Last month's 40th anniversary celebration in Las Vegas by Creation Entertainment was notable in part for the number of first-timers to the Star Trek convention scene in attendance. The following are a sampling of quotes from those convention newbies.

Mariette Hartley

Mariette Hartley played "Zarabeth" in the classic episode "All Our Yesterdays," and in her first appearance before the fans she impressed them with her sharp and sometimes off-color wit. "I'm a virgin, so please be gentle with me..."

"I did a lot of television, and I've been so lucky — I did Bonanzas and Gunsmokes, and did some wonderful stuff. And then this amazing piece came up called 'All Our Yesterdays'. I was going to be playing this Vulcan girlfriend. I mean, this man with the two strange-looking ears — and I had no idea that he had never gone to bed with anybody else before me. Apparently before me Spock was a vegetarian! I actually taught him how to eat meat! (Laughs) Whatever is said in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? ... I had a wonderful time but had absolutely no idea the immensity of the influence that this particular episode was going to have. Y'know, schtupping Spock was not my idea of a huge acting career choice. But it turned out to be terrific. And he wasn't bad!" (Laughs)

On working with DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy: "Well, De and I lived right next to one another, we used to see each other at the grocery story, and I really adored him. Leonard I didn't know as well, and of course, he was an interesting actor because he was very serious. He kind of stayed in character, and you know what being Vulcan is like ... but I loved him. You know, it's so odd, you do these things for five days and then you never see these people again. Unless it's Bill Shatner, whom I did see again in a terrible television show called Cade's County — I don't know how many of you remember that. Oh!"

On famously resisting Shatner's charms: "First of all, he's too short for me ... No no, I loved Bill, it's just that he really did have a tendency to take himself real seriously with women. And he still does!" she teased.

Robert Foxworth

Robert Foxworth was "Admiral Leyton" in two episodes of Deep Space Nine, and Vulcan Administrator "V'Las" in three episodes of Enterprise. But to Gene Roddenberry fans, he is most affectionately remembered as the android "Questor" in the 1974 TV movie "The Questor Tapes," which was a pilot for a series that never got off the ground due to creative differences between Roddenberry and the producing studio, Universal.

"When I first arrived in Hollywood a little over 35 years ago and did a series at CBS, I was beginning to read a lot of science fiction ... I started talking to the people at the network about doing a science fiction series, and they said, 'Science fiction doesn't sell. No one cares about science fiction.' And I kept saying, 'Have you read any science fiction, do you know anything about it?' 'Oh yeah, but nobody cares enough about it to do a show.' I was put off and I shouldn't have been. Luckily others weren't, especially Gene Roddenberry, who started all of this.

"Years later I had the great privilege of working with Gene Roddenberry on a pilot for a series called Questor or 'The Questor Tapes.' I got to know Gene fairly well, at least on a professional level, and I was always amazed at the generosity of spirit and the intelligence of the man. He was a remarkable guy. We spent about six months after we had done the pilot working on developing this thing as a series, and it had a lot of built-in difficulties, among them the fact that the android could do anything physically and didn't really have any emotions. I kept saying, 'Well, he needs a flaw,' and Gene kept saying, 'He needs a flaw,' and the network people and the studio people said, 'We don't want a guy with a flaw.' Well, they didn't get it ... they wanted him to be this powerful, autonomous figure with no weakness, no flaw. That was the struggle that we had.

"But more importantly was the fact that I got to spend that time with Gene Roddenberry, and I became very much a fan of his mind and his heart."

Foxworth said he had had a brief conversation with Herb Wright, a protégé of Roddenberry who secured the rights to finally produce Questor as a series, but died last year (related story). "I wished him the best, and he said 'We'll find something for you in it'" was the extent of the conversation. Commenting on the idea of bringing Questor to contemporary television, he said:

"I think it would be a difficult and wonderful pursuit to bring Questor back as a series, in terms of cracking open the realities of popular culture. By that I mean — and this is my own personal prejudice perhaps — but I think Questor could offer an opportunity for us to get beyond popular culture as only a consumer-driven or consumer-feeding instrument, and because of the nature of what I recall Questor as being, get to deeper questions of living, which I think is really important. I think to a great extent popular culture has taken us to a place that is very far away from our essence as human beings. And oddly enough I think an android could help take us back."

Page 2: Andrea Martin, Kim Darby & Grace Lee Whitney, Diana Muldaur