William Shatner’s Leonard Illuminates a Famous Friendship

This is entirely true. It’s also one of the many tidbits about the enigmatic actor that surface in Leonard, the new elegy from his long-time friend, rival, and costar, William Shatner. Leonard is an unusual book, wide in its scope and serving seemingly multiple purposes. But perhaps that’s befitting its subject.
Despite our recently renewed infatuation with the Star Wars universe, it can safely be said no television program or movie franchise has had a greater impact on the import of science fiction in pop culture than Star Trek. The launch of the original series was a seminal moment in our collective media consciousness. It went boldly where none had gone before, both in space, and in addressing hotbed cultural issues few other shows dared touch. Its diverse cast was unparalleled for its time—and, to an extent, for our time. This show—this show about space aliens—featured TV’s first interracial kiss.
Leading this grand adventure were two men, of similar backgrounds and widely diverging personalities: Shatner and Nimoy, as sometimes hotheaded Captain Kirk and the cerebral Spock. Timed to the one year anniversary of Nimoy’s death, Shatner’s book is both a brief biography of two actors, as well as a eulogy. Indeed, considering their late-in-life falling out, Shatner at times seems to be expressing the deep love and admiration for a friend that he was unable to adequately convey before Nimoy’s passing.
We learn a good many things about both men in Leonard, but perhaps nothing comes across as clearly as the depth of affection Shatner still has for the man we knew as Spock: “How lucky I have been to have shared this adventure with him, my ‘Siamese twin,’ my ‘brother from another mother,’ my best friend.” Here’s some of what we learned in this fascinating read.
The pair’s stories are more intertwined than you’d expect.
Perhaps it’s because we so deeply identify these men with the characters they created—Kirk and Spock, themselves polar opposites—or perhaps it’s because of their categorically different styles of acting, but the mind does not always see the similarities or parallels between Shatner and Nimoy.
But you’d be surprised. Both are products of immigrant families, Jews who fled eastern Europe. Nimoy’s family hailed from Ukraine, Shatner’s from Ukraine, Lithuania, and the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither family expected their son to wind up in acting, let alone Hollywood, let alone the Starship Enterprise. This shared history, as well familial faith, would later bond the two. As would struggles with alcoholism (Nimoy’s and those of Shatner’s third wife, Nerine), substance abuse (Nimoy’s son, Adam), health issues, and the perplexing cultural significance of the characters they created.
Heck, their mutual story didn’t even start with Star Trek. Shatner writes that, though neither would later remember it, the two first met briefly a year prior to their first voyage on the Enterprise. In 1964, they appeared in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Nimoy was a man of many talents.
It’s not exactly revelatory, but the list of Nimoy’s passions, interests, and abilities certainly runs wide and deep. Beyond being an accomplished actor and director (Were you aware he directed Three Men and a Baby?), Nimoy was a photographer and poet. He could also perform Shakespeare in Yiddish. And yes, Nimoy’s musical career is explored within these pages, and it includes an ample paragraph on “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”
No, they did not always get along.
Shatner dismisses the decades-long rumors that he and Nimoy were constantly feuding, saying “none of that was ever true.” That said, their relationship was bookended by hard feelings. When Shatner was cast as Kirk, for the second stab at a Star Trek pilot, he naturally assumed he was the show’s star, as dashing square-jawed action heroes tend to be. But Nimoy’s pointy-eared elegance in creating Spock stole some of that initial spotlight. It was tough to swallow at first, Shatner admits, and the two’s clashing personalities and approaches to their crafts likely exacerbated misgivings in the early days of their relationship.
Once past that, however, Shatner describes many decades of close, personal, genuine adoration and warmth, through times good and bad. Yet, in the very last years of Nimoy’s life, some level of hurt was renewed. Shatner himself seems somewhat at a loss to explain it, and the final chapters of Leonard read like a man coming to grips with the fact that he will never get a concrete answer. It’s a poignant, sad close to a shared story, but it does little to taint, for Shatner or for the reader, all that has come before.
Leonard Nimoy was, almost certainly, William Shatner’s best friend.
Shatner returns time and again to a theme of his life: surface-level friendships, rather than deep commitments. That this reflects a lifetime of on-set friendships, where camaraderie is felt strongly only until the next project scatters the crew, is certainly true. The exception to this rule, he writes, was Leonard: “There certainly have been some wonderful people I have been close to, people I know I could rely on, but as far as speaking openly and revealing that which is most troublesome and most secretive, secure in the knowledge it will remain as buried in their breasts as it is in mine, there was only Leonard.”