Nor did any of her Trek costars. William Shatner says he was shocked to learn of Whitney's story when he interviewed her this summer for his book Star Trek Memories. "I didn't notice anything odd in her behavior on the set," he says. "I just noticed a wonderfully funny, dizzy, good-looking blonde."
Fortunately, Whitney pulled herself back from the precipice on her own. One afternoon in 1981, she found herself in bed with a stranger in a 24-hour porn-film motel. "I looked at myself with this albatross lying next to me in bed," she recalls. When the man slapped $15 on the dresser, she had a revelation. "I said to myself, 'What are you doing here? What are you doing here?' "
At a friend's urging, she attended a 12-step meeting and found a way out. "I got sober that night," she says simply. "I said the Lord's Prayer at the end of the meeting, and my body was covered with goosebumps. The obsession to drink was taken away."
Whitney, 63, wants to help others achieve the same goal. Though she makes her living doing personal appearances at Star Trek conventions (as many as 15 a year), she spends most of her time counseling fellow alcoholics by telephone and at 12-step meetings, in prisons and even at Trekkie events. "I've turned my whole life over to God and my 12-step program," she says.
In return she has found the peace she has been searching for her entire life. The adopted daughter of a Detroit banker and his wife, Whitney (whose name then was Irene Yvonne Chase), admits that by the time she had "just barely" graduated from high school, she was already sexually active and drinking heavily to assuage her feelings of isolation. After a few years spent singing, modeling and acting in Detroit, Chicago and New York City, she wound up in L.A., where she won small parts in TV series and films, including a bit part in the all-girl band in Some Like It Hot. When she landed the Star Trek role in 1966, Whitney thought she'd made it. "I was excited to have a series," she says. "People loved me."
But the part brought difficulties as well. The diet pills she took made her anxious, and she had to drink to fall asleep. Before long she had trouble remembering her lines, and her face became so bloated from an allergic reaction to the alcohol that even the heavy makeup she wore couldn't disguise her condition. At the end of the show's first season, she was axed. "I tried to kill myself," says Whitney, whose first marriage (which produced two sons) was breaking up at the time. "I started drinking tremendous amounts of alcohol. I never had so much pain in my life."
Even when Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hired her back for 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Whitney couldn't break out of her downward spiral. "When I saw myself in the dailies, I looked like my grandmother," she says. "My father had been telling me I looked like a cadaver for 10 years, but I couldn't see it. Well, I saw it then."
Depressed by the breakup of a second marriage, she began frequenting L.A. discos and drinking even more heavily. Within two years, Whitney, who was then working as a secretary, was drinking away her lunch hours and spending her afternoons in a seedy motel with her drinking partners, who would sometimes give her money. "I didn't want to give anything to anybody without getting paid," she says.
Since her recovery, Whitney has made her home in a small central California town, sharing her ranch house with two dogs and two cats. Although she appeared in the Star Trek III, IV, and VI films, she doesn't pursue acting roles. "Forget acting—my mission now is to be clean and sober," says Whitney, who attends seven 12-step meetings each week.
The onetime blond bombshell has even come to terms with her advancing age. "I don't know how old I am because every part of me is a different age," she says, jokingly referring to her multiple cosmetic surgeries. "My boobs are 30, my face is 40 and my lush is 51. The only thing that's real about me is my heart, and that has been totally changed too."
CYNTHIA SANZ
JOYCE WAGNER in Fresno
- Contributors:
- Joyce Wagner.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
