HARLAN ELLISON

NEW YORK CITY

6 DECEMBER 1974

So it didn’t end there. It should have, but Roddenberry’s character flaws included one that continued to get his ass in trouble year after year. And that flaw—oddly enough omitted from the “authorized” biography as written by David Alexander—was his need to subsume into his self-perpetuating mythos of being El Supremo, every witticism, cleverly-turned phrase, story-concept, deed of derring-do, noble thought or selfless action of anyone he met. [8] If something was clever, or successful, or artful, it was his. If it was shit, it was ours. If something went wrong, it wasn’t his fault, it was the Conspiracy Theory machinations of the invisible men in black who actually ran the Network; or it was evil, ungrateful, penny-pinching Paramount that was out to get him; or it was the fault of those unruly, temperamental writers who acted like cranky babies and who needed the stern—but Solomonically fair and kindly—hand of El Supremo to set them back on the path of righteousness: the path of fulfilling Gene’s dream and vision of himself as the incarnation of his wearyingly repetitive god-surrogates (Adonis, V’Ger, Charlie X, The Squire of Gothos, Nomad and Q, just to reprise a mere half-dozen of the Deity-as-Demento that Roddenberry either wrote himself or forced into the work of others); or it was the evil ineptitude of Lurkers Within, the Iago or Brutus or Judas figures inside his own studio or production unit, whose smiling faces masked their true intent to thwart his Great Plan to show the less-perfect human race that they could be Starswept and Galactic, if only they would pay heed to Gene Roddenberry’s immaculate view of human perfectibility. Flaws could not be permitted in the rest of the human monkeymass, but El Supremo was never to be confronted with his own teensy imperfections—such as plagiarizing John Meredyth Lucas’s “Nomad” and Alan Dean Foster’s teleplay, to create the script for the first feature film (Foster had to go to the Guild to get his credit, and to the end Roddenberry kept insisting the work was original) [9] …betraying his most loving colleague, David Gerrold, by hiring him to write the bible for The Next Generation, then merchandising it ruthlessly, and denying Gerrold had ever written a useable word (Gerrold won his suit against Roddenberry for back wages to the tune of something close to seventy thousand dollars)…and doesn’t that story have an interesting resonance with the “unuseable script” of yet another sweet young writer named Ellison?…exploiting Bjo and John Trimble, who had set up Roddenberry’s merchandising arm, Lincoln Enterprises, by having them work their asses off independently until the divorce was finalized with Eileen Roddenberry, and thus avoiding the ex-Mrs. R’s claim to half those profits, and then freezing them out and giving it to his girlfriend Majel Barrett.

As one disillusioned ex-Trek official recently said, “You know why they cremated Gene? They were afraid people would come to piss on the grave.”

So it didn’t end there. Roddenberry continued to rewrite history in his head and spew out the revisions at conventions everywhere. And the vast monkeymass of Trekkie fans who have trouble differentiating between the fiction of television shows and the reality of those who created the shows, rewarded Gene with bouquets of gullible acceptance. Whatever Roddenberry said became canonical. And right up there in the forefront of his lies-made-history was that he had saved “City” from the drooling jaws and clubby hands of Spendthrift Ellison.