Ask most members of the television audience to complete the following sentence and they could probably come up with a plausible working answer:
“Star Trek has gained quite a reputation for . . .”
There are many possible responses, positive and negative, serious or flippant, that might deal with any number of topics, from the production values of the show to the deep philosophy behind it. But the first time that sentence appeared in print was on page 360 of the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek, credited to Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, and it ran:
“Star Trek has gained quite a reputation for using ‘revealing’ costumes in its shows.”
Star Trek was considered a “sexy” show from very early on. Its costume designer, William Ware Theiss, had gone so far as to develop the “Theiss Theory of Titillation,” which he defined in The Making of Star Trek as “the degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly dependent upon how accident-prone it appears to be.”1 In other words, he frequently constructed costumes from rather flimsy material and draped them over the female guest stars in a way that made it seem they were about to fall off. “A basic part of Bill’s theory requires the use of nudity on unexpected places, such as baring the outside of the leg, from the thigh to the hipbone. This is a rather sexless area, but it is also one that is normally covered.”2
A good early example was Sherry Jackson’s costume for “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” the seventh episode to be broadcast. Jackson played an android, Andrea, and wore a one-piece ensemble that combined a halter top with tight trousers. A strip of fabric, one blue, one olive-brown, covered each breast, but very little else on her top half. Her arms, back, shoulder, cleavage, ribs, and hips were all bare. The outfit was kept carefully in place with tape. It was a striking look, the publicity department were sure to take many photographs of Jackson, and newspapers and magazines were more than happy to run them. When Roddenberry took two episodes of Star Trek to Tricon, a major science fiction convention in Cleveland held the week before the show’s television premiere, he brought a couple of models with him to show off the costumes, including Sherry Jackson’s ensemble.3 This set a pattern for many subsequent episodes. Even people who didn’t watch Star Trek knew it was a show with weird creatures and scantily clad women.
The earliest episodes of Star Trek were made over fifty years ago. Social mores change. It’s astonishing to discover that in 1971, when Gene Roddenberry wrote and produced his first movie, Pretty Maids All in a Row, MGM ran a national “Miss Pretty Maid” beauty contest to publicize it. The poster declares “Hey, you in the hot pants! If you’re 18 to 25 years old and look good in hot pants, you’re eligible. Very eligible.” The winners of the regional heats would receive “a new hot pants outfit designed by Dimitri of Italy,” the grand prize was “an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood and an evening on the town with Rock Hudson.” The gender politics of the film itself are bizarre to modern eyes. The lead character is a middle-aged high school counselor who sleeps with his students and advises a colleague to do the same. Roger Vadim, the director, saw the willingness of a Hollywood studio to make such a movie as “a sign of something very healthy—that society is changing.” 4
Star Trek and—in a process of guilt-by-association—its creator purport to be predicting what society will look like centuries from now. Instead, when we watch Star Trek, it screams the Sixties at us. Star Trek: The Next Generation is older now than the original series was when The Next Generation was first shown. There are places where it, too, looks far more like what it is, a product of the late 1980s, than the window into the twenty-fourth century it’s meant to be. The attitudes are, in many places, worse fashion victims than the hairstyles and eyeshadow.
The original show’s gender politics might be the perfect example. Take one of the more visible aspects of the show: the fact that the Starfleet uniforms for women include a miniskirt. Yes, of course, a woman should be free to choose to wear what she likes, and some women want to wear short skirts. The Starfleet uniform is a popular choice for women cosplayers, those people at science fiction conventions who dress up as characters from the show, all of whom have chosen and lovingly reconstructed the costume. Grace Lee Whitney, who played Janice Rand, the yeoman assigned to Captain Kirk in early episodes of the series, genuinely loved the uniform: “People often ask me at conventions if I liked the mini-skirted uniforms the women wore on the show. My answer: Absolutely! I wanted to show off my assets, and Bill Theiss’s uniform creations certainly did that (of course my moral values are much different today than they were back then!)”5 She even occasionally took credit for the look, and noted that Nichelle Nichols would carefully pull her hemline up when she sat down, to show even more leg.
Whitney was annoyed that Star Trek: The Motion Picture had a unisex uniform and she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup. She felt director Robert Wise “was deliberately sabotaging me. I felt he did not want me to look glamorous, as I did in the original show . . . It seemed he wanted me to look plain and old—and it just about killed me. I was so horribly upset, practically suicidal, throughout the picture.”6
But James T. Kirk’s Enterprise is not some post-patriarchy where women are wearing what they want because they’ve been freed from the male gaze. Rather the opposite. One of the visual clichés of the show is that when a beautiful woman is introduced, we hold on a soft-focus shot of her for a few seconds while some seductive music plays. The camera angles are such that we can usually infer that we’re seeing what Captain Kirk is seeing.
Centuries in the future, there may be women serving in Starfleet, but there are limits to their opportunities. In the second-season episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” McCoy laments of a female officer, “She’s a woman. All woman. One day she’ll find the right man and off she’ll go, out of the service.” (Later in the episode, the character McCoy is discussing is sexually assaulted by an alien posing as the god Apollo.) The very last episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” features a female Starfleet officer who swaps bodies with Kirk because she’s bitter the “world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”
Expecting a more enlightened approach on Sixties American network television is not a pipe dream only possible with decades of hindsight and multiple waves of feminism between us and them. We can say this with confidence, because in the pilot episode of Star Trek itself, “The Cage,” written and filmed in the second half of 1964, male and female crew members of the Enterprise wore the same uniforms, with thick tops, trousers, and ankle boots. There were two women bridge officers, including the second-in-command. The story represents a cerebral attempt to explore problems with the concept of an “ideal” relationship between a man and a woman.
“The Cage” didn’t feature Captain Kirk. While Leonard Nimoy played Mr. Spock in the pilot, a different character, a woman called Number One, took both his rank as first officer, and his emotionless personality. She was played by Majel Barrett, who would later marry Gene Roddenberry. Pike has a female yeoman, J.M. Colt. Female crew members are clearly the exception rather than the rule, and Colt is new to the job. When Colt is out of earshot, the captain confides, rather undiplomatically, to Number One, “I can’t get used to having a woman on the bridge. No offence, Lieutenant. You’re different, of course.”
The episode’s story revolves around the captain’s “fantasy woman.” Lured to a distant planet by a distress signal, he is captured by aliens who can read his thoughts and place images in his mind. He experiences a series of perfect illusions—he rescues a damsel in distress; he enjoys a picnic with his wife in a beautiful park (the only glimpse of Earth we are given in the whole of the original TV show); then—the one everyone remembers—he is treated to a dance from a green alien slave girl. All three women are avatars of the same woman, Vina, who implores him: “You can have whatever dream you want. I can become anything, any woman you’ve ever imagined. You can have anything you want in the whole universe. Let me please you.”
Pike rejects all these scenarios, so the aliens capture Number One and Yeoman Colt and offer them to Pike, telling him, “Number One has the superior mind and would produce highly intelligent children. Although she seems to lack emotion, this is largely a pretense. She has often had fantasies involving you . . . (Turning to Colt) The factors in her favor are youth and strength, plus unusually strong female drives.”
It’s Captain Pike’s story, and one of the main purposes of a pilot episode is to see the lead character in action. His captivity is literally a series of male fantasies. Women are exotic creatures, presented to a man for him to select a breeding partner. That said, Pike never seems about to give in to any of the temptations on offer. We focus on the alien slave girl’s dance for two minutes, we’re told “They actually like being taken advantage of”— an extra sequence, where Vina was whipped by a slaver, was filmed but edited out. Then Pike stands and leaves, disgusted by what he and we have seen.
And this strange mix of the lascivious and the enlightened is characteristic of Star Trek. It’s taking the phrase “women are more than just sex objects” and applying it over-literally: women are sex objects, but they’re other stuff, too. Right at the start of the series, we’re seeing an attitude that will always be part of the show’s DNA, and it comes straight from its creator. Gene Roddenberry made this attempt to square the circle in 1976:
“You cannot write in science fiction . . . without realizing that sexual equality is as basic as any other kind of equality. This does not mean that in future pictures I will ever stop using women as sex objects, as I will not, but to be fair we have always used and will be continuing to use males as sex objects, too. As a matter of fact, when I was younger and much more agile, I’ve been used as a sex object myself; I think it’s great fun.”7
The second half of this comment is the more striking, and is the line that gets the laugh, but the first half is at least as important. Star Trek and its creator are committed to equality. Roddenberry repeated the following anecdote many times:
“I had insisted on half women on board. The network came to me and said, ‘You can’t have half women. Our people say it will make it look like a ship with all sorts of mad sexual things going on—half men and half women.’ So we argued about it like a poker game and they finally said, ‘Okay. We’ll settle for one-third women.’ I figured one-third women could take care of the males anyway.”
It was a frequent refrain from Roddenberry that anything regressive in the show was imposed on him by the “television executives,” a nameless, faceless set of adversaries who were seemingly intent on ruining everything by imposing antediluvian “standards” across the industry. The way he told it, he fought a series of heroic running battles to keep up the quality of the show. This was a strategic decision on his part, based on an early conversation which he very much took to heart:
“I’m sure that many remember me as a difficult, touchy person. In many cases, they’re right. Some of this I did purposely. I had a meeting with a studio executive who said ‘Gene, I’m going to give you some advice. You’re beginning to get the nickname of “Crazy Gene” around the studio because you’re calling up and saying how much does it cost to paint a woman green, stuff like that. The only way you can make the show what you want it to be is to take advantage of the fact that you are sort of a crazy person. Actually you are fairly easy to get along with, but you’ve got to create the image of yourself as a battler, a fighter, a person who is liable to toss an executive out of your office if he comes up with an impossible request.’”8
For most of the Seventies and Eighties fans seemed more invested in the content of the Star Trek universe and in the actors than what was going on behind the scenes. Relatively little research into the production of the show was done. The main source for information about the behind-the-scenes battles during the making of the show came from Gene Roddenberry himself. His account was that the network rejected the pilot episode because they thought it was “too cerebral.” The bosses particularly didn’t like the idea of a female first officer or “the guy with the ears”—Mr. Spock. They did see enough potential to take the unprecedented step of ordering a second pilot, but demanded a number of substantial changes. Roddenberry had the choice of fighting to keep Leonard Nimoy as Spock or Majel Barrett as Number One, and—it’s a punchline he and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry would both end up using at conventions—he “kept the Vulcan and married the woman because he didn’t think Leonard Nimoy would have it the other way around.”
The version of events Roddenberry told interviewers and packed convention halls in the Seventies had the full benefit of hindsight, and flattered the fans as well as himself. The crazy network executives didn’t like Mr. Spock, and he ended up the most popular character! The second-in-command of the Enterprise could have been a woman all along, if only the executives were a little more forward-thinking! He was trying to create a vision of the future where the human race had progressed, but his bosses were stuck in the past! They thought the show was too smart, what they really meant was that they thought their audiences were too dumb! Right from the beginning, I was fighting an uphill battle to maintain the integrity of Star Trek!
Clearly, there’s a kernel of truth in all of this. There were things you couldn’t show or say on television in the Sixties. The networks needed their shows to maintain a mass audience and this meant they worried about offending people (and, more importantly, scaring away advertisers). Many writers and producers wanted to push the boundaries, while the network bosses would tend toward toning material down and playing it safe. The shows emerged from the tension between those two forces.
For the last twenty years or so, Star Trek has attracted more scholarship and archival research than any other American TV show—although still nothing like the granular, ultra-comprehensive work Doctor Who fans have long been doing in Britain—and as a result many of the studio memos and other pieces of correspondence have been unearthed. Other people who were involved in the making of Star Trek have written books or been interviewed for magazines or DVD features, and we have new perspectives on events. It’s clear now that there are a number of salient facts Gene Roddenberry omitted from his version.
First of all, there’s the obvious one: NBC were not hostile to Star Trek, they ended up making three seasons of it. The entire point of commissioning pilots, rather than whole seasons, is to test a concept in action and see what can be improved. The $630,000 spent on the pilot included—unlike a Western or cop show—the cost of building sets, props, and costumes which it would be hard to use for any other purpose, and so NBC clearly had a financial and artistic investment in making Star Trek work. Roddenberry told fans it was “unprecedented” for a show to be granted a second pilot, but he must have known that was nonsense—it was uncommon, but plenty of shows did, including All in the Family, Lost in Space, and Gilligan’s Island.
Herb Solow and Robert Justman, respectively executive in charge of production and producer on the original series, published their own behind-the-scenes account, the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, in 1996. They say there that the executives had no particular philosophical objection to a woman first officer, they just didn’t like Majel Barrett in the role. Roddenberry had been having an affair with Barrett for several years by this point. Not all of the executives knew this, although some did. There was dissatisfaction with her performance both from those who knew about the relationship and those who didn’t. A couple of individuals in the know were worried about the consequences for the show if the two split acrimoniously, or if it became public knowledge that the executive producer was having an extra-marital affair with its female lead. Inside Star Trek concludes that Roddenberry might have concocted the story because he didn’t have the heart to tell Barrett the studio didn’t like her acting.
Once they’d seen the pilot in February 1965, NBC made it clear they wanted changes and ordered three new scripts to assess the potential of the series. These were delivered in May. Roddenberry wrote one, and extensively rewrote the other two. The first, “Mudd’s Women,” was a comedy story written by Stephen Kandel about a galactic conman. It was mostly set on the ship, so it would be cheap to make. It wasn’t seen as a good pilot episode, but reading the script would have served to demonstrate that Star Trek could change pace if needed. “The Omega Glory” was a script by Roddenberry featuring two alien tribes with ideologies very similar to American democracy and Soviet Communism. Robert Justman hated it. The story was eventually made at the end of the second season.
The studio were concerned that Star Trek would be an expensive show to make, and while it sounds counterintuitive, it therefore made sense that they should produce the most elaborate script, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” by Samuel A. Peeples, as the second pilot. The story saw the Enterprise pass through an energy barrier, and two of the crew (one of them played by Gary Lockwood) become beings with godlike powers. It required elaborate model-work and optical effects. The challenge was to make it on a tight budget, and Roddenberry and his team did just that. Helped by the fact that they could use sets and costumes from the first pilot, and a shorter running time, the second pilot cost a little over half as much as “The Cage”: $354,974.
“Where No Man Has Gone Before” is a halfway house between the first pilot and the regular series. Viewed now, it’s interesting to see what’s missing—Scotty and Sulu are there, Dr. McCoy and Uhura aren’t. Spock is restrained, but still emotional, and becomes visibly annoyed when he loses a chess game to his captain. The captain has a new yeoman, but it’s not Janice Rand, as it would be in the regular series. The biggest change, of course, was that the Enterprise had a new captain. William Shatner was third choice to play Captain Kirk, after Jack Lord and Lloyd Bridges. Shatner has noted wryly that, as the pilot was rejected for being “too cerebral” and the network were concerned about the budget, “I suspect Roddenberry thought I was the perfect choice for the lead role in a show because I wasn’t too intelligent for the audience, and he didn’t have to pay me a lot of money.”9
What about “equality”? The crew still wear a unisex uniform, gold or blue thick sweaters and black trousers. There’s a prominent female guest role—Sally Kellerman as Dr. Elizabeth Dehner—but she’s killed off during the episode. So what can we deduce about Gene Roddenberry’s attitude?
Here is the description of J.M. Colt, the yeoman who appears in the first pilot. It’s written by Roddenberry for the March 1964 pitch document, so early on in the process that the captain was not yet called Pike, but had his original name, Robert April. It wasn’t intended that the public would ever read this, and it has not been interfered with by even a single television executive:
The Captain’s Yeoman. Except for problems in naval parlance, J.M. Colt would be called a yeo-woman. With a strip-queen figure even a uniform cannot hide, Colt serves as Captain’s secretary, reporter, bookkeeper— and with surprising efficiency. She undoubtedly dreams of serving Robert April with equal efficiency in personal departments.
Colt’s replacement as yeoman in the second pilot, Smith— played by the model Andrea Dromm—was herself replaced, of course, when the show went to series, by Grace Lee Whitney’s Yeoman Rand. Janice Rand was obviously intended to be a major character. The initial publicity for Star Trek billed Whitney as the female lead. The cover of her 1998 autobiography, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, uses a picture from a photo shoot done before the phaser props were ready (they’re carrying electric torches instead and pretending they’re futuristic guns) and she’s dressed in the “original” uniform, not the minidress. Whitney was thirty-six when she played Rand—she was born in 1930, the year before William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The idea was that she was Kirk’s equal, that there would be a degree of sexual tension, but that they were professionals. Roddenberry told Whitney it would be “like Kitty and Matt on Gunsmoke. It could not be consummated. It had to be love from afar, an unrequited love between the captain and me.”10
What ended up on screen was a character who was twenty-four, and by far Kirk and Spock’s junior in terms of rank and experience. Her role was to serve, to be rescued, to be the victim in “The Enemy Within,” when the “bestial” Kirk tries to have his way with her, and in “Miri,” when she is tied up and taunted by a gang of children.
Rand was dropped after eight episodes, and it happened so quickly that her scripted appearance in the next episode, “Dagger of the Mind,” was rewritten for another actress. Officially, Roddenberry and his team felt that Dr. McCoy was a better character, and that the “unrequited love” angle with Rand not only wasn’t working out, it made it hard for Kirk to play romantic stories with other women. The show was running over budget, and of all the regular characters, Rand was felt to be the least essential.11
Grace Lee Whitney had a drinking problem, and William Shatner alleged in his book Star Trek Memories (1993) that this affected her work, saying: “Grace’s condition had worsened to the point where her scenes were consciously being given to other characters or completely written out of episodes.”12 She vehemently denied this, and while she admitted she was on diet pills and amphetamines to control her weight, she said, “I never drank on set, nor would I have allowed alcohol to interfere with my performance . . . it wasn’t my drinking that caused me to lose the part on Star Trek. It was losing the part on Star Trek that really sent my drinking off the scale!”13
In her autobiography, Whitney revealed that, after a wrap party for “Miri,” a man she refers to only as “the Executive” got her alone and, with both of them very drunk, told her he wanted to make sure Rand had more to do on the show. He forced her to undress, then perform oral sex on him. She went from there to Leonard Nimoy’s house. Nimoy was her best friend in the cast, a recovering alcoholic himself, and he would continue to support her. Attitudes to sexual assault were very different at the time. She lacked a term for what had happened, as she didn’t consider it “rape.” Whitney told Nimoy the name of her attacker (and Nimoy knew him) but apparently never named him to anyone else, even when offered “a considerable sum of money by a major New York publisher”:
“I refused to do that . . . there were two reasons I refused to name him: one, I am a recovering alcoholic, and in order to keep my sobriety . . . I must make amends to all persons I have harmed—even those who have hurt me. I must not harm others. So I refused to hurt this man or his reputation. And two, I was afraid of him and what he might do to me.”14
There has been some speculation online about the identity of this “executive,” with some—inevitably perhaps—suggesting it was Gene Roddenberry himself. Whitney implies that “the Executive” was still alive when Star Trek Memories was published in 1993, and Roddenberry died in 1991.15 Shatner’s book refers to the attacker as a “network executive” and Roddenberry was certainly not that. In her autobiography, Whitney conceded that Roddenberry made advances towards her, but what she says and the tone in which she says it contrasts starkly with the way she talks about her attacker:
“Did Gene make passes at me? You better believe he did! Passes, innuendoes, double-entendres, the whole nine yards. But I wanted to keep our relationship on a professional basis and I was basically moral at the time (it wasn’t until after I got written out of Star Trek that my sexaholism went off the scale). Who knows? Maybe if Gene had gotten me in the sack, I might have done all three seasons of Star Trek instead of only half a season!”16
Whitney long thought she’d been fired at the request of “the Executive.” The assault was on a Friday night, August 26, 1966,17 and she was informed that her contract would not be extended the following Tuesday, August 30.18 Many years later she came to accept evidence that the decision had been made before the assault—we have a memo talking about reducing her role that dates from August 12, 1966.19 She doesn’t make the connection, but “the Executive” may have preyed on her when he did precisely because he knew this was his last opportunity, as she would be getting fired the following week. There’s no evidence that anyone but Nimoy knew about the assault at the time.
In August, Roddenberry had brought Gene L. Coon onboard as a line producer, to help with the day-to-day running of the show. The two Genes had worked together on The Lieutenant, and Coon brought a fresh eye to Star Trek that would lead to changes that fundamentally strengthened the show. One of the most significant was the elevation of McCoy to a more central role. Bob Justman and Roddenberry both accepted the logic of reducing Rand’s part, but the original plan seems to have been for her to reappear as an occasional guest star. On October 28, Roddenberry wrote a memo to Coon suggesting they look for an opportunity to reintroduce her. Writers including Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold included the character in their scripts, but Rand never returned to the original show.
As Shatner puts it in Star Trek Memories, for Whitney being fired from Star Trek “marked the beginning of a personal slide that would become so deep and horrendous as to ultimately include a harsh, skid-row existence and prostitution.”20 Whitney claimed that in the Seventies, when Roddenberry was planning to revive the show, he told her,
“Grace, I’ve never made such a big mistake in my life as allowing NBC and Paramount to write you out. If I’d only seen my way clear, I could have kept you aboard. You would be the only person, really, who knew the inside story of Captain Kirk, and you could have been waiting for him when he came back from the escapades. We would have had a whole new focus for the show and for the character . . . I’m going to put you in the next series.”21
It’s worth noting that this may be an example of Roddenberry telling someone what they wanted to hear. Rand does not feature in the plans for the Star Trek II television series, which reached an extremely advanced stage. As it was, Grace Lee Whitney returned as Rand for blink-and-you-miss-them cameos in the Star Trek movies. The most substantial saw her as communications officer on Captain Sulu’s USS Excelsior in Star Trek VI (1991), and she returned to the same station for “Flashback,” a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager set during the same timeframe as that movie.
Once Janice Rand was written out, the most prominent regular female role on the original series was, of course, that of Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. She, though, soon decided to quit at the end of the first season. She had been offered a part on Broadway, and was not enjoying her experience on the show. Nichols attended an event in New York where Martin Luther King Jnr was speaking. She met Dr. King afterwards, and was astonished to learn he was a Star Trek fan. He told her that she was an important role model to young black women. She returned to Hollywood, and told Roddenberry what had happened:
“I don’t know if you know what Gene looked like, but he was a big guy and was like 6’3” with that hawk nose and a great sense of humor and this brilliant mind and a futurist and—whatever great things you heard about him are just a small part of what that man was. I looked down at him sitting behind his desk when I told him the story and I finally shut up, and a huge tear is rolling down his cheek. And he said, ‘Thank God someone understands what I am trying to achieve.’”22
If Nichols had left—and she has said she’d got as far as handing Roddenberry a letter of resignation—the show’s only female “regular” cast member would have been Majel Barrett’s Christine Chapel, a character who’d only appeared three times in the first season. Herb Solow claimed of Roddenberry that “the only performers he would stand up for were the actresses with whom he’d had a previous relationship: Majel Barrett, Nichelle Nichols, and Grace Lee Whitney.”23 In her autobiography, though, Whitney flatly denied sleeping with Roddenberry: “Sorry, Herb—you and Bob wrote a great book, but you got this one wrong. It doesn’t matter how you define the word ‘personal,’ it is simply not true . . . I never had a romantic relationship with Gene Roddenberry before Star Trek, during Star Trek or after Star Trek.”24 Nor did he show any great interest in building up Uhura’s role. Many years later, his secretary Susan Sackett suggested that “throughout his lifetime, he was never quite able to see women in a completely objective manner, and he brought a lot of excess baggage and hang-ups from his generation.”25 Chapel appeared in more episodes from the second season, but for the most part, Star Trek settled into a pattern of a “girl of the week”—episodes would see a parade of female Starfleet officers in the regulation miniskirt, or an alien space babe. Every actress was gorgeous, most could act, many of them were strikingly good. They played strong characters, and often demonstrated a gift for comedy and a real screen presence . . . and after one episode, they would vanish without trace. The pattern is set by Janice Rand’s “replacement” in “Dagger of the Mind,” Marianna Hill as Starfleet psychiatrist Dr. Helen Noel.
Roddenberry fought battles with television executives over these characters, but only over what they wore. Star Trek costume designer William Ware Theiss would go on to work with Roddenberry on many projects. They clearly enjoyed playing with network’s often bizarre restrictions.
Roddenberry had a favorite example of the ludicrous rules he was expected to follow. In The Making of Star Trek he states that “the navel is also taboo . . . you are not supposed to show it or call undue attention to it.”26 Decades later, Roddenberry would still be telling conventions that he and Theiss conspired to design the skimpiest possible outfit that still managed to cover the belly button. The best candidate for the Star Trek costume that does this would seem to be the one worn by Lois Jewell as Drusilla the slave girl in “Bread and Circuses,” who wears a brown outfit consisting of two triangles of material that converge at her navel. On his later project Genesis II, Roddenberry and Theiss had a mutant woman bare her midriff to reveal . . . two belly buttons, as an in-joke.
Another possibility, though, is that Roddenberry made up the story. It is true that a number of otherwise skimpy outfits on Star Trek have odd high waists, or strips or drapes of material that conveniently cover up the navel. But it’s also true that in every season there are at least a couple of examples where they’re exposed—the dancing girls in “Shore Leave”; Khan’s followers in “Space Seed”; the bellydancer in “Wolf in the Fold”; the “evil” Uhura in “Mirror, Mirror” (and the other women seen in the episode); Droxine in “The Cloud Minders”; several of the “hippie” women in “The Way to Eden.” It’s possible Roddenberry received a memo asking him to make the costumes less revealing, and that this memo mentioned the navel . . . but no such memo has ever been found in any of the various archives scoured over the years by fans researching the show. Tania Lemani, who played the bellydancer in “The Wolf in the Fold,” remembers that “in those days you were not supposed to show your belly button on TV,”27 but the fact she was playing a bellydancer in the first place demonstrates that this wasn’t a strict, puritanical regime. The evidence would seem to be that shows were supposed to avoid showing too much skin, but were allowed to get away with a degree of mild naughtiness, and that by the late Sixties, the “ban on belly buttons” was honored more in the breach.
And if we take a step back, then this adds up to a consistent picture: Gene Roddenberry was clearly committed to stretching the boundaries of “what you could show” when it came to women on television, but this didn’t involve him fighting to get a story that featured subversive gender politics on air, or to champion giving the women in the cast larger and more varied roles. Instead he was campaigning to liberate actresses from their clothes. He talked about wanting to establish that the Enterprise crew was split roughly equally along gender lines—but the women were secretaries who looked like strippers and wanted to sleep with their boss.
There is a very odd paradox at the heart of Star Trek, or at least it’s easy to find many examples where the show wants to have its cake and eat it when it comes to women and sexuality. We can trace this back to its creator. Sex was very important to Gene Roddenberry.
Roddenberry wrote about sex, he talked about sex in interviews and lectures, and he created characters who espoused thinly veiled versions of his attitudes to sex. It’s clear that he saw American society in the 1960s as particularly “hung up” on sex, that the human race was (to quote an alien space babe in Star Trek: The Motion Picture) “a sexually immature species,” and that this was one of the issues which would need to be worked on before the bright future of Star Trek could be attained. Roddenberry’s scripts in the Seventies went even further in exploring sexuality: “Planet Earth” depicted a matriarchal future society, and Pretty Maids All in a Row was a sex comedy.
Moreover, Gene Roddenberry practiced what he preached.
The official record looks rather straightforward. He married twice, both marriages lasting more than twenty years. He’d married Eileen-Anita Rexroat on June 20, 1942, when he was twenty and she was eighteen. They had two daughters, Darleen (born 1948) and Dawn (born 1953). They divorced in 1969, and he quickly married Majel Barrett. They had a son together, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Jnr (born in 1974, he’s been known as “Rod” since childhood). Roddenberry remained married to Majel until his death in 1991.
In his private life Roddenberry’s attitudes to sexuality and gender could be extraordinarily self-interested and often rather regressive, even by the standards of the time. His official biography itself has to concede that “Gene had always lived by his own code of marriage ethics, a set of standards that did not have sexual fidelity near the top of the list or, perhaps, even on the list.”28 By the early Fifties, working at the LAPD, it was an open secret that he had a string of affairs with secretaries.
When he started working in television, Roddenberry had flings with actresses. Many women clearly found him very charming, and it’s the women in his life who seem the least conflicted and most generous in their praise.
His plans did not always come to fruition. Of his choice of model Andrea Dromm to play the yeoman in the second pilot, Herb Solow says, “It was a non-part. But during the casting process, director Jimmy Goldstone overheard Gene say, ‘I’m hiring her because I want to score with her.’ It was not only a non-part, I’m sure it was a non-score as well.”29
He met Majel Barrett (her stage name; she’d been born Majel Leigh Hudec) in 1961, and becoming lovers “sort of developed after we’d become friends.”30 Majel had no doubt at all that Gene was telling her the truth when he said his marriage to Eileen was loveless and the two of them were staying together for the sake of the children. She also didn’t think he’d ever leave his wife. While they didn’t flaunt their relationship, and not everyone working at the studio knew, they made little attempt to hide it and attended parties as a couple.
In 1964, Roddenberry also had a relationship with Nichelle Nichols. According to Nichols the affair was over before she was cast in Star Trek, and—while there was some speculation on set—no one else on the show except Barrett had any idea it had ever happened until decades later. Nichols wrote about the relationship in her autobiography, Beyond Uhura, which was published after Roddenberry’s death. After appearing on The Lieutenant, she and Roddenberry started with a few lunch dates, then began a relationship that lasted “several months,” apparently over the spring and summer of 1964. It had quickly “become uncomfortably intense for both of us.” She knew “his divorce wasn’t yet final” (this seems somewhat overstating the state of play: while the marriage had clearly been an unhappy one for some time, it wasn’t formally ended until July 1969). Nichols says they at least discussed getting married—she was far less “idealistic” than he was, seeing huge problems for both of them in an “interracial” relationship.
Roddenberry then surprised her with a trip to meet Majel Barrett—and they surprised him in turn, as the two knew each other. Both being young actresses, they’d met at an audition. The two women had a polite conversation. Roddenberry said, according to Nichols, “I couldn’t go on behind either one of your backs. I love you both too much. I didn’t know any other way to bring—to tell—the two women that I love that I’m in love with two women,”31 Nichols realized Barrett “was dedicated to Gene above all else,” and stepped aside—although not before reminding Roddenberry that, since he was married, he actually had three women in his life.
Roddenberry was working on the pitch and pilot episode for Star Trek throughout 1964, and he told Nichols “there will be something important in it for you.”32 She was cast in neither pilot, but Roddenberry put in good words for her elsewhere. Nichols has remained extremely loyal to her ex-lover, saying, “His appetite for life was insatiable. He was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known, and throughout the years I have always been proud to call him my friend.”33
Unlike the vast majority of the original regular cast of Star Trek, Majel Barrett never wrote her autobiography. So, while her relationship with Roddenberry came up in the questions she was asked in interviews and at conventions, she never presented a full account of her own story. A constant presence in Roddenberry’s life since 1961, she was his mistress when he came up with Star Trek and pitched it to the network, and he cast her in “the Spock role” for the pilot, and then as Christine Chapel in the broadcast series. They would marry in 1969, very soon after he divorced Eileen—possibly even before his divorce came through. She is the mother of his son. She appeared in small roles in many of his subsequent projects, and had a recurring guest role as Lwaxana Troi, mother of regular character Deanna Troi, in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
While opinion of Roddenberry divides his colleagues and acquaintances between those who loved him and those who loathed him, Majel Barrett has proved far harder to draw a bead on. People agree she seemed taller and more striking in real life than she did on screen (officially she was five foot nine). No one argues that she was devoted to Roddenberry, passionately in his corner, or that she was central to the lasting success of Star Trek because she cultivated the fans, got them on side. Some portrayals have her almost as a Borgia dowager, the dark power behind the throne; according to others she was empty-headed and oddly oblivious to the world. She once told an interviewer, “I don’t think. I really don’t. I’m not an intelligent person. I’m very shallow. I like being shallow. I like fun and laughter.” When the interviewer suggested that was exactly the sort of thing someone cunning would say if they were trying to mask their intelligence, Barrett changed the subject to hat ribbons.34 Those who loved Gene often use Majel as a scapegoat. Those who found him dishonest and manipulative hold up his relationship with his wife as evidence.
“There may be times when I feel like dipping my wick, and I do so. When it’s right. When it feels good people may say ‘oh, that Gene Roddenberry, he’s no good. He’s an unfaithful husband.’ I say unfaithful to what—?”
“Majel, surely?”
“No, not at all. People aren’t concerned in their deepest selves about Majel. They’re concerned about themselves, their rules and so on. They mean I am unfaithful to the ideal, their ideal, of marriage . . . Majel and I have our own agreement.”35
Within a few years of marrying Barrett, Roddenberry had begun a long-term affair with his secretary, Susan Sackett. In 2002, Hawk Publishing released Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Sackett’s 220-page account of their relationship. She started work as his secretary on his fifty-third birthday, August 19, 1974. Gene’s son Rod was five months old. Roddenberry soon persuaded her to skinny-dip in his pool, and within a year was making more overt sexual advances: “Teasingly he asked if I would engage in a certain sex act—delicately put, it’s the one Monica and Bill enjoyed so much in the 1990s. Today this would be grounds for an harassment suit, but in those days this sort of thing generally went unchallenged.”36
Later they would smoke pot together and consummate the relationship, which continued until Roddenberry’s death. Whatever “arrangement” Gene had with his wife, whenever Sackett stayed overnight at his place, she “usually slept fitfully, fearful that Majel might burst in and find us there.”37
For a number of years, Roddenberry had been working on an original Star Trek novel, “The God Thing.” He only ever wrote sixty-eight pages of it, but Sackett had read what there was of the manuscript. One evening, Roddenberry showed up at her house with a child’s paddling pool, twelve pints of baby oil and some foaming milk bath, and she guessed he had a very specific fantasy in mind, based on “The God Thing”: “there was a scene in which several female sirens tantalized Captain Kirk while they engaged in a weightless free-for-all, rolling in oil, their bodies glistening in what began as a sensual gymnastic event for Kirk and turned into a deadly contest for his life.”38
Things didn’t quite go to plan. “There was hardly enough oil to cover the bottom of the pool, and it didn’t mix well with the foaming milk bath. We tried to slide around in it and pretend we were weightless, writing space cadets or something, but it was really quite messy. Also the floor was hard, so it wasn’t very comfortable.”39
In the only novel Roddenberry did complete, the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), there are more references to men getting erections than are strictly necessary to tell the story:
“Hello, Jim.” As always, her lips seemed to caress his name as she spoke it.
He could almost catch the scent of her body fragrance, and he could feel the slight pressure of his genitals responding to those memories.40
By the Eighties, other people Roddenberry worked alongside would become either uncomfortable with or merely amused by his obsession with sexualizing his work. As he prepared Star Trek: The Next Generation, he noted that Deanna Troi’s race the Betazoids “engage in almost constant sexual activity”; in the series, we learn that they have nudist wedding ceremonies. Herb Wright, co-producer of the first season of The Next Generation, says that when they started discussing one of the new alien races, “He spent twenty-five minutes explaining to me all the sexual positions the Ferengi could go through. I finally said, ‘Gene, this is a family show, on at 7:00 on Saturdays.’ He finally said, ‘Okay, you’re right.’”41
Roddenberry did use Star Trek to engage more thoughtfully on the subject of sexual relationships and societal attitudes. Typically, the male lead character of an American TV show in the Sixties was a young heterosexual man who “gets the girl”—in a serial, a string of girls. Captain Kirk was famously good at conforming to this model, with a guest star falling for his charms most weeks. Action-adventure shows of the time rarely delved into the personal lives of their characters, and nothing Kirk or his crew get up to really suggests that the future society of Star Trek has wildly different social mores than 1960s America.
Christine Chapel had a fiancé in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and a crush on Spock by “Amok Time.” Very little else was said on the subject, and there was nothing to suggest that marriage took any other form than one man and one woman bonding for life, and having children. An episode was planned, but never made, in which it would be established that McCoy had a daughter, Joanna, but that they were estranged since he’d divorced her mother.42 Not until the movies—and then in one which Gene Roddenberry had little to do with—did we meet a character whose parents we knew weren’t married when he was born. There were, to be fair, a number of “interracial” marriages—although in Star Trek terms, that came from marrying a Vulcan, an energy being or an android, rather than a human being of a different race.
Roddenberry did, though, imagine the nature of marriage changing. He took for granted that it would cease being a religious ceremony. A wedding service in Star Trek’s first-season episode “Balance of Terror” begins to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride,” but Kirk hits a secular, inclusionary note . . .
KIRK: Since the days of the first wooden vessels, all shipmasters have had one happy privilege. That of uniting two people in the bonds of matrimony. We are gathered here today with you, Angela Martine, and you, Robert Tomlinson, in the sight of your fellows, in accordance with our laws and our many beliefs so that you may pledge your—
. . . before the ceremony is interrupted by a Romulan attack. The view of matrimony espoused by Kirk was not a radical one in the 1960s, when many Americans had started to see marriage less as a religious sacrament and more as a civil contract. There’s no evidence that the network blinked an eye at the wording of the ceremony.
At the end of his life, Roddenberry was asked when, in his vision of the future, two people would marry. He replied:
“I think they don’t, in a perfect world. I don’t think there’s that kind of mutual possession. Marriage in the form that it is now cannot possibly continue into the future. That is why we have so little of it in Star Trek . . . my idea was to portray a world in which people are developed enough as humans to be sufficient unto themselves, and in which they have a wonderful world of human alien contact to explore. They don’t remain single, from my point of view, in order to satisfy some romantic need on the part of the audience.”43
After the original run of the show was completed, Roddenberry started to think through a more detailed and radical model for its future society. The novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture contained a number of interesting gems, particularly early on. Some fans had speculated that Kirk and Spock were in a homosexual relationship. Roddenberry had Kirk himself rule out the possibility that he and Spock were lovers, but with a degree of open-mindedness and humor:
“Although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into heat only once every seven years.”44
We can see that there has been a sexual revolution on Earth. Marriage can now be a short-term contract— Kirk and a woman called Lori Ciana have recently “lived the basic and simple one-year arrangement together.”45 People can be coached on sexual technique—we learn that Jim Kirk was named after “my mother’s first love instructor.”46 Spock and Kirk’s relationship is complex and best expressed using the Vulcan word t’hy’la, glossed in the following terms: “The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t’hy’la, which can also mean brother and lover.”
Roddenberry’s attitude did evolve over the years. He was careful that Star Trek: The Next Generation should watch its pronouns—famously, when Picard took over from Kirk, the opening narration changed from “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to “Where No One Has Gone Before.” After Roddenberry’s death, Susan Sackett
“began to notice that there was an increasing tendency on the part of the writers to masculinize the series . . . during the early seasons of TNG I was constantly on the lookout for gender-discriminating terminology . . . I monitored scripts for things like “crewman,” which would always be changed to “crew member,” and sentences like “my men are working on it,” which could easily be changed to “my staff (or crew) are working on it.” These were subtle, but (I felt) important contributions toward updating the 60s mentality of the original series.”47
One of the most subtle and interesting developments was Roddenberry’s idea that Riker and Troi would share “a sort of prototype relationship, a friendship between the opposite sexes carried to its fullest capacity.”48 In Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation (1994), a book that collects an extended interview/discussion between a dying Roddenberry and writer Yvonne Fern, he explained the concept: “They are friends, first and foremost, and then they have this sexual component. And they can choose to utilize that component—act on it or not. But it’s not a romance.”
Needing a word for this, he coined the Betazoid term imzadi, meaning “beloved.” Fern tells him that she thinks it comes across as a far more conventional relationship, and Roddenberry seems resigned to it being written that way. In the final Next Generation movie, Nemesis, Riker and Troi, now middle-aged, get married in a ceremony that looks like a generic modern-day American wedding. Why did Riker wait so long to make an honest woman of his imzadi? Sadly, it’s probably not a reference to “Manhunt,” a second-season episode where Roddenberry’s wife played Troi’s mother as she hit “the Phase”:
TROI: My mother is beginning a physiological phase. It’s one that all Betazoid women must deal with as they enter mid-life.
RIKER: Yes, it’s something Troi warned me about when we first started to see each other. A Betazoid woman, when she goes through this phase, quadruples her sex drive.
TROI: Or more.
RIKER: Or more? You never told me that.
It’s not hard to argue that, in the original series, McCoy proved a better character than Janice Rand. If you had to choose whether Star Trek should continue with Number One or with Spock, you’d be mad not to pick Spock. Nor is it hard to see why Nichelle Nichols might have been frustrated with her role as Uhura. But the same thing happens with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Of the three women with central roles in the pilot, two are gone by the start of the second season, and the third has been marginalized. Each time, you can justify the decision, but it’s a consistent pattern: male characters are given more and more to do, but what start out as strong, central female characters disappear. Gene Roddenberry finds it hard to write for women as anything other than objects of male desire. As early as “The Cage,” his conscience is nagging at him about this, but he never listens to it for long. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Gene Roddenberry looks distinctly old-fashioned when he talks about women and sexuality more generally. At his worst, he represents some of the most unpleasant behavior of the past rather than the best of the future.