Up Till Now. The Autobiography

characters in the history of American entertainment. One night, for example, decades after the show went off the air, I was watching a TV show. A scene took place in a lawyer’s office, and as the camera panned across the room I noticed that hanging on the rear wall, just over the main character’s shoulder, was a framed photograph of Captain Kirk. I literally had become part of the furniture.
    But the incident I remember most took place in the early 1980s, as I was driving to the Academy Awards with my second wife, Marcy. We were on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, a very main road. There was a lot of traffic and directly in front of us two cars were jockeying for position. As I watched, it was clear that this was a serious case of road ego. These drivers were both recklessly swerving in and out of traffic, trying to cut off the other’s car. Finally the two cars ended up right next to each other. I could see the passenger in the car on my left leaning out his window and screaming at the driver of the second car, who apparently was screaming right back. And then he just took a deep breath and spit at the driver. That was it. The second driver swerved in front of the first car, cutting him off, and slammed on his brakes. His door flew open and he jumped out of the car. The passenger swung open his door and got out. They started screaming at each other and finally one of them threw the first punch. They started pummeling each other. An incident of road rage had escalated into a dangerous fight.
    It was terrible. Marcy and I were going to be late for the Oscars.
    I got out of the car. I grasped the arm of one of the brawlers toalert him that I was there. I didn’t want to get hit by a wild blow. I held up my hand in front of the second man and said firmly, “I’m breaking this up.”
    It seemed obvious that both men had been driven by their machismo to get into it a lot deeper than they liked—and were happy that someone was stopping them. The second man glanced over my hand at my face. He seemed shocked. “Captain Kirk !” he said.
    Almost instantly both men relaxed. The anger just drained right out of them. Of course they had to stop—Captain Kirk had taken charge of the situation!
    That was the power of the Star Trek franchise. While we were doing the show, Leonard, more than anyone else, worried about being typecast. “When the part was first offered to me,” he remembers, “I had a conversation with Vic Morrow, who had starred in the successful series Combat! I told him I was concerned about what playing this character might do to my career. He told me, ‘You have three choices. You can do it in total makeup so nobody knows who’s underneath the makeup, or do it for the money and when it’s over you take the makeup off and you’re ready to go to work, or you can do it recognizably and hope it helps your career.’
    “I didn’t want to hide inside the character. I thought, if this thing works I want people to know that this actor did it. I was proud enough to want the credit for giving that performance.”
    But in its initial run Star Trek had not been successful enough for any of the actors to become typecast. Star Trek was just a few lines on our résumés and an occasional small check. Probably Leonard had a little more difficulty than anyone else because his character was so unique. When the show was canceled all of us went back to the work of being an actor. Leonard, for example, began touring with his play Vincent , and eventually joined the cast of Mission: Impossible for two seasons.
    It was only after the show unexpectedly became an international hit that all of the actors became well known and strongly identified with their characters. But by the time that happened all of us were hard at work on a variety of other projects. So until I began appearingat conventions and making the Star Trek movies I hadn’t seen any members of the cast besides Leonard since the day I had walked off the set for the last time. We’d worked together on the television series and on six Star Trek motion pictures, and then we’d gone in different directions. That’s what an actor’s life is like.
    I had always assumed my relationships with everyone else in the cast were fine. Maybe we hadn’t become good friends, but to my memory there had not been any difficulty, any bad feelings. And truthfully, for most of my life I’ve had very few close friends. I’ve had many acquaintances, there are so many people