Grace Lee Whitney: 1930 – 2015
Grace Lee Whitney was more commonly known to fans as Yeoman
Rand from the old Star Trek (though
she became Lieutenant Rand for the movies and one episode of Star Trek: Voyager.) I strongly
recommend her autobiography, The Longest
Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy.
The cover shows them holding flashlights, since the prop
department hadn’t issued them phasers yet. She covers other tidbits of insider
information like that.
Even if you’re lukewarm about Star Trek, she has funny stories about Hollywood. She was an extra
in Some Like it Hot, starring Jack
Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. She describes what an airhead Marilyn Monroe was,
sometimes opening a drawer for no reason during filming because she had hidden a
page of the script there to read.
What she mainly wanted to be known for was how she survived
addiction to alcohol and drugs. Her autobiography is brutally realistic about
how she hit rock bottom as an addict. She actually reached the stage where she
could not get drunk no matter how much she drank, and could not get sober when
she stopped. Her friends in Alcoholics Anonymous warned her that was the final
stage before death.
I’m glad she penned such an honest chronicle of her life,
and I’m amazed she lived to age eighty-five.
Super cool! I really liked Some Like it Hot, but man was that a racey movie for its day.
ReplyDeleteI think "We're No Angels," starring Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn, and Demi Moore was a remake of that. DeNiro and Penn play two escaped convicts on the run who pose as priests. Therefore, DeNiro's character cannot be too openly affectionate to Demi Moore's character.
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