Anomalies in fandom

I read Justman and Solow (Inside Star Trek) a long time ago, but I think I recall their prose as strongly suggesting it was GR. And they weren't too happy that Grace had cast a cloud of suspicion over several innocent men that she never cleared up.

She was having it both ways: fully stating her victimization, without openly naming which of a few men was the perpetrator, and that did some harm to them, not just good to her. If she wanted to come forward and be brave at all, she should have been braver.

 

It did? How?

 

That's a very male attitude though, especially pre Me Too. This behaviour has been rife in the industry since there has been an industry. Assuming it's true, she would be accusing the Father of Star Trek and relying on Nimoy to corroborate her story about the aftermath and deal with massive fallout himself. She would have been destroyed by his supporters.

I can understand why any executives who were not involved would be aggrieved but it's not like any of them went to bat for her at time she was let go, so my sympathies are limited.

 

I get what you're saying. She was in a no-win situation. Anything she did about it, including doing nothing, would be seen as wrong through one lens or another.

 

As I recall from The Longest Trek, her reasoning was that she felt that both herself and the unnamed executive were victims of their own sexual addiction. She felt worse about being separated from a group of people whom she felt had become a surrogate family, and identified herself as a willing participant, albeit one who, again, was an addict.

 

In retrospect the Yeoman position was useless anyway. The show needed another woman in a position of actual import. Somebody from The Sciences or engineering Etc. They had three women originally a nurse a switchboard operator and a secretary. They should have filled the Navigator position with a woman instead of Chekhov

 

Well, remember Chekov was primarily a response to the popularity of Davy Jones. It wasn’t as if Gene just wanted a regular navigator.

 

Yeoman Colt was pretty ballsy actually. In a line cut from the aired version she asks to go on the landing party, stressing that she had the same training as the men. I don't think that the issue is that the yeoman role is useless but rather that they rowed very far back from the original concept of the Captain's aide and confidante, and that they don't even use her in scenarios where it would be logical to do so.

As for Chekov, the main thing that distinguished him from navigator of the week, some of whom had a lot of personality, was that they wrote stories with him in mind.

If you notice, Colt, Smith, and Rand are all new to the job as stated or implied in dialogue. The intention was to start with a new relationship and build on it. The later yeomen, by comparison, are very thinly drawn indeed.

 

How about because we love them? Scotty's always been my fave. Forever. Literally, cannot remember a time when he wasn't, grew up watching Trek because my parents and grandparents were Trekkies.

Like-- sometimes we just love characters because we do. Because there's enough there to hook us and enough open space for us to imagine stories for.

And if you ask me, chewing on the emotional motivations of generally good people after some of them are dead is kinda tacky. No offense.

 

I didn’t mean to come across as against the characters, or against anyone who likes the characters. I’m just very interested in the fandom of the 70s and early 80s, and there was definitely more going on than meets the eye. Got a lot of very illuminating responses in the thread, especially with regard to the actors endearing themselves to the fans through generous appearances at conventions.

 

I always liked Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, and Rand. And Scotty is the reason I wanted to go into engineering, although that didn't work out I don't blame anyone/thing else.

But just watching the shows objectively without considering all that's come after, they were not major parts of the show. I like Lt. Palmer, M'Benga, Leslie, Kevin Riley, DePaul, Farrell and a lot of others, but they didn't catch on as much.


I feel like I need to have an example, there's many but, That Which Survives had Sulu in the landing party and Chekov nowhere, Rahda was on the bridge with "Hadley". If we sub out Sulu in the landing party for another character, no one would have missed him, Rahda was very good as the Helmsman.

And Doomsday Machine, one of the best episodes, didn't have Uhura or Chekov, did the episode suffer in any way? I don't think so.

EDIT: I forgot Kyle.

 

I think it's true to say that most episodes could function without the recurring supporting cast but it's also true to say that I enjoy the episodes more when the recurring cast get to do something more.

For example, I'd have enjoyed Doomsday Machine even more if Uhura had been part of the engineering team on the Constellation with Kirk and Scotty.

 

Well, I really didn't want to open this gigantic can of worms, but since it's being discussed anyway, I will say that I personally believe that Roddenberry was Grace's assailant. It's totally circumstantial evidence and with GR, GLW, and her confidant Leonard Nimoy all being dead now, we'll never know for sure, but yeah, I think it was him.

Look at the facts from Whitney's account & other sources.

1) The Executive was someone who likely had an office on the lot. (GLW says that they "found an empty office," but I think that's probably an obfuscation on her part. He was comfortable enough in the office space to pour her a drink from the wet bar.)

2) The Executive was someone who was creatively involved with the show. (He lured Grace there by wanting to talk about ideas for her character. That's unlikely to be an accountant with the studio. It points to someone who was involved in the writing and/or the production of Trek, very likely both. Someone who had the power and the ability to make changes to Yeoman Rand's character happen. GFW describes The Executive as someone who "had a lot of power over my future.")

3) The Executive was personally involved with someone else, someone who GLW seemed to know. (GLW and Majel Barrett were both in the episode "The Naked Time," which shot from June 30 to July 11, 1966. GLW says that they were halfway through the shoot for "Miri" when her assault occurred. "Miri" shot from August 22 to August 30, 1966. Presumably GLW would've also met Roddenberry's wife Eileen by this time.)

4) The Executive was someone who commonly had affairs with other women, to the point that he claimed his partner was understanding about it. (Over the years, Roddenberry had affairs with Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett, and his assistant Susan Sackett. And according to "WNMHGB" director James Goldstone, GR only cast Andrea Dromm as Yeoman Smith because he wanted to score with her, although Dromm has denied that GR ever gave her any problems. And these are just the affairs that we know about.)

5) GLW says that she'd known The Executive "a couple of years" by this point, and had known him to be "a womanizer," but not violent. (See above. I'm not personally aware if Whitney wrote about where or when she'd first met Roddenberry, but she starred in his unsold pilot Police Story, which Memory Alpha says was produced in 1965 after "The Cage," although it didn't air until September 1967.)

6) GLW was worried about seeing The Executive on the lot the Monday morning after the assault. (So it was presumably someone who was regularly on the Star Trek set, not just someone from the studio that she saw every once in a while.)

7) Grace was fired from the show a couple of days into the September 1966 hiatus in shooting. (So if her firing was retaliatory and not just coincidental timing, it came from somebody high up in the show, someone with the power to make that happen. According to his entry on Memory Alpha, Roddenberry stepped down as the sole producer of ST after John D.F. Black's departure from the series in August 1966, and Roddenberry instead became Star Trek's executive producer. And if Roddenberry was less involved in the day-to-day of the show after that point, perhaps that further explains why Nimoy stayed with the series after learning about Grace's assault.)

(...And now I'm wondering if the name "The Executive" was perhaps a subtle jab at Roddenberry's reduced responsibilities on Trek, or perhaps a conscious clue on GLW's part.)

And looking in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story to see what Herb Solow and Bob Justman had to say about Grace's firing, I find this on page 243 of my paperback:

"In discussions in early September, 1966, Roddenberry, Solow, and Weitzman agreed there was no artistic or financial justification to continue her very limited role in light of the show's serious budgetary problems. Strangely, Roddenberry evinced no interest in retaining his hand-picked yeoman, while Justman, opposed to 'losing her,' held out hope that she would return to guest star in future episodes. Roddenberry never contacted Whitney to give her the bad news. Her agent was formally advised by Desilu Buiness Affairs that her services were no longer required.

"(Years later, there was talk of a sudden personal rift between Roddenberry and Whitney that occurred just prior to her departure from the show. The rift supposedly guaranteed that she would never return to Star Trek. But she did return--in some of the Star Trek movies. And there was no appearance of any ill will between them.)"​

And finally, the clincher for me:

8) The Executive gave Grace a polished gray stone that he made by way of apology. (Herb Solow and Bob Justman talk about Roddenberry's hobby of polishing stones in their book Inside Star Trek and say that he often gave them out as gifts.)

When you think about it, there just isn't anyone else who ticks off all of those boxes.

I'm honestly not trying to convince anyone else of this - think what you want to think - but I know what I believe. The polished stone is just too distinctive and unusual of a detail for it to be a coincidence, IMO. I believe it was Roddenberry.

Yes. Which is why I haven't talked about it here before.

I can see where Justman and Solow are coming from there - I would also be upset to be tarred with that brush. But I think it's incredibly unfair to Grace to say "she should've been braver," especially if GR was her assailant. Roddenberry was positively lionized by 1998 when she wrote her book. It was incredibly brave of her to say as much as she did.

That's a point. But I think it's unlikely that anyone else in the production besides Nimoy knew the extent of what had happened to Grace.

 

BTW, one other thing that occurs to me when I think about the cameos that Grace did in the Star Trek movies: Robert Wise forbade her to wear makeup in her scene in TMP. Supposedly this was because a practical joke she pulled on him at the behest of Roddenberry went badly. So consequently, she didn't look very good on screen.

When Whitney came back to cameo in subsequent Trek films, it was in Star Treks III, IV, and VI. The two films that Nimoy directed, and the one that he executive produced. And she looked great in all of them.

Nimoy had Grace's back, man.

Leonard Nimoy fucking rocked.

 

Technically, GR could have given that stone to the perp, who then re-gifted it to Grace. But when you set it on the scale with all those other data points, it's awfully hard to keep doubt alive. And I don't think Grace would have included the stone in her telling if it was a red herring that pointed to the wrong man.

 

Yeah. I also believe that if the stone was something that the assailant had previously received from Roddenberry, he probably wouldn't be so stupid as to re-gift it to Grace on the set of Roddenberry's own show. That's something that could easily get back to Roddenberry.

And I'm sure that at the time that GLW wrote her book, the fact that Roddenberry polished stones as a hobby wasn't something that was known by the general public (although the Solow/Justman book that mentions it was first published in June of 1996). But I bet that others who worked on the show or worked with Roddenberry remembered that little detail. I was only able to piece it together because I'd re-read Inside Star Trek around the same time I read the excerpt from Whitney's book.

 

I might be reaching here, but there's another little data point, by way of psychological profile. I can't recall where I got this (possibly Justman and Solow?), but Jimmy Doohan and his wife reportedly tried to socialize with GR and Majel, having them over for card games and whatnot. But it was awkward at best, because GR couldn't bear to lose at anything, ever. If he didn't come out on top, there were demands for a rematch, or some such unpleasantness. GR was (in my words) totally uncool about it and needed to be dominant.

And I thought of that upon reading the painful Google Books excerpt from Grace's book, relating the assault. The Executive didn't just want to "get some." He went on a massive power trip, verbally ordering GLW around and coercing her to humiliate herself. I just think that's consistent (certainly not inconsistent) with a guy who can't stand to lose at cards.

 

Yeah, I've read that anecdote somewhere, too, which makes me think that it was likely in the Justman/Solow book.

And yeah, I think it's safe to say that Roddenberry was a control freak who could get very territorial. Witness his constant rewriting on Harold Livingston on TMP, even when we wasn't supposed to. And then putting his own name first on the revised pages, which I believe was a violation of some Writers Guild rule or another. And his attempts through his attorney Leonard Maizlish to maintain utter control over TNG after he was eased out of the movies, at the cost of alienating many of his old friends from the TOS days.

Being a sore loser seems to be very much in keeping with that personality type. Roddenberry always had to come out on top.

 

We can never know for sure. What I find creepy too is the way Rand is repeatedly stalked and assaulted in her brief tenure. Grace's description of the assault, that she was lured into role play as Rand and that the Executive viewed Rand as repressed and wanted to have sex with Kirk, also makes sense in the light of her original role in Dagger of the Mind. It is reported that the role of Helen was written because they viewed the original plot as bringing Rand's feelings too out in the open but they do exactly that in Miri anyway.

Rand trying to force her boss into loving her is just plain weird, especially when she could have asked for something funny, like a promotion, and have Adams bring up the weird shit, the aftermath of which could have freed both characters for a while.

Efforts to let Rand branch out into a more rounded character seem to have been squashed. In one script, she was manning a station in the bridge and Roddenberry expressed the view that she should not be there, as she should remain Kirk's valet. There is also the odd moment in Naked Time where Spock calls a random man at the Helm by Rand's name whereas her stint at the helm is weirdly brief. She's there in one scene and gone the next.

One reason I go to bat for her as a character is because I don't get why she hasn't been more rounded out as a character by subsequent writers but I think Grace endeared herself to the fans and that was why she became popular after the show's run.

 

The disease encountered by the crew on Miri's planet was also able to affect their mentality! With both McCoy and Kirk losing their tempers on numerous occasions so why shouldn't Janice be complaining about her wanting Kirk to look at her legs only not with the repulsive purple blotches!!!
JB