The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy

Part I

IN THE BEGINNING

1

SINS OF OUR FATHERS

WE WERE SITTING IN THE LAST ROW of the synagogue when Dad was called up to the bimah—the stage at the front of the congregation where he would be reading from the Book of Jonah. Dad and I liked sitting in the back. It was something we had in common—Dad because he normally didn’t want to be recognized, me because I didn’t want to be noticed. It was a weekday afternoon and the temple was almost empty, typical of Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement.

The morning services are always packed on this, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Everyone shows up to ask God for forgiveness—for the sin of lying, for the sin of hatred, for the sin of wanton glances. All the sins. We fast all day on Yom Kippur, so when the morning program is over almost everyone heads straight home to distract themselves from thinking about food (or to eat). Most return just before sunset, when we stand for an excruciating hour as the ark remains open for one last chance to seek forgiveness. Before that, the shul is near empty during the least popular afternoon service, the Mincha. This didn’t bother my father. Always the professional, he would give the few die-hard congregants something to remember. With his deep, resonant voice, he began:

The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai: Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment against it; for their wickedness has come before Me.

Instead of schlepping to Nineveh, which sits in what is now northern Iraq, Jonah boarded a ship headed in the opposite direction. Of course, you can’t flee from the service of the Lord. It’s like trying to run from yourself. I knew something about that, having for years hidden myself in a cloud of pot smoke as a way to flee from the challenges in my life—the challenge of college, the challenge of dating, the challenge of having a complicated relationship with my famous father. All the challenges.

When I started smoking in high school at age seventeen, it was fun. You have an instant community when you start smoking pot, and I liked hanging with the stoners because before that, I was eating my lunch alone in a high school bungalow. Five years later I was smoking daily by myself, and it had become a lonely, isolated experience. I was a pretty high-functioning substance abuser and was always able to keep up with my college coursework. But I couldn’t shake the need to be stoned all the time. In the words of my college roommate, Sure, I smoke pot. But you, Nimoy, are a pothead.

I wasn’t the only one in the family who fled from life’s challenges. Every night I’d hear the ice hit the glass, followed by a pour of Johnnie Walker or a dry Bombay martini with a twist, depending on Dad’s mood. There was a built-in bar in the family room next to my bedroom, and I could hear my dad whenever he was in there. My father was the epitome of a high-functioning alcoholic. He made every early morning call, every meeting, every personal appearance. Years later, when he was sober and being interviewed by none other than Bill Shatner, Dad admitted his habitual drinking began in the 1960s to cope with the pressures of making Star Trek. What he didn’t say during that segment—and later confided in me—was that his drinking was the result of long hours on the set, the difficult producers, and his problems with Bill Shatner.

During my college years there were times when I wanted to quit smoking pot but was clueless as to how to do it—my willpower having repeatedly failed me. Now I was back in L.A. living with my parents under the misguided notion that being home was a safe, supportive place to be as I took on the challenges of a first-year law student. Dad’s drinking and my pot-smoking were a combustible combination, which was why at night I would hide in my room to smoke, study, and stay the hell out of his way. Still, there were skirmishes about little things.

Were you in my toolbox? Dad asked. Because I’m missing an awl.

Why would I need an awl?

And about bigger things.

John Lennon’s been shot, Dad told me one December night as I was cramming for a final in Civil Procedure.

What do you mean he’s been shot?

They just announced it on the news.

I got up from my desk and ran to the family room to turn on the TV. I flipped through the channels looking for the news, not quite believing it. Or more like believing it but assuming that John was just injured. Nope. My favorite Beatle was dead. I turned toward Dad, who was standing behind me.

He’s dead, I choked out. Some idiot killed him.

I know, he said, I was just talking to Harold about it.

(Harold Livingston. The screenwriter of Star Trek: The Mediocre Motion Picture.)

Harold said John Lennon was responsible for the entire drug culture in this country.

The lighting was low in the family room as the TV flickered and the newscaster droned on about the tragedy that had taken place in front of the Dakota Apartments in New York City. Dad stood right in front of me, challenging me, my idol, my life. One of my all-time favorite heroes had just been shot dead on the street in front of his home, and this was my father’s response. He knew how much I admired John, how much I loved him. I still had an old, tattered Beatles poster on the door to my room, the one of them at the blue wall advertising the Royal Command Performance.

Yeah, well, Harold Livingston’s an asshole, I said, then stormed off to my room, slammed the door, and lit up a bowl.

The LORD provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah; and Jonah remained in the fish’s belly three days and three nights.

Dad was mesmerizing as he continued with the story of how God prevented Jonah from sailing away by throwing a tempest on the sea and how on Jonah’s suggestion the terrified sailors threw him overboard to stop the sea from raging. The whale showed up out of nowhere to save Jonah from drowning, which all seemed well and good except that Jonah then found himself stuck inside the whale with nowhere to go. Just like I was back in L.A. stuck in my room. Stuck in my addiction. Stuck.

Dad gave it his all. His voice was full and committed as if he were recounting events he himself had witnessed. The octogenarians in the congregation sat up straight. We were all there with Jonah, trapped in the belly of the whale, trapped inside the synagogue, forced to reflect on our own sins, the things we needed to atone for, the things we had run away from.

I turned in my seat to look at the sea of traffic flowing outside the open door of the synagogue. Despite the trouble I had connecting to my dad, a problem we had experienced off and on since I was very young, I was always proud of him. It didn’t matter that he was playing to a near empty house, he was a class act, as he would say of others he admired. Dad was a born actor. He knew his craft and he gave it his all. I started thinking that if Trek fans knew they could walk straight into the shul and watch Leonard Nimoy recount the trials and tribble-ations of Jonah and the Whale, the place would be packed.

The fans. By the time I was ten and Star Trek was in its first season, it was impossible for me and Dad to be in public together—people would swarm him asking for autographs, telling him how much they loved Spock and Star Trek. They’d get so excited I often heard them say, You’re my biggest fan. Dad always tried to oblige the fans. He had a deep appreciation for them, which I admired. Then again, there were times when the attention he gave the fans was frustrating—just another distraction from our relationship, a relationship which was often distant and awkward.

By my teen years, the awkwardness I had experienced with my father during my childhood turned to conflict. Throughout our lives my dad and I experienced many great moments together, mostly celebrating his incredible career. Along with those positive experiences came some serious head-banging that would periodically plague us. Now here we were on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Day of Atonement, the day of apologies and forgiveness, all of which eluded us.

Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish. He said: In my trouble I called to the LORD, who answered me; From the belly of Sheol I cried out, and You heard my voice. You cast me into the depths, into the heart of the sea, the floods engulfed me; All Your breakers and billows swept over me.… Would I ever gaze again upon Your holy Temple?

Jonah had really hit bottom. He prayed mightily, admitting that he was sinking to his lowest depths, that weeds wrapped around his head, that his soul was fainting away, when suddenly he remembered the Lord and promised to do what the hell he was told. It’s a heartfelt story of repentance and forgiveness, which is why we read it every year on Yom Kippur.

The LORD commanded the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon dry land. The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it what I tell you.

Our synagogue was modest compared to the monumental structures of Sinai Temple a few miles north or Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest congregation in Los Angeles. Adat Shalom was a basic rectangular structure much like the Tabernacle the Jews dragged around the desert for forty years, ours a rectangle with parquet wood floors and modest stained-glass windows. Halfway up the aisle was where my mother’s parents used to sit every Saturday morning for the Shabbat service, Grandpa Archie in his best suit and cuff links, Grandma Ann always wearing a pillbox hat, always lost in prayer. Not much had changed since my bar mitzvah in 1969, when I stood on the bimah where my father stood now.

Beautiful mosaics hung on the walls, depicting Bible stories: Sarah and Abraham being visited by three strangers, Rebekah drawing water from the well, and a picture behind me of a boy dressed in a plain white tunic lying blindfolded on top of a woodpile. His feet and hands were tied together, and behind him was all blue sky, giving the sense that he was high up on a mountain. The woodpile was firewood, the round logs neatly stacked under the boy’s body. As my father continued to read, I felt sick as I realized what I was looking at. The blue mountain sky, the blindfolded boy, the firewood. This was the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, in which Isaac’s father, Abraham, prepared to sacrifice his son as an offering to God. As the story goes, just as Abraham grabbed the butcher’s knife to slit Isaac’s throat, an angel appeared and stopped him.

I looked back out the front door to catch my breath. The intersection of Westwood and National Boulevards is one of the unsightly cross streets in West L.A., with a strip mall on one corner and a gas station on the other. A freeway overpass connects the two. In that moment, with the view of all that grotesque concrete and the noise of the street traffic, it seemed as if Adat Shalom was nothing more than a giant shoebox built at an ugly intersection, adorned on the inside with the mural of a boy about to be murdered by his father.

It’s in Genesis 22 where God puts Abraham’s faith to the test by telling him to take his son up to the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice. Biblical commentary explains this as Abraham passing the test of his faith in God, but there’s been some debate as to whether he would have gone through with it, whether he really would have killed Isaac. Then again, why else go through all the trouble of calling Isaac, collecting the firewood, and schlepping all the way up the mountain?

Rabbi Mark Borovitz, with whom I later studied the Bible, would tell me that Abraham failed the test because of his resentment toward Isaac. Isaac was not his only son. Because Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was too old to have children, she gave him her handmaiden Hagar, and soon Ishmael was born. Sarah did eventually give birth to Isaac, but to protect Isaac’s interests, she told Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael, and this hurt Abraham deeply. Rabbi Mark explained that Abraham resented Isaac because he was forced to send Ishmael into the wilderness. He was acting on this resentment when he willingly took Isaac up to the mountain, thereby failing the real test presented by the story.

But at that moment, sitting alone in that sanctuary as my father’s voice commanded the space, I couldn’t understand why the synagogue would prominently display one of the most hideous scenes in the Bible. I only knew that it seemed personal—like in-my-face personal.

The Akedah is a horror show, a reminder to all young men that if they don’t stand up to their fathers, they might be destroyed. This is a running theme throughout Torah, the first five books of the Bible: ancient stories of fathers and sons struggling with one another. Abraham with his son Isaac, Isaac’s problems with his son Jacob, Jacob’s problems with his twelve sons. And now here I was back in L.A., living in my father’s house, repeating the cycle of dysfunction all over again, not knowing if anything could ever be done about it.

2

SPOCK AND SPIDEY

ON A SATURDAY MORNING IN THE FALL OF 1966, when I was ten and Star Trek had just gone on the air, I went with my dad to Hollywood on one of our father-son outings. It was an annual tradition we’d started the year before where we’d drive to M’Goos—an old-school pizza parlor on Hollywood Boulevard—then head over to the Cherokee Book Shop, where Dad would buy me some vintage comics. It was a tradition that occurred exactly twice before being abandoned, which was something of a relief, as I never knew what to say to him when we were alone, and he barely said anything to me. In this respect, my dad was exactly like his father, my grandfather Max, a man of few words if any. Oftentimes it felt like Dad and I were strangers, always struggling for something to say.

I like the sawdust on the floor, I said.

Yeah, it’s good, Dad replied. Then, nodding toward the waiters in their straw hats and red vests, What do you think of their uniforms?

Yeah, they’re neat, I replied.

Despite our discomfort, I loved M’Goos—it had an authentic old Hollywood feel to it not unlike Musso & Frank, a dining landmark right down the street. We were at M’Goos in the late morning before the lunch hour, and the place was practically empty. Had it been busier, people would’ve been coming up to the table to ask for autographs, something that had been happening regularly over the past few months as Spock’s popularity grew. One time Dad took me to a carnival at St. Timothy’s Church on Pico and Beverly Glen. He was immediately mobbed, and that was the end of that. With no fans around at M’Goos, we just sat there in our awkwardness. I was glad when the pizza finally arrived because it gave us something to do. And it was delicious.

After we ate, it was off to the Cherokee Book Shop. Finding the collectible comics section at Cherokee was like discovering hidden treasure. You had to walk to the back of the store, then up a narrow staircase that led to a secret attic hideout. A humorless hippie named Burt ran the comics section, which was a small room of wooden bookshelves stacked with cardboard boxes filled with classic, colorful editions from DC and Marvel. There were sample comics in plastic bags taped to the front of each box—Batman, Justice League of America, The Atom, The Fantastic Four. The place was a mecca of comic book art and storytelling. It was there that I picked up old copies of Daredevil and Green Lantern, and my all-time favorite—The Amazing Spider-Man. So satisfying to sift through those boxes and find back issues with killer covers of Spidey being tormented by Green Goblin, Sandman, and Doc Ock. I could relate to that fatherless loner Peter Parker.

Dad and I didn’t spend much time together in those early days. Before Star Trek he was constantly working odd jobs and pursuing bit roles in TV shows, a remnant of the work ethic forged on the Depression-era streets of Boston, where he was born and raised. My dad was a man obsessed with paying the bills while pursuing his passion. When he got his big break costarring on a new science fiction TV series on NBC, I barely saw him at all. I knew Dad had brought me on a father-son outing to Hollywood because he felt he should, because he wanted to be a good dad. But as was typical, he was distracted and withdrawn that day at the Cherokee Book Shop. We were in a room filled with one of the best sci-fi/fantasy comic book collections in the country, and the man who had appeared on The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, and was now making a splash as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, leaned against a wall and waited in detached silence. Sometimes, I simply could not figure the guy out. I remember feeling this unspoken pressure to decide what I wanted so we could get the hell out of there.

And his own sensibility, it seems safe to say, informed [his] character. So read the obit in the New Yorker after Dad died in 2015.

It was definitely safe to say. Like Spock, my father was often inscrutable—it was hard to know what he was thinking or feeling. The similarity to the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer didn’t end there. Like Spock, Dad was not the warm and fuzzy type. One of my earliest memories of him was when we were living in our tiny first house on Palms Boulevard in the Mar Vista neighborhood of L.A. I must have been five or six years old. It was morning, and Dad was wearing a suit because we were going to High Holy Day services. We were waiting for my sister and my mother when dad showed me a magic trick. He tucked a small rubber ball into the upper part of his sock and, with a wave of his hand, made it disappear.

Wow, I thought. Daddy can do magic! Then I had this weird sensation. While I was standing there in awe, I was waiting for him to give me a hug or a kiss. My mother would have done it. Her parents, Grandpa Archie and Grandma Ann, would have done it. But Dad didn’t. I had this feeling that he was almost like a stranger to me, as if he were a long-lost uncle who came to visit and showed me a little magic and that was that. My mom would later tell me that when my sister and I were babies—my sister Julie is a year and a half older than me—Dad was much more hands-on helping to take care of us. We even have some old 8 mm film showing Dad giving us baths and holding us during outings. But by the time I was old enough to start remembering things, I felt this distance from him.

There’s another memory about my dad that’s stuck in my mind, something that happened when I was a little older, probably when I was seven or eight. I was standing in the kitchen of our second house, on Comstock Avenue in West L.A., while my mother was looking for something in the refrigerator. Dad came in to fix himself a drink. It was the afternoon, and I watched as he made himself a martini with a lemon peel. He then shuffled off to the bedroom, drink in hand, leaving the bottles and the lemon and the knife on the counter. It was just an ordinary weekend afternoon that I never would have remembered, except for the fact that, seeing the mess he left behind, my mother pulled a milk bottle out of the refrigerator, lifted it over her head, yelled my father’s name, and threw it against the countertop. It shattered on the avocado-green tile. I ran out of the kitchen and into the living room, where I hid under the coffee table, whimpering. My father came into the room and sat in a chair. He sat there and said nothing. I crawled out from under the table and into his lap. He reluctantly put his arms around me. Years later when I read about Dr. Harry Harlow’s monkey love experiment for some psychology class, I flashed back to that day, because it felt like I was one of Dr. Harlow’s baby monkeys trying to get comfort from a parent made of bare wire.

I had so much trouble bonding with Dad when I was a kid, which isn’t to say he didn’t try. In the winter of 1968–69, not long after we moved into our third and final house in the neighborhood of Westwood, Dad returned home from an out-of-state personal appearance, which was something he often did on weekends, because it gave him a chance to interact with the fans. And it generated fast cash. I was in my room when he came in and handed me a small box containing a colorful set of Mr. Toad cuff links and tie clip. The set was clearly made for a little boy, but I was twelve at the time. It didn’t matter, because I was so grateful for the gift. My father had thought to buy me something while he was away. I never wore the Mr. Toad cuff links or tie clip, but I adored them.

Dad also took me fishing back in the day when there was a huge barge anchored way out in the Santa Monica Bay. And sometimes we’d go sailing. He was an excellent sailor from his years growing up on the Charles River in Boston. He had a natural feel for the wind and the water and would give me clear orders when to switch the jib sail when he was turning the boat. I remember one day we were at the rental office at Marina del Rey and it was windy as hell. The guy at the desk had just said to the people in front of us that he was only outfitting the boats with mainsails. Then he turned to Dad and said, Mr. Nimoy, you know how to handle yourself out there, so I’m going to also give you a jib.

I always felt secure with Dad when we were doing these kinds of activities, whether we were sailing a boat in rough conditions or he was flying his single-engine Piper aircraft through a rainstorm.* He had a focus and a confidence that put me at ease. Then again, sailing with him was more of a meditative experience than an opportunity for us to connect. And sitting for hours in a noisy cockpit with his eyes fixed on the controls or searching the sky at ten thousand feet was not exactly conducive to conversation. This was the difficulty I had with my father: there was always an emptiness between us—we were missing a deep emotional connection. He sometimes told me that he loved me, but it was so hard to feel it. We never watched TV together, never played catch. He never came to my Little League games. Except for our occasional excursions, we never hung out together. It just wasn’t his thing. But I was always proud of him.

Even before Star Trek, I’d see him popping up in bit roles on my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Wow, I’d think. That’s Dad! I remember one Saturday afternoon in the early ’60s, I was at home watching a low-budget thriller called The Brain Eaters. I could tell it was a cheesy film, but there were only six channels back then and there was nothing else worth watching. Roger Corman, the king of cult movies, was one of the producers, as was Edwin Nelson, a friend of Dad’s. Ed had brought his family to a party my parents threw when we were living on Palms Boulevard. He would go on to costar in the highly successful prime-time soap Peyton Place, but in those early days, in the struggling actor days when Dad was hustling all sorts of odd jobs, Ed got him a job as a process server. The two of them would hide in the bushes then jump out and serve people with court papers.

In The Brain Eaters, alien parasites have infiltrated the small town of Riverdale, Illinois, and have managed to attach themselves to—wait for it—people’s brains. It was a typical black-and-white horror movie featuring crawling, slimy things terror-bent on destroying the world! Ed coproduced and starred in the film as Dr. Kettering, the lead investigator who finds a spaceship-type structure that has let loose the parasites. Fearlessly climbing inside, he finds a bearded man named Cole who seems to be in control of the brain eaters. The actor is wearing so much makeup he’s unrecognizable, but the minute Cole spoke I was shocked to discover that it was Dad. I thought to myself, Holy cow, Dad is the king of the brain eaters! Then I yelled for my mother. Mom! You gotta come see this!!

That’s the kind of acting work Dad was doing in the late ’50s and early ’60s: small parts in a few films and dozens of TV episodes. Then, one December night in 1964, he brought home some Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot episode he was working on. It was one of those I’ll never forget this moment moments, as he handed me the pictures, front and back shots of Mr. Spock. It was the early Spock, the primitive Spock: rough, uneven haircut, bushy eyebrows—and those ears. (Many years later Dad would explain to me that it was Charles Schram at the MGM makeup department who created the first foam latex prosthetics for Spock’s ears. Mr. Schram was best known for his work creating the prosthetic makeup for the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.)

Even in 1964, when nobody had heard of Star Trek, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian episodes to understand exactly what I was looking at. I mean, The Galaxy Being, the first Outer Limits episode, had a huge impact on me. A scary but benevolent alien accidentally arrives on Earth and is misunderstood and treated badly—a sci-fi trope that always appeals to us outsiders and social misfits trying to find our way in a sometimes unwelcoming world. And now here was Dad playing the half-human, half-alien Mr. Spock, soon to take that trope to a whole new level. All these years later I can still feel the excitement I felt that night when I was given my first glimpse of this strange-looking man from outer space. (Miraculously, I still have one of those Polaroids of Spock backed with the inscription LEONARD NIMOY DEC 1964.)

This is what I’ve been working on all week, Dad said, obviously pleased by my reaction. It was a big moment for him, a costarring role in the pilot of a potential new TV series. In Dad’s family his older brother Melvin was the star because of his academic career—something my father had no intention of pursuing. When Dad told his parents he wanted to be an actor, they were devastated. It was as if he had told them he wanted to join the circus. Dad always played a supporting role to my uncle, but now he was coming into his own, and I