Born with Teeth: A Memoir (25 page)

It was important to put on a brave face for the children, who were inordinately sensitive to my moods, particularly where work was involved. I wanted to teach them that rejection, and the sadness that attended it, were an integral part of loving something passionately and therefore nothing to be ashamed of. Still, young boys think in a linear fashion, and I know it was difficult for them to grasp the notion that, despite having done well in the audition, I failed to get the part. After all, in their world, a payoff was immediate and almost always gratifying. Alec’s primitive painting of a campfire garnered an A-plus, and in the top-right-hand corner of Ian’s rather dark interpretation of the “The Twelve Days of Halloween,” the teacher had written: “This is truly frightening, Ian. Keep up the good work.”

After exhausting myself in the pool, I told Lucy I was going to the market and to set the table outside; we were going to grill steaks. The market was always a pleasant diversion. I could escape within the aisles of the air-conditioned and impeccably appointed San Vicente Market, and I could leave feeling a sense of satisfaction and anticipation, despite having spent enough to have sustained a small Mexican pueblo for a month. I packed the red-and-white-striped grocery bags into the back of my jeep and drove home.

When I pulled into the driveway, I was greeted by what could only be interpreted as an alarming sight. Lucy, Ian, and
Alec were standing on the front porch, waving their arms and shouting at me to get out of the car and come quickly. I thought, Oh, no, the dog is dead, and then amended that to Oh, good, I hope the dog is dead, she’s such a miserable creature. That, then, had to be corrected for reasons of absolution before I jumped out of the car and heard Lucy reprimanding me.

“Señora, you got to get in the kitchen and listen to the phone. Why you never listen to those messages, señora, huh?”

And now I was thinking, Oh my God, someone I love is dying—not dead. This I could glean from the look in my boys’ eyes, which simply said:
Listen to your bleeping messages, Mother!

I reached into the backseat to gather a few grocery bags, but Ian interrupted me with a sharp, “Mom, get out of the car, do that later, go into the kitchen! Go!” I did as I was told and went into the kitchen, where I pressed the button to replay the messages on my answering machine.

There was only one, and it said, “Kate Mulgrew, this is Rick Berman, the executive producer of
Star Trek: Voyager,
and I simply wanted to say welcome aboard, Captain. I’ll see you on the bridge Monday morning.”

The boys were suddenly screaming, Lucy was screaming, and I was screaming, but all of this came to an abrupt halt when I held up my hand and said, “On your knees, everybody, and let us thank God for His wonderful and mysterious ways.” They did as instructed, we clasped our hands in prayer, and then I turned to Lucy and said, “Now get over to that refrigerator and pull out that bottle of champagne, because tonight we are going to celebrate
all night long!
” And while everyone scrambled for glasses and the mad cheering of my children rang out from the kitchen, I stepped into the quiet of the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and said out loud, “Now,
this
is happiness.”

That night, my time-honored resolve vanished into thin air
as I picked up the phone to call Tim in Cleveland. His voice was hushed and distant when he answered.

“Hello?”

“I just wanted you to know that you were right,” I said, barely able to contain my excitement. “I
did
get the part of the
Star Trek
captain. How could you possibly have foreseen that?”

There was an odd, protracted pause, before Hagan replied in a low voice, “Because you deserve it, because you’re a natural commander.”

“Tim,” I asked, “why are you whispering?”

“My girls are asleep next to me, and I don’t want to wake them. Can I call you later?”

A small letdown, but perfectly understandable. His children were sleeping. “Of course,” I replied. “Good night.”

“See you,” Hagan said, and hung up.

It was as if I were shot out of a cannon, life changed so quickly and so dramatically. One night, I was celebrating my good fortune with family and friends, and the next, I no longer knew who I was or what was happening to me. The phone did not stop ringing. My agents were busy negotiating the final deal, UPN was busy launching its network with
Star Trek: Voyager
as its flagship show, Paramount was busy announcing its new captain and the immediate resumption of shooting, and Rick Berman was saying to me, “Your life is about to change in ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

This gave me pause, as it would any thinking human being. “By which you mean, it will it be exciting?” I asked.

“By which I mean, it will be… phenomenal,” Berman said.
“Now come to the studio immediately, we need to do costume and makeup tests.”

Incredibly enough, the same guard greeted me when I arrived at the Paramount gate that afternoon. “What did I tell you, Captain?” He beamed, as the gates lifted.

“You must be psychic.” I laughed, to which he immediately responded, “No, ma’am, just smart.”

I parked in what was referred to as “the Tank” and found my way to Stage 8, navigating between speeding golf carts, down dark alleys, and past huge hangars known as soundstages. As I approached Stage 8 a young man, clearly on the lookout for a captain, walked briskly toward me.

“Kate?” he asked, already pulling his walkie-talkie from his belt. I nodded.

“I’m Mike,” he said, “the second AD. Pleased to meet you, everyone’s very excited. I’ll be taking you through the process today.”

Beep.
“Stage.”

Crackle.
“Kate Mulgrew has arrived, I’m going to start her in hair.”

Beep.
“Roger that,” came the disembodied response. “Then take her to costumes, makeup is last. Test on the bridge at two o’clock. I’ll call the office.”

“Check.”

The friendly and unassuming assistant to the assistant director named Mike could not have known at the time that it was he who placed me squarely in the one-man luge, supine and feet first, and gave me the push that started me down a chute so fast moving and perilous that, for the seven years that followed, I felt as if I were competing against a timer so precisely calibrated that often a thousandth of a second could make a difference. It was immediate, breathtaking, and completely immersive.

Once in the hair trailer, I was introduced to the head of the
hair department, Josée Normand, a stout, good-natured, and very tough French-Canadian woman whom I liked immediately. She sat me in a chair, placed an apron around me, and turned me slowly to get a look at what it was she had to sculpt to perfection within the next hour. We considered every conceivable hairstyle until the door to the trailer was pulled open and two men and a woman entered, filling the confined space with a sense of importance so great that Josée immediately stopped what she was doing and stepped back.

“Kate, Rick Berman,” said a tall, nice-looking man, as he stepped forward and shook my hand.

I laughed and said, “Ah, you’re the man who seemed to find me amusing at the audition. I felt like winking at you.”

“Probably wise you didn’t,” he responded, with a slight smile. “Not very captainly of you.”

“One captain to another, as it turns out,” I said, standing to shake the hands of the other executive producers, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. All three were professional and composed, but Berman alone struck me as someone who hid beneath the surface of these qualities, a man who might be concealing the more genuine aspects of who he was. I was aware, for the first time in my career, that I was facing the old guard, a conservative and successful group of producers who had worked for a long-established cause, known as the
Star Trek
franchise. There was a discipline in place, an unshakeable order, and a principle of such significance that this initial meeting was almost entirely lacking in bonhomie. Even the woman, Jeri Taylor, who, because of her gender, might have expressed a certain solidarity, did just the opposite. She was polite but detached. Berman was the alpha, no question about it, which probably explains why I was so quickly attracted to him. Indeed, within minutes he had issued instructions to Josée and her team about how to style Captain Janeway’s hair.

“We’ll test it a couple of ways, but let’s take a look at it up first.”

“Up in a chignon, a French twist, or a bun?” Josée inquired.

Berman studied me.

“Keep the front of her natural hairline, and pull it up with another piece into a bun. You’re probably going to go through a lot of changes in the next few weeks, so fasten your seatbelt.”

“Isn’t outer space more advanced than that?” I joked.

“Not much,” Berman said drily, “but you’ll find that out for yourself soon enough.”

Jeri Taylor stopped at the door and turned to me.

“Oh, by the way, you should know that we can’t, after all, use Elizabeth as Janeway’s first name, there happens to be a living author with that name, so we’ve decided to call her Kathryn. We thought that would please you.”

“Very much,” I responded. “How do you spell it?”

“K-a-t-h-r-y-n. Do you like it?” Jeri Taylor asked.

I swallowed, on the verge of suggesting the spelling of my own name, Katherine, which I considered the more classic version, but I caught myself and said, “It’s lovely. How nice.”

The triumvirate of producers, no doubt in a hurry to complete my deal and get on with the show, offered their congratulations, their best wishes for a successful seven years, and their collective assurance that should I need anything at any time, I need only say the word. No sooner had they stepped out of the trailer than I was spun around in the chair and a coven of hairdressers wielding scissors, pins, and hairpieces went to work, furiously converting my head into that of a futuristic captain who might exude an effortless command but who was, nonetheless, a lady.

I was then ushered from one trailer to another, delivered from one set of hands to the next, all of them pushing, plucking, kneading, tightening, snipping, zipping, and snapping. When I walked onto the bridge for the first time to undergo a
series of tests, I felt completely transformed and admitted as much as I introduced myself to the director of photography, Marvin Rush.

Unsmiling but not unkind, he said, “Nose to the grindstone, eye on the prize.”

Then he said, “Turn around, please, slowly.”

“Hey,” I joked, “this is a family show!”

Neither Marvin Rush, the camera operator, the focus puller, the gaffer, nor the best boy broke a smile. The heat was on, and standing there in my handmade Italian boots with four-inch heels, I could feel it from the tips of my toes to the top of my bun-enhanced head.

On Monday, my makeup call was four fifteen a.m., which necessitated a three a.m. wake-up at home. I needn’t have set the alarm; I’d been lying in bed, wide awake, since two. Now I jumped out of bed and began the ritual that would serve me well for the next seven years. My work clothes were laid out on the back of my desk chair; I had showered the night before, so I had only to wash my face, brush my teeth, and pull my hair back into a ponytail. On the way out of my bedroom, I grabbed my script bag, a light jacket, and my purse before heading down to the kitchen, where Lucy had prepared the coffee the night before. I pressed the auto button, opened my script, and spent the following ten minutes sipping my coffee and going over my lines. This was my first day, and the first scene on the call sheet was scheduled to shoot on the bridge. Janeway enters from her office, which on the USS
Voyager
was called the captain’s ready room, and walks slowly through the bridge, greeting each officer in turn.

I was about to meet my comrades-in-arms, and I was excited. Curious. How would I react to these actors, with whom I would be spending the next seven years of my life? And more
important, how would they react to me? Having already experienced the confusion and disappointment of Genevieve Bujold’s defection, they were unlikely to be in any mood for fun. We were down to the wire, and now it remained to be seen whether or not I could control the set, and command the bridge.

It took nearly three hours that first day to get me camera-ready, a process that, over the next months, I would whittle down to an hour and a half. I was to become the bane of Josée Normand’s existence, in her ongoing effort to achieve a coiffure that would suit not only Janeway but all of the Paramount executives, as well. Obviously, this had not been a concern during the production of
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
and without having even met the man, I envied Patrick Stewart his freedom from this kind of attention. For the extra sleep it allowed him, if nothing else.

While I was being helped into my captain’s uniform, there was a knock at my trailer door.

“Come in!” I called out, realizing that there would be no such thing as standing on ceremony.

The door opened, and a voice inquired, “May I come in?”

“Yes, yes, come in and close the door behind you!” I shouted.

A young man bounded into the small space and filled it immediately with his vitality, his charm, and the completely unaffected way in which he greeted me.

“I’m Kevin Brockman, publicity for UPN, and I’ll be looking after you personally for the next few months. We’re going to have some fun.”

He laughed, and I laughed with him. His handsome face was lit by something else, something more than beauty, more than charm. He struck me as essentially incorruptible, and I instinctively knew that I could trust him.

I took his hand and said, “Help me, will you?”

“Oh yes, ma’am, that I will do, but some of this ain’t going
to be easy, especially initially,” Kevin explained. “You’re going to be pulled in every possible direction over the next months, it will be very demanding, but I’ll be there to guide you.”

“Just don’t let go of my hand, whatever you do,” I said.

Kevin Brockman smiled broadly, looked me dead in the eye, and replied, “I promise that I will never let go of your hand.”

A pause, during which we sized each other up.

“As long as you do everything I ask of you,” he quipped, slamming the trailer door behind him.

Mike, the second AD, knocked on the door and informed me they were ready on the set. These were words that I would come to respond to with Pavlovian discipline. As I walked through the door of Stage 8, I was greeted by several strangers, crew members, day players, technicians, all of whom stood sharply to attention and said, “Good morning, Captain!” Mike led the way to a group of people huddled in conversation around a monitor. The
Star Trek
triumvirate was present, of course, and there were a number of Paramount personnel present, as well, come to see the goods for themselves.

A trim man with an intelligent, handsome face approached me and, extending his hand, said, in a slight German accent, “I’m Rick Kolbe, the director. It is a great pleasure to meet you, and rumor has it that you are not only ready to work but willing and able to boot.”

“Yes, sir,” I assured him, “that’s what I’m here for, so let’s get going.”

Kolbe laughed and, taking my arm, led me onto the bridge, where the other officers had gathered for introductions.

The first to greet me was Robbie McNeill, who jumped up from his post at the helm and said, “Welcome aboard, Captain! I cannot tell you how happy I am to meet you!” His handsome Celtic face shone with mischief, and I felt the first gladdening of a spontaneous friendship.

“Is that a book you’re reading, Lieutenant Paris?”

Robbie hid the book behind his back, looked at me sheepishly, and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid it is. Will I be punished?”

“Depends on what it is,” I replied.

“Russell Banks, ma’am. I find him difficult to put down.”

“Then carry on, Mr. Paris, but don’t read and drive.” We laughed, and although my nervousness was growing with every passing minute, I maintained a poise I thought becoming to an officer of my rank and gender.

Ensign Harry Kim stepped out from behind his station at operations, took my hand in a formal and extremely gracious manner, and said, “I’m Garrett Wang, and this is where you will always find me. Unless, of course, I’m promoted.”

“Easy does it, Ensign,” Kolbe interrupted. “Let’s get through the pilot before we start promoting people. For all you know, you’ll be dead.”

Garrett blanched, and we all laughed again as the first AD called out, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, find your marks! Get ready to roll on scene four, episode one, ‘The Caretaker’!”

Rick Kolbe showed me to my ready room and, pulling me aside, said, “This is your home, and the bridge is your living room. You own it; it’s yours. You should feel completely at ease, and in total command.”

I entered the bridge from my ready room, assured Harry Kim that it wasn’t “crunch time” yet, acknowledged another actor who was playing my first officer but who would soon be dead (Chakotay and Tuvok were still on the renegade Maquis ship, and we had not yet joined ranks), sat in the captain’s chair, nodded to Mr. Paris, and said, “Engage.”