November 6, 1968
It was a typical mid-week morning for Gene L. Coon, Co-Executive Producer and
de facto showrunner of
Star Trek, sitting in his uncomfortable chair at his battered desk in his cramped office. Space was at a premium at the Desilu Gower studio, and even after Gene Roddenberry had been quietly “convinced” to vacate his offices there, very little could be dedicated to the writing staff of
Star Trek. So Coon’s own office – which, Herb Solow had repeatedly assured him, was the largest of any producer working on any series for Desilu, and
definitely bigger than Bruce Geller’s, he swears, he checked twice! [1] – doubled, rather uncomfortably, as the makeshift “writers’ room”. There was no hope in asking for more lavish accommodations, even though the show’s ratings numbers were finally starting to improve; nobody working
below Coon got so much as a broom closet, and Solow himself frequently complained about how cramped his
own office space was. “If Senator Muskie were going to get an office like mine, he wouldn’t have run for Vice-President,” Solow had remarked earlier, the news from last night still fresh on everyone’s mind. Coon had chuckled at this. Solidarity among Vice-Presidents, he supposed, had led Solow to bring up Muskie when the headlines of every paper that morning were all trumpeting that
Humphrey had won the election. He thought he
might have seen a mention of Muskie on A15 in one of them, somewhere…
So it was that his staff were gathered around. Dorothy Fontana, the Story Editor and the only hen amongst the bantam roosters that comprised his writers, got to sit in one of the two chairs in front of his desk; Solow, the
very hands-on Executive in Charge of Production who technically was Coon’s own boss, took the other chair in deference to his seniority. Everybody else – Bob Justman, the Associate Producer and the long-suffering “glue” that kept the show together; John Meredyth Lucas; and 24-year-old
wunderkind David Gerrold – stood huddled around the desk, with Gerrold barely able to fit inside the doorway.
Honestly, Coon wasn’t sure why they hadn’t just stuck to memos. Well, no, he
was sure – they took too long. Creative and production decisions always needed to be made yesterday. Coon took a puff of the cigarillo he had gripped like a vice between his lips. [2]
Nothing like Cuban, he thought. Sure, it was a show-business cliché, the cigar-chomping executive, but as these Swinging Sixties drew to a close, Gene L. Coon worked at the only studio in town that still handed out
Cubans. He was thankful that Desi Arnaz still had some fondness for the studio he had created, and that he was perhaps the only Cuban-American, dead or alive, who was reasonably chummy with Castro. [3] In his darker moments, sometimes he wondered if he would have even stayed at Desilu if it hadn’t been for these Cubans, but it really wasn’t something he needed to think about right now. Right
now he was finally done going through the latest batch of story outlines and handing out writing assignments through to the end of this miserable year.
“Right then, so that’s all of them. Onto new business. Or rather, revisiting
old business. We’ve all read the latest draft of ‘Joanna’, yes?” Coon asked, noting the copies everyone, save for Fontana and Solow, had in hand. “Thoughts? Concerns?”
“Thoughts? Your best since ‘Babel’,” said Justman, leafing through the pages. “Concerns? Always. At least you don’t call for any planetary sets.”
Fontana smiled at the positive comparison to “Journey to Babel”, an episode she’d enjoyed writing a great deal, and thought had turned out even better. [4] Of course she couldn’t help but smirk at the perpetually penny-pinching Justman’s dread of however much this or that would cost the production.
“Well Bob, the
next script I’m writing is going to be set on five different alien planets and we’ll have to re-dress the swing stage every single day for the whole week,” she said, refusing to break eye contact with Justman.
Justman blinked first, only to shudder. “Well if you do
that, you won’t have Bob Justman to kick around anymore,” he said, drawing laughter from the other producers.
“Does that mean you’ll be back in six years?” Gerrold asked, slyly.
“Luckily
Star Trek won’t still be on the air in six years,” said Justman. “Or at least it won’t still be in production. If this show runs for nine seasons, I think it’ll bankrupt the studio.”
“Which is why it’s very important that you don’t ask me for any more money this week,” Solow said. “But speaking of longevity… I worry we’re leaning too far into our younger audience with this one, we’re trying to convey that
Star Trek is a show for the adult viewer and now we’ve got hippies.
Space hippies.”
“Hippies are hardly the first people to reject materialism and embrace communal living, Herb,” said Coon. “Surely I don’t have to bring up the
Kibbutzim in Israel.”
“Or that long-haired, bearded freak who preached love and brotherhood about a couple thousand years ago,” said Fontana.
“Besides, Joanna
rejects the guru, that’s the whole point of the episode,” said Gerrold, who naturally had several friends who had joined the hippie movement. “It’s a consistent
Star Trek theme – self-improvement can come only through drive and determination, not blindly following someone who claims to know all the answers and submitting to pie-in-the-sky promises of a better future.”
“I just wonder if we’re being too on-the-nose here,” Solow said. “I mean you’re already writing the episode about a bunch of space miners torn over whether to follow Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. [5] And we’re still knocking around the one about the white slaves and their Negro masters.” [6]
“
Black masters,” Gerrold corrected automatically.
“Black masters,” Solow echoed, suitably chastened. [7]
“This episode isn’t really about hippies, it’s about Bones and his daughter,” Coon said. “That is what the episode is about. Dorothy has a gift with parents and children, obviously. That’s what made ‘Babel’ work and it’s what will make
this one work too.”
Solow had always been, in his way, somewhat dismissive of Fontana; Dorothy knew he still saw her as Gene Roddenberry’s secretary. Gene L.
Coon seemed to value her more; she’d finally gotten the promotion to Story Editor under
his watch, after all. But she still couldn’t help but be touched by Coon’s kind words. “
Thank you, Gene,” she said.
Coon took another puff. “Well, it’s a good one. And it’s smart to make it a De episode. We know we can count on him. And he’s in the opening titles, so let’s make him work for it.”
“You know De wants to do this, we’ve been talking for ages about McCoy’s family life – ” [8]
Coon held up his hand. “Again, De isn’t the issue here. It’s the daughter. Now we all love Joe, we all know Joe finds the most amazing, beautiful women and makes sure they aren’t just pretty faces. However, obviously we want someone special for Joanna McCoy. We should approach agents directly on this one.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the assembled writing staff.
“Is this a request for a bump to the casting budget for this one?” Solow asked, already wearing his omnipresent frown. “Is
that why I’m here?”
“You’re here, Herb, because you have contacts. Or you have contacts with
Lucy who has contacts. Calling in favours, I think, might get us what we need without having to spend above the low four figures.”
“The
very low four figures,” said Justman.
“Now,” continued Coon, ignoring Justman, “Dorothy, your original outline calls for Nancy Sinatra or Bobbie Gentry, were those serious suggestions?”
“Well, I meant more the look, the attitude,” she said. “And of course Nancy Sinatra has a famous father, that kind of informed the character in my head.”
“Yeah, a famous father she sings about her incestuous relationship with,” [9] said Gerrold, and the writers couldn’t help but snicker rather childishly at that.
“Lucy is friends with Sinatra, isn’t she?”
Solow nodded. “Yeah, he even did that interview show she had a few years back for her. [10] I think strings can be pulled to at least talk to Nancy, but… do we really want her for the part? She’s really not an actress. I mean, we might as well get… I don’t know, Cher Bono.” [11]
“Hell, she can’t sing, so maybe she
can act, right? Has to be good at something!”
More laughter from those assembled. Coon nearly choked on his cigar smoke.
“Nah, then everyone will compare Bones to Sonny Bono. Even their names sound similar. We couldn’t do that to De,” Fontana said, finally, once she had swallowed her mirth.
“I do think if we’re going to go with an angle in terms of casting, instead of the father-daughter direction, we might try someone who was known for playing a wholesome little girl in the past, for the shock value of it,” said Gerrold. “All those wholesome little girls in their Mary Janes and their poodle skirts in the ‘50s are the same girls who grow their hair long and smoke dope and live with bearded, unwashed men without getting married
now.”
“I like that idea,” said Fontana. “We had the older sister from
Father Knows Best on last year. Not to mention Jane Wyatt as Spock’s mother.” [12]
“Then we should go for the hat-trick,” said Lucas. “Wasn’t there another daughter?” [13]
Solow cringed at this. “You need to read the gossip rags more often, John,” he said. “She’s in a bad way.”
The uncomfortable, awkward pause that ensued was broken up by Lucas again, eager to resolve the situation his earlier outburst had caused. “Well all right then, there were other family sitcoms back then, why not cast one of the daughters from
them?”
“Well,
Leave it to Beaver is out,” said Coon. “Ironically enough.”
Fontana rolled her eyes. “No beavers but plenty of
pigs,” she sniffed.
“I could work blue on the street corner outside O’Blath’s down the street and I
still wouldn’t be the filthiest producer named Gene that you ever worked for.” [14]
That got a chuckle from Fontana. “Touché.”
“
Donna Reed!” Gerrold said. “That had a girl. Shelley Fabares. She still acts, too – been in a couple of Elvis movies recently.” [15]
Coon smirked at this. “Was she your first crush growing up, David?”
David glanced away. “Uh… something like that.” [16]
“Well, if she does Elvis movies it’s probably a safe bet she wouldn’t consider
Star Trek to be beneath her talents,” Solow said. “I like the idea. Maybe I can help. The girl who played Lucy’s daughter on
The Lucy Show had been on
Donna Reed a bunch of times, maybe we can tag-team our way back to her. Otherwise, Gene, send Joe a memo and have him reach out the old-fashioned way just in case. If she likes the script – and who
wouldn’t like this script – we may have our Joanna McCoy.”
“Okay, with that out of the way I wanted to go over something in scene 15…”
---
[1] Bruce Geller is the creator of
two Desilu series,
Mission: Impossible and
Mannix, and by all rights should have the larger office (and does, barely, but of course Solow never tells Coon that).
[2] Coon chain-smoked cigarillos IOTL as well, almost certainly resulting in his premature death from lung and throat cancer at the age of 49 in 1973.
[3] Desi Arnaz, whose family had been deprived of its wealth and fled into American exile as a result of
the Batista revolution, had no particular animus against Castro, nor political opposition to his vision for Cuba, and IOTL visited the Castro regime. ITTL this translates to receiving the fruits of such a warm relationship – Cuban cigars, smuggled into his possession, and distributed to the senior staff at Desilu, which of course he would not do if that studio had been purchased by Gulf+Western and absorbed into Paramount, leaving him with no sentimental attachment to it.
[4] Fontana has cited “Journey to Babel” as her favourite of all the episodes she wrote for
Star Trek IOTL; ITTL she would of course say “Joanna”.
[5] From Gerrold’s OTL story treatment, “Castles in the Sky”, for the episode that became “The Cloud Minders”. ITTL, the episode airs more-or-less as outlined by Gerrold, resulting in one of a number of episodes considered overly leaden and preachy (something the third season becomes known for in general).
[6] ITTL, the episode which (IOTL) was oft-discussed but never actually made was produced and aired as
“Bondage and Freedom”, the very preachiest of the preachy season 3 episodes.
[7] The late-1960s were a period of transition from the traditional term for persons of African descent (“Negro”); at least one surviving script from
Star Trek (IOTL and ITTL), “Court Martial”, explicitly describes the character of Commodore Stone as a “Negro”.
[8] Most sources indicate that DeForest Kelley and D.C. Fontana workshopped the character of Joanna McCoy as part of their discussions on Dr. McCoy’s backstory, with which Kelley was intimately involved.
[9]
“Somethin’ Stupid”, a #1 hit for Frank and Nancy Sinatra in 1967, the only time a father-and-daughter duo ever topped the charts. Sung by virtually all other performers as a romantic love song.
[10] That Wacky Redhead hosted an interview show for radio in the 1964-65 season, and
one of her guests was indeed Frank Sinatra.
[11] Today universally recognized as a mononymous figure, during both of her marriages (first to Sonny Bono, and then to Gregg Allman), Cher was inconsistently addressed by her married name by various people, including the media and her own husband(s). Cher’s birth name, for the record, is Sarkissian.
[12] Elinor “Princess” Donahue, born April 19, 1937 (a Monday), played Ambassador Nancy Hedford (described as a woman in her early thirties) in “Metamorphosis”, aka “The One with Zefram Cochrane”. Jane “Margaret” Wyatt, of course, played Spock’s mother Amanda Grayson on “Jouirney to Babel”, a role she would reprise once and only once IOTL, in
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
[13] There was – Lauren “Kitten” Chapin, born May 23, 1945 (a Wednesday). By 1968, at the tender age of 23, she had been married, divorced, and spiralled into drug addiction. Much like the U.S. Presidential debates, she has no professional credits between 1960 and 1976.
[14] O’Blath’s was a bar across the street from Desilu (and Paramount)’s Gower (Melrose) studio. When
The Brady Bunch was in production, Robert Reed was quite notorious for lunching there constantly, often coming back to work half in the bag.
[15] Shelley Fabares appeared as the love interest in no fewer than
three Elvis Presley movies, making her the Shirley Bassey of that set. IOTL, she continued her acting career as an adult with some success, culminating in the long-running sitcom
Coach in the 1990s.
[16] Gerrold, of course, is gay, but was still closeted at the time. Gay pride, alas, was not something that was celebrated in 1968.
===
Thanks to
@e of pi for reviewing this little
lagniappe. This is a one-off bonus update for which the inspiration struck me like a lightning bolt when I finally arrived at the perfect actress to play Joanna McCoy.
Say hello to the actress who, ITTL, plays Joanna McCoy: Shelley Fabares!
Shelley Fabares in 1968; a publicity still from her film A Time to Sing
. ITTL, she appears as Joanna in the episode of the same title in lieu of her OTL appearance in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
, also filmed and aired in the 1968-69 season.
