My Father the Vulcan
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1931. As an actor, he is best known for his portrayal of Mr. Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human, hyperlogical first officer aboard the starship Enterprise on Star Trek. He was also a poet, director, photographer, and philanthropist. In 1954, he married Sandra Zober, with whom he had two children, Adam and Julie. The couple divorced in 1987, and in 1989, he married actress Susan Bay, who played Admiral Rollman in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He died in 2015 at age eighty-three.
i arrived late to the lecture. It was the fall of my senior year at UC Berkeley, and my father was making a personal appearance at Wheeler Hall in front of three hundred mesmerized students. During the 1970s, Dad made a number of paid college appearances where he would talk about Star Trek, his work in the theater, his recording career, and his photography. Having lived through all of this, I didn’t need to be at the lecture from the start, so I quietly slid into a seat in the back of the auditorium halfway through and waited for him to finish. We hadn’t seen each other since I had been home the previous summer, and in the three years I had been away at school, Dad had never come to visit. His appearance at Cal gave us the opportunity to have dinner together. I was looking forward to it, despite knowing in my gut that it was the fans, not me, that had finally brought him to Berkeley.
When the talk was over and he was done signing autographs, I waved to Dad. He walked up the aisle toward me. We had barely finished hugging when he hit me with a sucker punch.
“I can’t go to dinner after all,” he said. “I have a commitment in the morning. There’s a car waiting for me, and I’m already late for my plane.”
That was it. He walked out the door.
Devastated but not surprised, I pushed down my feelings like I had done so many times before. But his behavior made perfectly clear something I had struggled with all of my life: Dad’s career came first.
Later, when I told my sister, Julie, what had happened, she said that Dad was being passive-aggressive because he was in competition with me. “What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulously. How could my father possibly see me as a threat?
Star Trek was exploding in TV syndication, and college campuses like mine were epicenters of Star Trek mania. Berkeley even boasted the Federation Trading Post, a store where you could buy all things Trek, including a photo of me standing with Dad on the bridge of the Enterprise sporting a Spock haircut and a pair of his pointed ears. Every weekday at 5:00 p.m., my fellow students would cram into dormitory TV rooms all over campus to watch reruns of the show. With the popularity of Spock soaring, Dad was a bona fide star, a Vulcan sex symbol. I remember seeing women attempt to kiss him when we were out in public—sometimes successfully. I didn’t understand how my father could possibly see us as competitors.
“Dad barely made it through high school,” Julie reminded me.
“And?” I asked.
“And being Russian immigrants, Nana and Papa always dreamed he would go to college. Now that you’re at Cal, he’s flat-out jealous.” At that moment, I began to understand my father a little better.
Dad had to grow up fast during the Depression. The son of a barber, he supplemented the family income by selling newspapers in the Boston Common at age ten. In 1949, when he was eighteen, he traveled alone cross-country to find fame and fortune in Los Angeles. Success didn’t come easy. He drove a cab, serviced gumball machines, and scooped ice cream to make ends meet, all the while honing his craft in dozens of bit parts in film and on TV. Everything changed in the fall of 1966 when the TV-watching public decided that Mr. Spock was one of the coolest characters ever to hit the airwaves. From then on, his life was all about the work and the publicity and the personal appearances and all those fans.
When Dad did spend time with me, it was often awkward. Unlike him, as a kid, I didn’t contribute to the family income. Instead, I was listening to the Beatles, reading Spider-Man comics, and watching TV. None of that seemed to interest him. Our real clashes began in the mid-’70s when I was working hard in school while living on a steady diet of cannabis and the Grateful Dead. Dad couldn’t tolerate it. Sure, there were some wonderful moments, like the time he took me to the press conference to announce Star Trek: The Motion Picture or the time he went bonkers when I told him that I had managed to pass the California bar exam on my first try. But he was drinking and I was using, and this fueled episodes of conflict in which we simply lacked any tools to break the cycle.
Adam (age nine) and Leonard on the set of Star Trek, 1966
For most of my adult life, this pattern of conflict followed by total estrangement marked my relationship with my father. But the turning point came in 2006 after he wrote a six-page letter outlining all of my shortcomings with an emphasis on how, through the years, I had taken advantage of his largesse. By that time, I had been sober for two years (my dad had been sober for six), and I thought I was practicing the principle of “contrary action”—a core tenet of twelve-step programs in which one does the opposite of their habitual impulse—by refusing to respond to a letter that cut me straight to the bone.
But when I told the story of the letter, and my pride at ignoring it, my sponsor, who knew me well, said, “Not so fast.” He agreed that what my father had done was not so great for his own recovery. He knew I could find plenty of people who would agree that what he had done was wrong. But he also believed that the letter presented me with a choice: I could be right or I could be happy. He told me that I had let the conflict with my father define much of my life, and that if I wanted to achieve the recovery objective of being “happy, joyous, and free,” I should take that letter and make an amends to him for everything in it. I was shocked.
When I finally caught my breath, I balked at this—fought it, even—reminding my sponsor that during the course of my father’s sobriety, he had never made an amends to me. The amends wasn’t for him, he assured me. It was for me and my recovery.
I could be right or I could be happy. So I took that letter and met with my father at his big house in Bel Air and made the amends to him, and it sucked. Without qualification or hesitation, I read through the entire six pages of grievances and apologized to him for all the mistakes I had made and all the things I had said and done that were hurtful to him. He just sat there listening. By the time I left his house, I was crushed.
But lo and behold, things started to change. What followed was an almost immediate period of rapprochement in which Dad and I began building a bridge to each other. We started talking regularly and even attended AA meetings together. When my second wife, Martha, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my father was there for me every step of the way. I could always count on him during moments of crisis when I just needed someone to talk to. This was his amends to me. In recovery, it’s referred to as a living amends. From that point on, until the day my father died, we focused on building a loving relationship and never again looked back at the wreckage of our past.