VR: That’s Harlan Ellison.

RODDENBERRY: Yeah. He had Scotty dealing drugs and it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend for an episode.

And by 1990, he was telling the world I had been more than $350,000 over budget!

From $66,000 to $200,000 in just twenty years.

And by 1990, he was telling the world I had been more than $350,000 over budget! Yeah, and I also had Scotty dealing drugs.

A few loose ends, interesting digressions, a moment to catch our breath and depressurize so we don’t get “the bends” from all this intense self-justification and naked animosity. Not to mention speaking considerable ill of the dead. (But then, I have also spoken some ill of the living. I’m an Equal Opportunity Opprobriumist.)

Not everybody ate from the poisoned mushroom of Roddenberry flack. The New York Times Book Review of 23 December 1993 carried a short review of Shatner’s MEMORIES. And in that little notice, the reviewer, Rosemary L. Bray (whose name I never encountered prior to seeing it on that Times page, but whose name raises hosannahs from me every time I now hear it), wrote this:

“…bits of gossip and a record of happy accidents that led to some of the show’s signature moments. For example, the episode snidely considered the best of any Star Trek season, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ starring Joan Collins, was a watered-down version of a script by the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who so hated the entire experience and its result that he refused to associate with any of the staff again.”

Well, almost right. I still associate with D.C. Fontana and occasionally talk to Johnny Black and even invited Herb Solow and Bobby Justman over to the house when they wanted information for their INSIDE STAR TREK. Leonard Nimoy and George Takei and De Kelley remain friends. We don’t see each other much these days, though Leonard and I, and our wives, went out and had some excellent Indian cuisine about three months before my heart attack, and that’s fairly recently. Walter Koenig and I see and talk to each other all the time.

But I don’t talk to Roddenberry no more.

I’ve mentioned David Alexander elsewhere in this essay. He’s a guy who was hired by Majel Roddenberry to write the “authorized”—that is, sanitized, prettified, heroificated—biography of Gene. It’s been brought to my attention that I seem to manifest some rancor at Mr. Alexander. If I do, it is because I think Mr. Alexander plays with the facts and has done a hired-gun job that maintains myths and untruths that no self-respecting biographer should have allowed to stand. What I guess I’m saying, is that I don’t think there is anything even remotely like evenhandedness in Mr. Alexander’s snow-job about the Great Bird.