[10] Hell, I’m tired of playing cutesy with you about who actually wrote the rewrite that aired. I’ve hinted at it, because to me it was a great revelation. But if you go to page 257 of the Afterwords section, you will find Dorothy C. Fontana’s comments, wherein for the first time in our more than thirty years of mutual respect and friendship, she cops to having worked on the teleplay after Gene Coon’s rewrite. Somehow, Dorothy didn’t know about the first rewrite, the gawdawful version written by the man who briefly replaced John D.F. Black…Steve Carabatsos. Dorothy makes no reference to it, but I had a copy of that version and it was the existence of that inept attempt to rewrite me that convinced me I should drag my ass back to Desilu, for no remuneration and damned little approbation, to do the three or four rewrites that you will find reprinted in this book.

But what of Roddenberry’s claim to have penned the aired version? Well if we are to believe Gene Coon—whose words come to us through the lips of Glen Larson and others—he wrote that version. But now we know that Dorothy Fontana whacked at it after they were done with it. I assert that Roddenberry may have fiddled, but that he did no substantive work. At least, nowhere in the UCLA Star Trek archive do we find even one page of a “City” script with Roddenberry’s handwriting on it, or his typewriter’s identifiable print, or anything that confirms either Dorothy’s or his own contention that he rewrote on “City.”

Peculiar, ain’t it? I was supposed to have written only a first draft, according to Gene, but the UCLA archive contains at least three complete drafts and any number of rewrites, all neatly dated and catalogued; but nary a whisper of a script on “City” that can be directly laid at the altar of the man who twisted the truth so many times he came to believe his own fanciful mythology.

Gee, I wish everyone would buy into my untruths as they so happily did Roddenberry’s, without ratiocination, without question. Hell, with that kind of blind adoration, even I could make the trains run on time.