KHAAAAAAAN! … and Me (or How I Learned to Love Star Trek - Part II)

Sometimes – perhaps most of the time – an actor can wait all his life for his breakout role.

It was late in his career, but when it came his way, Ricardo Montalban grabbed Khan with both hands and never let go.

Ricardo grew up in a Mexican village where they showed movies on a sheet. There, he not only became enamored of film but also fell in love with his future wife.

“Nick, did you ever see The Story of Alexander Graham Bell?”

“Don Ameche and Loretta Young, sure.”

“Well, Loretta played a deaf person, and Bell is teaching sign language. Several other members of the deaf girl’s large family appear in the story, at least one of whom was in fact played by Loretta’s actual sister, Georgina. I became fixated on her.”

“Ricardo, lemme get this straight. You’re watching movies on a sheet in your village, and your eyes wander from the central romance between Don Ameche and Loretta Young inventing the telephone, to focus on… her sister?”

He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I started acting in Mexican films, and when the war broke out, and many of Hollywood’s leading men went off to war, I went to Los Angeles, typecast, of course – along with Fernando Lamas – as the Latin Lover.”

An observant Catholic, Montalban attended the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, where – what do you know! – he sees Georgina Young in the church parking lot.

“Did you approach her?”

He shook his head. “What was I gonna say? ‘I fell in love with you on a sheet in Mexico’?”

“But you did meet.”

“Eventually. I took her dancing at the Coconut Grove nightclub.”

“Why did you do that? Why not start with a coffee or take her to dinner?”

He shrugged. “That’s what you did in those days. “Anyway, we’re dancing at the Coconut Grove, and I say, ‘Miss Georgina, I have something to say to you, and that is that I love you and would like to marry you’.”

“Jesus, Ricardo. What happened?”

He smiled. “She said, ‘Well, first let me break up with my boyfriend…’”

“Are you serious?”

Maybe it was a bit more protracted, but that was the essence.

Throughout the forties, Montalban was a workhorse, either the Latin Lover in such epics as “Latin Lover,” escorting Lana Turner to their booth (in yet another nightclub), or appearing in innumerable westerns and film noirs, usually cast as Indians (now Native Americans), Mexicans, or other miscellaneous “types.” That chest had been around.

In Across The Wide Missouri (1951), a horse rolled over Montalban, permanently injuring his spine and leaving him with an imperceptible limp that he largely managed to conceal, even when dancing with Lena Horne on Broadway in “Jamaica,” in light blackface. You could do that sort of thing then.

He starred on Broadway again in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. Altogether, his resume was longer than the combined cast of Star Trek. Montalban was the real deal.

But where was that breakout role?

Director Ed Zwick once explained to me that actors only want to know one thing about the director: Is he crazy? Do I have to drag the boat over the mountain? In other words, will I survive the shoot?

Meeting Montalban for lunch at the Paramount commissary, I experienced his guarded courtliness. He was polite but gave no ground, discreetly seeking hints as to whether or not I was bonkers. I had watched him in the Star Trek prequel episode, Space Seed, and noted his capacity for ominous stillness. He couldn’t be at our rehearsals because he was still filming his Fantasy Island television series, so this would be our only encounter before shooting the film. I handed him a copy of Moby Dick.

“Everything you need to know about Khan is in there.”

He inclined his head and murmured something open to interpretation. Try as I might, I couldn’t penetrate that carapace, smooth as Corinthian leather. Who was in there??

All this by way of introduction…

The next time we met was Montalban’s first day on set for his big introductory scene and monologue, in which we learn the origin of his ferocious hatred of Kirk. It was a whole bunch of pages, and I had the idea of doing it in one shot with something like 20 marks for him to hit. Movies are always coitus interruptus, and I didn’t want to penalize my actor.

Montalban hit every mark and was letter perfect on the first walk through. The only problem: to the stupefaction of assembled cast and crew, he bellowed the whole thing at the top of his lungs. All I could think of: this guy’s been doing this since before I was born. What if I try to tell him anything?

He’s way bigger than me.

Of course, I’m the director. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

“While they’re lighting, let’s go to your trailer and talk interpretation,” I suggested. He followed behind like a large, but for the moment, tractable horse, then sat eyeing me expectantly. Hard to take my eyes off those pecs.

“Uh, Ricardo, I once heard Laurence Olivier say that an actor should never show an audience his top,” I began. “Because once they’ve seen your top, they know you’ve nowhere else to go.”

He stared at me. Is this where he punches me out?

Then sat back and abruptly his noble, forbidding features split into a wide grin.

“You’re going to direct me!” he chortled. “That’s great. I dunno what I’m doing up there!”

The courtly carapace dissolved, and Khan was now eagerly regaling me with showbiz tales of ridiculous directors with whom he’d been, so to speak, saddled.

“Ricardo! Lana! Make it a good scene!”

What followed was the only time in my life I kinda drove a Maserati. The slightest touch of the pedal; the lightest foot on the brakes.

“Nick, how if I raise the eyebrow here?”

“Ok, but not so high.”

“Ah, yes.”

As shooting progressed, our friendship deepened. I saw his astonishing range in several films.

“Why did you do Fantasy Island?”

“My kid needed braces.”

Eventually, I met and dined with the fabled and beloved Georgina, as improbably beautiful as the day her future husband first beheld her on a sheet in Mexico.

Montalban’s Khan has gone down as one of the great screen villains, possibly because he is someone you also pity. Not every actor can pull off that duality. I’ve never seen anyone playing Richard III manage to elicit pity. And over the years, the shadow of Montalban’s performance looms ever longer and larger. Other Trek films are always in search of a Khan-like character – but come up short, minus his secret sauce.

Khan’s Ahab/Lear/Lucifer fixations come about quite plausibly. Before exiling him on Ceti Alpha V, Kirk gave Khan the run of The Enterprise’s library, where the overthrown tyrant helped himself to copies of Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and, of course, King Lear, monarchs in exile with whom he inevitably identified. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” etc.

Watching him as we filmed, I said, “Ricardo, you should be playing Lear.” He made some self-deprecating reference to his accent. “No one will care,” I insisted, “you enunciate beautifully.”

Didn’t happen. Khan was IT. Ahab, if you prefer.

Montalban invested Khan with a tragic grandeur worthy of Melville’s Ahab, going so far as to paraphrase the Pequod’s captain as justification: “He heaps me! He tasks me! And I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and perdition’s flames before I give him up!”

Ahab, it might be noted, has lost his leg to the whale, while Khan hides one of his hands in a glove, implying a like impairment.

Eventually, Montalban’s old spinal injury ruptured, and the courtly, unflappable man was forced to endure his last years in agony.

Ricardo Montalban should have played Lear. And could have played it. Khan was as close as he came, and generations of filmgoers will always be grateful. He’d waited a lifetime for his breakout performance.

Over the years since I’ve worked on three Star Trek films, I’ve slowly – always slowly – come to appreciate its complex appeal. Hornblower may have been my point of entry, but the series was more ambitious in its subject matter than C.S. Forrester ever had in mind for his naval hero.

I think of Khan as the missing link, the regal connection between kitsch and truth.

I miss the man who embodied him to this day.