Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship With a Remarkable Man
By William Shatner with David Fisher
Thomas Dunne Books (288 pages, $29.99)
Readers accustomed to William Shatner’s punchy, pugnacious style on Twitter might be surprised by Leonard, his relaxed, warmhearted appreciation of Leonard Nimoy, his Star Trek co-star and friend who died in 2015.
Shatner and Nimoy portrayed Capt. James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock together for just three broadcast TV seasons (and subsequent movies), but the roles defined them professionally and personally from that point forward.
The distinctive joys and burdens of being Star Trek heroes were far from the only common ground for Shatner and Nimoy. Both grew up in lower-middle-class Orthodox Jewish immigrant families: Shatner in Montreal, Nimoy in Boston. Unlike Shatner, Nimoy learned Yiddish and retained a fascination with it: While living in Los Angeles, he paid a Yiddish-speaking psychiatrist her regular hourly fee to converse with him in that language.
Both spent years as hard-working actors stringing a living together by taking any parts they could land. Shatner quotes Nimoy’s advice to his son Adam, then a budding director: “Don’t turn down work if you don’t have work to replace it.” As proof of the wisdom of that statement, Shatner notes that Nimoy’s unpaid performance in a children’s theatre production of The Three Musketeers started a chain of work for him that continued for years.
While they had a similar work ethic, their approaches to acting differed. Nimoy practiced and taught Method acting, working to become the character from deep inside. Shatner describes his own approach as “the classic nontechnical technique: I memorized the script and played the character.” Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but this introversion-meets-extroversion dynamic helps explain why Kirk and Spock made such a fine pair on TV.
Shatner suggests many possible sources that fed Nimoy’s creation of Spock, such as Michael Rennie’s character in The Day the Earth Stood Still (a cool, rational, peaceful alien), Charles Laughton’s performance as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (a sense of alienation), Harry Belafonte’s stage performance (the power of minimalism and small gestures). He also retells familiar anecdotes about Nimoy’s creation of the Vulcan salute and neck pinch.
This book reflects Shatner’s point of view and opinions. Some future Memory Alpha historian will have to compare his recollections against those of many other Trek people for something approaching a definitive history. But Shatner takes no shots at Nimoy; in nearly every implied or direct comparison, Nimoy comes out different but equal, or better.
They feuded occasionally. Shatner, expecting to be the star of Star Trek, was thrown off guard by the intense public fascination with Spock; a pep talk from Gene Roddenberry helped ease Shatner out of his jealousy.
After Star Trek ended, each went on to other work, surprised first by the series’ success in syndication, then by the growth of the convention circuit, which Shatner notes became an important source of revenue for former cast and crew: “Leonard and I probably attended at least one hundred different conventions together, and this became the glue that cemented our friendship.”
Nimoy’s drinking escalated into alcoholism, but he found and embraced recovery. This weakness-turned-strength became another covalent bond between the men. When Shatner planned to marry a woman with active alcoholism, Nimoy gently warned
him of the trouble ahead, but also stood by him after her death.
“One of my greatest regrets is that Leonard and I were not as close as we had been during those last few years of his life,” Shatner writes.
While Shatner had been working on his documentary The Captains (2011), a cameraman filmed Nimoy speaking at a convention without his permission. Upset, the actor essentially stopped speaking to Shatner, who never found out what really bothered Nimoy before he died, and who also had to fend off criticisms that he didn’t attend Nimoy’s funeral (Shatner was involved in a major Red Cross fundraiser thousands of kilometres away, and wanted to keep that commitment).
“There are times in life when being a celebrity can be painful,” Shatner writes. “The fact that rather than being able to mourn the death of my dear friend in my own way, I had to deal with this controversy was one of them.”
His book is a fitting envoi to that friend.
