FEATURE
The Corbomite Maneuver For more than fifty years, Tony Call has worked as a stage performer, television soap star, and voiceover actor, but it was his role as Lt. David Bailey in the original Star Trek series that made him famous. By Thomas Vinciguerra Freelance Writer Being remembered as a navigator aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise was not something Call had ever envisioned. But early on, he was pretty sure where his destiny lay. “All I wanted was to direct in film and act on stage,” he recalled over drinks at the Players, the private Manhattan theatrical and literary club. “I knew exactly what I wanted to be.” His father, Abner Biberman, a veteran director who transitioned from acting, encouraged him. After seeing his son in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown, he said, “I could never be the actor you are.”
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he durable actor Anthony Call ’58 has well over a hundred stage credits and a television résumé that includes The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, and The Fugitive. A staple of the soap operas Guiding Light and One Life to Live, he received four Daytime Emmy nominations for the latter. But nothing has won him as much recognition as a single featured appearance on the original Star Trek — an episode called “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
It was a welcome affirmation; Call’s early years had been unsettled. Biberman and his wife divorced when Tony was 7, around the time the director was blacklisted. Mother and son moved to Washington, D.C. to be with her family; in 1952, she married the actor John Call (whose caricature, Tony discovered to his delight, is in the men’s room at the Players). After a year apiece at St. Albans and the Harvey School, Tony interviewed at Choate and Hotchkiss. At that time he also encountered the headmaster of Pomfret.
As the 50th anniversary of the “The second I met Mr. Twichell,” broadcast approaches, Call looks he said, “I wanted to go there and back with wonder. never wanted to leave.” “I don’t think anything in my life makes me more famous,” he said. “Every single week I get fan mail.” Once, a golfing buddy called him at 3:30 a.m. to announce that his episode was on the air. “3:30 in the f***ing morning!”
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The late, legendary David Twichell impressed Call as enlightened and progressive — and, especially, empathetic. “He was so interested in me as a human being. He had no interest in telling me what I ought to be thinking. He expressed his ideas about defining ways to express yourself.”
Call’s Pomfret years included friendship with classmate Orville Schell and a blur of football, baseball, ice hockey, and, naturally, acting. He remembers crossdressing to play Sheila Birling in An Inspector Calls and how his co-star, Peter Beard ’56, approached him afterward. “As if he were talking to somebody else, he said, ‘She’s a good kid but she needs a man’s deodorant.’” Following graduation, Call spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania; outside of class he was on the gridiron and in Kismet and Oklahoma! In 1960, following a reunion with his father in California, he began acting in earnest. “I had to take odd jobs. I would get very good leading parts from time to time, but I was always broke.” By this time, Call had married his first wife, whose close friend, Mary Carver, was part of a Desilu Studios actors’ workshop. In 1966 Carver invited him to join her in a staging of Tennessee Williams’ one-act play Talk to the Rain and Let Me Listen. A week later Carver’s husband, the director Joseph Sargent, asked Call if he would audition for a new Desilu show called Star Trek. Call’s episode was the first in regular production after NBC green-lit the series. In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the huge, globular spaceship Fesarius threatens to destroy the Enterprise. Actually, its ostensibly malevolent