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Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura on ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 89

She was among the first Black women to have a leading role in a TV series. She later worked with NASA to recruit minorities for the space program.

July 31, 2022

Updated 8:53 p.m. ET

Nichelle Nichols, the actress revered by “Star Trek” fans everywhere for her role as Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer on the starship U.S.S. Enterprise, died on Saturday in Silver City, N.M. She was 89.

The cause was heart failure, said Sky Conway, a writer and a film producer who was asked by Kyle Johnson, Ms. Nichols’s son, to speak for the family.

Ms. Nichols had a long career as an entertainer, beginning as a teenage supper-club singer and dancer in Chicago, her hometown, and later appearing on television.

But she will forever be best remembered for her work on “Star Trek,” the cult-inspiring space adventure series that aired from 1966 to 1969 and starred William Shatner as Captain Kirk, the heroic leader of the starship crew; Leonard Nimoy (who died in 2015) as his science officer and adviser, Mr. Spock, an ultralogical humanoid from the planet Vulcan; and DeForest Kelley (who died in 1999) as Dr. McCoy, a.k.a. Bones, the ship’s physician.

A striking beauty, Ms. Nichols provided a frisson of sexiness on the bridge of the Enterprise. She was generally clad in a snug red doublet and black tights; Ebony magazine called her the “most heavenly body in ‘Star Trek’” on its 1967 cover. Her role, however, was both substantial and historically significant.

Uhura was an officer and a highly educated and well-trained technician who maintained a businesslike demeanor while performing her high-minded duties. Ms. Nichols was among the first Black women to have a leading role on a network television series, making her an anomaly on the small screen, which until that time had rarely depicted Black women in anything other than subservient roles.

In a November 1968 episode, during the show’s third and final season, Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura are forced to embrace by the inhabitants of a strange planet, resulting in what is widely thought to be the first interracial kiss in television history.

(A series called “Beulah,” also called “The Beulah Show,” starring Ethel Waters — and later Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel — as the maid for a white family, was broadcast on ABC in the early 1950s and subsequently cited by civil rights activists for its demeaning portraits of Black people.)

But Uhura’s influence reached far beyond television. In 1977, Ms. Nichols began an association with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, contracting as a representative and speaker to help recruit female and minority candidates for spaceflight training; the following year’s class of astronaut candidates was the first to include women and members of minority groups.

In subsequent years, Ms. Nichols made public appearances and recorded public service announcements on behalf of the agency. In 2012, after she was the keynote speaker at the Goddard Space Center during a celebration of African American History Month, a NASA news release about the event lauded her help for the cause of diversity in space exploration.

“Nichols’s role as one of television’s first Black characters to be more than just a stereotype and one of the first women in a position of authority (she was fourth in command of the Enterprise) inspired thousands of applications from women and minorities,” the release said. “Among them: Ronald McNair, Frederick Gregory, Judith Resnick, first American woman in space Sally Ride and current NASA administrator Charlie Bolden.”

Grace Dell Nichols was born in Robbins, Ill., on Dec. 28, 1932 (some sources give a later year), and grew up in Chicago. Her father was, for a time, the mayor of Robbins, and a chemist. At 13 or 14, tired of being called Gracie by her friends, she requested a different name from her mother, who liked Michelle but suggested Nichelle for the alliteration.

She was a ballet dancer as a child and had a singing voice with a naturally wide range — more than four octaves, she later said. While attending Englewood High School, she landed her first professional gig in a revue at the College Inn, a well-known Chicago nightspot.

There she was seen by Duke Ellington, who employed her a year or two later with his touring orchestra as a dancer in one of his jazz suites.

Ms. Nichols appeared in several musical theater productions around the country during the 1950s. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, she recalled performing at the Playboy Club in New York City while serving as an understudy for Ms. Carroll in the Broadway musical “No Strings” (though she never went on).

In 1959, she was a dancer in Otto Preminger’s film version of “Porgy and Bess.” She made her television debut in 1963 in an episode of “The Lieutenant,” a short-lived dramatic series about Marines at Camp Pendleton created by Gene Roddenberry, who went on to create “Star Trek.”

Ms. Nichols appeared on other television shows over the years — among them “Peyton Place” (1966), “Head of the Class” (1988) and “Heroes” (2007). She also appeared onstage occasionally in Los Angeles, including in a one-woman show in which she did impressions of, and paid homage to, Black female entertainers who preceded her, including Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey and Eartha Kitt.

But Uhura was to be her legacy: A decade after “Star Trek” went off the air, Ms. Nichols reprised the role in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and she appeared as Uhura, by then a commander, in five subsequent movie sequels through 1991.

Besides a son, her survivors include two sisters, Marian Smothers and Diane Robinson.

Ms. Nichols was married and divorced twice. In her 1995 autobiography, “Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories,” she disclosed that she and Roddenberry, who died in 1991, had been romantically involved for a time. In an interview in 2010 for the Archive of American Television, she said that he had little to do with her casting in “Star Trek” but that he defended her when studio executives wanted to replace her.

When she took the role of Uhura, Ms. Nichols said, she thought of it as a mere job at the time, valuable as a résumé enhancer; she fully intended to return to the stage, as she wanted a career on Broadway. Indeed, she threatened to leave the show after its first season and submitted her resignation to Roddenberry. He told her to think it over for a few days.

In a story she often told, that Saturday night she was a guest at an event in Beverly Hills, Calif. — “I believe it was an N.A.A.C.P. fund-raiser,” she recalled in the Archive interview — where the organizer introduced her to someone he described as “your biggest fan.”

“He’s desperate to meet you,” she recalled the organizer saying.

The fan, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., introduced himself.

“He said, ‘We admire you greatly, you know,’ ” Ms. Nichols said, and she thanked him and told him that she was about to leave the show. “He said, ‘You cannot. You cannot.’”

Dr. King told her that her role as a dignified, authoritative figure in a popular show was too important to the cause of civil rights for her to forgo. As Ms. Nichols recalled it, he said, “For the first time, we will be seen on television the way we should be seen every day.”

On Monday morning, she returned to Roddenberry’s office and told him what had happened.

“And I said, ‘If you still want me to stay, I’ll stay. I have to.’”

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Lauren Bacall in 1946. Photo by John Engstead

 

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 I love to read about PEOPLE! I also collect pictures of my favorite "Celebrities'" I created this group to have an outlet for that. 

Scotty Bowers

 

Scotty Bowers Journalist

George Albert "Scotty" Bowers is an American who was a Marine and, from the 1940s to the 1980s, a Hollywood pimp. Stories of his exploits circulated for many years and were alluded to in books such as Hollywood Babylon.

According to film critic Peter Debruge writing for Variety in 2006, "Everyone knows Scotty. After all, he’s been serving drinks to the Beverly Hills crowd for almost 60 years, working a different party almost every night of the week, sometimes two a day." The veracity of Bowers' many claims was endorsed by Gore Vidal; in his last public appearance Vidal spoke at the official launch of the memoir. Robert Benevides, the partner of actor Raymond Burr, said to the LA Weekly: "Scotty just liked to make people happy." Film director John Schlesinger and investigative reporter and novelist Dominick Dunne also attested to Bowers' honesty

Joan Allemand, a former arts director of the Beverly Hills Unified School District, who knew Bowers for more than 20 years and introduced him to his subsequent co-writer, Lionel Friedberg, said: "Scotty doesn't lie about anything. He's a poor kid from a farm in Illinois, and when he got here, his two assets were his big penis and charming personality. That's what he used to feed his family." Cecil Beaton wrote of his sexual encounters with Bowers in his published diary of the 1960s, while Debbie Reynolds wrote in her memoirs of Milton Berle employing him for a party prank. A profile in the New York Social Diary attested to Bowers' connections, career of sexual support, and happy-go-lucky character: "Clients all agreed that he was 'very good' at what he did, and very agreeable... And very discreet. He did not discriminate. He even had one regular longtime client... who had no arms and no legs... The Scotty I knew was a guy who always seemed to be enjoying his life working morning, noon and night, with never a gripe; always with a smile to greet you, and never with an axe to grind. After a lifetime in Hollywood, that's a remarkable feat and its own kind of Zen."

It has been suggested that Bowers' claims were dismissed by some not simply because "virtually everyone he talks about has died", but because "many in the industry still cling to a prudish, homophobic and manufactured version of the past." According to Matt Tyrnauer, director of a documentary on Bowers, it is merely proof of "the enduring power of the (Hollywood) myth machine... created there—by outsiders, Jewish immigrants themselves who were furriers and glove manufacturers projecting a lie of a made-up image of white Americanism... I think there are a lot of people who want to cling to that."

Author William J. Mann, who interviewed Bowers for a biography of Katharine Hepburn, said, "I found him forthright and honest and not interested in personal fame or gain." At that time he turned down Mann's offer to write about him or introduce him to a literary agent. Author and journalist Tim Teeman, who also interviewed Bowers, wrote that "as candid as Bowers was, he was also respectful, and when it came to sex and sexuality utterly without shame and judgment."

Anthony Perkins is best known for playing Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Friendly Persuasion. Perkins was intense, sensitive, and complex, according to Scotty Bowers in Full Service. He was married with two kids but also gay. His longest gay relationship was with actor Tab Hunter, but he saw many men. Bowers writes that Perkins always wanted someone different. Bowers writes, "He always wanted someone different. 'Who've you got who's different, Scott?' 'Who do you have for me for tomorrow night that will surprise me? Anything really new?"

“Of course, he was carrying on with Tab Hunter for a long time, we were told on good authority,” artist Don Bachardy told author Charles Winecoff in Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins. Only in mixed gatherings, such as a party at acting teacher Elaine Aiken’s, would Perkins allow himself to be seen with Hunter. They would go on movie dates but buy tickets separately and sit apart. The Vista Theater, near the predominately gay neighborhood of Silver Lake, attracted a primarily male audience, and Perkins felt comfortable sitting with Hunter there. “Tab was a known homosexual at the time,” camera operator Leonard Smith remembers. “I don’t think Tony was, he kept to himself. But he used to have Tab come on the set two or three times a week, and they’d have lunch or something. The crew made a lot of jokes about it; they were cruel. Of course, Tony was upset. He’d go off to his dressing room, and answer them in a way that said he didn’t want any more of it. If guys made cracks, he’d get upset and just walk away from them.”

George Cukor

George Cukor was a legend in the movie industry. He had directed Camille, starring Greta Garbo, along with classics like Romeo and Juliet and The Philadelphia Story. Cukor had sex with Scotty Bowers, author of Full Service. In their first encounter, Bowers writes that Cukor "moved over to me, began to fondle my balls, then rapidly stroked me to a full erection. In no time at all he started to suck on my erect penis. He was so good at what he was doing that before I knew it I was dizzy with ecstasy and simply lay back until I experienced an absolutely exquisite orgasm." Then, Cukor quickly showered, asked Bowers to shower, and insisted on paying Bowers. Bowers realized that he always has blunt sexual encounters like this. "There was never any foreplay or necking. There was no preamble, nor was there ever any form of penetration. Anal sex was out of the question. To put it crudely, just like my friend, Cole Porter, George just wanted to suck dick. And he would do it with a quick, cold efficiency."

Cole Porter

Cole Porter was a composer and songwriter, and he won the Tony Award for Best Musical for Kiss Me, Kate. In Full Service, Scotty Bowers says Cole Porter asked Bowers to bring two or three Marines over to his house. When Bowers arrived, several young handsome men were there — and his wife, Linda, was not. Bowers writes, "I soon learned that Cole's passion was oral sex. He could easily suck off twenty guys, one after the other. And he always swallowed." On another evening, Bowers took nine of his best-looking young guys over to Porter's house and Porter "sucked off every single one of them in no time. Boom, boom, boom and it was all over." Bowers slept with Porter also. Bowers said Porter "loved to suck me off and then have me fondle him until he reached his own orgasm." Porter was insecure and told Bowers to throw a dinner party and invite a group of 12 or 14 people who had all known Porter for a long time. Porter said he'd hide under the dinner table and eavesdrop as Bowers asked them questions about Porter. They covered the dinner table with three large bedsheets and Porter crawled underneath the table. He heard the entire dinner conversation and never once came out from under the table.

Rock Hudson was best known for his Academy Award-nominated role in Giant with Elizabeth Taylor and Pillow Talk with Doris Day. Rock Hudson's homosexuality was carefully kept secret by his gay agent, Henry Willson, and the studio. They managed to conceal his sexuality right up until the time he died of AIDS in 1985.

He was married to Phyllis Gates, who was a lesbian. In Full Service, Scotty Bowers writes, "Over the year I arranged many tricks for [Gates]. She liked her female sex partners slim, dark-haired, and young." In William J. Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, an 80-year-old man talks with Mann about the 1950s when it seemed everyone in Hollywood was gay. He said, "Don't repeat all that crap about how tough Rock Hudson had it. You know how he had to pretend to be straight and live a lie and all that. That was just surface. Rock Hudson had it easy. You just have to ask any Joe from Peoria what life was like for him. Who didn't have to lie? Who didn't have to pretend? The difference was, in Hollywood, our bosses lied for us. They protected us. We had a whole community, for God's sake. We had — dare I say it? — power. Where else in America did gays have such a thing?"

Cary Grant was an English actor and considered one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men. He was nominated twice for an Academy Award for his roles in Penny Serenade and None But the Lonely Heart. Randolph Scott was an actor best known for Heritage of the Desert, a film that established him as a Western hero. Cary Grant was married to Barbara Hutton, but he was sharing his house with actor Randolph Scott when Full Services's Scotty Bowers met him. Scott was also married. When Bowers was with Grant and Scott, he writes, "The three of us got into a lot of sexual mischief together. Aside from the usual sucking — neither of them were into fucking, at least not fucking guys, or at least not me — what I remember most about the first encounter was that Scott really liked to cuddle, and talk, and was very gentle." Grant and Scott's relationship lasted for years. They eventually ended up sharing a home together behind the famed Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood as well as their Malibu beach house.

Tyrone Power was an actor most known for The Mask of Zorro and Blood and Sand. In Full Service, Scotty Bowers writes, "Women swooned over him and he bedded quite a few of them, but he much preferred men." He preferred young men in particular, and "some of his sexual tastes were rather odd and offbeat, but none of the guys seemed to mind. He was always meticulously careful about who he saw. He fiercely guarded his reputation at the studio and his position as a highly visible actor, so few outside of a very tight circle could point a finger at him and accuse him of indiscreet behavior." Bowers had a ménage à trois with Power and a random girl, even though Power was married. Bowers writes, "As we romped around that rather grimy hotel room that night it was patently clear to me that Ty had a healthy and inventive sexual appetite, but one that was infinitely more focused on me than it was on my girlfriend. I felt truly sorry for the poor guy. It must have been very tough for him to have to perpetually hide who he really was."

Ramon Novarro was a Mexican film, stage, and television actor who is best known for Ben-Hur and Across to Singapore with Joan Crawford. Novarro was fairly open about his sexuality among industry insiders. In William J. Mann's book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, Mann writes that Novarro was Haines' polar opposite: quiet, reserved, a devout Roman Catholic...yet at the same time, he was as much involved in the gay subculture as Billy Haines — although he usually prayed for absolution the next day." He and Haines were scolded by MGM's producer, Louis B. Mayer, for patronizing a male brothel on Wilshire Boulevard. In Full Service, Scotty Bowers writes that Novarro loved oral sex so much he referred to semen as "honey." Bowers writes, "He would call me up and say, 'I need some honey. Urgently. Tonight. Help me out and find me a few guys. Please.'" Bowers would bring five or six young guys over to his house, and Novarro, who had a drinking problem, would summon each young man in one by one while Bowers sat in the living room with the other men. Bowers writes, "Within the space of half an hour he would go through them all and then stumble out and call the first one in again." But the first man could not ejaculate again since he already ejaculated, so Novarro would get mad at Bowers, but he was so drunk, he quickly forgot. His alcoholism got out of control. On the morning of Oct. 30, 1968, his body was discovered by his servant in his North Hollywood home. He had been beaten to death by two young male hustlers who thought he had thousands of dollars in cash stashed away in his house. He didn't.

Playwright Tennessee Williams was most known for The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. In Full Service, Scotty Bowers says Williams was still grieving over his longtime companion, Frank Merlo, a sailor he had met who died of cancer in 1963, when Bowers met him. Bowers started sleeping with Williams, who Bowers said "proved himself to be a horny devil once we got to know one another." Bowers remembers him as a very insecure man. Merlo's death, his unhappy childhood, his sister Rose's mental illness and institutionalization, his fractured relationship with his younger brother Dakin, his depression, and his addition to prescription drugs all took a heavy toll on him.

Noel Coward was an English playwright, composer, actor, and singer known for his wit and flamboyance. Coward had many lovers in his day, including Prince George, the Duke of Kent; actors Alan Webb and Louis Hayward; and playwright Keith Winter, according to Scotty Bowers in Full Service. His longest relationship was with the South African actor Graham Payn. He slept with Bowers and never had penetrative sex. Bowers writes, "It was strictly oral, with lots of bodily touching, caressing, and kneading in between." Bowers writes that on one occasion, Coward bought Bowers a first-class return steamer ticket to come to his home in the Caribbean with him. Another time, Coward asked Bowers to spend a vacation in Tahiti with him, but both times, Bowers declined. Coward would attend parties where Bowers would do his infamous "Swizzle Stick Trick," where he'd stir drinks with it. Bowers writes, "People loved to order cocktails and watch me stir them with my flaccid penis. Needless to say, I would always add ice to the drink only after I'd stirred it!"

The street date of Scotty Bowers’ “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” written with Lionel Friedberg, is Valentine’s Day, but the eagerly anticipated memoir has been generating buzz for several weeks, and will most likely encounter a firestorm of criticism from some segments of the Hollywood set. It offers the former Marine paratrooper, pump jockey and bartender’s accounts of three decades of having sex with — or arranging others to have sex with — some of the biggest names of Hollywood’s Golden Age — Cary Grant, Vincent Price, Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy and the Duke of Windsor.

The title is a not-so-subtle reference to the job that was Bowers’ entree into his career as a sexual “fixer,” pumping gas at the Richfield station at 5777 Hollywood Blvd., where he began to connect former Marine Corps pals and other acquaintances with Hollywood elite looking for secretive sexual encounters — gay and straight — in an era where the studio system and the mores of the day kept a lid on sexual activity and orientation.

Walter Pidgeon

Jacques Potts

He says his first “trick” came in 1946, with actor Walter Pidgeon and milliner-to-the stars Jacques Potts, and other bold-faced names Bowers mentions along the way include composer Cole Porter, director George Cukor, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh. The initial impulse, of course, is to compare Bowers’ allegations about his career with that of Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, and though both pandered to the prurient interests of the entertainment industry, Bowers’ fantastical story goes further.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover

porn star John Holmes

Alfred Kinsey

When he wasn’t crossing paths with the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and porn star John Holmes, Bowers writes, he acted as stud service for infertile couples in Colorado, assisted .at least one Hollywood star in a custody battle and helped Alfred Kinsey research his book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” as well as connect Kinsey with former Egyptian ruler Farouk I and his legendary stash of pornography.

Iwo Jima

Brian Epstein

By the time Bowers has finished sharing anecdotes about fighting on the island of Iwo Jima in World War II and once assisting Beatles manager Brian Epstein (one of his tricks) in whisking the Fab Four out of the hands of groupies during an August 1964 visit to Los Angeles, he’s been less than one degree away from so many people and events in popular culture one starts to wonder if “Forrest Hump” might have been a more appropriate title.

This doesn’t mean that “Full Service” is an easy book to read. It isn’t — for several reasons. Chief among them is the gnawing question about the book’s veracity — especially given the fact that virtually all of the people he mentions in the book are long gone and unable to refute his account. (Asked about this in a recent phone interview, Bowers’ response was: “Not only did I do all the things I said I did in the book, I did even more.”) The pacing of the book is a bit uneven in places, choppy in others, and full of purple prose throughout (it’s unclear, for example, why an account of his childhood on the farm needed to include a sentence like: “As my fingers tugged on the cow’s soft teats, her warm milk squirted into the pail.”) and occasionally punctuated by a rhetorical elbow to the ribs. While it’s easy to marvel at his sexual escapades, it’s hard to forge any kind of emotional connection with Bowers, who comes across as well-endowed in the ego department as he suggests he is below the belt and who rattles off the names of his sexual partners with all the emotion of making a shopping list. He even refuses to label his own sexual orientation as straight, gay or bisexual. And even those who consider themselves open-minded and not the least but prudish — gay or straight — may find some of the specific details are too much of an over share (such as some of British actor Charles Laughton’s alleged peccadilloes). Even more troubling — especially in light of the current allegations about teachers at the Miramonte Elementary School — is Bowers matter-of-fact account of his childhood activities, which included his introduction to sex by his adult male neighbor, having sex with not one but several Roman Catholic priests, and arranging a lesbian tryst between a 13-year-old classmate and his own grade school teacher. "The Los Angeles Times" 14feb2012

 Gore Vidal wrote that Bowers was a long time friend whose stories he believed.

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