Leonard Nimoy and Me

Today there is finally enough material available to read about Leonard Nimoy. Back when I was an eighth grader at Hunter High School, I would have read my eyes out, every last Google News entry.  I would have saved  them all  to a folder on at least two devices.  

But 1968 being around 16 years before the arrival of personal computers and 32 before Google, back then I scissored out every printed article I could find, in the Times, Parade, and TV Guide, and kept them in a manila folder that still has to be in a box around here somewhere, five or six moves later. 

This was the 5x7 glossy that came in response
to fan letters

I memorized everything written about Leonard Nimoy's Boston childhood and early career, how his father was a barber and his mother worked at Filene's Basement there.  I loved the fact that he'd been born to immigrant Jews from Ukraine, with roots just like my family's.  Nimoy never took his success for granted, and was always happy to admit the humble origins from which his brave gamble on acting, talent, perseverance and good luck had saved him.  

I drew pictures of Mr. Spock in all the margins of my loose leaf sheets.  I practiced one-eyebrow-raising in the mirror. I made a clay bust of him in art class that still sits on a bookshelf in the family room; I think I was working on it in 1968 when news arrived of Martin Luther King's assassination.   I screamed at finding the phone number of his father, Max Nimoy, in a Boston phone book hanging alongside all the other phone books in Penn Station.

Mr. Spock was the alien, the intellectual, the observer, and (ergo, for me) the metaphorical Jew on board the Enterprise's bridge.  And for that, -- and the looks that tripped some deep-rooted programming -- he made my adolescent heart go pitter pat.  Add the unswervable integrity, the repressed but hinted-at emotion, the longing simmering beneath the surface, and you had the perfect bait for 13-year old girls of a certain cosmic sensibility. 

HCHS 8th-grade art project, 1968

I read today that Nimoy got more fan mail than William Shatner; I remember reading somewhere long ago that the writing quality of his fans' letters positively spooked him.  As Isaac Azimov wrote in TV Guide at the time, Leonard Nimoy had made it sexy to be smart.

Smart, yes, but also, in some alluring way, tortured.  I spent a whole semester debating with my friend Laura -- when we weren't trying to write Star Trek scripts -- whether Mr. Spock had emotions and couldn't let them show, or was even more hobbled by not having them at all.  I argued for the sexier first option, and I believe that history has proven me right.  Besides,  Laura felt that William Shatner was the more attractive  one.  Shatner!   That heavy-stock piece of cardboard! (Another Jewish boy, from Montreal yet, but not quick to publicize either fact...)

Then on March 2,  1967 they aired an episode -- This Side of Paradise -- in which the spores of an alien planet dissolved Spock's shell and freed  him to fall joyously in love with Jill Ireland. When Leonard Nimoy as Spock actually swung on a tree limb and laughed... I just about swooned.  And when he delivered the episode's closing line.. "for once in my life, I was happy." -- well, it was such a heavy dose of poignancy that I just dragged my heart around outside my chest for days.   I find it amazing that of all the series' episodes, that was the one the NY Times reporter cited in her obituary today.

For television, Nimoy was such a classy act.  He was the only celebrity to whom I ever wrote fan letters.  With pen and stationery and envelopes and stamps, (and maybe wax and seal, this being 1968) I begged him to prevent his character from appearing on lunch boxes and Halloween costumes. (I got back the usual machine-signed black-and-white glossy.)  Nimoy was also the last cast member to give in to the mercenary lure of Star Trek conventions.  You might see Majel Barrett or George Takei, but you didn't see  Nimoy at the one or two Star Trek Conventions I attended in my early twenties. (Met the absolute worst date of my life there.)

Maaaany years later, while editing a yearly Jewish Federation publication, I asked his office if he'd agree to be interviewed; I'm sure I wasn't the first to play the "Federation" card. He turned me down, but I was thrilled just to get a call from his office.

I bought Nimoy's  "I am Not Spock" book, where I learned how he was interested in his roots, like me. I was intrigued by his account of a visit to long-lost family in Russia, how he communicated in Yiddish, and how the old country family was oblivious to his fame and even nervously suspicious of his appearance in their midst. I even got his first album, probably in Alexander's on 63rd Drive in Rego Park, Queens. And while I regretted that purchase -- I wasn't totally blinded and deafened by love -- I felt good about my choice of idol years later, when I learned how he sponsored and promoted Yiddish language and culture.  And today, reading how much Obama loved Spock -- his fellow brainy, self-controlled half-breed -- I'm reminded why and how much I like Obama. (I must go look for the 2014 bumper sticker that came late.)

Except for a few Mission Impossible episodes, I never made a habit of watching Nimoy's post-Star Trek shows.  Leonard Nimoy the actor and his Mr Spock shared the title as my one and only teen idol -- even though the actor was exactly my mother's age. I have a soft spot in my heart for him still. That spot is tender today.