The City on the Edge of Forever (6 page)

Well, Gene called me up one day and said, “The
Enterprise
has to be in danger.
Big
danger.”

I replied that the focus of the show was not on the
Enterprise
, which existed in a timeless place frozen in the chrono-stream till Kirk and Spock could either set time in the past back the way it was supposed to be…or change the future, in which the ship might not even exist.

“No, no,” Gene said, getting troubled that I was arguing with him, as if I knew what I was doing, “we
have
to have a great threat to the ship in every episode. The network is asking for it.”

“But it’s beside the point, Gene! It only wastes time and takes the viewer’s focus off the love story, which is what this is all about.”

“You’ll have to do it!”

So I did it. To Gene’s order, I created a sub-plot about the
Enterprise
being thrown into an alternate future where they had become, gulp!, space pirates. It was an unnecessary, foolish, redundant distraction…but Gene thought it would placate the suits over at NBC. (Eventually, of course, it was dropped. But it helped contribute to the myth that I had written this unshootable, incredibly expensive teleplay. Horse puckey.)

And there was, of course, the opening, in which I had one of the ship’s complement getting a weak-willed officer to do something crooked, by tempting him with Jewels of Sound, a kind of futuristic hallucinogenic narcotic. Oh no, I was told, we can’t
possibly
have anyone on the
Enterprise
doing anything as scummy as that. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

That was the first time I ever heard that miserable excuse for hackneyed formula writing. Our hero wouldn’t act that way. Our lead won’t allow her character to act that way. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

No, indeed not. What they
can
do is act the same damned predictable way each and every week, in each and every new situation. Never mind that human beings are irrational and unpredictable and an amalgam of good and bad and smart and dumb, never mind that the most universal reason that most of us do
any
thing, even if it gets us in trouble or messes us up, is that It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Never mind that making these characters unchanging gave them about as much depth as a saucer of oatmeal. Never mind that common sense tells us that if you jam a mixed crew of approximately 450 people into an interstellar tunafish tin, for extended periods, that maybe, possibly, whaddaya think
someone
might get just a touch cranky with someone else? You mean to tell me, I said to whomever would listen, including Gene and John and Herb Solow (then head of the studio), and Bobby Justman, who was, at the time, associate producer—all of whom tell wonderful stories about how I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and how
each
of them, according to them, saved this script—that all 450 of these spacefaring men and women are saints, without flaw or natural human instincts or crankiness or rotten spots in their nature? No, I was told, Gene believes in the ultimate perfectibility of the human race. (Yeah, but all them third world aliens, who were nothing more than surrogates for ghetto minorities,
they
could be miserable rotten sonsabitches. Talk about your White Man’s Burden.)

Yet, with all of that in there, Gene okayed the treatment finally, and I set about the long chore of writing the script.

So you know who it was that
really
sandbagged me?

It was Shatner.

I wasn’t a kid. I should have heard the sound of creeping actors in the night.

Shatner had been sucking up. No, let me correct that, heaven forbid any of the True Believers get the impression that Bill wasn’t absolutely and strictly the kindest, least self-serving entity in the universe. Bill had been solicitous of my friendship. I won’t talk about that afternoon at the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. All I’ll say is that Bill was a sharp listener, and he knew that I had won the Writers Guild award, plus all these science fiction Hugos and Nebulas, and I was coming off a feature film that (until the wretched thing, in fact, opened) gossip was predicting would make a fabulous film…and he made me his little pal, his little chum. Leonard Nimoy wasn’t like that. He was simply a good guy, and never hustled me, and we have remained friends for a quarter of a century.

But Shatner had me conned. Butter wouldn’t melt…well, you know the rest. And I was going for the okeydoke again, silly me.

Bill had made it clear that the moment I finished that
great
script everyone on the show said I was writing, he wanted to see it, wanted to hold it in his hands still warm and pulsing from the typewriter.

I finished the script on Saturday the 28th of May, the day after my thirty-second birthday. I wrote FADE OUT and THE END and sat back and smiled and felt great compassion for Captain James T. Kirk, who would have sacrificed the entire universe, all of time and space, for the woman he loved. And I was filled with pride at having created the character of Trooper, a legless veteran of World War I, whose bravery meant nothing in the infinite flow of merciless time. Boy, I
loved
that damned script!

And like the Mt. Everest of schmucks, instead of going and playing a game of miniature golf or swimming the Hellespont, I made one of the great idiot mistakes of my life. I took an actor’s disingenuous camaraderie as true friendship, and I called Shatner at his home.

“I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Bill said.

I wasn’t a kid. I hadn’t just taken a dive off the turnip truck. OhBoy, if Time really
could
be called back!

I heard his Harley coming down the mountain road toward my house long before he shot halfway past the driveway, decided to course-correct doing 35 on a steep slope, and laid his bike down in the tarmac with a hideous wounded-beast screech.

The scar from his wheelie remains to this day in my driveway, though the 1994 Northridge earthquake splintered it some.

He came limping up to the door, I opened it, and in came The Great Actor, to peruse my humble offering.

Shatner sat on the sofa in the living room, and read the script front to back, top to bottom, page after page. I went off around the house to tend to other matters—everything having gone to hell while I’d obsessed over the dawn-to-dusk writing of “City”—and every once in a while I’d cruise past and offer him a cuppa coffee or ask if everything was cool. He was abstracted, but he indicated everything was peachykeen. It took him some time to read it. He read it close, bro,
very
close.

Then, when he had finished it, he sat there for a few minutes, staring out through the sliding doors of the living room toward the watershed land behind my house. Contemplative. Then he picked up “City” and started reading it all over again.

This went on for a couple of hours.

And after he completed the second pass, I saw him slowly turning the pages, studying the script for something…I knew not what.

Talk about being a Mt. Everest capacity jerk, that was me, that was I, that was the both of the not-a-kid.

He was line-counting. The Great Actor was weighing the freight of lines spoken by his publicity nemesis on
Star Trek
, the enigmatic Mr. Spock, the excellent Leonard Nimoy, against how many Kirk shots there were. And let me not suggest that the ego of Bill Shatner influenced his opinion, but when he toted up the numbers in his head, and found that Lenny had, what, maybe half a dozen more lines…I was on my way to an anger and a heartpunch that has lasted for thirty-five years.

He told me how great the script was, how he couldn’t wait to play it, how he was going to tell Gene it was the best script they’d ever had for the show…and I battened on the banana oil flattery like a bad dresser buying a cheap suit. (I’m sixty-one years old. Shatner calls me “a surly young man.”)

Shatner, of course, still limping from his flameout, went straight to Roddenberry and said he’d seen the script and it was swell, just perfectly swell,
but he had a few problems with it
.

(A small digression. MY STAR TREK MEMORIES “written by” William Shatner—which is to accuracy as
Le Sacre du Printemps
“danced by” Harlan Ellison at the Bolshoi is to reality—had an initial printing of 250,000 copies. And though I don’t follow Shatner’s business dealings with even minuscule attention, I do know that in December of 1993 HarperCollins went back to press for another 25,000 copies.

(That means that yet another quarter of a million gullible readers read the following fanciful interpretation of Shatner’s one and only visit to my home, as I’ve just described it to you. This is from page 219 of STAR TREK MEMORIES:

(“Finally, when it got to the point where Justman and Roddenberry felt they were going to have to give up on the script, Gene sent me up to Harlan’s house, hoping that I might be able to reason with him, and I have to admit, I failed miserably. At the time I was rather friendly with Harlan, and I’m sure that Gene felt like maybe he’d listen to me if I went up there and told him why his script wasn’t usable. And I can remember driving up to Harlan’s house on my motorcycle, getting inside the house and being yelled at throughout my visit. Harlan was very irate and within a rather short period of time he’d thrown me off his property, insane with anger at Justman, Roddenberry and Coon. I was just the messenger, but he was out to kill me, too.”

(I’ve told you what really happened.

(That this is complete codswallop, the delusionary attempt to insert oneself into a game being played by others, that it bears absolutely no relation to the facts, is not startling. Mr. Shatner’s memory, and the accuracy of that implement, has been called into public question before. Take for instance, in the 4 December 1993 edition of
TV Guide
, in the “Grapevine” section, a pullquote insert box called “Sound Bite.” Shatner, during an interview, was asked about the U.S.S.
Enterprise’s
“five year mission” on
Star Trek
, one of the most familiar lines in the pantheon of American Pop Culture Babble, if I’m not mistaken. And, in the words of
TV Guide
, Shatner “drew a blank” and finally had to have the lines repeated to him, at which point this Paragon of Infallible Recollection responded…

(“Seek out new civilizations, oh, yeah, I remember.”

(Using this anecdote as trope, as metaphor, as touchstone, as anydamnthing you choose, kindly explain how it was that Shatner was sent to explain to me why my script was unusable, when actors and writers on tv series barely
meet
each other, much less get these Mission: Impossible assignments by the Executive Producer to intercede when all else has failed. In fact, Shatner was the first to see the script, as I’ve said, before
anyone
read it, Justman, Roddenberry, Coon,
any
one! Shatner was at my home once. Only once. And I’ve described what happened. But here we go again, for thirty years, yet
another
minion of Star Trek Memories advising a quarter of a million strangers that I was—and likely still am—no-price, a bum, a dawdler, an incompetent.

(Do I seem to get angrier and angrier as I write this introductory essay? Yeah, well, as I said, thirty years is much too long to keep getting kicked in the ass before one does something about it.)

After all that time it had taken me to write it, Roddenberry now had been put on notice by his leading man that if the script wasn’t substantially altered, there would be, er, uh, some hesitation on Bill’s part when it came time to shoot the story.

Oh, hell, why belabor it…I rewrote the script, I rewrote it again, I worked on it at home and on a packing crate in Bill Theiss’s wardrobe room in Building “E” and when Gene kept insisting on more and more changes, and when I saw the script being dumbed up, I couldn’t take much more, and I went on to do a 90-minute script for
Cimarron Strip
.

And Gene gave it to a guy named Steve Carabatsos, who’d been brought on staff after Johnny Black had his falling out with Gene and righteously walked off the show; and Carabatsos took a chain-saw to it, and screwed it up so badly that Gene asked me to come back and do yet
another
rewrite (for no money, of course); and then it was rewritten by yet another hand (whose name I’ll not reveal here, but it wasn’t Roddenberry, who for years afterward told everyone that
he
had been the great talent who had “saved” poor inept Ellison’s script), and I hated it; and I tried to take my name off it, and put on my pseudonym
Cordwainer Bird
—which everyone in the industry knew was Ellison standing behind this crippled thing saying
it ain’t my work
and sort of giving the Bird to those who had mucked up the words—but Gene called me and made it clear he’d blackball me in the industry if I tried to humiliate him like that; and I went for the okeydoke. I let my name stay on it.

And then he called me in to save his damned show.

In Shatner’s STAR TREK MEMORIES, on page 220, he writes, “Believe it or not, Harlan Ellison, who had become so thoroughly disenchanted with Gene Roddenberry and his
Star Trek
creation, can actually be held directly responsible for saving the show when it appeared headed for cancellation at the end of our first season,” and then he goes on to get the story I’ve told you here all wrong in his charmingly Shatnerian way. But he verifies what I’ve written here, and concludes with this:

“It is truly one of the show’s greatest ironies that
Star Trek
may have owed its continued existence in large part to Harlan Ellison, a man who would shortly become one of the show’s greatest detractors.”