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The Pre-Trek Careers of Majel Barrett, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Grace Lee Whitney, and Walter Koenig
The six performers who, along with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley, played recurring characters on Star Trek took widely varied, sometimes danger-filled paths into show business. Their stories are as distinct as their Star Trek characters (Nurse Chapel, Engineer Scott, Lieutenant Uhura, Helmsman Sulu, Yeoman Rand, and Ensign Chekov), and often more dramatic than anything they were asked to play on television. Nichelle Nichols, who began her performing career as a dancer, not only faced racism but ran afoul of the mob. Grace Lee Whitney, who began her career as a singer, battled alcoholism and other personal demons. James Doohan fought the Nazis in France and was maimed during the conflict. George Takei and Walter Koenig took to acting as a refuge, to help them cope with traumatic childhoods. Yet, while they came from different places and took divergent routes, for Doohan, Nichols, Takei, Whitney, Koenig, and Majel Barrett, all roads led to the starship Enterprise—and immortality
Majel Barrett
Lovely young Majel Barrett vamps it up in this glamorous publicity still.
The future Nurse Chapel, born Majel Leigh Hudec on February 23, 1932, began acting classes at age ten. She regularly appeared in plays at Shaker Heights High School in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and earned a degree in theater arts from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Yet she never seriously considered making acting her career until she flunked out of law school in the mid-1950s. Then she moved to New York, where, as Majel Barrett, she landed a few minor theatrical roles, including a nine-month stint with the touring company of The Solid Gold Cadillac as it traveled across the Southwest and California. She moved to Hollywood in the late 1950s to break into film and television, but her pre-Star Trek résumé included only a half-dozen bits and uncredited walk-ons in feature films, plus minor supporting parts in seven television series.
Fortunately, however, one of those TV shows was producer Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant, where Barrett appeared opposite Leonard Nimoy. The statuesque, thirty-two-year-old actress soon began a torrid affair with the married Roddenberry, and in 1964, Roddenberry cast her as First Officer “Number One” in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.” That pilot was rejected, and, at the request of NBC, the Number One character was eliminated from the show. But after a second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (1965), earned a green light from the network, Roddenberry created the recurring role of Nurse Chapel for Barrett. She and Nimoy were the first actors cast by Roddenberry for Star Trek, and the only ones to appear in both “The Cage” and the subsequent series.
During the show’s first season, Roddenberry began sharing an apartment near the Desilu Productions studio with Barrett, who he would marry shortly following Star Trek’s cancellation and the final dissolution of his first marriage. Roddenberry also asked Barrett to provide the voice of the Enterprise computer, and the actress continued to supply computer voices for every Star Trek film and TV series until her death, from leukemia, in 2008. Barrett also appeared as Lwaxana Troi in several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
James Doohan
Like William Shatner, James Doohan was Canadian, born in Vancouver, British Columbia on March 3, 1930, and raised in Sarnia, Ontario. Like Gene Roddenberry, Doohan was a World War II veteran, a decorated member of the Royal Canadian Artillery who stormed Normandy’s Juno Beach on D-Day. As Doohan returned to camp a few nights later, a jumpy sentry shot off his right middle finger (which is why Scotty’s right hand is almost never in frame on Star Trek). Doohan was struck by a total of six bullets that night but survived, took pilot training, and served through 1945 as an army flyer. After the war, Doohan, who had joined the army in part to escape from his abusive, alcoholic father, returned to Canada. Since he had always possessed a fine singing voice and natural gift for imitating accents, Doohan decided to pursue a career in radio. He began taking voice and acting lessons and landed his first Canadian Broadcasting Corporation appearance in January 1946.
Over the next dozen years, he would appear on thousands of CBC radio broadcasts and hundreds of CBC television programs, nearly all of them live (and almost none of them preserved today). Among his many roles during this era were parts on the seminal science fiction programs Tales of Tomorrow and Space Command, as well as a short tenure as Timber Tom on the Canadian version of the children’s program Howdy Doody. (Coincidentally, Shatner had briefly appeared in the similar role of Buffalo Bob on the American version of the show.) Doohan split time between Toronto, where he worked for the CBC, and New York, where he studied acting, appeared in plays, and formed long-lasting friendships with fellow actors including Leslie Nielsen. Doohan’s personal life was troubled—in his memoir Beam Me Up, Scotty, he describes his first marriage as loveless and bitter—but his career was booming, and in the late 1950s, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue higher-profile film and television work.
Aided by his flair for accents, Doohan quickly established himself as a versatile character actor, landing roles on dozens of television series including The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In 1964, his marriage finally disintegrated. Doohan left his wife, the former Janet Young, and their four children and moved in with his pal Nielsen. But the work kept coming, and in ’64 and ’65 alone he racked up seventeen film and television appearances. One of those was as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott in the second Star Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
George Takei
Like Roddenberry and Doohan, George Takei’s life was shaped by World War II—but in a very different way. Takei, born April 20, 1937, and his Japanese American family was interned, forcibly removed from their Los Angeles home and shipped to Arkansas and, later, Oregon, spending the duration of the war in camps encircled in barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. Takei’s parents were declared “disloyals” when they refused to provide “friendly” responses to a pair of questions on a form all adult internees were required to complete. His mother, the former Fumiko Emily Nakamura, a native-born American, was stripped of her citizenship, and his father, Takekuma Norman Takei, faced possible deportation. After the war, a protracted legal battle averted Takekuma’s deportation and eventually restored Fumiko’s citizenship.
As a result of these troubles, young George struggled with ambivalent feelings about his homeland. He challenged his father when Takekuma began studying to earn American citizenship in the early 1950s, following passage of the landmark Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which allowed Asian Americans to become nationalized citizens (previously, they had been barred). “But America has treated us so badly,” Takei, in his autobiography To the Stars, recalls asking his father. “What made you decide to become a citizen of a country like this?” His father’s answer—“My choice is to help America be what it claims it is”—helped Takei move beyond his anger and resentment over his family’s internment and instilled in him a sense of civic duty that he has carried ever since.
After graduating from high school, Takei briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley with the intent of becoming an architect. But he secretly dreamed of becoming an actor and, after winning his father’s grudging permission, transferred from Berkeley to UCLA to study theater. By the time he graduated from UCLA in 1960, Takei had earned honors for his performances in student plays (twice named Best Supporting Actor at the school) and had earned small roles on the television series Playhouse 90 and Perry Mason. His first big-screen acting assignment was looping English dialogue for the American release of the Japanese giant monster movie Rodan in 1957. He briefly studied in England before returning to Los Angeles, where he landed a steady stream of small stage, film and TV roles, including bit parts on The Twilight Zone and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
When he interviewed with Roddenberry in 1965 for a spot in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Takei was ecstatic about the role of Lieutenant Sulu—and not just because it meant steady, good-paying work. He was inspired by Roddenberry’s vision of a multiethnic starship crew as the avatar of a postracial future for the human species and excited by the opportunity to play a heroic Asian character. “This was unbelievable,” Takei wrote in To the Stars. “This project was a quantum leap ahead of anything on the air, the role, a real trailblazer. And this was really happening to me! … I was lightheaded.” It was the kind of role he didn’t even dare dream about during his boyhood.
Nichelle Nichols
According to its accompanying text, this stylish publicity photo was intended to promote “Nichelle Nichols, Torch Singer.”
Although her pre-Trek résumé included few film or television roles, Nichelle Nichols was a triple-threat (singer-dancer-actor) professional with more show business experience than most of the show’s other cast members.
Born Grace Nichols on December 28, 1932, in the Chicagoland exurb of Robbins, Illinois, Nichols studied both ballet and Afro-Cuban dance as an adolescent and landed her first professional dancing gig at age fourteen. Four years later, she married dancer Foster Johnson, giving birth to a son, Kyle, in 1951. The marriage failed, but Nichols’s career continued to ascend. Now working primarily as a singer, she toured with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton and made hundreds of nightclub appearances across the United States and Europe throughout the 1950s, including one that led to an uncomfortable entanglement with a Milwaukee crime boss and a Canadian gig that ended in an attempted rape. Tiring of life on the road and yearning to spend more time with her son, Nichols moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to try to find film and television work.
Her first screen appearance—an uncredited role in the chorus of director Otto Preminger’s 1959 adaptation of Porgy and Bess—proved very important, as the actress explains in her autobiography, Beyond Uhura. “This was the break I’d been waiting for, though not because it brought me sudden fame,” she writes. Working alongside African American stars including Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, and Sammy Davis Jr. “opened doors for me that I might have otherwise been knocking on for years.”
While several theatrical roles followed, five years elapsed before Nichols stepped in front of the cameras again. When she did, in 1964, it was for her first television appearance, in an episode of Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant. Nichols played the wife of Ernest Cameron (Don Marshall), a young black Marine assigned to the same unit as a white racist (played by Dennis Hopper) who, along with a gang of other bigots, once beat Cameron nearly to death. When Lt. Bill Rice (Gary Lockwood, the show’s star), learns of the two men’s personal history, he asks why the attack occurred. “I was just another nigger who didn’t know his place,” Cameron explains. This excellent episode, titled “To Set It Right,” was directed by Vincent McEveety, who would later helm six installments of Star Trek, including the classic “Balance of Terror.”
Nichols and Roddenberry struck up a friendship, which blossomed into a romance until Nichols learned that the married Roddenberry was also having an affair with Majel Barrett. “I could not be the other woman to the other woman,” Nichols writes in Beyond Uhura. The romance ended but the friendship continued, and Roddenberry added Nichols to the cast of Star Trek once the show had been green-lighted by NBC. Roddenberry not only created the character of Lieutenant Uhura specifically for her, but asked Nichols to collaborate in writing the character’s detailed backstory, although little of this material made it into Star Trek’s teleplays.
Grace Lee Whitney
A young-looking thirty-six when she won the role of Yeoman Janice Rand on Star Trek, Grace Lee Whitney already had nearly twenty years of experience as a model, actress, and vocalist. Born April 1, 1930, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as Mary Ann Chase, she was renamed Grace Lee by her adoptive parents, the Whitneys. She began her show business career as a teenage jazz vocalist, opening nightclub dates for established artists such as Billie Holiday and touring with various groups including Spike Jones and His Other Orchestra (the zany bandleader’s noncomedic ensemble). Modeling jobs and minor theatrical roles eventually followed, including a small part in comedian Phil Silvers’s revue Top Banana (she reprised her role in the 1954 film adaptation of the show). Whitney fell in love with the show’s snare drum player, converted to Judaism, and married him. The couple moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, and over the next eight years, she landed bit parts in director Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)—she appears alongside Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon in the famous “upper berth” scene—and Irma La Douce (1963), along with guest spots on more than two dozen TV series, including The Outer Limits and Batman.
In 1963, she appeared in an episode of Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant. Roddenberry was impressed and offered her a major role in his 1964 pilot Police Story. When that show failed to sell, he brought two members of its cast—DeForest Kelley and Whitney—on board with Star Trek. Whitney, wearing Yeoman Rand’s blonde beehive wig and red minidress, was featured prominently in initial publicity for the program, yet the character appeared in just eight episodes before Whitney left the show under controversial circumstances midway through Season One (see Chapter 10, “Ahead, Warp Factor One”). In her autobiography, The Longest Trek, Whitney writes that her dismissal from the show exacerbated alcohol and other substance abuse issues she had been struggling with for decades. Although her tenure was the shortest among the cast, she would be fondly remembered by fans of the show and would make a belated return to Star Trek, again as Rand, in the first, third, fourth, and sixth installments of the feature film series, as well as in episodes of Star Trek: Voyager (“Flashback,” 1996) and the fan-created Internet series Star Trek: The New Voyages (“Of Gods and Men,” 2007).
Walter Koenig
Even though he affected the phoniest-sounding Russian accent in Hollywood, Walter Koenig was of authentic Russian Jewish heritage. In 1915, his grandparents and their four children emigrated from Lithuania to Chicago, where Koenig was born September 14, 1936. In his autobiography Warped Factors, Koenig, a self-identified “neurotic,” writes that he spent most of his childhood feeling lonely and scared. His father’s radical political beliefs (he was an ardent communist) placed the family’s financial security and even physical safety in jeopardy during the McCarthyist Red Scare era of the 1950s. No wonder Koenig began seeing a psychologist in elementary school. However, he discovered during the summer between second and third grade, while appearing in a play at a socialist summer camp, that he enjoyed acting and was good at it. Entering the persona of a character freed him from his own anxieties.
He spent two years at tiny Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, as a pre-med student. Then, after his father died suddenly of a heart attack, Koenig decided to pursue his true love and transferred to UCLA and entered its theater arts program. After graduation in 1958, he earned an invitation to continue his education at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, where his classmates included James Caan and a half-dozen other up-and-comers who went on to prominent careers in film and television and on Broadway. Koenig moved back to Los Angeles after completing the two-year Neighborhood Playhouse program but struggled to find consistent employment, in part due to his diminutive stature (at five-foot-six, he was never considered leading man material). He made twenty-two mostly minor, sometimes uncredited, film and TV appearances over the course of the next six years.