Dallas Public Library: De

Dallas TX

30 August, 2021

11:27 AM

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Press release from Dallas Public Library: Andrew Anderson August 23, 2021 Anyone can say "He's dead, Jim." Nobody says "Your weight was up a couple of pounds" like DeForest Kelley. I'm serious. No matter who had played the U. S. S. Enterprise's chief surgeon, Dr. McCoy, that famous line referring to the unexpected, untimely, or otherwise inconvenient loss of life would have attached itself to the actor. The line practically acts itself. But can we say the same for "everything's all messed up" or "I never eat until the crew eats"? These lines, devoid of dramatic punch, simply can't be delivered in such a way as to make a strong impression, unless the aim is to make them memorable for the wrong reasons. While I have attention focused on "He's dead, Jim," let's set the record straight: DeForest Kelley—"De" to his friends—as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, uttered it in that precise form fewer times than most viewers of Star Trek: The Original Series realize. How many times do you think he said it? Twelve? Fifteen? Seventy-nine? Five. He said it five times, She's dead, Jim" in that count (check Memory Alpha, the online Star Trek encyclopedia, if you don't believe me). Kelley said many other lines only once, though, and with such skill as would put a Rex Harrison He's-dead-Jim to shame. Incidentally, the boldface headings for the sections below don't relate at all to the content that follows; they're just lines from :The Original Series, impeccably delivered by Kelley as Dr. McCoy, such as: I'm Good, But Not That Good Several times in Star Trek's original run, Dr. McCoy seems to lapse into a full-blown Southern accent. In fact, that accent was more like Kelley's own unaffected way of speaking than what we normally hear on the show. He grew up in small towns in Georgia—Toccoa, Conyers, and eventually Decatur—and then spent time in the military and various corners of show business before landing his first starring role in the feature film Fear In the Night (1946). By the end of 1947, he had appeared in a musical comedy with William Holden, and a DeForest Kelley fan club had formed. You'd think that would have been enough to have them pouring the concrete in front of Grauman's, but it wasn't, and they didn't. Yet, though his career didn't exactly skyrocket after that, neither did it fizzle; his next 20 years' acting looks both steady and unremarkable, at least on paper: around 25 films and 130 television episodes, and little stands out. Watch his work, though, and you see the consistently skillful creation of characters (with an occasional flash of brilliance) across a wide range of film and TV genres and in a wide variety of roles, including exasperated construction site managers, sleazy bankers, doctors, crooked lawmen, honest lawmen, more doctors, murder suspects, bad guys and good guys. I'll spare you the statistical rigor of a full breakdown by genre of his career during this period—you know how I love that sort of thing—and I'll further spare you a full discussion of the 37% percent of his screen life spent in westerns such as 1956's Tension at Table Rock (undoubtedly a remake of Inconvenience at Lacuna Gap), and 1963's Gun Fight at Comanche Creek (retitled from Awkward Moment at Marginal Molar Ridge). I'll concentrate instead on the disproportionate amount of time he spent recreating a single event: the shootout at—or at least in the vicinity of—the Old Kindersley Corral. Not as Wrong as the Bottle I Drank From Kelley was in more O. K. Corral shootouts than any other actor on record. Moreover, he never played the same character twice, and each time he helped write the story anew. In his earliest appearance, the 1955 episode of You Are There treating the event, he played a particularly menacing Ike Clanton, leader of the cattle rustlin', rip snortin', adjective contractin' cowboys known as…well, the Cowboys. His colossal moustache seems to pull his upper torso into a neanderthal crouch, and he snarls every line to perfection. And, true to actual events, he runs away from the battle and hides in a neighboring building. In his second shot at this landmark of western conflict-resolvin', he plays Morgan Earp (Wyatt's brother) in John Sturges' 1957 Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, a rendition that swings rather wide of the facts in favor of a psychological study of the relationship between Wyatt Earp (played by Burt Lancaster), Marshal of Tombstone, AZ and the tuberculosis sufferin' J. H. "Doc" Holliday (played by Kirk Douglas). Of course, the film's climax features the gunfight promised by the title, and it delivers further on that promise by having people shoot at each other in, from, and around the eponymous corral—though we now know the actual gunfight took place elsewhere (but who wants to see a movie entitled Gunfight at the Vacant Lot Down the Street From the O. K. Corral?). About all De Kelley gets, though, is a grazing from a historically accurate bullet.This Isn't Chicken Soup He pays a third visit to the Corral in the third season of Star Trek's original run, in the episode entitled "Spectre of the Gun." As a penalty for trespassing, officers from the U.S.S. Enterprise are cast, against their will, as characters in the drama—Captain Kirk as Ike Clanton, Kelley's Dr. McCoy as the historically ill-fated (but stick around) Tom McLaury, Spock as his brother Frank, Mr. Scott as Billy Clanton, and Chekov as Billy Claiborne. Finding themselves in this sci-fi You Are There, they comment on their relationship to the actual people and events of October 26, 1881, even as they try to subvert those events. Though you can't charge this retelling with accuracy, it's a version of Tombstone's historic difference of opinion that deserves credit for awareness of its own inaccuracy, complete with minimalist sets and stark, stylized action. In the episode's most ingenious historical antipode, however, Kelley's character (more properly, Dr. McCoy's character) Tom, like the other Enterprise crew members conscripted into this bad afternoon up the street from where it really took place, survives the battle by refusing to believe that the bullets are real, though the fence behind him is not so fortunate. If only we could all control the effects of firearms so well, and if only "Bones" McCoy had been able to convince "Doc" Holliday that his tuberculosis was, as Spock declares, "to be ignored" like the bullets. Eat Right and Exercise Regularly It's easy to underestimate the difficulties involved in assembling the right cast for an ensemble drama like Star Trek. Ridiculous as it may sound, the network turned De Kelley down for the role of the Enterprise's Chief Medical Officer for the show's second pilot episode because he wasn't what they had in mind. They hired Paul Fix instead. What part, you ask (I hear you distinctly), had they originally offered Kelley for the show's first pilot?Mr. Spock, of course. This press release was produced by Dallas Public Library. The views expressed here are the author's own.