Alternate Gerrolds (6 page)

There’s this other series that’s just winding down—a war series called
The Lieutenant—
Bobby calls in the producer, a guy named Roddenberry and tells him that NBC wants a sci-fi show based on
The New Frontier.
Can he make it work? They’ve still got all the costumes, the sets, the miniatures, everything. Roddenberry says he doesn’t know anything about science fiction, but he’ll give it a try. He tells his secretary to rush out and buy up every science fiction anthology she can find and do summaries of all the stories that have spaceships in them.

What with one thing and another, it’s 1964 before they ever start filming the first pilot. But all the MGM magic is applied, and they end up with one of the most beautiful—and most
expensive
—TV pilots ever made. Of course, Roddenberry put in all his own ideas, and by the time he was through, the only thing left from the movie was in the opening lines of the title sequence: “Space, the new frontier. These are the voyages ... et cetera, et cetera.”

NBC hated the pilot—they said it was “too cerebral”—but they liked the look of the show, so they say to Bobby, let’s try again, give us another pilot. Bobby says no. Take it or leave it. MGM bails out, so Roddenberry
goes over to Desilu, where they make a second pilot. He changes the name to
Star Track,
and the show goes on the air in 1966. You know the rest.

Two years later, MGM buys Desilu. Bobby Kennedy strong-arms NBC to move the show to an eight o’clock time slot, and it’s a big hit. But then, to settle some old grudge—Bobby hated being wrong—he fires Roddenberry. The rumor mill said it was women—maybe. I don’t know and I’m not going to speculate. Dorothy Fontana takes over as producer, and surprise, the show just gets better. Meanwhile,
The Untouchables
gets cancelled and Jack Kennedy is out of work again.

The timing was everything here. See, Shatner and Nimoy were feuding. Not only feuding, they were counting each other’s lines. Nimoy threatens to quit. Shatner does too. They’re both demanding the same thing: “Whatever he gets, I get.”

Bobby agrees and fires both of them. He starts looking around for a new Captain.

He doesn’t have to look very far.

In hindsight, yes. It was the perfect decision. John F. Kennedy as Captain Jack Logan of the starship
Enterprise
. The man was perfect. Who wouldn’t want to serve under him? But—at the time, who knew? It sounded crazy. Here’s this old fart who’s career is clearly fading fast—why cast him in
Star Track?

And Jack didn’t want to do it. By now, he hated science fiction so much, he once took a poke at Harlan Ellison at the Emmy Awards. He didn’t understand it. He had to have it explained to him. Once, he even called down to the research department and asked, “Just where is this planet Vulcan, anyway?”

And that was the other thing—Jack had already seen how Shatner got upstaged by the Vulcan. To him, it was the goddamn Martians all over again. The man was almost fifty—he looked great, but he was terrified of becoming a has-been, of ending up like Ronald Reagan.

But Bobby had a vision. He was good at that stuff. He promised to restructure the show in Jack’s favor. Jack agreed—very reluctantly—to listen. That’s enough for Bobby. He calls in the staff of the show and says my brother wants to be captain. “Make it so.”

I gotta tell you. That was not a happy meeting. I’d just come aboard as story editor, so I just sat there and kept my mouth shut. Harlan argued a little, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe he was afraid he’d get punched
again. He didn’t like the Kennedys very much. Dorothy did most of the talking for us—but Bobby didn’t want to hear. He listened, maybe he just pretended to listen, but when everything had been said, he just answered, “Do it my way.” We were not happy when we left.

For about three days, we were pissed as hell, because we’d finally gotten the show settled into a good solid working formula, and then suddenly—
poof!
—Roddenberry, Nimoy and Shatner are gone, and Bobby Kennedy is giving orders. But then it sort of hit us all at the same time. Hey, this is an opportunity to reinvent
Star Track.
So we made a list of all the shit that bothered us—like the captain always having to get the girl, the captain always beaming down to the planet, that kind of stuff, and we started thinking about ways to fix it.

We knew Jack couldn’t do the action stuff believably. He was already gray at the temples, and his back problems were legendary on the set of
The Untouchables,
so we knew we were going to have to introduce a younger second lead to pick up the action. That’s where the Mission Team came from. So Jack wouldn’t have to do it.

We really had no choice. Jack had to be an older, more thoughtful captain who stayed on the ship and monitored the missions by remote control. The Mission Team would be headed by the first officer. But this was perfect because it kept the captain in command at all times, and it also made it impossible for the first officer to become a sidekick, or a partner. Jack would be the undeniable star.

We also figured we’d just about milked the Vulcan idea to death, so we eighty-sixed the whole Vulcan species and brought in an android to take Spock’s place as science officer. The android would be curious about humanity—kind of like an updated Pinocchio. The opposite of Spock; he
wants
to be human.

Just as we were starting to get excited about the possibilities of the new format, Jack suggested adding families to the crew of the starship to attract a family audience. Maybe the android’s best friend could be a teenage computer genius ... the kids would
love
that. We ended up calling the android REM—it means Rapid-Eye-Movement—and casting Donald Pleasance. Billy Mumy came aboard as Dr. McCoy’s grandson, Wesley.

To be fair, Pleasance made the whole android thing work, but none of us ever really
liked
the idea very much. We tried arguing against it, but who ever listens to the writer’s opinion? Whatever Jack wanted, Jack got. Bobby made sure of that. So, there we were—lost in space with Jack Kennedy.

And then ... to make it even worse, Jack started reviewing outlines, sending us memoes about what Jack Logan would or wouldn’t do. Clearly, he was having trouble telling the difference between the character and the actor who played him. Jack killed a lot of good ideas. I had one where these little furballs started breeding like crazy—kind of like the rabbits in Australia? Dorothy thought it had a lot of whimsy. Everybody liked it. But Jack killed it. He said it made Logan look foolish. He didn’t want to look foolish, said it wasn’t right for his image.

His
image?
Give me a break. It doesn’t matter much now, though, does it? He’s got the best image of all. He’s an
icon.

Harlan quit the show first—which surprised all of us, because he was always the most patient and even-tempered of human beings. Y’know, he did that
est
thing and just mellowed out like a big pink pussycat. Ted Sturgeon used to come to him for advice.

Dorothy quit three months after Harlan. I tried to stick it out, but it wasn’t any fun without them. I didn’t get along with the new producer, and I finally tossed in the towel too.

The worst part of it, I guess, was that after we left, the ratings went up. It was pretty disheartening. I mean, talk about a pie in the face.

What happened to the original crew? I thought you’d never ask.

Roddenberry went over to Warners and worked for a while on
Wagon Train: The Next Generation.
Shatner showed up in a couple of guest spots, then landed the lead in a cop show; when he lost his hair, he took up directing—I hear he’s pretty good at it. Nimoy, of course, gave up show business and ran for office. He’s been a good governor; I guess he’ll run for the Presidency. Walter Cronkite called him one of the ten most trusted men in America.

Dorothy was head of new projects at Twentieth for a while, then she started up her own production company. Harlan moved to Scotland. And me—well, my troubles were in all the newspapers, so I don’t have to rehash them here, do I? But I’m doing a lot better these days, and I might even take up writing again. If I can figure out how to use a computer. Those things confuse me.

You don’t need me to tell you anything else about
Star Track,
do you? You can get the rest of it from the newspapers.

Yeah, I was there when it happened. We all were. I was as close to Jack as I am to you.

I dunno, I guess none of us realized what a zoo a
Star Track
convention could be. Not then, anyway. It was still early in the phenomenon.

I mean, we had no idea what kind of impact the show had made on the fans. We thought there might be a couple hundred people there. You know how big the crowd was? Nobody does. The news said there were fifteen thousand inside the hotel. We had no idea now many more were waiting outside.

We just didn’t know how seriously the fans took the show. Of course, the Ambassador Hotel was never the same afterwards.

Anyway, Harlan was there, so was Dorothy. Gene came by, but he didn’t stay very long. I think he felt disgraced. And of course, all the actors. De, Jimmy, Grace, Nichelle, Walter, George, Majel, Bruce, Mark, Leonard, Bill—all the also-rans, as they were calling themselves by then. I guess Bobby had put the screws on. Attend or else. There wasn’t a lot of good feeling—at least, not at first.

But then the fans started applauding. One after the other, we all went out and chatted and answered questions, and the excitement just grew and grew and grew.

Of course, when Jack came out, the place went wild. It was like election night. There were people there wearing KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT buttons. Like he was really the character he played. They loved him. And he loved being loved. Whatever else you might say about Jack Kennedy, he knew how to make love to an audience. Style and grace. That was Jack all over.

Y’know, I saw the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. All three concerts. And I never saw that kind of hysteria, not even when Ringo threw jellybeans at the audience. But the Trackers—I thought they were going to scream the walls down.

Jack was glowing. His wife had just turned to him and whispered, “Well, you can’t say they don’t love you now—” when it happened.

At first, I thought it was a car backfiring. It didn’t sound like a gunshot at all. In fact, most people were puzzled at the sound. It all happened so fast. Then Jack grabbed his throat, and I guess for a second, we all thought he was joking. Y’know how you do: “Augh, they got me—” But he had this real stupid look on his face—confused, like. Then the second and third shots went off—and it was the third shot that killed him. And that’s when the screaming started. And the panic. All those people injured and killed, suffocated in the
crush. It was terrible. Everybody running. I can still see it. I still get nightmares.

I’ve always been amazed they caught the little bastard who did it. Sirhan Sirhan. I’ll never forget his name. Another one of those nerdy little geeks who never had a life of his own. He lived inside the TV. He thought it was real. Half a dozen of those really big women we see at all the conventions just jumped the poor son of a bitch and flattened him. They were outraged that someone would dare to attack
their
captain. Sirhan was lucky to escape with his balls still attached.

Y’know, later some of the witnesses said that Sirhan kept yelling, “Wait, wait—I can explain!” Like you can explain a thing like that? It didn’t make any sense then. It doesn’t make any sense now, no matter how many articles William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe write about it.

You know what it was? Sirhan never forgave us for replacing Kirk and Spock with Logan and REM. He said we’d ruined the whole show.

But that’s not even the half of it. You want to know the rest of the cosmic joke? Bugliosi, the district attorney, told me later on. Sirhan was aiming at Bobby and missed. Three times! Bobby was standing just behind Jack, but that kid couldn’t shoot worth shit. I think if he’d have hit Bobby, the industry would have given him a medal. Instead, he got the gas chamber and a movie of the week.

But now—y’know, I think back on it, and I see how stupid we all were. We didn’t know the power of television. None of us did. We didn’t even suspect.

Jack knew, I think. Bobby knew for sure. He knew that you could change the way people think and feel and vote just by what you put on the screen. Bobby knew that. He had the vision. But he was never the same after that. How could you be? The whole thing scared the hell out of all of us—the whole industry. NBC cancelled the show, but they couldn’t cancel the nightmares.

Y’ask me, I think that was the turning point in the sixties—the killing of Kennedy. That’s when it all started going bad. That’s when we all went crazy and started tearing things down. But, oh, hell—that’s old news. Everybody knows it.

Now, we’ve got the Kennedy mystique and
Star Track: The New Voyages.
And ... it’s all shit. It’s just ... so much merchandise. Whatever might have been true or meaningful or wonderful about
Star Track
is
gone. It’s all been eaten up by the lawyers and the fans and the publicity department.

Don’t take this personally, but I don’t trust anybody under thirty. I don’t think any of you understand what happened then. It was special. We didn’t understand it ourselves, but we knew it was special.

See ... it’s like this. Space isn’t the new frontier. It never was.

What is the new frontier? You have to ask—? That proves my point. You’re looking in the wrong place. The new frontier isn’t out there. It’s in here. In the heart. It’s in us. Dorothy said it. If it’s not in here, it’s not anywhere.

Ahh—you know what, you’re going to go out of here, you’re going to write another one of those goddamn golden geezer articles. You’ll miss the whole point, just like all the others. Shut that damn thing off and get the hell out of here before I whack you with my cane. Nurse! Nurse—!