The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(42)

Danny Kaye was impressed by the Howard boys’ professionalism. We were impressed that he was a fellow baseball freak. When he learned of our mutual interest, he brought out some gloves, a bat, and a rubber ball, and we took some batting practice right there on the soundstage. Clint smacked one high into the catwalks that nearly took out a spotlight.

Clint and I never took our work home. Though we shared a bedroom and atypical lives as young kids with flourishing acting careers, we simply didn’t talk shop at 346 Cordova Street. There was no discussion of our “craft” or even of mundane stuff about our workplaces. Home was where we were simply brothers, not actors.





CLINT


The next big job for me after Bonanza was a new NBC sci-fi program that was to make its debut in the fall of 1966. Dad read the script and thought it was pretty good, if eccentric: I was cast as an alien! I was excited because the show was set in outer space, and what kid wouldn’t want to pretend he was on a spaceship? The episode was called “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The show was called Star Trek.

Neither Dad nor I had any inkling that “The Corbomite Maneuver” would have resonance beyond the week it aired. In 1965, NBC commissioned two different pilots for Star Trek. The first one, which didn’t even star William Shatner as Captain Kirk, proved unsatisfactory to the network. But the second one did the trick; Star Trek was picked up as a series. Ours was the first-ever “regular” episode of the show to be filmed, in May of ’66, though it was broadcast out of sequence, as the tenth episode of the first season.

None of this was of any concern to me or Dad. We were too busy prepping, because everything about this gig was strange. We were told by the producers that I would speak my lines in my own little seven-year-old voice, but my lines would then be processed through a synthesizer—a very new toy at the time—to create an otherworldly, “alien” effect. Furthermore, for the first time in my career, I was not playing a child. If I remember correctly, Balok had some kind of Yoda-like backstory that revealed that he was something like six hundred years old, though they never used that information in the episode.

In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the USS Enterprise is threatened by a giant, spheroid ship called the Fesarius and its belligerent commander, Balok. Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock manages to pull up a visual of the commander on-screen. Balok is revealed to be a terrifying humanoid alien with a long face, a protruding forehead, and a permanent scowl—he sort of resembles one of those bitter old Hollywood moguls who’ve had too much plastic surgery. I won’t get deep into the weeds of the plot, except to say that Captain Kirk keeps his cool, and a landing party of Kirk, McCoy, and a one-off character named Lieutenant Bailey teleport to a tiny pilot vessel that has dispatched itself from the mighty Fesarius. They are intent on making peace with the evil commander.

Once they are inside the vessel, they are surprised at how cramped and low-ceilinged it is, and they discover the scary humanoid to be merely a puppet, inanimate and unthreatening. Then they hear a chipper voice say, “I’m Balok, welcome aboard!” That’s when things get weird.

The camera zooms in on the source of the voice, a smiling, hairless little figure sitting on a throne in a futuristic robe ensemble and a Roman-style headpiece, clutching a goblet: me!

It turns out that Balok is actually a friendly little alien who runs the entire Fesarius operation from the pilot vessel; he was merely testing the Enterprise’s intentions before making a generous overture of friendship. He pushes a button, and a punch bowl slides out on a tray, with three more goblets. “We must drink!” he says. “This is tranya. I hope you relish it as much as I.”

“Commander Balok,” says Kirk, eager to get down to business.

“I know, a thousand questions,” Balok says. “But first: the tranya!”


BEFORE WE GO any further, I’ll answer the question that Trekkies throughout the decades have always asked me. What was tranya, the mysterious, civilization-bridging elixir?

Grapefruit juice. That’s all. And not even the fresh-squeezed kind, but the kind poured from a punctured can. More on that in a bit.

I have to credit the Star Trek guys—Gene Roddenberry, who created the show, and Joseph Sargent, one of the all-time great TV directors and someone who Dad always held in high regard—for hiring a child. If I were producing this episode and it called for an alien of diminutive stature, logic would tell me to hire an adult little person and make him up accordingly. I would hire someone over eighteen so I wouldn’t be burdened with the added expense of a child-welfare observer on the set, or the possibility that the kid would screw up his lines and blow up the shooting schedule.

That they went with that crazy Benjamin Button approach, with a guy who looks like a baby but isn’t—that’s the reason that the episode, and my role in it, are still remembered and celebrated today. It’s so surprising, so unlike anything any viewer of a sci-fi series would ever have expected.

Some of Balok’s lines were a mouthful—he was a superintelligent alien life-form, let us not forget—and demanded that Dad be at the top of his game as a dialogue inculcator. For example, Balok describes the puppet as “my alter ego, so to speak. In your culture, he would be Mr. Hyde to my Jekyll. You must admit he was effective. You would never have been frightened by me!”

Dad and I talked things through so that I had at least a basic understanding of the term “alter ego” and the archetypal Jekyll-and-Hyde story—which, incidentally, is based on a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, the namesake of our elementary school.