ‘You cannot drink a little.’ We talked for two hours and the next night I went to my first AA meeting, which was a thrill. I haven’t had a drink since we had that conversation that night.”
    Years later Leonard’s alcoholism, about which I knew nothing while we were making Star Trek , would come to play a central role in my life. And it would bond us together in a way that I never could have imagined—particularly when he was getting all that attention. Not that I minded the character with the weird ears taking the attention away from the noble Captain Kirk, of course.
    Wooden? I barely even remember sitting at the kitchen table on a rainy morning, eating three slightly undercooked eggs over easy, reading that review while Gloria, who was dressed in a pale green cotton top, got the girls ready for school. As a professional actor, those things don’t bother me. And that particular review has continued to not bother me for more than four decades.
    A series begins to work when the personalities of the characters, and the relationships between those characters, become clearly defined to the viewers. So you don’t need an explanation about the meaning of each line or gesture. Leonard always pointed to the end of an episode entitled “The Devil in the Dark” as the moment that perfectly captured the relationship between Kirk and Spock. After we’d successfully saved a creature named the Horta, who seemed to be attracted to Spock, I told him that he was becoming more human all the time. He considered that, then responded, “Captain, there’s no reason for me to stand here and be insulted.” Then walked off the bridge of the Enterprise.
    Certainly no television show in history has been so thoroughly chronicled and analyzed as Star Trek . There are people, Trekkies,