Former 'Trek' star has a mission

Grace Lee Whitney writes her memoirs to help others suffering from addiction

_____ The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy By Grace Lee Whitney, with Jim Denney Quill Driver Books, $14.95 208 pages Three stars (A good read) _____

By Billie Rae Bates
The Detroit News

Former Star Trek star Grace Lee Whitney opens this account of her life, most appropriately, at the point where Americans know her best, Star Trek.

It is at this point in the 1960s where, the Detroit native believes, in some ways her life "began." The TV show embraced her, made her feel like she had a family for the first time in her life, promised to make her a star as one of its three lead characters, Yeoman Janice Rand, a sort of secretary in space to dashing Capt. James T. Kirk.

But a sexual assault on the studio lot by a man she'll call only "the Executive" brought Whitney's pink slip from the show after just half a season. Nobody on the show spoke in her defense. The official explanation for her departure, reiterated just last month by Kirk himself, William Shatner, in the Sci-Fi Channel's Special Edition airings of the classic episodes: Kirk had to have breathing room to womanize in space; he couldn't have a female yeoman hanging around.

But Whitney has always known why she was jettisoned, and the loss of that role, despite other acting jobs she had, sent her on a downward spiral into addiction. While her problems began long before she hopped aboard the Starship Enterprise, her substance abuse developed into a full-blown, threatening, menacing beast in the following decades.

Now, it may be difficult, you understand, for hard-core Trekkers to listen to a negative take on the pop-culture phenomena they've worshiped for more than 30 years.

But that's OK. Whitney does not write The Longest Trek for the Trekker so much as she writes it for another segment of our population (and a horribly large one): the addicted.

Whitney paints an ugly picture of her life even before Trek: alcoholism, sex addiction, eating disorders, an incident right here on Grand River Avenue in Detroit when she believes she killed a man with her car but was too drunk and scared to go back and find out. There was also a gruesome illegal abortion, and a singing career in Chicago clubs when, among other things, she guarded the bathroom door while the heroin-addicted Billie Holiday was getting shot-up.

It's not perfectly worded prose, but it's powerful.

Just about everyone from the original Enterprise bridge has written their own version of the classic Trek days: Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei. But while they've dropped names, Whitney here drops bits of insight into the nature of an addict:

* "We alcoholics can't have healthy relationships. If a relationship is going too well and seems to be healthy, then we have to find some way to wreck it."

* "Defiance is an outstanding characteristic of alcoholics."

* "One morning I looked in the mirror and saw the veins in my face. Recovering alcoholics call that having your wiring exposed."

* "The -ism part of alcoholism ... is that gnawing sense of restlessness, depression, anxiety and guilt that the alcoholic feels. The -ism of alcoholism makes us self-centered."

But why? Some people believe addiction is a chemical thing. Whitney explains, however, that her problems had an emotional basis: the need for family, the need to belong, the deep need to feel human and loved. She made her "longest trek" for these things -- and that trek took 50 years.

"Drinking is not the problem; it's only the symptom of the real disease," she says. "I can easily switch from drinking to something else. The real disease is that sense of emptiness and worthlessness, that feeling of 'What's the use?'"

They don't get any tougher than Grace Lee Whitney, who is 17 years sober this year. In an interview before her appearance in Novi last spring, Whitney said she was a bit scared about the book's release. You'll see why. She throws it all out there in a very straightforward fashion, pebble after pebble, flying out into the darkness, pelting over and over any reader who's an addict.

"I believe we are punished not so much for our sins as by them," she says.

Addiction thrives all around us. The demons that Grace Lee Whitney has wrestled to the ground kill people on a regular basis. Every day, someone like my cousin Raymond passes out from alcohol and never wakes up. Every day, an anorexic like my friend Becky has cardiac arrest.

Around the shell of the Star Trek phenomenon, which will always be one of her true loves, Whitney has written a book, sneakily and sincerely, with every intention of lessening the body count.

. . . . . . . . . . . .


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