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couldn’t very well say no, could he? So he goes ahead and does it. Bobby retitles the picture The New Frontier. And guess what? It’s the studio’s biggest grossing picture for the year. Go figure. But everybody’s happy.
    After that, Jack had a couple of rough years. One disaster after another. The biggest one was that goddamned musical. That was an embarrassment. The man should never have tried to sing. Even today, nobody can mention Camelot without thinking of Jack Kennedy, right? And those stupid tights.
    You want my opinion, stay out of tights. Your career will never recover. It was all downhill for Errol Flynn after Robin Hood, and the goddamned tights killed poor George Reeves. Superman ’s another one of those unproduceable properties. Nobody’s ever going to make that one work. Or Batman. Tights. That’s why.
    Anyway, back to Kennedy—his career was in the dumper. So, when he was offered the chance to do a TV series, it didn’t look so bad any more. Most of the real action in town was moving to TV anyway. So Jack
went over to Desilu and played Eliot Ness in The Untouchables. Y’know, that was one of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite shows. Hoover even wrote to Kennedy and asked him for his autograph. He visited the set once just so he could get his picture taken with Jack. Hoover had to stand on a box. They shot him from the waist up, so’s you’d never know, but the photographer managed to get one good long shot.
    Meanwhile, back over at MGM, Bobby’s looking at all the money that Warner Brothers and Desilu are making off TV and he’s thinking—there’s gotta be a way that he can cut himself a slice of that market, right? Right. So he starts looking around the lot to see what he’s got that can be exploited.
    Well, Father Knows Best is a big hit, so Bobby thinks, “Let’s try turning Andy Hardy into a TV series. And how about Dr. Kildare too? The Hardy thing flopped. Bad casting. And it was opposite Disney on Sundays. It didn’t have a chance. But the Kildare property caught well enough to encourage him to try again.
    So, Bobby Kennedy’s looking around, right? And here’s where all the pieces come together all at once. NBC says to him, “How about a science fiction series? You did that New Frontier thing. Why don’t you turn that into a TV series for us?”
    There’s this other series that’s just winding down—a war series called The Lieutenant— Bobby calls in the producer, a guy named Roddenberry and tells him that NBC wants a sci-fi show based on The New Frontier. Can he make it work? They’ve still got all the costumes, the sets, the miniatures, everything. Roddenberry says he doesn’t know anything about science fiction, but he’ll give it a try. He tells his secretary to rush out and buy up every science fiction anthology she can find and do summaries of all the stories that have spaceships in them.
    What with one thing and another, it’s 1964 before they ever start filming the first pilot. But all the MGM magic is applied, and they end up with one of the most beautiful—and most expensive —TV pilots ever made. Of course, Roddenberry put in all his own ideas, and by the time he was through, the only thing left from the movie was in the opening lines of the title sequence: “Space, the new frontier. These are the voyages ... et cetera, et cetera.”
    NBC hated the pilot—they said it was “too cerebral”—but they liked the look of the show, so they say to Bobby, let’s try again, give us another pilot. Bobby says no. Take it or leave it. MGM bails out, so Roddenberry
goes over to Desilu, where they make a second pilot. He changes the name to Star Track, and the show goes on the air in 1966. You know the rest.
    Two years later, MGM buys Desilu. Bobby Kennedy strong-arms NBC to move the show to an eight o’clock time slot, and it’s a big hit. But then, to settle some old grudge—Bobby hated being wrong—he fires Roddenberry. The rumor mill said it was women—maybe. I