by Echo Heron

Thursday, October 27, 1994

To the delight of "Star Trek" fans, Nichelle Nichols, better known as Lietenant Uhura, communciations officer on the Starship Enterprise, has writter her autobiography, "Beyond Uhura."

With a tendency to dwell on detailed accounts of the racial injustices that have plagued her life as well as her career, Nichols hammers home to the point that she won all her battles through sheer tenacity, pure talent and a passion for the performing arts.

According to Nichols, she was something of a child wonder: "By the time I was 5... after only a couple of reads, I could memorize reams of poetry which I would not merely recite, but dramatize with great flair." Her gifts also included dancing: "Ballet came so naturally to me by the time I was ten, I had advanced en pointe."

Nichols also recalls that after she had applied to the Chicago Ballet Academy, her father was told emphatically by the Russian ballet master that black students were not accepted. But after a grueling aduition (though perfectly executed, the author tells us) she was taken in as the academy's first black ballet student.

Nichols says her rung-by-rung climb to success was peppered liberally with encounters with entertainment royalty such as Josephine Baker, Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis Jr. and Duke Ellington -- all of whom apparently thought she was wonderful and told her she'd go far.

There are moments when readers may begin to think the author's world was made up exclusively of adoring Nichelle Nichols fans and racists. The occasional interjection of a turbulent will-against-will relationship with her mother brings some much-needed shots of humble honesty.

Love Affair
Just as Nichols' self-aggrandizement begins to wear thin, she lands the part of Lieutenant Uhura -- and not a page too soon. Trekkers (not Trekkies, insists Nichols) will devour her candid, behind-the-scenes revelations about her co-stars and her long-term love affair with creator Gene Roddenberry.

For example, Nichols' account of network television's first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Uhura is an amusing piece of mind candy.

After 36 takes, the director realized there might be an interracial issue, says Nichols, and ordered the two actors not to kiss during the scene. Shatner (more than likely realizing an opportunity to make television history) purposely flubbed the nonkissing take by crossing his eyes. Thus, the kissing scene stayed.

But all was not roses aboard the Enterprise, she says: Roddenberry's original plan to make Uhura major character was fought by the network's "front office suits." As the author tells it, her gender and color again kept her from advancement, and this time Nichols' frustration over shabby treatment from the directors and constant cutting of her lines is infectious.

It's easy to sense her anger when she describes two mail room workers who confided during the first season that the studio had ordered her fan mail withheld so she wouldn't know how popular her character was.

One of the major drawbacks of working on "Star Trek," Nichols writes, was the cast's dislike of the apparently overbearing Shatner.

After the first season, "Bill began to make it plain to anyone on the set that he was the Big Picture and the rest of us were no more important than the props."

During their third season, Shatner began "bossing around and intimdating the directors and guest stars, cutting other actors' lines and scenes, and generally taking enough control to disrupt the sense of family we had shared during the first season."

Cutting Communication
Finally, embittered by Shatner's treatment of her in his own memoirs, in which he violated confidentiality regarding her affair with Roddenberry, she writes, "Looking back now, I realized that Bill was as self-centered and unaware as ever," and, "as for Bill personally, I say with some regret and much hurt, this communication channel is now closed. Uhura out."