A Brief Biography of Gene Roddenberry
by
David Alexander

Author: Star Trek Creator:

The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry

******

Less than twenty years after the Wright Brothers showed man how to fly but before Jolson sang and Garbo talked at the movies, Gene Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas on August 21, 1921 to Carolyn Goleman, a local girl, and Eugene Roddenberry, a native of Georgia and World War I veteran. Before Gene turned two the family moved to Los Angeles where his father became a policeman, a job he held for twenty years.

Growing up in Los Angeles Gene attended Franklin High School where he was a member of the debate team and played guitar in the family band. In the Thirties mass entertainment came in the form of radio, movies, and pulp magazines, named for the cheap pulp paper they were printed on. Gene read them avidly and listened to the radio which offered audio versions of the pulps: The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery. It was all a training ground for a young boy’s imagination

Gene’s high school interest in writing was encouraged by his English teacher, Mrs. Virginia Church, herself a published author and playwright.

At Los Angeles City College Gene took classes in police studies and learned to fly, getting his pilot’s license in September, 1940, less than a month after his 19th birthday.

Knowing war was eminent, he and several friends joined the Army Air Corps in July, 1941, but Gene was allowed to continue civilian life until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - December 7, 1941. He was called to active duty a few days later.

Sent to Kelly Field in Texas Gene trained as a bomber pilot, being commissioned a Second Lieutenant at graduation in 1942. He married his high school sweetheart, Eileen Rexroat, had a short honeymoon and was assigned to the South Pacific. Gene flew nearly a hundred combat missions winning the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal and promotion to Captain with his own plane and crew. Rotated back to the US Gene spent the remainder of the war investigating plane crashes. At war’s end he joined Pan American World Airways as a co-pilot, flying routes across the Atlantic, to South Africa, and the Karachi-New York run. In 1947 his Lockheed Constellation lost two engines and crashed in the Syrian desert. As the surviving officer Gene supervised the crash scene and rescue efforts in spite of two broken ribs. Almost as a statement about life, Gene got Eileen pregnant with their first child, Darleen Anita, within days of returning home to New Jersey.

His close brush with death, his restless nature, his growing intellectual curiosity, and the limitations of being a pilot ("a bus driver in the sky" as he would later characterize it) lead him to writing classes at several schools including New York’s Columbia University. The late 1940s saw the continued development of television that had been interrupted by the war. Gene thought this would be a medium that would need writers.

Quitting Pan Am to his wife’s relief, the young family moved to California where Gene naively thought he would find work as a television writer. Unfortunately, he miscalculated as there was little television being produced in Hollywood and there were no jobs for neophyte writers. After a brief stint as a salesman for a company that manufactured three-dimensional cameras Gene joined the Los Angeles Police Department. The decision was a natural. His younger brother Bob had joined when he returned from the war, several high school and college friends were members, and Gene knew a number of command officers from his time as president of the LACC Police Club. Finally, Gene’s father, less than ten years retired from the LAPD, still had a lot of friends on the force.

Papa Roddenberry’s old sergeant, Bill Parker, had risen in the ranks. Eleven days after Parker was promoted to Deputy Chief, Gene was assigned to the newspaper unit where he became part of the machinery that turned the LAPD into a professional law enforcement organization.

Gene found himself writing on a daily basis: principally, press releases and later speeches for Parker when he became the Chief of Police. Parker and his staff sought to remake the LAPD internally in structure and attitude and externally in its public image.

Parker was short, balding, politically conservative to the core, a devout Catholic, and the "imperial" chief. Gene was a tall, young, good-looking, moderate Democrat, a wet-behind-the-ears policeman with limited street experience, who had, in childhood, rejected belief in the Christian god.

Despite their differences in philosophy, theology, professional rank, and virtually everything else, the two men liked each other. Binding them was Parker’s knowledge of Gene as a powerful intellect, a strong respect for each other’s minds, shared ethical standards, the ability to argue on an intellectual level, and their mutual desire to see law enforcement become a recognized profession.

It made for some interesting moments. Decades later, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates remembered the first time he saw Gene and Parker "discussing" an issue. "I walked into Parker’s office and straight into a very strange situation. Gene was arguing with the Chief...they were having an intellectual argument over the preparation of a particular speech. Parker would pound his fist and Gene would respond with a reasonable argument of his own, delivered just as vigorously. Gene was clearly not afraid of Parker. He was probably the only person on the department who wasn’t."

Parker had two ways of influencing public opinion: speeches he would give nearly anywhere to any civic group – speeches usually written by Gene – and a television program the LAPD supported with all the vigor at its command: Dragnet.

Originally a radio program, Dragnet went to television in December, 1951. Drawing its stories "from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department" Dragnet became a weekly message from the LAPD as to what real police work was all about. It reached both the public and police officers all over the country with its subtle message of law enforcement professionalism.

Unfortunately, poorly researched biographies of Gene have given him credit for writing scripts for Dragnet. This is not correct. Jack Webb, the producer/star of the program was always on the lookout for material for his show. He readily bought story outlines and ideas. Lacking extensive street experience Gene would trade his skills with beat cops and detectives who couldn’t write, putting their stories in one-page outlines and selling them to Webb. Gene and his source would split the $100 fee, good money for a policeman making $400 a month.

Gene wanted to do more: he wanted to write scripts. He set about teaching himself. He borrowed scripts from Webb and other sources and then watched the corresponding programs when broadcast, matching each scene with the direction on the page. From that he learned the terminology and camera directions needed in scripts. To learn blocking and action he would watch a program with the sound turned down and to develop his sense of dialog and timing he would listen to dramatic programs, not watch them.

While maintaining a full-time position with the LAPD, Gene wrote at home producing scripts and program ideas at a furious pace and, like most beginning script writers, had no success. He continued to write, honing his skills, knowing that luck belonged to the well-prepared.

By 1954 television had expanded and program production raced to keep up with the demand. Gene had been sending out query letters and treatments to producers all over town, but his "big break" came in the form of a request to his immediate boss, Captain Stanley Sheldon, for a technical advisor for a new television series, Mr. District Attorney.

Gene read several scripts and made the observation to the head of the production company’s story department, "I can write scripts as good as this." Gene was invited to make good on his boast. In October, 1953 Gene sent a story outline to the production company who liked what they read. It became his first sale.

Even thought the LAPD had given him permission to work outside the department Gene wrote his early work under the name "Robert Wesley" primarily to disguise how successful he was becoming. His first year of sales - three full scripts - brought him $2100, equal to nearly half his pay as a policeman. Even with his writing success Gene did not neglect his duties at the LAPD. February, 1954 marked his fifth year in the department, the minimum amount of time before he could take the sergeant’s exam. Preparing for this test can consume all of a candidate’s free time, and some begin studying two years before they are eligible. Many do not pass on the first try; others, knowing the difficulty, never bother taking it at all.

Gene studied and passed on his first try, placing among the top candidates while continuing to perform his regular duties as Chief Parker’s researcher, lecturing at Los Angeles State College, acting as a technical advisor for Mr. District Attorney and writing several scripts.

By 1956 Gene realized that he had to make a choice to pursue writing full-time or not. He reluctantly left the LAPD and plunged into free-lance writing full time. Within four years he had a development contract with Bill Dozier (later to produce Batman for television) at Screen Gems paying him $100,000 a year to create and write television pilots. This arrangement lasted two years. Before Star Trek, Gene was a highly successful free-lance writer with dozens of produced scripts to his credit. (Please see my book for a complete filmography.)

In 1963 Gene created and produced The Lieutenant for Arena Productions at MGM. He had a number of other series ideas, one of them being an adult science fiction show with continuing characters. He called it Star Trek. Star Trek did not jump fully developed out of Gene’s sub-conscious. It was the result of a steady accumulation of story and series ideas. In the early 1960s Gene had seen the film Master of the World, based on a combination of two Jules Verne stories – it was 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in an 1870s airship manned by an idealistic "band of brothers." Gene suggested a continuing series based on this premise with the airship circling the globe righting wrongs. The idea did not get past the talking stage, but remained in Gene’s creative memory.

He also had an idea for a series similar to James Michner’s Tales of the South Pacific that would be set during World War II, but well behind the lines. This idea actually got to pilot stage and was produced as APO 923. It had three main characters: Captain Phillip Pike, the strong, in-charge captain (who would surface again with a different first name in the first Star Trek pilot); Lt. Edward Jellico, the character whose emotions were in the forefront; and Lt. James T. Irvine, the "smart" character who early in the plot had built an ice machine out of spare parts.

That pilot did not sell, but the idea of the three principals lived on in Gene’s creation of the central characters for Star Trek. While at MGM Gene developed the series idea and tried selling it but the studio wouldn’t buy, although, as he was leaving, one executive who believed in the project wrote a note saying that seeing Gene leave, taking Star Trek with him, was like watching his mother-in-law driving off a cliff in his new Cadillac convertible.

Across town, Desilu, a small production studio owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, had brought in the former president of CBS, Oscar Katz, to pump up lagging production. Oscar brought on board several producers who had established track records: one for comedy, one for drama, and one for action-adventure: Gene Roddenberry. Gene was signed to a three-project deal. One of the projects was Star Trek.

Lucille Ball was the reigning queen of television, but only signed one-year contracts, extracting as much as she could in yearly negotiations that often required the personal attention of the powerful William Paley, founder and Chairman of the Board of CBS. The network added "perks" as inducements for Lucy to sign. One of these inducements was a $500,000 development fund that Desilu could use as they saw fit in creating new projects. This became the foundation for the development of Star Trek.

Up to this point the bulk of science fiction on television had been children’s’ fare: Tom Corbett Space Cadet, Captain Video and the wildly successful Space Patrol in the 1950s. The only adult sci-fi programming had been a couple of anthology series without continuing characters.

In an exclusive interview with this writer shortly before his death, Oscar Katz remembered how they sold the series to television. CBS, whose money they were working on, held a long meeting with Gene and Oscar, but had already bought Lost In Space and were only looking for story ideas.

The next network pitched was NBC with Oscar describing the series in terms the executives could understand. In later years Gene often described Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the stars," but that was a simplification of the successful approach he and Oscar developed.

Oscar Katz: "We said there were four kinds of stories on Star Trek. First, the spaceship is out for a five-year mission on some sort of ‘police action." It gets word that on some planet where there’s some rare mineral being mined there is some claim jumping. So we go to the planet and settle the dispute. That’s very much like Gunsmoke."

"The second kind of story has us on the spaceship. It’s five stories high, has five hundred people on it, and the story takes place entirely on the ship. There’s a girl who has a problem, the two leads find out it’s an emotional problem with someone. The two leads are the catalytic agents who push her into solving her own problem and once she does, you never see her again. That’s similar to Wagon Train."

"The third type of story has the spaceship visit a planet where they are very much like us because the atmospheric conditions are the same. The locals are lagging behind us. Their Civil War is about to break out, or Al Capone is about to take over their Chicago and our leads use their knowledge of what happened on Earth to help these people. We didn’t get into that type of story too much."

"Finally - only this last story type would be considered real science fiction by Star Trek fans - they land on a planet where the atmospheric conditions are different, people don’t look like us, and things are very different." "NBC chose the latter type of story, the most difficult and expensive to produce. Gene developed three story outlines and NBC selected one to be done as a pilot. It became known as ‘The Cage.’"

"I also knew that the pilot was going to cost a lot more. I think NBC gave us $435,000 for the Star Trek pilot. We spent $500,000 to $600,000 and deficit-financed the difference. A good part of the additional $150,000 spent wasn’t cash, it was studio services, overhead. Today [Katz was interviewed in 1992] it would cost $2 or $3 million."

After an enormous amount of work, the first pilot staring film actor Jeffery Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike was screened for test audiences and NBC executives.

The common myth that the pilot failed because it was "too cerebral," was put out to save network face. The truth, as Oscar Katz explained it, was, "It wasn’t the quality of the program that they objected to, they didn’t like the type of story we told." NBC told Katz that they would not buy the series because they didn’t think they could sell the program to enough sponsors.

Katz reminded NBC that they had selected the story to be produced. On Friday, March 26, 1965 NBC made television history by ordering a second pilot.

Hunter, whose wife hated the program, quit. Gene had to find a new captain and get new stories for the second pilot, stories both Desilu and NBC management would feel was more apt to sell the series. Gene wrote outlines for two stories, "The Omega Glory," and "Mudd’s Women," writing the script for the first and passing the second on to Stephen Kandal. For the third story and script, Gene called on his old friend Sam Peeples. At a story conference the two men tossed around a number of story ideas and Gene chose "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Peeples, then highly successful, took a substantial cut in pay to write the script.

Memos show that NBC liked the Peeples’ script and selected it. Memos also show that Gene moved forward enthusiastically, writing, "Our aim is to make an episode which will sell Star Trek."

The character of Number One, played by Gene’s then girlfriend (later wife) Majel Barrett, was eliminated on demand of the network. Leonard Nimoy was held over as Mr. Spock and many of "Number One’s" character traits were transferred to Spock. The hunt for a new captain began with a look at nearly every leading actor in Hollywood. The job went to Canadian-born William Shatner. He had caché with studio heads with his impressive credits of solid stage roles, films, and prestigious dramatic television. Shatner had one other advantage: he was represented by the Ashley Famous Agency, the same agency that represented Desilu and Gene.

The second pilot, using sets already constructed, cost just under $300,000 and NBC bought it, but didn’t like Mr. Spock. Originally conceived as a red-hued Martian, Gene decided that if the show were a success, explorers might actually land on Mars during its run, so Spock’s origin was moved to another, unnamed planet. The idea to have him ingest energy through a plate in his stomach was also scrapped after an intense discussion with Sam Peeples, who argued that Spock should share more human traits, making him a more interesting character and able to comment on the human condition more believably.

It was his Satanic appearance that bothered NBC, and Leonard Nimoy didn’t much care for the ears, either. Gene would later joke that Spock’s ears "broke" the show’s special effects budget. Memos show that the first set of "ear appliances" cost $80 with each pair thereafter billed at $8. Oscar Katz had to explain how Spock worked in the series to NBC, easily winning that battle as he remembered.

Gene rewrote virtually every Star Trek script for the first two seasons, often working around the clock, days at a time, to produce scripts that conformed to his view of what Star Trek was and could be. It was not unusual for Gene to be walking out of the studio in the morning as the actors were arriving. As Gene used to say, "It isn’t Star Trek until I say it’s Star Trek." This ability to synthesize and improve input from others, adding his own special insights and touches, is best illustrated in the famous opening that set the tone for the series. One of the early versions went like this:

Bob Justman suggested:

At the bottom, in Gene’s penciled scrawl, is a variety of words, some scratched through:

Writer John D.F. Black suggested:

Or:

On August 10, 1966, Gene wrote:

Split infinitive and all, it set the tone and mood for an entire generation of Star Trek fans.

Gene’s story is too complex to give him proper justice in a short bio. In his 70 years he lived enough for several lives (the 600 pages of my book are barely enough to contain some of the details), and limited space here gives no opportunity to discuss Data’s precursor, Questor, Gene’s occult series Spectre, his script for a Tarzan feature film, his experience with Star Trek The Motion Picture and subsequent Star Trek films, and his creation of StarTrek: The Next Generation , his amazing feat of catching lightning in a bottle for the second time, proving that the first series wasn’t a fluke.

Putting down the essence of a man in a few short words, especially a man as complex as Gene is impossible, but a number of Gene’s letters to friends give us glimpses into the man and what motivated him. I used them extensively in my book. In one letter to Janet Quarton, a friend in Scotland (for whom he named the character "Q") he wrote about his creation of The Next Generation:

"I am an independent artist to whom Paramount has laid down the challenge of a lifetime. They very carefully made it clear ‘No one thinks it can be done again.’ Could you turn your back on that? I certainly can’t. I’ve never begun a morning’s work without wondering if I’d win or lose artistically on that particular day–I know of no other way to work or attitude to have."

In October, 1992, a year after his death, a canister of Gene’s ashes was sent to Houston to the care and keeping of astronaut Jim Weatherbee. The ashes were sealed in a slightly larger machined stainless steel cylinder. Accompanied by a 5" X 7" American flag the cylinder was carried on board the space shuttle Columbia, inventoried only as part of the several pounds of personal property each astronaut is permitted.

On a giant column of fire and smoke the Columbia rose into the sky above Florida, taking a small part of Gene along with it. Gene Roddenberry had made it into space, if only symbolically. He was a part of our evolution into a space faring society and his contribution was being honored by the people who had turned imagination into reality. It was a unique tribute for a man whose vision inspired many of the people whose creativity and skill took him into space that day. By their actions, their generosity of spirit, with this quiet, simple tribute NASA showed that Gene’s optimistic vision of humanity’s future, his Star Trek dream, lived on.

Gene would have loved the adventure.

© 1998–David Alexander–All Rights Reserved

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