James Doohan, Star Trek's Scotty, died. It must be time for another of Tom's Show Business Memories. If you're not interested, skip this entry.
When I was in college, working for the newspaper at the University of Iowa, I spent a Saturday covering a local Star Trek convention. I like Star Trek just fine, but think people who dress up as TV characters are nuts, unless of course the person is my wife and the character is a hooker on Starsky & Hutch. (I used to drink at a bar called "Starsky's Hutch," but that's a different story.)
Anyway, Doohan was giving a speech about space travel along with a NASA scientist named Jesko von Puttkammer. I learned years later that von Puttkammer was referred to around NASA circles as "The Last Nazi" because he had joined the American missile program after serving in Germany, and had outlasted the rest of Von Braun's progeny.
Doohan and von Puttkammer apparently did a lot of these conventions together, and were good friends. That day, they made two apppearances together, separated by about two dead hours when they had nothing to do but drink. And boy did they drink. They got shitfaced almost beyond coherence, and I got shitfaced right along with them.
It was awesome. I was a college kid, for goodness sake, covering a convention of people who I had little but scorn for, and I was getting drunk -- for free! -- with Scotty and this elegant German scientist in a suite at a nice hotel. And here's the best part: They scorned the Star Trek people even more than I did! The whole afternoon was "did you see that idiot" and "where do these people come from" and "that Klingon had some tits." I'd been out wandering in the crowd and saw some characters who were openly ridiculous, and when I told those stories Jimmy and Jesko -- we were on a first-name basis by then -- threw their heads back and laughed out loud.
I was agog. It was my first time seeing something akin to show business from the inside, and it was way, way cool. Now, 20 years or so later, I've spent enough time backstage at various events to know that what they were saying and laughing at had more to do with beating boredom than it did with their actual sentiments. But still, what fun it was. I decided right then and there that show business -- which I believed consisted of sitting backstage and getting shitfaced with famous, charming and roguish people -- was my true calling.
Later, I learned that show business is a lot of hard work. That's why I'm not in show business anymore. Well, that plus a nearly complete lack of talent.
Iowa wasn't his first encounter with a Nazi:
"At age 19, Doohan [joined] the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. “The sea was rough,” he recalled. “We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans."
The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren’t heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.
Posted by: Conrad | 07/21/2005 at 02:04 AM